The Big Meow

“I did,” Ith said. He had hunkered down, now, with his head and just the tops of his shoulders pushed into the room through the open French doors, and was more or less wearing the sprawled-out Arhu like a hat. “Some of them were in very bad state and had to be reconstructed, but they were willing enough to be reminded of what they had been once. Indeed, they were eager to become what they had been, even if only temporarily. They were full of urgency to be read. But when I read them…” He trailed off. “I did not know what to make of what I was seeing.” Even as Ith leaned on his elbows, those long slender claws of his were scissoring together, clenching, flexing, clenching again in great nervousness.

“Elder brother,” Rhiow said, “what is it? What did you find?”

Ith’s voice dropped again to a whisper, and despite the awful tension of the moment, Rhiow couldn’t help but be tempted toward laughter by a whisper that nonetheless filled the whole room. “The tablets said that darkness must fight darkness, that only the dark can save us: that wizards must turnto their oldest enemy, and only so will the worlds be saved…”

Rhiow’s tail lashed. “Turn to her how?” she said, horrified. It was completely counterintuitive, utterly impossible, almost certainly a lie. At least that’s the conclusion that reasonable thought would lead you to… “It’s some trap,” she said to the others, unable to believe anything else. “Some stratagem of Hers, to get us to fall in with Her plans and do exactly the opposite of whatever will stop Her.”

Urruah was sitting with eyes slitted, very still.“It’s always been a favorite tactic of the Lone One,” he said, “to get wizards to do Her dirty work for Her.”

“But She knows we’d know that,” Arhu said. “She might think we’re annoying, but when has She ever thought we were stupid?”

“You’re sure about the translation?” Siffha’h said, looking at Ith a little suspiciously.

“There was no mistaking it. Look for yourself.”

A moment later, replicas of the uptime tablets and annotations of their carvings had appeared in the middle of the living room floor. Everyone gathered around to study them. But Ith was right about the words, insofar as the Speech sufficed to read them, and right about the absolute flatness of the language in the inscriptions, and the inability to construe it in any other way. The carvings that ornamented the texts even looked a little hasty, as if the ancient artisan was unnerved by what he or she had been carving. With reason… Rhiow thought. If the artist was a wizard, this message can’t have made any more sense to him or her than to us…

Helen Walks Softly was sitting on the floor in jeans and an LAPD sweatshirt with her legs curled under her, and now she leaned over the glowing simulacra of the carvings on the tablets, gazing at them thoughtfully.“Isn’t this interesting,” she said, and tapped a finger on one of the reconstructed tablets. “See this?”

Rhiow paced over to look at the carven character Helen was indicating. There seemed to be two heads embedded in it, one a cat’s and one a serpent’s, each with some ornamental scrollwork surrounding it. But then she looked more closely, and saw that the Feathered Serpent was wearing a collar adorned with cat’s heads, and the Great Cat had a collar that looked like a snake…

“An ocelocoatl,” Helen said, “and a Chan-Bahlum. When they turn up at all, theyturn uptogether a lot.”

Rhiow glanced at Arhu and Ith.“Maybe now we know why,” Rhiow said. “It’s been becoming plain that the two of them go a long way back. Or about six months, depending on how you look at it…”

“But that’s not the whole point, Rhiow. Look at the two of them. They’re right next to this – “

Rhiow peered at the carved character Helen was indicating. At first glance it looked like the the Black Leopard’s head, with a constellation of little leopard heads around it. “Now what?” Rhiow muttered. “Is that the Devourer in the Darkness having kittens or something? Isn’t He a tom?”

“Look closer, Rhi. It’s not Tepeyollotl: He’s on the far side of this carving. This is sa’Rraah, with her little friends all around her – right next to the Ocelocoatl, our feline-saurian fusion. And they’re looking at Tepeyollotl together.”

“Not with the friendliest expressions I’ve ever seen, either,” Urruah said.

“Not arguing that point,” Rhiow said, “I still don’t know if I’m going to trust the fate of all known universes to some artist who was practicing carving snarls…”

Siffha’h now came over to look at the carving, especially the part that Helen had identified as sa’Rraah and the shadow-imps. “You know,” Siffha’h said, “Herself’s little jackals were sure down there in strength in that cavern.”

“True,” Rhiow said, bristling. “Something I was trying to avoid thinking about at the time.”

“But that’s the problem, Rhi. Why weren’t they doing anything?”

That gave Rhiow pause. In the cavern, Rhiow had dismissed it the shadow-imps’ nonintervention as a momentary condition, something to be grateful for as long as it lasted: and then everything had gone crazy and she hadn’t had time to spare them further consideration. But now she thought, They should’ve been attacking us. What was holding them back?

“I don’t have any answer for you on that count,” Rhiow said. “But after reviewing what happened, I don’t see that we have any cause to relax at the moment.” She licked her nose. “That wizardry, black as it was, executed before poor Laurel managed to remake her Oath and withdraw enacture from it. The calcified heart that Dagenham threw into it was the product of the last ceremonial murder they needed – the one that would enable the entry of Tepeyollotl into our spaces. That kicked the spell into execution, though we were able to disrupt its running somewhat, and the weaving of the incursion worldgate.” She looked over at Hwaith and Aufwi. “You two were instrumental in that. And then Ith arrived –“

“Though not where intended,” Ith said, regretful. “When I had the data I needed, I was trying to transit directly to your location. But the executing spell was spitting out so much energy that no transit could have arrived here without being deranged. And along with the warping of local hyperstring structure by the gate that was attempting to form – and then being shredded –“ He scraped for a moment at a smear of tar on one long wrist that he and Arhu hadn’t managed to spell off on the way back. “My transit was knocked a hundred yards or so off target. Fortunately the built-inoffset function cut in so that I did not materialize inside a crowd of upset humans…”

“I was half hoping that the sudden physical presence here of a being so senior in the middle of that spell, even at a distance, could have so completely changed the local running conditions that the spell would exhaust all the energy pumped into it by the serial murders,” Rhiow said. “But theWhisperer tells me that the disruption just wasn’t sufficient. Unfortunately, my cousins, a spell always works, and this one intends to do just that. It’ll try to complete before the end of the date cycle it was tuned to – the dates that we found in the first tablets.”

“Meaning tonight,” Helen said.

“Late tonight, yes. It can’t do it exactly where the spell was started: the local space has been too deranged by the destruction of the cavern. What we have to do now is plot out all the places nearby where the locus seems likely to reroot, stake them out with spell-sensors, and be ready to move when the spell tries to finish executing.”

“Probably the place where a gate has rooted most strongly in recent times,” Siffha’h said.

Rhiow sighed.“Working that out is going to take yet more time away from what we really need to be doing. Which is trying to figure out some way to keep this world and all its surrounding space from being torn apart when the spell finishes running…”

She fell silent for a moment, for the problem was truly rather bigger than that. Everything we had wasn’t enough just now, Rhiow thought. We assumed we were going to be able to stop the spell completely and prevent the Outside’s incursion that way… and failed. So what will we have tonight that we didn’t have a few hours ago? And when is one of these guys going to call me on this? Because I can’t be the only one that this problem has occurred to, and I don’t see how what Ith has brought us is going to make any difference…

“Rhi,” Hwaith said, “why not be a little more proactive? Why let Tepeyollotl and the Lone One pick the ground that suits them? Force the issue.”

She looked over at him, bemused.“How, exactly?”

He was looking at Auwfi with his whiskers forward.“Take advantage of local circumstances. Get our local long-term, allegedly fixed gate to do what it always wants to do anyway.”

Aufwi’s eyes opened, and he dropped his jaw in a big grin, and he and Hwaith said in unison, “Get uprooted and move around…”

“We’ll pull up the fixed gate and put it someplace where the ground suits us,” Hwaith said, “and then pump it so full of energy that the spell won’t have any choice but to execute there.”

“Ideally,” Arhu said, “somewhere mostly away from ehhif, so that we don’t have to worry about a lot of collateral damage.”

“Plenty of empty hillsides around here…” Hwaith said.

Rhiow put her rightside whiskers forward in ironic amusement at the sound of toms contemplating doing what they secretly loved best: destroying things with impunity. But truly it’s not a bad idea… “The concept has merit,” she said.

“Great. And then what?” Siffha’h said, and yawned.

