To Visit the Queen

  "Great. Right back," said Rhiow.

  Sidled, she followed Auhlae's instructions and made her way up to the Circle Line platform, past the unnoticing travelers waiting for the tube train, and down the stairs at the very end of the platform. The gate's tracery was very visible: some other wizard passing through had just used it, she saw from the status-and-log weft, for a transit to Vladivostok via Chur. She reached into the control weave, got her claws into the spatial location webbing, and wove its hyperstrings together until they matched the string-coordinate qualities of the roof of her apartment building.

  Normally Rhiow preferred not to do gatings of this kind: they were wasteful of energy, when you could walk. But at the moment walking was out of the question, and everything seemed to be happening at once, and she couldn't spare the time. Rhiow pulled the control weave taut, watching as the scene within its oval boundaries snapped into place. Gray gravel, ventilators sticking up...

  Rhiow locked the gate coordinates in place, set it for selective nonpatency except for her own return, and jumped through: came down on the gravel. Hurriedly she sidled, then trotted over to the square shape that was the outlet for the building's fire stairs. The door was locked from the inside.

  She walked through it, feeding the atoms of her body past the atoms of the door, and ran down the stairs a couple of flights; then she walked through a second door, the one that led to the hallway where her apartment's front door was. Rhiow galloped down the hall and walked through one last door, her own.

  There was no sign of Iaehh, which was just as well. Rhiow ran over to the refrigerator, did a very small-scale skywalk up to the handle of the freezer, and put one paw through it, pulling hard. No good. She sat up on her haunches, put both forefeet through, and pulled again. This time the freezer door came open, almost knocking her down. She ducked sideways out of the reach of the swinging door and looked inside. Thank you, Iau, she thought, for there were about five pizzas stacked up in there. Hmm. Pepperoni... not for a first-timer. Meatball... no. Pieces might fall off in transit. Plain with extra cheese...

  Her mouth was watering as she levitated the pizza out of the freezer down onto the counter. It's been too long since I had pizza, Rhiow thought, but the hunger she'd seen in Artie's eyes suggested to Rhiow that it was going to be a while longer. She first did a small wizardry that would release the catch of the microwave oven and push the door back: then, while that was working, she spoke to the coefficient of friction at the end of the pizza box where the glue was, then levitated the box up on its side and shook. The pizza slid neatly out onto the rotating tray in the oven.

  Rhiow ran her wizardry backwards and shut the microwave door: then jumped down to the counter and stared at the controls. You have to be a rocket scientist to run these things, she thought, annoyed, trying to work out which control pad to push. Finally she succeeded in programming in a five-minutes run on High and started the microwave going: then took a moment to take the empty pizza box and push it down into a briefly opened pocket in spacetime, off in a corner of the kitchen. She would empty out the pocket and get rid of the box later.

  The air started to fill with a very appetizing smell indeed. Rhiow's mouth watered more earnestly. The only bad thing about this, she thought, is that he's going to notice it's gone. I think. Iaehh could be slightly vague about the contents of the freezer: he and Hhuha had had some pretty heated discussions on the subject. Either way, I'm going to have to replace it with one of the same kind as soon as I can. One more thing to think about.

  The oven dinged. Rhiow ran her wizardry again, forward this time, and levitated the pizza out into the air again. It was tricky: the thing was no longer solid, but kept trying to flop over in one direction or another.

  Rhiow stood there for a moment considering her options. She might be sidled, but the pizza could not be, not while she was handling it either directly or with a wizardry. She was not going to walk down the apartment's hall, invisible, with a visible pizza floating along behind her. Logistics, she thought.

  Oh vhai. She walked through the air over to the glass doors that opened on the terrace, the pizza trailing along obediently behind her, and straight out into the air to one side of the apartment. Let the neighbors think they saw a levitating pizza, she thought rebelliously. If any of them are even looking. With the pizza in tow, Rhiow skywalked up to the roof of the building, and back through the worldgate, which she shut down behind her and left in standby configuration.

