The Big Meow

  The issue of the number of one’s lives behind and the number yet to come was one not lightly discussed by any Person, wizard or not. Rhiow noticed that Hwaith had not volunteered any specific data. But he’s smart enough to read the signs, she thought, being familiar with them in himself… “Hwaith,” Rhiow said at last. “Why me? It can’t be … mere physical issues…”

  Hwaith did put his whiskers forward then. “You have a bit of a blind spot,” he said, “for the physical issues.”

  Then he hurriedly ducked away from the swipe she aimed at him. “So,” Hwaith said, though good-humoredly, “that prey was well spotted. Rhiow, what would be wrong with someone finding you beautiful? And I’m not talking about just the way you move. Or the wise way you handle your team. Why would it make me an idiot to say that I like your eyes? And what looks out of them.”

  She was warmed, and embarrassed, both at once. “You are an idiot,” she said. “And by that measure we’re well matched, because so am I for letting you go on like this! Sweet Iau, Hwaith, consider the circumstances! Ehhif sacrifice, earthquakes, the Lone Power being wooed by some bigger darker power trying to use Her as a tool to destroy the world, and the Queen only knows how many other worlds too – this is not a time to be thinking about romance!”

  “If you may never have another chance, it is,” Hwaith said. “Especially when you haven’t seen anybody in this life that you think it might work with, and suddenly they come along. What, am I supposed to bury my Personhood in a hole until circumstances improve? And in a universe where Entropy’s running, when’s that likely to happen, do you think? It’s who I am that makes me of use to the Powers. Or so They keep telling us.”

  Rhiow had no immediate answer to that, and had to fall back on a different angle of approach, one that she was a lot less comfortable with. “Hwaith, that’s not the real problem here,” she said. “It’s just that…” She suddenly felt ashamed to say it, and had no idea why. “It’s just not returned,” Rhiow finally said, very low. “It means a lot to me, that you feel so kindly toward me, but I just…”

  He looked full at her, and Rhiow was peculiarly relieved to see that Hwaith didn’t look hurt. But the expression in his eyes was strange in other ways. “Kindness has nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said. “The heart spoke, is all. It knew something I didn’t. Knew it the moment I laid eyes on you.” He looked away. “I could almost say I’m sorry. Except wizards don’t lie, and I’m not sorry –”

  Rhi, Arhu said.

  She licked her nose, looked away too. Ehhif are arriving, Arhu said. Some in groups. And I’ve seen where the first few went as soon as they came in. Down on the level where the wine cellar is, but right on the other side of the house, up against the big hill: there’s a door at the back of another of these little rooms. I can’t see in there very well: it’s heaving with sa’Rraah’s little jackals.

  All right, Rhiow said. Pass the news to the others. She thought for a moment about whether it would be wiser to wait until all the ehhif were in, or go early. Early won. Arhu, I need you to go in first, she said. Hide and look around. Then pass us coordinates and we’ll slip into some quiet spot that you recommend.

  Fine.

  And remind Sif to keep her power-presence low and quiet! Rhiow said. The jackals are going to be twitchy enough at the feel of her just being in the space. The less reason they might have to crystallize their attention out, the better.

  She knows that, Arhu said.

  Good. Where’s Helen?

  Aufwi says she’s sitting on his head. Arhu sounded bemused. Is anybody going to tell me exactly how that works?

  If we see the dawn, I’m hoping she’ll tell me, Rhiow said. And ‘Ruah –

  He’s closest to the door into the hill. Down the hall and outside. He’ll come in right after me.

  Fine. Choose your moment, then send along the coordinates. And if you should hear Dagenham nearby, be very sure not to be seen. There’s something about him – Rhiow bristled a little.

  All right. In-mind silence fell again.

  The silence outside her mind was far less comfortable to deal with. Rhiow licked her nose again: she couldn’t help it. “Hwaith — ” she said.