Rhiow knew what, or rather knew what she didn’t know, and was about to speak up at last because she had no other option. But then she became aware of Urruah sitting like a statue at the edge of the reconstruction of the uptime tablets — his tail curled around his toes, his head bent down, and staying so still that Rhiow was wondering whether he had dozed off. But after a moment he spoke. “Ith,” he said. “Hheh’len. What do you make of that?”

They both looked at the spot he had been gazing, a place at the edge of the last clay-tablet fragment in one row. There was another serpent figure there, the front part of it twisted around in several tightly-coiled S shapes, and underneath it a peculiar funnel-shaped figure, with a coiled and back-flexed end.“What does that say?” Urruah said, leaning down further and staring at the characters next to the funnel shape.

Helen leaned over and studied the characters.“It’s something about how the Nine-Wind God comes to the place of the serpent rope – “

“But look at the picture,” Urruah said. “Everybody, Rhi, look at it. If you didn’t know what you were drawing – or trying to make a picture of it just from somebody’s description, maybe not a terribly good description either – doesn’t that look like a rough schematic of the throat of a worldgate? Look how it bends back there – that’s almost the Klein-bottle rationalization that we use to represent the schematic in 2D – “

“And look what’s inside the funnel,” Helen said. “Another one. A little tiny one…”

Very slowly Urruah lifted his head and looked at Rhiow.

Her eyes started to widen. And I thought I was seeing typical tommish let’s-destroy-stuff business going on before! “Oh, no,” Rhiow said. “No, Urruah. No chance! If you think that just because of a little thing like the world possibly ending — ”

“It doesn’t have to end, Rhi!” Urruah said. “Look at it! A little open-throated claudication stuck into a gate’s patency locus. We know perfectly well from wizardly theory what will happen when we do this — ”

“We think we do,” Rhiow shouted at him, “because gate theory also tells us perfectly clearly why that this is something we should never ever do! If you put a working claudication through an active worldgate, the eversion reaction will rip spacetime apart on a massive scale –“

“Or when in the vicinity of an equivalent rip of roughly equal proportions, with careful management,” Urruah said, “mesh with and evert the corresponding eversion so that the two cancel each other out.”

He was looking over at Hwaith and Aufwi now. Both of them were acquiring the same look of rapidly growing and truly terrifying interest, made far worse because each of them was contemplating how wonderful it would be to have a good reason to do something that was normally a gate technician’s worst nightmare. “Urruah, you are out of your vhai’d mind!” Rhiow said. “’With careful management?’ You’re contemplating constructing a gate adjustment of this complexity and magnitude on the fly? Because there’s no way to judge the actual forces or qualities of the incursion until it happens– “

“Of course there’s a way. We already have some indicators,” Urruah said. “From the earlier gating that failed! Sure, this time the scalars will be bigger, because Ith won’t be falling into the middle of everything without warning. But we know roughly how the incursion gate will build itself.”

“So we root the pumped-up LA gate where we want it – “ Aufwi said.

Hwaith’s tail was lashing. “And we build a pocket claudication with a lot of power wound up inside it, tailored so that when it’s pushed through the LA gate, the eversion is on a close order of force to the incursion event – “

“And then when the incursion starts right in front of us, which it’ll have no choice to do, we feed the claudication into the live gate, and when the eversion starts, we push it into the incursion locus, and… blooey!”

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 theearlier 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 addsto 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 itvulnerable. 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 much 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…!”

Pulling sa’Rraah’s whiskers in such a way was reckless business, and Rhiow waited for the scorned fury and the lightnings to break loose, revealing the true intention underneath. But it didn’t happen. There was merely a long pause, and then the darkness said, with an outwardly affronted air, Whether you’re a fool or no, that’s between you and the Queen. But I tell you that She Herself has no better plan. Ask, and see.

And everything went quiet as that unseen presence withdrew.

Rhiow sat there in the dark of dream for some time, waiting for an afterword, some rebuttal from other levels of reality. But nothing came. At last she said to the Whisperer, Well, your sister’s voluble today. And you have nothing to say on this subject? No advice?

The silence was deafening. Rhiow couldn’t recall having heard anything like it before. It was not the waiting quiet the Whisperer allowed you to hear when She expected you to figure something out for yourself. It was straightforward uncertainty. Whatever words the Lone One might have for Rhiow in this pass, the Queen had none. And as for sa’Rraah, there had been more than mere indignation behind her riposte. The Lone Power was afraid, and – again, absolutely in character for her – unwilling to show it: for among a People for whom pride was normally no sin, sa’Rraah carried enough of it around inside Her skin for an entire species. Not even now, not even with worlds at stake, would She admit either Her own impotence or Her fear of what was to come.

So, Rhiow thought. So it’s true.

And after this sank in, Rhiow laid her ears right back at the unfairness of it all. So once more I’m expected to carry a whole world out of trouble by the scruff, she said to both the Queen and the Lone One. More than just a world! – or so it seems, if I’m not actually being tricked into the worlds’ destruction.

The unbroken silence did not help her composure. She was fuming. If we survive this, she shouted into the Void, I want a sabbatical! Do you hear me??

Silence still; but Rhiow thought she was heard.

She curled up and lay down again.“Now if I can just get some sleep out of this sleep,” she said to the darkness, “I’ll see what can be done…”

Nerves woke her up early, as she’d half expected. It was early afternoon, and outside the sun was shining on the palm trees and the bougainvillea flowers as if the world wasn’t about to end.

Stop thinking like that… she thought. She got up, stretched fore and aft, and sat on the window for a moment, watching a hummingbird visit the flowers one after another with methodical and singleminded thoroughness.

Her mind went back to the last things under discussion before she’d slept. Urruah and his solutions…. Yet she hadn’t thought that his solution to moving the Penn gate would work, either: and it had. That seemed ‘so tommish’, too… Now she had even more evidence that Urruah was on the right track: sa’Rraah’s somewhat grudging description of the plan as “satisfactory.”

Assuming that I too am not being played…

But the Whisperer had been silent… and there came a point where you had to set paranoia aside and act. Rhiow jumped down from the windowsill, pulled the door open with one paw, and strolled down the hall.

The living room was a hive of wizardly activity, with spell circles laid out on the floor and Siffha’h, Urruah, Hwaith, and Aufwi working on various tasks: while Helen Walks Softly still sat on the floor looking the work over, and the Silent Man sat at his desk making hurried notes on something. At the edge of the circle Rhiow stood for a moment, looking at it unfocused to get a general idea ofwhat was going on: then sat down and washed her face, acutely aware of the others watching her.

She let them wait, hunting for the right words. Then she lifted her head.

“All right,” Rhiow said at last. “Where’s a good place to make a last-ditch attempt to save the known and unknown universes?”

Her team looked at one another with satisfaction: and Hwaith caught her eye.

“Griffith Park?” he said. “There’s a great view from Mount Hollywood…”

“Fine,” Rhiow said. “We have a lot to do in a hurry besides our own setup. There are all the planet’s Regional-level and higher wizards to speak to; they’ll already know from the Powers and their manuals, in a general way, what the threat is and what’s being done about it. But we’ll need to let them know the specifics, now, and help them start preparing to preserve and protect their own pieces of the world.” She looked over at Hwaith. “And I need to talk to the Planetary,” she said. “If things on Earth get too damaged, the kindest thing may be for him or her to pull the plug.”

“I’ll get started on that,” Aufwi said, and vanished.

“You, naturally,” Rhiow said to Urruah, “won’t have been wasting time while I was off side…”

Urruah waved his tail at the spell structure he’d been working on since Rhiow had gone to sleep.

“You’ve been busy…” she said. The circle contained all the worldgate variables sourced from the attempted manifestation in the cavern, which the Whisperer’s more automated functions had thoughtfully stored for them.

He shrugged his tail in agreement.“I’ve got four redundant power containment structures built in here,” he said. “If one blows out, we’ve got room to fail.”

“Don’t say that word tonight,” Rhiow said, looking over the diagram. “Robust,” she agreed. “It’ll need to be. But why four? Three’s the normal arrangement.”

“’Three’s the charm,’” Helen said from one side, “that’s what they say in the West. But it’s my land, my cultural substrate, we’re anchoring this to. And in my people’s linguistic and cosmogonic traditions, the ‘fulfillment number’ is four. Four directions. Four winds.” She grinned. “Four feet.”