  That only left the tube station to deal with. Rhiow went down the stairs, then hung an immediate left and walked straight through the wall, trying to keep the directions back to the abandoned platform straight in her head. She took a few false turns, but finally found where she wanted to be: and had the satisfaction of seeing young Artie's mouth drop open as she walked straight through a wall not far from him, the pizza floating along behind her.

  She put it carefully down on the floor. "It's fairly clean here," she said. "Sorry I couldn't bring a plate. Here, just pull it apart with your hands. Watch out, it's still hot."

  Artie pulled his first slice off, bit it tentatively; finished it immediately and pulled off another. "Good," Rhiow said, and went over to Urruah, who was lying nearby. "Now then. What's next?"

  He looked at the pizza.

  "Don't even think about it," Rhiow said. "I went to a lot of trouble over that. How's he doing?" She glanced over toward Fhrio and the timeslide.

  "How would I know? I'll wait until he tells me. He might genuinely be in the middle of something I don't want to disturb." Or I might just not want to get my head bitten off.

  Rhiow put one ear forward and one back, a wry expression. "Is Siffha'h all right, did Auhlae say?"

  "Recovering," Urruah said. "She's just exhausted after doing two big power-feeds close together— and apparently the fact that something knocked us sideways affected her, too: she tried to force us through anyway, and so she took the brunt of what hit us." His tail thumped on the concrete. "She tries real hard. It's not like she has to prove anything to anyone."

  "I know," Rhiow said. "If she only— "

  "What's that?" Siffha'h said suddenly from the other side of the platform, pushing herself up again. "Something's coming."

  Everyone looked up in alarm. Mostly they did it just in time to see the air in the middle of the platform stretch and sheen like pulled plastic wrap, then peel apart.

  A dinosaur stepped out.

  A casual viewer could have been forgiven for mistaking it for a dinosaur, at any rate. It stood about six feet high at the shoulder, and its long neck arched up another couple of feet to terminate in a long, lean, toothy muzzle: a pair of well-made and delicate forelegs with six claws each were folded decorously in front of the creature's chest. It stood mostly upright on its long-clawed hind legs, and a tail about five feet long lashed out behind it, helping it keep its balance. The shadowy lighting down here did not show off to best advantage the subtly patterned hide patched in red and orange, but somehow the small golden eye found the light, and kept it.

  The London team stared at this apparition in astonishment: the saurian bowed to them gracefully, bobbing forward and back. "I am on errantry," it said in a soft, hissing voice, "and I greet you."

  "You're well met on the errand," Huff said, still very wide-eyed. "Rhiow, is this the help you said you were sending for?"

  "Indeed so. Ith, let me make you known to the London team."

  She strolled over and took him around, making the introductions. Huff and Auhlae recovered their composure quickly: Fhrio, caught in the middle of doing something technical to the timeslide, simply stood for some moments with his mouth hanging open. Siffha'h gazed at Ith too, and spoke to him politely enough when introduced, but Rhiow couldn't help noticing her expression, a peculiar look of half-recognition, as if she had seen him before sometime, but couldn't place where.

  Finally she brought Ith over to Artie. "And this is our 'pet' ehhif," Rhiow said, with some amusement. "Artie, this is Ith."


  "Oh, rather," said Artie, very impressed indeed. "Are you a thunder lizard?"

  Ith dropped his lower jaw and flickered his long, blunt tongue slightly in what Rhiow had come to recognize as a smile. "I have not thundered at anything very recently," he said, "but in the past I have occasionally done so."

  He crouched down on his back legs next to Arhu, who leaned against him companionably. "Your summons was opportune," Ith said to Rhiow, "for I was thinking of coming to see you anyway. The master gate matrices in the Old Downside, the ones that service Grand Central and many other gating complexes, have been showing signs of strain, these last few days. Gatings have not been progressing as they normally do."

  "It's not just strain," Arhu said. "Let me show you."

