Rhiow was trying to keep her tail from revealing her inmost thoughts. ‘Blooey.’ Sweet Iau, what am I going to do with these three?
“But Rhi, you haven’t heard the best thing about this!”
“I haven’t?”
He ignored her irony. “The other effect associated with an eversion, the other reason this is such a bad thing to do! It inflicts dimensional quantum outrage on all of hyperstring structure throughout a given physical reality, sensitizing it to such eversions so that they can never happen again. If this was just a regular gate eversion, it would make worldgating impossible right across all the universes affected. But in this case, it’s not regular gatings that would become impossible, but the kind of unnatural fusion gating that tried to happen in the cavern. Our sheaf of universes would be immunized against this kind of thing forever more!”
At first hearing the concept sounded attractive, but Rhiow was feeling more ragged by the moment and was beginning to doubt her analytical abilities. “Ruah, there’s no way the San Andreas fault could fail to trigger with the forces that would be discharged here. The earlier earthquake would be nothing to this. And I’m leaving aside the effects on the ocean and the atmosphere clear up to space – “
“Rhi, it’s true, the Earth may be seriously damaged. Even if we can minimize the worst effects, we may at the very least we may destroy the state of California, which I would regret – “
“I bet the Californians would too,” Arhu said under his breath.
“But for that price, if things go right we’ll shut down the invader’s access to our whole khiliocosm so It can never get in here again. And worst case, even if it doesn’t work, by Iau we’ll give the Great Old One Outside something to remember us by, a multidimensional abscess in its very guts that’ll never heal — and stuff a hairball into sa’Rraah’s gullet like she’s never had since Aaurh the Mighty shoved the Big Bang down her throat and made her cough it up!”
Rhiow wanted to just lie down and cover her eyes with her tail. It’s such a tom thing to say. Yet splendid in its way. The spirit of Life hooking a claw in Death’s ear– And the wizardry is solid. What can I possibly say?
Except that it’s a better idea than anything I’ve come up with.
Even though I’m still not sure it’ll work —
“Urruah, I have to think about it for a little,” Rhiow said. “And take it to the Whisperer, obviously. But whatever we wind up doing, this threat has to be resolved and destroyed in this time. Otherwise it’ll simply propagate up the timeline into our world and execute all over again, as the earlier tablets warned. And not just through time, but through all the spaces and worlds that the One from Outside is able to affect when it comes through.”
“That is plain,” Ith said. “But we must choose our course of action quickly, get behind the choice, and enact it with one heart.” He looked at Rhiow. “I am more senior than you, perhaps, by what I’ve become since we first met. But seniority is not experience. What power my presence adds to this equation is useful, but I may have done all the good I can do simply by arriving. You are the most experienced of us on site. You have to decide what to do, and lead us.”
They were all looking at her, waiting: not a one of them disagreed with what Ith said. The pressure of it all came down on Rhiow as intolerably and inescapably as the darkness had in the cavern.
“I can’t decide,” Rhiow said, distraught. “I can’t decide right now, not after what we’ve been through. I’m a wreck. I have to sleep.”
“Sleep then,” Urruah said. “So will we: we’ve had a rough night. If this follows the timing data we have so far, we’ve got at least until nightfall. But then we’ve got to move.”
Rhiow tottered off in the direction of the Silent Man’s bedroom. Behind her, she heard Ith say to the Silent Man, “By the way – I have heard that a provision of great fame can be obtained here. Do you know of a place called Langer’s?”
There was a pause. Langer’s–? Oh, wait. You mean that new little deli down by Seventh and Alvorado? Sure, I know it.
“Then since the world may be about to end, while there is still time, let us go to investigate its pastrami.”
Rhiow rolled her eyes and pushed the bedroom door shut behind her.
She was afraid that by now she might have slipped into that state where sheer exhaustion leaves you desperate for sleep yet unable to achieve it. But this turned out not to be the case. No sooner had Rhiow curled up on the windowsill in the Silent Man’s bedroom than she fell straight into slumber as dark and total as if another cavern like the one behind Dagenham’s place had fallen on her. How long this happy state lasted, she couldn’t tell: but there came a moment when she was aware of lying on the floors of dream, and Rhiow realized that she wasn’t alone.
She opened one bleary eye in the darkness. “Hwaith,” she said, “please, of all times, not now…”
I am not Hwaith, the answer came back, sounding more than usually annoyed.
Rhiow bristled as she realized Who had invaded her slumbers. Slowly she sat up, yawned, and then deliberately threw one hind leg over her back and started washing right in the face of the Lone Power, giving her privates her best attention in the best insult she could summon at short notice. “You’re going to have the hide off me soon enough,” Rhiow said between sets of strokes, not bothering to look up. “I’d think you might let me sleep one last time without ruining even what good I can still get out of that.”
Sleep is not going to be an issue for any of us soon if you don’t take advantage of the chance laid before you, sa’Rraah said.
Oh, wonderful. Yet another temptation, right here on the threshold of the end of the worlds, Rhiow thought, annoyed at the Lone One’s eternal fixity. “What is it now?” she said. “Don’t I have enough problems without You poking your nose even further into my dish? What chance are you talking about?”