Rhiow flicked an ear in amusement, turned her attention back to the diagram.“There’s Sif’s spot,” Urruah said, indicating one sub-circle. “She’s already laid a lot of power into the basic structures, just in case something knocks her back and leaves her needing time to take a breath. Other than that – “ He waved a paw at the tightly inwritten analysis circles, completely full of a compact spiral of tiny Speech-characters. “Those have all the data about the structure of the black gating last night, both what the Whisperer got and what Aufwi and Hwaith derived from direct contact. We can match it up and scale it up to a thousand times more than last night’s power.” He turned a concerned look on her. “Which is the only thing that bothers me. Even Sif can only do so much. Power…”

“You leave that with me,” Rhiow said. “I have an alternate source. …And this – ” She indicated one circle that was dark and empty while everything else was glowing in test mode.

“That’s where the claudication will go,” he said. “Sif’s packing it now. ”

“With what?”

“A direct tap into the heart of a quasar,” said Siffha’h, who was off to one side, sitting in a small, densely interwritten circle of her own and gazing down at it thoughtfully as a power gauge display slowly crept toward half full. “The Whisperer said she had a spare one that she wasn’t using for anything.”

Rhiow gave Urruah a sideways look.“She’s being cooperative…”

“The safeties are off, Rhi,” Urruah said. “We’re being given whatever we ask for. It feels a little weird…”

“If not now,” Rhiow said, “then when? Since if the Powers aren’t nice to us right now, there might not be a universe tomorrow… Good work, anyway. With that much power and that much mass packed into the portable claudication, when we shove it into the gate to start the eversion, it should be like nothing even Iau’s ever imagined.”

“Let’s hope so…” Urruah said.

Rhiow wandered out into the back yard. There were People eating the buffet on the concrete by the house, and Rhiow greeted them casually in passing: but most of them were fluffed up, and looking repeatedly over their shoulders between bites. This was due to the presence of Ith, who was reclining in the middle of the back lawn amid a scatter of white cold-cut wrappers. Beside him, Arhu lay on his back with his paws in the air and his gut visibly bulging.

“How much pastrami?” Rhiow said, looking with some dismay at all the garbage lying around.

“Not too much,” Ith said. “Only four or five pounds. It would not have been polite to deprive everyone else of their sandwiches…”

“You should clean this up,” Rhiow said. “You’ll attract rats.”

Ith gave her a droll look that wordlessly suggested rats were the very least of their problems.

“And you,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Isn’t there something you should be doing? Something Sight-related?”

“Nothing to See right now, Rhi,” Arhu said. “It’s either all light, or all dark… So I’m taking the afternoon off.”

Rhiow snorted.“Greed and sloth,” she said. “No doubt the other ehhif sins will be along shortly…”

She strolled over to sit down by Ith’s head. “You’re likely to be the key to all this,” she said.

“I thought it more likely you would be,” he said.

Rhiow suddenly got the feeling that Ith knew about her conversation in the darkness with the Lone One.“We’ll have to see about that,” she said. “But your presence back here definitely changes things in our favor. Not even sa’Rraah anticipated the way you were going to come out of the Old Downside, or that you’d turn her Old Serpent avatar against her and drag it up with you into the Light. Now you’re not only the White Serpent, but also a living connection between the Old Downside and the other complex-state worlds ‘beneath’ the world, the foundations of Earth’s physical reality.”

Ith looked thoughtful, his claws twiddling together.“Yet this time I am not meant to be just a connection,” he said, “but an anchor. The Serpent wrapped around the roots of the Tree…”

Rhiow waved her tail gently in agreement as Urruah came out to join them.“The dimensional and physical dissociation that will accompany the incursion of Tepeyollotl’s master will rip the planet apart if it can’t be held stable,” she said. “That stability’s going to have to be sourced from the more central dimensions, the Old Downside being the most easily accessible. You’re a direct and powerful link to a more senior and more ancient Earth, and you’re going to take most of the strain when the Outside One breaks through.”

“When it breaks through,” Urruah said, sounding disturbed. Arhu had rolled over as Helen came wandering out as well.

Rhiow’s tail waved gently, a gesture of uneasy agreement. “It has to,” she said. “And It will anyway. There’s no way we can stop It. Not Queen Iau Herself could stop It. However – once It’s through, we have a weapon it won’t be expecting.”

“Ith,” Arhu said.

“In part. After all, he’s Tepeyollotl’s rightful enemy: his battle’s a matter of legend that runs deep in local spacetime.”

“Even though it has not happened yet…” Ith said, sounding a little dubious, though he wasn’t arguing the point.

Urruah stretched.“But that’s the way things go in the greater field of being, isn’t it,” he said. “Echoes from the great battles travel both forward and backward in the local timeflow. We know that you’re going to fight him because the legends say you did…”

“All we need to determine now,” Ith said, his jaw dropping in a grin, “is whether I won or lost.” He glanced over at Rhiow. “On that count the tablets were, if nothing else, equivocal…”

Rhiow looked up at Helen.“And your presence here is vital as well, because you’re of this place, in both the past and the future. You and your folk are profoundly connected to this land in ways we can’t be: rooted in ways that People aren’t and not even ehhif usually are. You’ll be our other link to the deep world, Earth’s inner realities. If you and Ith between you can’t keep Earth in one piece around here, I don’t know what can, for you’re a shaman as well as a wizard. There are powers answering to you that we don’t fully understand… but we know they’ll be on your side.”

Helen nodded.“I think I have an idea of what to do,” she said. “I’ll start getting ready when we’re done here.”

“One thing,” Hwaith said.

Rhiow hadn’t heard or felt him appear between Urruah and Ith, but that was par for the course. Surprised, for they hadn’t heard him either, everyone else looked at him. But Hwaith’s his eyes were on Rhiow. “You’re not saying much about what your part in this is going to be,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “to produce the result we’re after, sa’Rraah is going to have to act as opener of the way. And to do it most effectively, she’s going to need someone to channel through. That will be me.”

Her team stared at her.“Why you?!” Urruah said.

“Because I’ve been set up for it,” Rhiow said. “The last time we got caught in this kind of situation, I wound up playing that role for the Queen Herself, remember? Apparently this has rendered me unusually suitable to contain the Lone One this time.”

“Wait just a minute,” Arhu said. “Last time I did the Lone One! I have previous experience –“

“Not enough for this,” Rhiow said. “It’s settled, Arhu. And so’s the script for this little drama.” She cocked an eye at Urruah. “We root the gate in your chosen site and power it up. When the incursion starts, I take sa’Rraah into me, manifest Her here, and synch Her with the gate to let the arriving guest know that Its welcoming committee is on site. Then the Outside One comes through the gate to accept the gift She’s delivering It. And when It does, and It gets physical enough to affect, you shove the claudication into our gate and mesh it to the incursion – “ From Hwaith, who was looking suddenly stricken, Rhiow looked back to Urruah. “’Blooey.’”

Everyone sat quiet for a moment. Then Urruah said with great enthusiasm,“I’m excited about this plan! I’m proud to be a part of this plan!”

Aufwi threw him a wry look, probably secondary to some tom joke.“…And then what?” said Siffha’h, who’d wandered out with Aufwi to see what was going on.

The question cheered Rhiow strangely, though at this point the cheer was irrational.“Then we clean up the mess,” Rhiow said. “What else? Probably the whole area will need major temporospatial patching. But for a team who once helped tidy up all of Central Park after an incursion by crazed dinosaurs – “ and she glanced at Ith with amusement – “none of us should even have sweaty pads afterwards.” She flirted her tail.

Her team and Helen looked at one another.“Water bowl full inside?” Rhiow said. “I could use a drink. Then we have a lot to do…”

She strolled back to the house, in the French doors, headed past the Silent Man’s empty chair into the kitchen, put her head down in the water bowl and drank and drank, for her mouth was very dry.

“Rhiow – “

She finished drinking before she looked up at Hwaith.

“I wish you wouldn’t do this,” he said.

“I truly don’t see that I have much of a choice.”

“Let me rephrase that,” Hwaith said after a moment. “I really, really wish you didn’t have to do this.”

So do I! she wanted to shout.

“Of course,” Hwaith said very quietly, “that’s not anything you’re going to say, especially in front of your team. But regardless, you should know that someone hears.”

“The way you did inside the Silent Man’s mind,” Rhiow said. And just now. “Hwaith… I don’t forget what you did there – “

Hwaith’s ears went back: then he shrugged his tail and turned away. “Please,” he said, “don’t thank me again. I’m just sorry – “ He stopped, started again. “It should have occurred to me that this would never work, that there was no way you could – “

He moved away.“I really am sorry,” he said, not looking back. “We’ve got work to do. I am a wizard, and you can count on me to do my part, regardless of other matters. Just so you know. But it’s a pity that things aren’t otherwise…”

“Hwaith,” Rhiow said after a moment.