  For a few seconds they were silent together. It was not vision, Rhiow thought, but rather something to do with their old history together; they had been in one another's minds in extremely harrowing circumstances, involving their jointly completed Ordeals, and there were times when the communication between them seemed so complete and effortless that Rhiow wondered whether some kind of permanent connection between them had been wrought by the anguish and triumph they'd shared.

  Ith looked up, then, and said, "You have been having a busy time." He clenched his claws together, interlacing them. "And now this business of the Longest Winter. Very interesting indeed."

  He looked up over at the London team. "That was what killed my people in the ancient days," he said to Huff. "The Lone One, the Old Serpent, brought that fate down on us when we made our first Choice as a species. It said if we accepted Its gift, we would rule the Earth so long as the Sun shone on it. And so we did: until the blow fell burning from the sky, and the dust and the smoke of its impact rose up and hid the sun. It killed all my ancestors except the very few who, by accident or by grace of the Powers, managed to find their way into the Old Downside and take refuge in the caves there, down where the catenaries spring up from their ultimate power source. There we lived for ages, and there the Lone One ruled us, saying that someday It would lead us up into the Sun again, and we would conquer all the puny creatures that lived there and take the Earth for our own once more." He smiled, showing most of his teeth. "Well, they conquered us instead, to our great good, and my people lost their old false Father, and gained a new one.* Mostly due to my brother, my father here." He glanced down at Arhu. Arhu looked away, and purred.

  "But the thought of the Winter has not been far from my mind, or my people's," Ith said to Rhiow. "It is a charged subject for us, as charged in its way as humankind's old story that you told me about the apple and the garden: and there is a serpent in that story too, though I am afraid it is not the Bright One Who is a shape I wear these days sometimes, or Who wears me— whichever. In any case, we are eager that the Winter should not come back, from whatever cause, for if it returns to the upper world, that will eventually affect the Old Downside as well. Since we have no guarantees from the Powers that this fate would never befall us again, I thought that we might seek to put guarantees of our own in place."

  "You could get caught up in that kind of thing to the exclusion of everything else," Auhlae said, "if you weren't careful."

  "Oh, indeed. We know well enough that every race dies," Ith said. "That alone has become obvious enough from studying other species' history. Entropy is running." The young-old, wise eyes looked a little tired already. "We cannot stop it. But this does not mean we need instantly to enter into a suicide pact with the Universe. We may forestall the event as long as possible... indeed the Powers would prefer that we do."

  "Getting familiar with Them, are you?" Urruah said.

  "No less than you," Ith said mildly. "Your good friend, Saash of the unending itch, now herself walks the floor of Heaven about the One's business, and the depths of reality echo to the thumping when she sits down to scratch. And she thought of herself as 'nothing special.' I am nothing special either, but I am also Father of my people now, and so I find myself chatting often enough with my people's Grandparents as I try to make some sense out of this terrible mass of data They've wished on me, and try to claw it into some shape that our new wizards will be able to handle."

  "New wizards already?" said Arhu.

  "They are hatching out even as we speak," Ith said. "Some seem to have been trying to be born for a long time, some say they have tried many times, but were always killed in the ongoing hethhhiiihhh." Rhiow blinked at the word: the Speech said holocaust in her ear, but there were even more terrible implications in the word, speaking of a people who for many generations had simply been born to be killed, almost all new hatchlings being destined to feed the chosen warriors of the Lone Power's planned army.

  "Now, though," Ith said, "there are more than twenty already. Our latency period is fairly short, and besides, there is the time difference between the Upworld and the Downside to consider. We are, in any case, making up for much lost time, which is a good thing, considering the importance of the gates we guard. The Downside will be alive with wizardry before very long, and all the better for it: it is not good for a world to go unmanaged. But our 'wizard's manual' is still in its early stages, and I have been kept very busy trying to codify it."

  "I would have thought it would have just appeared," Urruah said. "As if it had always been there, now that your people's Choice is properly made. I mean, the information's all in the Speech after all, so your people won't have trouble understanding it."