  “Rhiow, don’t,” Hwaith said. “Let it lie. If dawn comes and we see it, there’s time to take this further. And maybe no need to.”

  His tone wasn’t flat or neutral: he genuinely wasn’t upset. Rhiow couldn’t understand it, because she certainly was.

  She got busy calming herself down again. I seem to be doing so much of that, she thought. It has to be due to spending such a while in the wrong time…. It was a well-known side effect of prolonged timesliding. A day or so wouldn’t do much harm: the soul fairly quickly forgave you the injury of being briefly decoupled from its proper temporospatial alignment. But the longer the decoupling lasted, the worse the effects, and if you –

  I’m in, Arhu said.

  His tone of mind was unnerved. What? Rhiow said silently.

  A long moment’s silence. Rhiow’s fur started standing up. Are you all right…?

  You should see this –

  Don’t show me! Just wait till ‘Ruah gets in. Then give us the mark to hit.

  A few seconds later the coordinates appeared in their minds. Rhiow’s eyes met Hwaith’s. Let’s go –

  The Big Meow: Chapter Eleven

  They came out in shadow nearly as deep as the little cupboard they’d left. But the feel of the space on Rhiow’s fur and whiskers was instantly different: high, wide, deep. The air was unnaturally cool, unnaturally damp, and utterly still; and except for one faint light away off to Rhiow’s right, everything was nearly as dark as night.

  They were in a natural cave that reached up above them into the upper reaches of the hillside behind the house. But the cold rammed-earth floor where Rhiow and Hwaith now crouched, with Arhu and Sif and Urruah and Aufwi behind them, was well below the level of the wine cellar. The hard dirt under their feet felt surprisingly damp, considering how hot and dry everything was just a matter of forty or fifty feet above them on the surface.

  With the others, deep in shadow near one of the cavern walls, Rhiow held absolutely still and looked around. The wall behind them was just raw earth mixed with haphazardly buried stone – rocks and boulders that looked like they might have been washed down into pressure-hardened mud many years ago by some flash flood in one of the surrounding ravines. Roots stuck through the raw earth of the walls here and there: in places the wall had crumbled away, leaving little piles of unregarded dirt. Holes in the cavern walls suggested that small creatures had tunneled in or out over time. It was hard to imagine rabbits coming down this deep: the immediate assumption had to be rats.

  The space enclosed by the damp earth walls was roughly circular, though the ceiling was higher down toward one end than at the other. In the dimness, maybe fifty feet up, Rhiow could just see some roots hanging down through that ceiling, possibly the roots of one or more trees up on the hillside, all shriveled and dried out from not having found water. Beyond that, the cavern had no unusual characteristics except for what lay in its center.

  At first she thought it was just a single circle of rough stones, maybe thirty feet across. They were not carved as far as Rhiow could tell, maybe not even shaped: lumpy, rounded boulders, longer than they were wide, more or less stuck in the ground. Inside them, and outside them, were two matching rings of smaller stones. There were perhaps twenty of the big ones, and maybe thirty of the smaller stones in the outer circle. The inner one was harder to judge, partly because as Rhiow looked at the stones, she found herself having trouble getting a count. There was something about the stones that made her dislike looking at them.

  Hunting circle, Helen said silently. Or it started out that way….

  This is something to do with your people? Siffha’h said.

  It might have been once… a very, very long time ago. But then someone started using the ring for some other purpose. A pause. And then it looks as if at some
point a hillside fell on it… which suggests the other purpose might not have been very wholesome.

  Did the Azteca ehhif ever come up this far? Aufwi said.

  I don’t know, Helen said. It doesn’t have to have been them. Just someone who perhaps had been down into their lands, heard from them about the powerful being they were beginning to worship… then brought the news up north.