He stopped, his tail twitching, but didn’t turn.

“There’s no point in this,” Rhiow said. “We may win tonight. But even if we do win, it’s likely enough that I won’t survive. I’ve come away from containing a god once. But twice? And when the Power involved is sa’Rraah, and very likely to shatter the vessel out of spite once its job’s done?” She was trying to sound calm, and trying to be kind; but now, now that the time was getting so close, she couldn’t entirely keep the fear out of her voice. “Surely you understand that I can’t see the point in planning very far ahead.”

He did turn, then. His eyes, too, were filled with fear. But there was something else there: stubbornness. He simply was not going to give up.“Maybe you can’t, right now,” Hwaith said. “I can understand that. But there’s no harm in having a plan, Rhiow. The worst it can do is fail.”

She stared at him.

Hwaith gazed back for a moment, and then turned again to go out.

Rhiow watched him, and a curious feeling began to rise in her– a desire, in the face of the overshadowing darkness, to do something utterly nonsensical just this once. So much of being a team leader involved being careful, being sensible, not being distracted by your own wishful thinking, covering all the possibilities. Yet isn’t this a possibility? she thought. An insane one. And Iau only knows how it could ever come to fruition. But still. Still –

And especially when there was someone else who had such faith in her, regardless of everything that was happening— to deny that, to deny hope, to deny him, suddenly it just felt wrong –

“Hwaith,” Rhiow said.

He stopped, looked back one last time.

She put her whiskers forward.“Go on. Make that plan.”

Evening drew near.

In the Silent Man’s living room, Rhiow looked over everyone’s work one last time before they left, while the Man himself sat at his desk and kept a theoretically casual eye on the proceedings.

Siffha’h’s work concerned Rhiow most, for a temporospatial claudication with so much energy and mass packed down in it needed careful watching: if anything caused it to come unwrapped, the result would be spectacular damage. But Siffha’h had been extra careful about the safeties that held the claudication shut, to the point where it would practically take a nuke to undo it without the right keywords in the Speech.

“Are you sure you know the passwords by heart?” Rhiow said to Sif as she collapsed the claudication down to a glowing spheroid about the size of a pea and levitated it into an invisible otherspace pocket.

Siffha’h rolled her eyes at Rhiow. “Yes, mother…”

This reaction at least was normal. Rhiow went to watch Urruah gather up the master gating circle and collapse it in turn, vanishing it into the workspace in the back of his mind as he glanced out into the back yard, where Arhu and Ith were getting ready to transit.“The kits are taking all this pretty calmly,” she said in his ear.

“Youth has its advantages,” Urruah said. “One of them being the belief that you can never die. Or the refusal to take the belief seriously.”

Aufwi came up behind Urruah.“I have my copy of the circle,” he said.

“Got mine too,” Hwaith said from the other side.

“Everybody’s checked all their personal data in all the copies?” Urruah said. “Long-version names and terminology only? Good. Don’t want any handling routines failing to execute because someone’s using abbreviations – “

“This is possibly a caution that we’ve heard before,” Aufwi said.

“About a thousand times…” said Hwaith.

“A thousand and one is good,” Urruah said. “Let’s shoot for a thousand and two.”

From down the hallway that led to the bedrooms came Helen Walks Softly, and the Silent Man’s eyes opened wide. Instead of that beat-up LAPD sweatshirt or anything by Elie Saab, Helen was wearing a two-piece midcalf dress of beautifully tanned deerskin, the sleeveless top of which was embroidered with bead designs of whale and orca and salmon. The skirt was ornamented with geometric lightningbolt designs in white and brown shell, as were the deerskin boots below. Helen’s hair was tied back into a long, long ponytail, her cheeks were streaked with red and white clay, and her arms ringed in white clay paint bands; her milkweed-linen and flicker-feather headband had a fan of blackcondor feathers angling up from the back of it, and in one hand she carried a pair of condor-feather reed wands.

The Silent Man looked her up and down and pursed his lips to whistle soundlessly. I didn’t know the end of the world was formal, he said. I’ll go get my tux.

Helen smiled at him and waved the wands at him in amused blessing.

Rhiow walked over to him and reared up to lean on his knee.“You’ve been very kind to us,” she said, “and so very flexible through all this….” She stopped then, for there was no point in saying much more. “Go well, cousin.”

He put down a hand to scratch her behind the ears. If this is it, Blackie, he said, all I can say is, it’s a better end than I’d been anticipating. The last couple of days have been a hell of a ride… and I’d sooner go out knowing what I do, than not knowing at all.

“If we’re lucky…” Arhu said, and then stopped.

Don’t say it, Patches. Just come back, and we’ll laugh about it later. He looked around at the People and Helen. All of you.

“From your mouth to the Spirit’s ear,” Helen said. “Rhiow?”

She flirted her tail“yes”.

They vanished as twilight fell.

The spot that Hwaith had chosen for them was at the end of a long drive that came up the top of Mount Hollywood on the north side. In the middle of the drive stood a high white granite obelisk with a base like a seven-pointed star, in the angles of which stood statues of six ehhif astronomers. On a white pedestal just south of that, a bronze sundial with a steel-strip gnomon pointed at the North Star. At the other end of the drive, facing the mountain’s south slope and set in the middle of a broad green lawn, was the Observatory itself, with its great central dome all sheathed in rectangular greened-copper plates, and the two smaller ones each down at the end of the east-and west-oriented wings. It was a gracious and handsome space, and Rhiowlooked around it and wished she’d had time to see it before the events that were about to unfold.

All around them, the brightening lights of Los Angeles lapped upwards toward the surrounding ridges, fading out into the faint speckling of the sparsely built-up hillside streets and then into complete darkness, with here and there a dark spot lacking any lights at all– virgin slopes not yet seen as useful for anything but the occasional theater or golf course. In the fading light of evening, the view across the ridges and canyons toward Cahuenga Peak with the sunset behind it was particularly lovely. The white of the sign that said HOLLYWOODLAND was clearly visible, in this lighting, despite all the dust kicked up in the air by the previous evening’s quakes.

Rhiow stood there for a while just looking at it, and watching the lights twinkle to life on the hillsides to westward.“Some days,” Hwaith said, “you can’t see that from here at all. A last glimpse…”

“You were right about the view from here, anyway,” Rhiow said. Reluctantly she turned away from it, looked at Urruah. “By my preference, I’d set up the gate right here on this entry lawn. I take it we’re past closing time now – “

“The last visitor-ehhif have just gone home. There are a few observatory staff, but Sif is going to make them feel like they want to leave. Maybe a little tremor to suggest there’s about to be an aftershock from last night.”

Urruah was paying this discussion no mind. He was looking behind them at the noble domed building with its white Deco columns, and his expression was distressed.“This is all wrong,” he said, “it’s just not fair – “

Rhiow looked at him in great bemusement.“What? What’s the matter?”

“Do you know,” Urruah said, sounding unusually mournful, “how many times this building’s been destroyed in ffihlm?”

“A lot,” Aufwi said.

“Yes. Aliens and monsters and Iau knows what else… It never occurred to me that I might be involved in doing something similar!”

“I know. Life,” Aufwi said, “it’s full of little surprises.”

Toms! Rhiow thought in near-desperation.“Cousins…” she said.

Urruah sighed.“The gate,” he said, and turned to get busy.

From around the corner of the building came Ith, with Arhu still riding on his head.“Everything’s clear up here,” Arhu said.

“Good,” Rhiow said. “’Ruah – “

From where Urruah stood, the spell circle that would contain the rerooted LA worldgate was flooding outward across the observatory’s lawn and walks to its full size, several hundred feet wide. As it manifested, Siffhah went over to the empty space prepared for her – now nearly twenty feet wide – and spoke the brief sentences in the Speech that activated the small dome-shield that would keep her and the claudication safefrom whatever energies might assault them until they were needed.

Hwaith looked over at Aufwi.“Let’s go get the gate,” he said.