  "Yes, but first there's the question of what information a wizard of our people will routinely have access to," Ith said, "and what they'll have to ask for authorization from Higher Up to get."

  "I would have thought the Powers would make that distinction themselves."

  "No," Ith said. "We— upper-level field operatives— are given more autonomy than you might suspect. Surprising amounts of it." He opened his mouth to grin slightly, the amiable saurian smile that showed all those teeth. "The Powers' attitude is plainly, 'You're living in this universe: why would you be so dumb as to pull down the ceiling of the cavern on yourself? Be cautious running the place, but take what risks you think need to be taken.' And does it not say in the Estivations, 'I shall walk Your worlds as You do, as if they are mine... for so indeed they are'? So I find I must make these decisions, the Powers apparently feeling that one from inside a native 'psychology' will be best fitted to understand wizardry's best implementation for that psychology. Then there's the matter of how Seniors and Advisories will be chosen, and a very basic one: how the wizardry itself will manifest to my people. We've had all kinds of different modalities— voices heard, visions seen— but they've been haphazard, and I've been told that we should try to keep it to one or two modalities for the whole species, so that legend and tradition regarding their handling will have time to build up around them. At least we don't have to try to keep wizardry secret, the way the poor ehhif do. My wizardly children will lead normal lives... as far as any wizard's life can be considered normal."

  "You're getting pretty organized," Arhu said.

  "Order is a wonderful thing," Ith said, "when it flows from the roots of a matter rather than being imposed from the top down. And organization usually follows, yes, but not so much so that I can't slip out for a pastrami sandwich every now and then." He grinned at Arhu. "And we should try to meet soon in that regard: I've found a good place up on Eighty-sixth between First and Second. Meanwhile, though, I have other business in hand. They tell me you need me," he said to Rhiow. "And to my people's Stepmother I can only say, 'Tell me what you need, and it's yours.' "

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward.

  "Meanwhile," Ith said, turning his head sideways and giving Artie one of those peculiar looks of his, like a very large bird eyeing a very large worm, "is there any more of that pizza?"

  Rhiow laughed. "No! Get your own. There's probably a fairly decent pizza place not too far from where you're getting your pastrami."

  "No," Ith said, "I would say Eighty-sixth is somet
hing of a desert as regards pizza. Now if you go a little farther uptown— "

  "Don't!" Rhiow said. He and Arhu looked at her, startled. "Just don't," she said wearily. "Later. Later I will go and look for pizza with you. If there's still a reality left on Earth that involves pizza."

  "All right," Ith said. "Back to the subject. While involved in the codification, I have been eagerly searching for a spell that would prevent a second Winter's fall. Now I see and hear from your interview with Hwallis that there is, or was, such a thing. The Whisperer does not know of it, though. Or if she did, it is lost."

  "How would she lose anything?" Siffha'h asked.

  "I do not know. But let us see the spell again, what you have of it."

  Rhiow showed it to Ith where she had it laid out on the floor. He looked at it for a few moments, and then chuckled, a deep clicking noise in his throat. "Yes," he said, "there is a piece of my name, and another piece. And the Bright Serpent's name, which I would have thought was a new thing; but now it seems it is old, and existed from ancient times. Another piece of information temporarily lost, or submerged under formerly more aggressive archetypes. And see here." He put one claw down on one symbol of the spell, which flared briefly brighter in response. "Yes, this is the Ophidian Word in one of its new variants: my people are certainly involved— either the memory of our old tragedy, or the prophecy of our later intervention against repetitions of it. And here is the symbol for the Winter, and the indicator for the conditional branches of the target designation spell. There are definitely pieces missing: and this"—he tapped another symbol— "seems to indicate how many. Six other major parts. The master structure is hexagonal." He sat back, looking satisfied. "That makes perfect sense, for the universe has a broadly hexagonal bent: things tend to come in sixes." He flexed his claws, giving a little extra wiggle to the sixth claw on each forelimb. "Particle arrays, hyperstring structures..."