You have been very forward about assuming that you know what I have in mind as regards this whole situation, sa’Rraah said.
It was most unsettling to hear her in this mode, speaking as clearly as the Whisperer normally did. But at the moment it was the Whisperer who was being more than usually silent. Everything else is so topsy-turvy right now, Rhiow thought, why should this be any different? She licked her nose. “Daughter of the Queen,” she said, trying to be polite, but unable to resist using an epithet that would remind the one on the other side of the conversation exactly where her loyalties lay, “your motives have always been the same from aeon to aeon. What wisdom would there be in assuming you’d suddenly gone all distracted, like some kitten chasing a leaf in the wind, and had started doing good?”
The Lone One’s purring laughter came rumbling through the darkness. “I wouldn’t be so quick to laugh,” Rhiow said. “Let me put a possibility to you, Queen’s Daughter: something that’s been occurring to me this last day or so. That in the deeps of time, when you discovered the existence of this terrible Power from Outside — the force for which Tepeyollotl is merely an avatar — you thought you might be able to use It for your own purposes. You found a way to reach It, and you entered into what the ehhif would call a ‘deal with the Devil’ with that power. In exchange for your help in making a gateway into our worlds, it would destroy the Powers that had been hindering your will for so long. Then, after the ‘Great Old One’ had come plunging into our sheaf of universes and wrecked everything, It would leave you in peace to rule what remained of the Queen’s domain. A delightful thought! Revenge and mastery, all at once, after all these aeons of being balked. …But then you discovered that the Darkness from Outside was far bigger than anything you had imagined – a force that not even the Queen, not even all the avatars of the One right across every known universe joined together, could thrust out of reality once It had got in. And somehow or other, You got wind of its real intent: that You, no less than everything else in reality, from the littlest speck of dust up to the One, would be drowned in Its darkness and unmade.”
As
she spoke, the laughter had trailed off, gone silent. Now, all around her in the darkness, Rhiow could hear a low ugly yowl starting way down in sa’Rraah’s throat.
“And possibly you even found that It had played you,” Rhiow said. “Not merely that It intended to use you as a tool, and then to destroy you – but that It was laughing at you.” Rhiow put down that one lag and put the other one over her shoulder. “And that, of course, could not be borne under any circumstances. So you began to consider… unusual levels of intervention.”
Rhiow started washing again. The growl in the blackness went on, but she ignored it; and after a while it began slowly to subside.
Back off a little now, Rhiow thought, and let Her have some stretching space. “In the cavern,” she said, “though they were thick as ants on a dead rat, Your little friends didn’t attack us. Why would that have been?”
Because the One from Outside thinks I am Its friend, sa’Rraah said, I have been acting a certain part…
“’Acting’! Spare me.”
Perhaps it would be as well to admit that initially, the position I took was in earnest. Not even the slightest hint of rue at being forced to make the admission. Yet if It’s to be overthrown, if– and she laughed a laugh not entirely devoid of humor – the Big Meow, as your colleague called it, is not to be heard in this world and bring about its downfall and that of all others – it must trust Me enough to do the thing that will both allow it entry and make it vulnerable. You know the law.
“Remind me,” Rhiow said, scrubbing her face. “There are so many laws, and you’ve broken most of them at one point or another.”
To interact successfully with matter, the Lone One said, Gods must descend into its realm, and join with matter, take it into Themselves. Rhiow could heard the distaste in her voice, like that of a Person forced to use a particularly dirty litterbox and step in the old waste. Nasty stuff that matter is, and the sordid business of mixing it with the purity of spirit, so awful —
This particular snobbery of the Lone One’s, Rhiow knew about quite well. “The point you’re making,” Rhiow said, “is that when a Power descends into the mortal sphere, it becomes vulnerable to physical attack and other such strategies that work on mortal beings.”
Yes.
This was certainly one aspect of the attack on the Outside One that Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi were contemplating. Urruah hadn’t been overstating the potential effects on anything physical that tried to use a gate that was being subjected to a double eversion. Yet I have to be sure. She is still the Lone One, after all…
“You’re being unusually forthcoming of late,” Rhiow said. “Is this what you did with Dagenham, Queen’s daughter? Instead of sending one of your little jackals to whisper to him, did you perhaps do it yourself, as you’re doing it with me now? Did you tell him where to find poor Laurel, how to catch what remained of a soulsplit wizard after her body was gone, and what to do with her? A wizard that perhaps you yourself drove to madness and suicide?”
And if I did? said the darkness. Would that be so much worse than a thousand million other things I’ve done before?The worlds are My plaything, as you surely know. My Dam may claim the primacy of creation, but I have found another – one she has spent all of time contesting without success.
“Yet suddenly,” Rhiow said, “here you are, the greatest power in the Worlds save Iau – as you would have us believe – holding up your side of this little chat and not bringing your power to bear on me. Because you need me for something. Because you suddenly find that the rats you turned loose to gnaw at the roots of the Tree for your amusement are instead about to bring it down on top of you. Because the game you set out to play has without warning turned far more serious than you ever dreamed. And now only through the willing cooperation of mere mortals, paltry things made of matter with souls stuck inside, can you keep the worlds that have been your playground from being destroyed, and yourself and your Mother and all your sisters and all the hosts of Heaven from being devoured by something as much more powerful than you as you are more powerful than us.”