The two of them vanished. Ith came stalking over to Rhiow, who had been joined by Helen, and the three of them spent a few moments looking out over the hills, and the many little sparkling lights that spoke of human habitation.“They are going to see some terrible things tonight,” Ith said. “And leaving the strictly physical destruction aside, considering the fragility of human minds in the face of multidimensional phenomena, many of them may die of what they see…”

“I’ve done what I can about that,” Helen said. “I’ve spoken to my ikheya, and the powers of the Earth know what’s coming, especially after last night. The Elder Spirits of the Earth, the ikhareya, are awakening and putting forth their strength. A lot of people will feel the urge to go to bed early tonight. Many others who have to be awake will find their senses dulled and their interest in the sky or the hills minimal. It’s all that can be done for the people, at least before the fact. Afterwards, what we have to patch, we’ll patch. And as for the Earth itself… it’ll stay where it is the best it can: and we’ll help it.”

A few moments later Hwaith and Aufwi returned, transiting directly into one of the non-active parts of the spell circle. Between them hung the nonpatent gate, just a tall, narrow, shadowy veil of rippling force in this growing dusk.

“Right there – “ Hwaith said, indicating a container-circle near the center of the diagram. The two of them busied themselves tethering the gate into the language-recepticle prepared for it. A few moments later the borders of the gate sprang out clear and sharp as Hwaith touched one of the activator strands in the spell-circle with one paw and brought it online.

He stood studying its conformation for a few moments, watching the faint polychromatic light of a gate’s normal standby state run up and down the warp and weft of the hyperstrings woven into it. “Looks steady,” he said.

Aufwi walked around the gate and looked it up and down.“Agreed. Let’s do it.” He stepped into the circle and touched another of the control lines.

The gate blazed up bright as a spotlight, throwing long sharp shadows away from Rhiow and her team and from Ith and Helen. The interwoven hyperstrings of the gate’s pseudosurface throbbed with the power pouring through them, brighter with every passing second. It was an alarming sight. If any gate Rhiow was managing had started to behave this way, she would either have locked it to some location and activated it or would have taken it offline instantly, terrified that it would burn out while being held in the nonpatent state. But this one’s been reinforced against that, she thought. And even if it did burn out, we could build another. Assuming there’s a planet left to attach it to –

Then something made Rhiow shiver.“Ith,” she said, looking over toward where Ith and Helen had been standing near the edge of the terrace, where the mountain slope dropped away southward. “Ready?”

Helen was standing with the condor feather wands in each hand, looking south with a listening expression. As for Ith, without warning he was now about ten times his everyday size, a towering fanged apparition from which any sensible tyrannosaurus would have fled; and his stripes were burning paler, fading to match the hot underlying gold. It was one of the ways Ith appeared when roaming the plains of the Old Downside with the saurians he had redeemed and brought out of the darkness with him. But the other, more ancient form he wore at need, Rhiow suspected he was holding in abeyance. Trust him, he’ll know the moment —

She turned her attention back to the gate. It kept throbbing brighter and brighter, and Rhiow looked over at the control characters written underneath the spot where it hovered in the spell-circle.

“It’ll hold,” Aufwi said.

Urruah was stalking around the inside of the circle, carefully stepping in the empty access and maintenance patches and keeping an eye on the gate’s power draw. “Yes it will,” he said, “but we’re going to need a new one when this is done…”

“Which will be a good thing,” Hwaith said heading over to the management circle inside the diagram that held his own link to the power draw controls. “Especially considering how much trouble this thing’s been giving me lately. Wouldn’t you love the chance to do initial emplacement on a gate? And see the installation done right for a change?”

“Please,” Urruah said, “don’t get me started. That one gate over at Penn, even at the best of times – “

He started in on his favorite rant about the worst-built gate of the Penn complex, and Rhiow threw Hwaith a grateful glance as the gate throbbed brighter and brighter, coming up to the peak of its energy feed.‘Ruah gets nervous in the runup to any intervention, she said silently. This is how he copes, but when things break loose –

It’s how I cope too, Hwaith said silently. What do you think I’m doing now? But he’ll be fine, Rhi –

This was almost certainly true, but it was somehow a great relief to have someone else saying it to her. Rhiow headed over to where Sif was babysitting the claudication package, which sat like a tiny fiery pearl in front of her at the center of the domed-in circle.“It’s stable?”

“No problems so far,” Siffha’h said, not taking her eyes off it.

Rhiow went on past her to the spot where Arhu was sitting by himself, eyes closed as if ignoring everything around him… but she knew nothing was further from the truth. “Arhu…?”

He didn’t look up or around: he didn’t need to. “It’s coming,” he said very quietly. “Get ready.”

Once more Rhiow turned her attention to the sky. No stars were showing, initially because of the dust still hanging in the air. But then it became plain that there were not going to be any stars tonight; and Rhiow started going cold from the inside out.

The initial effect hardly looked apocalyptic enough, at first. It began getting dark. Well, it was doing that already, Rhiow thought. But the unnatural quality of the descending darkness, something relentless and strangely cruel, became plainer moment by moment as the gate came up to its maximum power output and held there. Outside the circle of the gate’s radiance, the ugly new nightfall seemed to be fading down not merely the light of the sky and the sunset, but the outlines and colors in things – not the way normal night did, but in a way that suggested that light and color and even solidity were being sucked out of everything. For the timebeing, the ferocious light of the gate resisted the sucking. But even its normally multicolored light was turning pale and unhealthy-looking, a livid sheen setting in.

This is what we saw last night, Rhiow said. Here it comes–

Not far from the obelisk halfway down the drive, something started to trouble the air– a curdling, a growing obscurity. Very faintly, a suggestion of a dingy weave could be seen forming in it, growing more solid, darkening. But as it darkened the weave grew somehow more distinct. Rhiow’s fur rose at the sight of it, as it began to shimmer around the edges with that same disturbing light that the gate in the cavern had radiated.

Blacker and blacker it went, and all around the second gate things were quickly losing their color and their solidity. The white obelisk faded away like the Moon behind cloud as the outflowing gloom washed up against and around it, flowed past it. Rhiow watched with concern as that ink-in-water obscurity in the air deepened, advanced toward the boundaries of the spell containing the LA gate.

“Rhi,” Urruah said. “Better get in here – “

She licked her nose several times, very quickly.“No,” she said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“But Rhi – “

She reached back into her mind to erect around her the small but robust personal shield that she’d constructed earlier with this situation in mind. “’Ruah, if I have to climb out of there to do something in company with our silent partner, the gate could be overwhelmed when you crack the shield to let me out. The gate’s both the bait and the trap, and the rat hasn’t stuck its nose in yet. So seal it up.”

Inside the gating circle, Sif’s expression was unsurprised: she spared Rhiow only a glance and went back to concentrating on the tiny blazing claudication-pearl she was guarding. But Aufwi and Hwaith looked at Rhiow in alarm.

Rhiow ignored them and looked over at Arhu, who was trying to climb up on top of Ith again.“Not this time,” she said, sorry to do so, but it was necessary. “He may have to go where you can’t, Arhu, and do what you can’t, and you don’t dare slow him down. Get in there with the others.”

“Rhi – “

There was no energy to waste arguing with him. She simply held his eyes. After a moment Arhu looked away and up at Ith, who reached him down a claw.“You must,” Ith said.

Arhu cursed, then bumped his head hard against the claw and ran back to the spell-circle, leaping through the interface into one of the maintenance roundels. Urruah glanced back at Aufwi. The circle domed over with light, leaving Rhiow standing just outside.

She turned away and licked her nose again. I really need to stop doing that, she thought, it’s going to get sore… And then Rhiow laughed out loud. Am I insane?? She sat down on the paved walkway and tried to calm herself down while she watched the dark gate finish forming and flare into a ragged patch of shadowy, eye-hurting fire.

It could not be looked at for long– there was something increasingly offensive about that livid light — so Rhiow turned her attention to Ith and Helen. Ith was a fanged and taloned statue of burning gold, now, even taller than he had been before, and looking wesward to where the last embers of sunset were fading away to cinders. Helen stood still over by the edge of the terrace where the ground dropped away, watching the unnatural darkening of the night around them. Alone of all unprotected things around them, as the shadows in the air spread away from the new dark gate, Helen seemed not to be losing the dim warm color ofher deerskin dress; the shell-designs on it glowed faintly, and her hair was a dark river down her back, a far more wholesome darkness than what was gathering ever more intensely around the black gate.

Rhiow glanced back at it through air gone murky with shadows, and saw that it was elongating upward. No, she thought then. It’s being pulled up. Things were about to start happening, she was sure of it. Keep them congruent… Rhiow said silently to Urruah. Don’t let that one drag yours up with it and get out of control.