  Rhiow’s tail lashed. She looked rightward toward the source of the faint light, sniffed the air. Something’s burning –

  It’s one of those little camp lanterns ehhif use, Arhu said. It burns one of those petroleum liquids they use. I saw one bring it in a while ago through the door they’re using down there… then he went away. A few others came in too, looked around, then left again. They were talking about the others coming here, getting ready to come in here very soon and do something…

  Probably best we should scatter around before they start coming in here in numbers, Rhiow said. Stay by the walls. Their eyes aren’t anything like as good as ours under these conditions: they won’t be able to see much even if they bring more lights in here.

  Her team split up and took off in both directions. Off to one side, Arhu was lingering. How many have you seen coming into the house so far? Rhiow said.

  Twenty or so.

  All right. Go on. And Arhu – He paused. Watch Sif’s back. She’s likely to make the difference between us being able to stop what starts happening here or not making any difference at all.

  Don’t worry… I’ll be right with her. He faded off into the darkness.

  Rhiow looked at the stones again, trying to force herself to concentrate on the nearest of the large ones. It was hard: she felt her eyes burning as something made her want more and more to look away. Nasty, she said. Come on, Hwaith, no point in lurking there and hoping I won’t notice you. If you’re going to be with me, be with me.

  She headed off toward the nearest of the big stones, being careful to keep it between her and that dim light down by the doorway. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Hwaith said.

  I’m not seeing much of anything, Rhiow said as they got closer to the stone: her eyes were bothering her more and more as she tried to focus on the thing.

  Not that, Rhiow. Look at the strings!

  Unusually for a gate technician, she had been paying little attention to the hyperstring structure in the area. Now Rhiow made the little mental shift necessary to alter the way she was seeing the physical world, and the hyperstrings in the area sprang into view. But she didn’t see the normal relatively straight warp and weft of brilliant lines that grossly marked the structure on which the physical universe was hung. Here the lines of force invisibly filling the air were all warped out of shape, unnaturally bundled together around the circle, as if they were writhing away from the stones in the circle.

  It wasn’t the stones themselves that were the major force disrupting the string structures, however. It was the hard-to-see diagram dug into the rammed clay in the circle’s center. All right, Rhiow said silently, we knew something like this would probably be here… She moved forward cautiously, avoiding the chance of touching any of the stones, and watching where she put her feet to make sure she didn’t come in contact with any of the figure inscribed into the ground. Even if the thing was composed entirely of fragments of charms, it was entirely capable of containing “tripwires” that would alert whoever had drawn it.

  From way down the cavern, near the wall, she caught a flash of Urruah’s eyes as he paused near the kerosene lamp to look back her way. This is so un-Hollywood, he said. There should be all kinds of evil carved figures, a big dais, a sacrificial altar…

  We’ve got more than enough nasty stuff here without starting to complain about the aesthetics, Rhiow said, pausing at the edge of the diagram and looking it over. Behind her, Hwaith was circling past one of the stones to her left to get another angle on it.

  Rhiow had been half expecting either a clumsy aggregation of mangled Speech-symbols or one of the peculiar but nonfunctional spell diagrams that had percolated down through ehhif popular culture from medieval times, some farrago of alchemical symbols, ancient languages and confused numerology. But this was neither. Scratched in the ground the diagram might be, no polished work, but all the essential elements of a spell circle were here. Inside a series of nested envelopment circles and intersecting power management rhomboids were many long and intricately interconnected statements in the Speech. Rhiow knew she could spend a good while teasing out the fine details, but the overall structure made the spell’s purpose clear. It was meant to contain and trap power funneled into it from outside, and it was full of symbols and contractions that had to do with the confinement of extracted life force. The means of extraction were obvious enough: the broad bloodstains were still in place, the color plain even though the clotted blood had been scraped away. With the blood, soaked into the ground under the spell circle, she could feel the remnants of many previous ehhif attempts to contact dark forces and twist their power to the ehhifs’ will. Blood had been spilled then too, though with far less focused purpose than most recently. Rhiow looked away from the biggest pool and saw something that in its way troubled her more: the eight stones dropped here and there on focus points of the circle’s inner diagrams. At least they looked like stones at first. But if they were stones, then someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to carve each one into the likeness of an ehhif’s torn-out or cut-out heart…