A long, long silence then.
“So I’ll take that as a yes,” Rhiow said, and went back to washing.
The quiet all around her was most ominous. But Rhiow kept washing. She was not the most passionate player of hauissh, but she had the wit to know when she was sitting in the best position she’d ever held in such a game, and she intended to enjoy it.
She put her leg down and paused for a moment as if considering where to wash next. “In any case,” Rhiow said, “I wouldn’t want you to be overly concerned. I think Urruah and the boys have our solution sorted out now.”
Their little plan? Amusing. Even satisfactory, on the merely physical level. But it won’t work without Me.
Rhiow was instantly intent on not revealing the effect this declaration was having on her, particularly the word “satisfactory”. “You would say that, of course,” Rhiow said, “to save face, if nothing else.” She regarded one forepaw and started licking it idly.
The Outside One has managed minor breaches into our realities before, sa’Rraah said. But these have always been merely local: one universe or another. And always it has been driven out, and the breaches sealed. Eventually the Outside One came to know that only with the active assistance of one of the resident Powers could It break through right across the sheaf of sheaves of worlds, and make the breakthrough permanent. Even so It would have to put forth all Its strength. For if It failed, It would never be able to make such an attempt again, and must remain confined to the Outermost Darkness forever.
Rhiow started washing the side of one paw, then scrubbed behind her ear with it. So?
So even as junior a wizard as you should understand that there’s a spiritual component to this problem, said the Lone Power. It can’t be omitted from any potential solution. The One Outside, insofar as such a vast unliving negation can be said to want anything, wants to be a god. As part of our agreement… I suggested that It could be shown how. Therefore, as It attempts Its incursion, it expects me to confer upon It…
“Godhead?” Rhiow said. “Oh, come on!”
I had some training for the position, sa’Rraah said. Our worlds’ cosmogony had a different prospective direction once, before our Royal Dam overreacted to something I invented.
Rhiow rolled her eyes.
But I was being trained as a possible replacement for Her, the Lone One said, in case the rigors of running a universe should require such. Didn’t you know?
Rhiow thought this sounded very like a lie, and remembered who’d also come up with that invention. “I didn’t,” she said. “But what you’re suggesting is that the One Outside expects this gift from you… and you have in mind to give It something else entirely. The opposite of what it’s expecting.”
Whatever. I’ve certainly convinced It that It needs to become physical before It can be a god. The Lone One shrugged her tail. That’s such a popular trope, after all.
“And It swallowed that?”
We’ll soon find out.
“That’s a pretty glib answer for such a tall order,” Rhiow said. “Maybe the tallest order anyone’s ever seen. And what proof can you offer me that what you say is true?”
None that your tiny mortal brain could hold, the Lone One said. But even you have to admit that what faces us now is worse by far than anything I might inflict on the worlds by Myself. Yes, My agenda remains. Yet if this course of events goes forward, there’s an end to agendas for all of us, and for all time. If I play hauissh with the Queen and the worlds to their detriment, well, that’s My business. But what’s trying to happen now would end all games in the same darkness. There’s no profit in that for Me.
It all sounded very smooth and too-plausible until the last word. And there some claw of certainty snagged Rhiow’s ear and held her still a moment That selfishness, that certainty that the world could be drowned in darkness unless it suited Her plan, rang absolutely true – regardless of how mu
ch sa’Rraah mostly disliked truth, her divine Dam’s invention.
The realization made Rhiow lick her nose again, several times. “Well enough,” she said. “But why should you come to me with such a proposal. We have quite a lot of history together – “
History is the very point, sa’Rraah said. You have borne the Queen Herself inside you, in the flesh and in Her strength, for however brief a time — and lived to tell the tale. Such a passage, the cosmic irony of the merely mortal kitling bearing her Queen and Mother inside her, will have strengthened you in ways you wouldn’t understand – but gods would. And whether it’s by chance or some cursed plan of Hers, no one else would have the strength to bear Me in the same wise. And once again the absolute insufferable pride rang true, and nearly made Rhiow laugh.
“And what gift are you offering me if I fall in with your plans and actually do this insane thing?” Rhiow said. “Normally there’d be an temptation suitable to the size of the work.”
None, said the Lone One. Except that the worlds, and the Queen, will survive, and the normal state of play can be resumed after this interloper has been seen off.
Now Rhiow did laugh, and though she felt the Lone Power bristle at the sound, she couldn’t bring herself to care. “Fairest and Fallen, this still sounds entirely like a plot to make sure that the darkness does fall, by housing Yourself in me and then rendering me unable to lead my team against you and the greater darkness. Indeed, maybe that’s why you whispered Laurel’s name to me earlier – as part of the wider plot, to make me trust you when you broached this mad idea to me. Allow us a small victory – but knowing that was all it would be, the way one of us would lift a paw to let the mouse run and think it’s free before the final blow. A fine fool the Queen would think me if I fell for such a ploy after everything we’ve been through with you in the past…!”