No fear of that, Arhu said. I’m borrowing some rooting from him. His eyes went to Ith’s ever more brightly-glowing form. We’re not going anywhere.

The dark gate rose, and the shadows in the air flowed down from it as Rhiow had seen thick mist come flowing down the hillslope behind the Silent Man’s house in the morning. Away from the ground, it started shedding its spreading gloom more quickly, more thickly. Soon the white obelisk was completely gone and the Observatory was reduced to a hard-to-see ghost through the dimness, visible only because of Ith’s fierce glow against its north-facing walls. He was watching the gate rise high over the terrace, his claws knitting together as always: but there was something far more studied about that movement now, and Rhiow thought she could see the glow of manipulated hyperstrings between the claws, wound down small and tight… for the moment.

A shiver went right down Rhiow from her ears to her tail and all her fur stood on end as the black gate paused in the air above them, and began to throb and grow. It spread fast, its blackness flickering now, impossible to look at for more than a second’s glance. And then, the portal section of the gate having widened out to nearly fifty feet across, it went utterly dark… and something came out.

It was a single pinpoint locus of darkness, like a micro-black hole. But no innocent singularity ever carried with it such a freight of unreasoning horror as swept over Rhiow with its appearance. Inside the shielded worldgate enclosure, Rhiow saw all her team staring at the tiny thing with loathing and fear. But it did not stay tiny long. Very slowly it started blooming outward into a dark sphere, as incursions from mathematically more complex dimensions tend to do. The sphere was not solid: part of it passed through over and through the black worldgate as it grew, briefly obscuring it, then drifting to one side. Absolutely silently it grew to ten feet in diameter, thirty, fifty, a hundred feet wide. Rhiow noticed, then, how all sound had been fading away with its growth. The realization made her fur stand up even more enthusiastically than it had been.

That was when the black sphere finally stopped growing; and through its surface, on all sides, a writhing shape began to extrude.

At which point the air began to scream.

Right through her shield Rhiow could instantly feel the burning on her fur, the desperate inner shriek of matter outraged by intimate contact with something impossible in normal space, the air burning a brief and horrified violet of instant annihilation where it came into direct contact with what was coming out of the black-burning sphere. Black wasn’t even the right word for it; but it would have to do, for sensory perception in this continuum had few other ways to deal with the concept of something that was the absence of physicality and on which light refused to fall, as if refusing contact with something so alien. Emptiness didn’t workas a description either; both brain and spirit, used to dealing with a universe that had no true emptiness in it though it was full of space, shied away with nature’s own abhorrence to something that by comparison made a vacuum seem packed full. Caught between the contradictions, the eye and the mind both reported emptiness that was full of something peculiarly horrible, that curled out in strangling tendrils that gripped and slid over and around the hyperstrings in space, annihilating even them where touched, and gazed eyelessly at you with a hunger that could never be filled no matter what it devoured –

From down in the city, from nearer on the hillsides, the anguished screams of ehhif began to arise– innocent souls realizing that they without warning they were suddenly damned, and far worse than damned. Rhiow shot a glance at the gating circle. The nothingness was washing up around it, eating at it; she could see thinning in the outer walls of the protective dome over it, places where the splashed-out glow of the LA gate against the forcefield was wearing thin. Inside it, Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi were all reared up, every one of them with his claws full of hyperstrings that were trying to warp out of shape, but being prevented. For how long? Rhiow thought, shuddering with the pain that beat on her own shield, relentlessly eating through it toward her like acid.

The dreadful shape kept on boiling out of the sphere on all sides, filling the air over the Observatory, and the air kept on screaming in agony as the shadowy manifestation of the Outside One poured into the world, like flood waters from some dark sea, irresistible, infinite. Its dreadful pressure on the soul grew moment by moment, crushing, so that you wanted to do anything to make it stop: flee, even die. But fleeing won’t help, Rhiow thought, and neither will dying. Now’s the time!

She was shivering with terror, and ashamed of it; yet she knew what she had to do… and so did sa’Rraah. You have no choice, the Lone One said in the back of her mind, urgent. I am the only one that our enemy will trust to come into contact with it. It thinks It knows my will. And now it will find out exactly how well it knows me. And then the silence fell in Rhiow’s mind again, waiting.

So will I, Rhiow thought, desperate. For of all the Powers, sa’Rraah cannot enter in except where by commission or omission She is invited. And now we find out whether the word I speak next will kill not only my body, but my soul.

One last look she threw at her team inside the great gating circle: and, inside, gazing back at her in terror, Hwaith. There has to be something else I can do–! he said to her.

At such a moment, she thought, he’s still thinking about me! It pierced her to the heart. But there was nothing he could do, and right now, only one thing left for her.

…Come, Rhiow said to the Lone Power.

And She came.

Whether what followed took a moment or forever, Rhiow couldn’t tell; she was flung down writhing, her bones burning with the entry into her body and soul of something as dark as the moment before the First Light and only a little less than an eternity old. The agelessness of the divine Rhiow had experienced before — but Queen Iau had some regard for thePeople she had made. What vastly burst into Rhiow now was the Queen’s ancient rival, the breeder of all envies and resentments, not overly concerned about the welfare of anything merely mortal except as its being gave Her a chance to drive a claw into Her Mother.

Yet sa’Rraah did not dare damage Rhiow at the moment, for fear she should fail in the work now before them.Slowly Rhiow pushed herself up again as the Lone Power slid into congruence with her. With terror she felt, first the dark and cold drawing around and clothing her, and then an awful restless fire— all angers and frustrations concentrated together at the heart of the darkness, like the core of blasting pressure at the heart of some collapsed star: heat indescribable, an unbreakable inwardness, a fury at the world that almost since the beginning of things had refused to go her way.

Power, though, that She unquestionably had as well: and unafraid Rhiow drew on that, knowing that to survive what was coming, she would need everything the Lone One had to offer her. She thought of the possibility of a shield to hold away the pain, and instantly the pain vanished, even in the face of this awful onslaught.

Very well, Rhiow thought, looking up into that darkness that had been so painful to the sight. Now the discomfort at least was gone, set aside by something in its way far worse, that core of jealous rage inside her that burned like an ancient furnace. It had burned so since Aaurh the Mighty cast sa’Rraah out of the Pridelands and away from the Hearth, and it was the proximate cause of all the miseries the Lone One had inflicted on life from then until now. How dare She slight My primacy, sa’Rraah’s heart roared so as to be heard by all Creation: how dare She give you what She will not allow Me! You will suffer for that: suffer for it forever!

Rhiow was conscious of the blatant one-sidedness of the anger, and she held desperately to that consciousness: the last thing she could afford right now was to be swept away into sa’Rraah’s undiluted point of view. But there was nothing in the universe like that anger, and it was something she would use.

That you would use— ! said something from inside her, and strove to crush her down into resistlessness. I am the immortal here, I say how we shall deal with this —

Lone One, Rhiow said, pushing back, shut up or I’ll shred your ears! We have work to do. Mortality you needed? Well, now you’ve got it. So get busy manifesting yourself! They’re buying us the time we and the world need. Don’t waste it on playing hauissh-in-the-head with me: do whatever you have to do!

In a moment–

Rhiow glanced at the Observatory. Over that way the Father of the Saurians stood towering up over the building, even in the face of the Outside One radiating the essence of a settled power that was binding all things together as they were, running up straight up into space and far down into the Earth and into neighboring dimensions. As Rhiow watched, Ith threw down the blinding wizardly construct he was holding in his claws, and Earth and air together kindled from it in a single blaze. That settled to reveal a glowing and intricate network of bindings, involving everything from the subatomic to the macrospatial levels, a network of unbreakable intention that sank into the fabric of things, reinforcing it. But enough?

There was no telling, and from the look of things, Ith wasn’t too sure either. For a breath later right around the huge base of the Observatory a massive, shining serpent-shape was curving, the gold of its burning paling down to white now, the eyes glowing dark and determined against the fire. And off to the westward, toward the sea, light began to glow in the darkness —

In the spite of the Outside One, as if the horror was happening in some other world, the horizon began to glow, and the landscape to change. The sea dried up and vanished away at the edges of things, and the coastline stopped being the coast and became just another set of ridges in a vast plain flooded by light, as out past Pacific Coast Highway were now revealed the endless vistas of the True West. The light from the eternal sunshine of the Old Downside now flooded across the Hollywood Hills and washed up against them like a hot dry ocean, threatening the alien darkness that was flooding in from the sky.