  Rhiow shook her head at the low, angry, hungry buzzing noise that was getting louder every minute while she stood inside the stone circle. Here one could clearly hear sa’Rraah’s little minions, and sense them thronging thickly around, just as Arhu said. You could feel them in the air but most especially in the ground, through your feet, as if yellowjackets had buried nests everywhere under the floor. The shadow-imps were reacting, not just to the presence of wizards here, but to the greedy and ambitious ehhif who had once again been stirring up that old pool of darkness with their desire to control it. And more so than usual, Rhiow thought, because this time the stakes are so much higher. This time sa’Rraah has so much more to gain if the ehhif’s endeavor succeeds…

  Out at the edge of the circle of stones, Aufwi had slipped out of the shadows to examine the circle more closely. There was definitely a gate here, Rhiow, he said. You can see where the ambient string structure’s deformed by the material memory in the floor of the previous gate anchoring, and there are some temporary mooring receptacles still sunk underneath this circle. But some time in the recent past the gate was moved to that temporary anchorage we found upstairs… maybe while somebody was working on it who didn’t want to be down here all the time.

  I can understand that, Rhiow said, for that dark buzzing at the edge of things was getting more and more unbearable. And something else was troubling her: an increasing sense of being buried, buried alive, buried in ground that nonetheless was thinking about moving, moving the first chance it got, killing everything… She shook herself, told herself to stay focused. Anyway, it’s not up there now. And it’s not down here. Where’ve they got it stowed? Because whatever gate was operating here was extremely powerful, on a par with a hardwired permanent gate. It has to have deranged everything else for miles around whenever it went operational. No wonder the formally emplaced gates in the area have been acting so badly….

  She glanced over at Hwaith, whose tail was fluffed out to about three times its size as he stared at the spell diagram. Gating issues were plainly far from his mind right now. Rhiow, this is very bad, he said. This isn’t just some clueless ehhif dabbling. This is professional stuff.

  Her tail lashed in agreement. It’s unquestionably the Speech, Rhiow said. Unquestionably a spell. But now we’re left with the question: how could it possibly ever enact? No wizard in the Powers’ service would ever build a spell like this. Or expect anything to come of it —

  Yet then Rhiow had to stop, for at least once now she’d seen a wizard working in a Power’s servi
ce because it knew no other source of power… and his spells had enacted. But that was in another universe, a whole pocket world in the Downside that the Lone One had subverted to its own intentions. This is the Powers’ world. This kind of thing can’t work here –

  It can if the wizard’s physical tie to Them has been completely severed, Hwaith said, his voice full of pity and dread. And all that remains is a soul-shell that walks and speaks and hates…

  Her eyes met his in the dark, widening in realization. And down at the end of the cavern, the door opened and ehhif started filing in.

  Swiftly and silently Rhiow and Hwaith fled for the walls, staying in the shadows. Those writhed and darkened now in the light of the tall torches some of the ehhif were bearing in with them. In and in they came, making for the circle of stones, the line of approaching ehhif parting around it as they came near: one to the left, the next to the right, left, right… They were all dressed in long dark blood-colored garments, and the embroidery on these caught the torchlight here and there with brief glints of gold and silver as the ehhif moved to surround the rings of stones.

  Robes, Urruah said softly. They’re wearing robes with ‘arcane’ symbols on them. Do you believe this?

  You were the one who was wanting this situation to get more filmic! Rhiow said. But I wouldn’t mock. Anything that makes it easier for whichever of them is really behind this sordid business isn’t to be ridiculed, much though we might feel like it. And these people live in Drama Central, by definition. Her tail lashed. But Ruah, feel for yourself! Not one of these people is a wizard —