From where his head and uppermost body were coiled, the White Serpent’s body now stretched curving like a mighty silvery river right away into the distance of that vast landscape, as if it might stretch right around that world. Maybe it did; World Serpent was one of the shapes that Ith wore since delivering his people. But the anchoring he had built with his wizardry and now mediated in his own person was founded in more than just the idea that he might be spiritually or even physically wrapped around Earth’s old dream of itself. However the reality of Earth might quake, the Old Downside should not. Here there was only one continent, one vast plate with nothing else to grind against: and it stood fast.

Helen Walks Softly stepped out into that light, out onto what previously had been empty air but was now hot dry summer grassland. She lifted the condor-feather wands high on either side of her and began addressing the circles of the world in long, intricate words of song, not in the Speech, but in her own Chumash language. All around her, an impossibly deep echo of the words went up as if from the earth itself.“’Alchup’osh, White Serpent, Sky Serpent, Hutash speaks to you! Once more I’ve made the world from the Seeds of the World for our children – “

The power amassing around her, reinforcing Ith’s wizardry, was impossible not to feel. Helen didn’t stop her song or turn away from her regard of the West; but Rhiow heard her say silently, Rhi, this is as good as it’s going to get right now — !

Rhiow licked her nose one last time and spoke to the angry presence inside her. Elder Sister… let’s take this rat by the throat!

Yes, said sa’Rraah. Now. And if Rhiow had thought the Lone One’s presence in her before was difficult to take, now she knew better. It had taken sa’Rraah a few moments to consolidate her presence inside Rhiow properly and get Her teeth into the scruff of her soul. But now Rhiow felt as if she was simply being exploded from within. Her perspective on everything around her whited out, skewed, then resettled. Suddenly her eyes were on a level with the dark sphere and the pre-sentient un-stuff boiling out of it. She was larger than that, even; Rhiow found herself also seeing the world as if from a great height, and her mighty body crouched over the whole Los Angeles basin as if over some prey that she’d caught. There she towered up over the world, radiant with a pure and terrible darkness, the Fairest and Fallen indeed: but regardless of the Fall, she was still the Queen’s daughter, still in full possession of the glory of a God when She wanted or needed it. Now, in the face of the Outside One, sa’Rraah wore that glory for once not as a badge of insolence in her Dam’s face, but merely as identification, an ostensible mark of respect to a being more powerful than she. She bowed Her head humbly, for once playing the jackal instead of the outcast Queen of the Pride.

Above them the darkness continued boiling in through the incursion hypersphere’s surface from Outside, and Rhiow for the first time realized that only just now — when something with the power of a god manifested before It — had the Outside One’s attention actually been drawn to them. Even now It did not speak; it was the opposite of life and thought. But nonetheless It made Itself understood. Give me the gift You promised. Give me entry into matter, that I may abolish it, and end this rebellion from within, and be All.

“Here,” sa’Rraah said through Rhiow, and the hills around them shuddered with the power of Her words. “Here is the weak point, the way to the throat of the prey. Join with me and I will show you, and all this will be Yours.”

Everyone and everything seemed to hold its breath as the Outside One reached out to sa’Rraah discover the way into the world of matter. It meant holding still and allowing Oneself to be felt and fondled over by that terrible slithering touch, something that invaded her body’s matter in awful analysis. Away back in the core of herself that was still wholly a Person and a wizard, Rhiow turned her whole being to the purpose of holding still and letting the violation happen, horrified beyond all reason but still strangely satisfied. It and sa’Rraah are of one mind about matter, she thought. And It’ll share her blind spot. They see matter as contemptible, and this is why Its avatar Tepeyollotl always sought to shatter the Earth – because like sa’Rraah, It takes spirit to be superior.

We’ll see about that –

The violation seemed to go on and on, and Rhiow could do nothing but suffer it. But after endless time, the pain subsided, draining away and leaving her limp and wretched, wishing she could die though totally unable to, with hardly even a thought able to crawl across the pitch-black floor of her mind. For what seemed like forever, nothing happened, nothing at all, as the Outside One examined what It had learned.

And then It took the bait. It started pouring itself into sa’Rraah, and into Rhiow. As it began to manifest within them, the Outside One took the nature of matter to it, and wrapped that matter around itself, and started to become a physical thing inside the world.

Rhiow was now beyond any further reaction except a silent scream of pain and horror that bid fair to last forever. She had been afraid that sa’Rraah might not set her free again after their ploy succeeded, or at least allow her the mercy of death. Now she realized that sa’Rraah was screaming too, screaming along with Rhiow at a violation She found as horrifying as Rhiow had found the earlier one. She began to wonder whether even the Lone One had miscalculated, had overestimated her ability to beguile this force of unnature. Will we be trapped together like this forever? Or just cast aside and destroyed, both of us, when It’s got what It wants and we’re not needed any more —

There was no seeing anything in such a state; perception was all that was left, and even sa’Rraah’s perception was blurred by pain and terror now. But Rhiow knew that outside them, above them, the newly incarnated Outside One was taking on a shape like the Lone One’s, like Rhiow’s, but even huger and more terrible. The Black Leopard — Tepeyollotl no more Its mere avatar, but now truly containing its progenitor from Outside — loomed over Los Angeles, its great, hating, hungry eyes looking down at Earth, and beyond it, at the rest of Earth’s universe and all the worlds beyond, straight across the khiliocosm.

Everything cowered. Right across the planet, right across the worlds, the structure of space and the fabric of time themselves crouched down low in the darkness and looked up into it fearfully, hearing the long slow snarl of the Hunter as it bent low over them, about to open the jaws of its great yawning maw to snap them up at last and swallow them down into the dark.

But down on the terrace outside the Observatory, one patch of light remained, flowing to it from away westward in a narrow corridor where another dimension’s landscape still obtained, even under that world-ending regard. The substance and will of the World Serpent were sunk deep into that corridor of power. And though his body between Earth and the Old Downside was pulled unbearably taut, Ith’s radiant upper coils were cast around the whole fabric of the Observatory, anchoring and his jaws locked around the next coil down as his eyes blazed with an ebony fire of certainty and rage. I – shall not – be moved –!

Rhiow and sa’Rraah could feel Ith bunching every muscle to resist the abolishing power of the great hating eyes that hung in the heavens, all the length of his body rigid with the inconceivable strain of holding a world in place. Now – would be a good time! he said silently to Rhiow.

Not yet! sa’Rraah cried. It’s not finished becoming physical yet! Just a little more –

Yet the shattering that Tepeyollotl most desired, the precursor of the worse destruction to follow, was already beginning. Rhiow could hear it starting at the roots of things— a tremor in the earth that would build and build until all the land shattered and was overturned, until all the seas ran into the cracks and boiled away in the mantle-deep cracks that would burst open right across the planet. That shattering wave would run straight away from here through space and time, breaking everything it met, shattering it right down to the atoms; and even the particles of dust that remained would themselves be swallowed up into the fissures that would open in space’s own structure. In time those too would close, and there would simply be nothing… nothing but theOutside One, now Inside forever, Deity by default of a dead and empty cosmos.

Against that, though, Ith still strove. And Helen kept singing to the West as if the Old Downside was a frightened animal.“Sky Serpent, ’Alchup’osh,” she was singing, “once more give the children the gift you once gave them – “

The shaking didn’t stop, but at least it didn’t get any worse. It’s all that can be done right now! sa’Rraah said silently to Rhiow, though She too was writhing in anguish. No active attack until It’s all here, until the connection can’t be broken –

How much longer? Rhiow cried.

The earth under the Observatory rocked. Ith hung on, but Rhiow could feel the strain, feel him starting to slip–

Suddenly the earthquake broke out in full force, a roar that began to scale up and up to the point where nothing else could be heard, not even one’s own thoughts. In the sky over Los Angeles, the Leopard went jet-black and real, and Its eyes poured out a light that was itself destruction as that final roar of triumph and hatred rang out and filled the whole physical universe.

Now, something whispered in Rhiow’s ear: to her surprise, not sa’Rraah. And something Person-shaped and burning white went past her like lightning, and caught Tepeyollotl by the throat, knocking it onto the floor of Creation.

Rhiow, joined all against her will with a God, realized that she had now been caught up into that far more central level of being where the Gods have their dwelling, and their wars. With a yowling that broke even through the echo of the destruction trying to unleash itself on the planes below, Queen Iau in her full majesty, in lioness-shape and blinding as a star, roared and tore at the Outside One in its form of Black Leopard. To that fight too came Aaurh the Mighty with the untempered fires of creation wreathed about Her, and beside Her the Whisperer slender and deadly as an unsheathed claw, and with them even the Great Tom, black and scarred and one-eyed, the other Eye fully open and blazing now, and every claw alive with lightning from the birth of things. All of them attacked the Leopard together. Its scream, and their battle roars, went up until they seemed to fill the whole world. And sa’Rraah, dark-pelted like Rhiow now, flung herself into that fight as well, intent on tearing out the throat of the enemy before which She had been forced to humiliate herself.

Never before had all the Pride of Heaven gone into the fight together against a foe from outside. Now as one They attacked the monstrous horror from Outside, and tore it with teeth and claws.

But it was far bigger than They were. And Rhiow, carried along with sa’Rraah into the center of that battle, went cold with fear.

One more thing is needed, said the soft voice inside her brain. Let’s hope it’s enough —

Out beyond the Observatory terrace, Helen Walks Softly lifted the condor-feather wands over her head in the face of the awful black countenance staring down from the sky. A shadow fell even over the narrow corridor of light leading back to the Old Downside: the shadow of vast wings. Under their shadow, the wind started to rise, running down the canyons like the Santa Ana. Now let the Nine-Wind God come to the place of the Serpent Rope—

For just a flash those wings, half-seen in the sky, covered everything with a cleaner shadow than what streamed away from the Outside One. And in answer, lightning struck out of that shadow, lashing down like whips all over the high ridges and mountains surrounding the basin. Smoke began rising, and the dim red eyes of flame opened in the brush on the hillside, growing stronger and brighter with every breath.

And with those few breaths the lightning became more focused, more accurate, and did not strike the hillsides any more. A huge thick bolt like a whip braided of fire struck the Black Leopard right between the eyes. It yowled in pain and rage, and with the pain, surprise. Pain had apparently not occurred to It. More lightning leapt out of the air and began to strike it again and again. There’s a little distraction for you, cousins, Helen said. Make the most of it, because I don’t know how long it’s going to last!

Over in the spell-circle, Urruah and Aufwi and Hwaith exchanged glances. Ready?

Ready–

Ready!

Sif?

Get on with it!

The three toms reached out of the confinement enclosures where they stood inside the spell-circle, and each gathered to him like an armful of guy-wires a bundle of hyperstrings that had been tethered to the floor of the spell. The secondary strings that defined the synchronization between the LA gate and the incursion gate, still burning black above them, sprang into visibility. Hastily the three of them started to pull on the three sets of strings.

There was nothing easy about it. Slowly, like a tethered zeppelin, the black gate started drifting toward them: but it resisted them, and at one point simply refused to drift any closer to the LA gate and the spell circle. The Black Leopard had noticed it. But it was twisting and yowling under an increasing onslaught of lightnings, and caught up in a battle on another plane.

There was no telling how much longer this state would last, however. From her little spell-dome, Siffha’h looked over at Arhu.

Do it now! he said.

No, Aufwi yowled, we’re not ready!If it’s not inside the circle, we can’t be sure of the synch —

Urruah glanced around at the Leopard, then back up at the black gate. I wouldn’t wait, he said. Sif, go!

The dome under which she had been sitting and watching her claudication-pearl winked out. Siffha’h seized the pearl in her mouth, not wanting to trust its management to levitation under the circumstances, and bounded across the circle to where Urruah and Aufwi and Hwaith were desperately trying to reel the hyperstrings in. Right up Urruah’s bunch of strings Siffha’h ran, and paused there, balancing precariously, as the black gate was slowly dragged closer to the spell-circle’s edge.

Around them, the lightning licked and flashed at the hillcrests as the Black Leopard’s seeming fixed on them and tried to move closer. Hurry up! Siffha’h yelled.

None of the toms answered her. Like the others, Urruah was clawing the hyperstrings closer to him in armfuls, as if climbing a tree. They vanished into the spell structure behind him, and slowly, slowly the black gate drifted closer–

Siffha’h balanced, wavered as the strings were pulled under her, and almost fell – then caught herself and took four or five hurried steps up the string bundle again, sinking in her claws, hanging on. The black gate was almost up against the spell-circle’s border now. Behind them, the Leopard roared and everything shook again –

Sif!

She didn’t bother answering Arhu’s desperate shout. Siffha’h ran up the string bundle nearly to where it anchored into the structure of the black gate, near the bottom of the portal, and there again she clung and waited –

The gate’s interface butted into the spell-circle’s boundary… and then, an eternal few seconds later, through it.

Siffha’h spat the little glowing pearl into the gate locus. The pearl vanished into its darkness.

Get down! she yowled, and turned to leap down into the circle.

As she hit the ground, Urruah had just time enough to turn around and leap onto the control section of the spell that broke the connections to the black gate. Aufwi let go the strings he was holding, reared up and came down on the separate section that activated the circle’s protective shield. Then, looking around, Aufwi’s jaw dropped. Urruah!

Urruah turned to look.

Hwaith was gone—

Everything whited out as the black gate blew.

Deeper in reality, the battle went on, Queen Iau and her Mate and children tore at the Black Leopard’s essence, seemingly without effect. That darkness now reared above them, growing greater until one of its paws was the size of the Queen or the Great Tom. Aaurh the Mighty charged It, roaring, but the roar was lost in the earthquake-thunder, and it swept Her aside like a kitten. Sa’Rraah leapt at Its throat and clung there, biting deep, but It shook Her off like a rat. In front of It, Queen Iau crouched down and readied Herself for one more spring, though it seemed hopeless –

And suddenly the whole ground of being in that place flickered, as if a wave of some kind had run through the air. It passed over all the Pride without effect. But when it had passed, the Black Leopard looked somehow less definite, somehow diminished. And a moment later it stared at itself in astonishment and rage, for it was once more no bigger than the Queen.

“So,” Queen Iau said, and leapt. And this time, caught by the throat, the Black Leopard screamed and went down.

The Pride followed to finish off the Queen’s enemy. Squealing in pain, flailing in horror, the Outside One began to come apart beneath their teeth and claws. It shredded away like cloud before wind, in tatters and patches, as the connection to its power was lost. Tepeyollotl the Eater was vanishing now as It had in Its time made others vanish: for it was now just a physical thing. Methodically, tempering Their rage now – for there was no need for it – the divine Pride abolished the Outside One as It would have abolished Them and everything else.

And the floors of Heaven shone clean and empty except for the Pride, who stood panting and scarred on the floor of Heaven, looking at one another.

“My Daughter,” Queen Iau said, “well done. “

“Yes,” sa’Rraah said, “it is.” And without another word she flung herself at her Mother’s throat.

They rolled over and over the floors of existence together, the Lone One kicking at her Dam’s guts and tearing at Her with Her claws, during this one moment when the One might be slightly less than omnipotent. Rhiow, now separate again from the Lone One with the destruction of the black gate and the dissolution of the conditions that had prompted their joining, stood aside on the floorof Heaven and yowled in distress at what she had inadvertently brought about. No, this wasn’t supposed to happen, no!

But the Queen rose up and threw sa’Rraah aside – and as she did so, without warning a dark shape came shouldering past Rhiow and leapt onto sa’Rraah in turn. For several of those eternal moments Rhiow could only watch in astonishment as the Great Tom caught sa’Rraah Herself by the scruff and slammed her down against the dark floor of their conjunct mind, digging his claws in behind her shoulders and pinning her so that She didn’t even dare writhe or struggle to get away.

Out! He yowled.

A moment later, She had fled.

Only then did He look back at Rhiow. Only then did she see the one dark eye… and the one bronze one. She stared.

Queen Iau shook Herself all over, glancing in an idle way at the bright fur on her back, still roused a little with the annoyance of the fight, and then strolled over to Rhiow and Hwaith. Behind her, the Whisperer and Aaurh the Mighty came along like good pride-daughters, already healed of the scars They had acquired in the fight, and looking a little curiously at the Great Tom.

Hwaith in the Tom’s person flicked an ear at the Queen. Madam, he said.

She eyed him with amusement, then looked at Rhiow. It seems that your friend learned something from the bargain you and my Eldest Daughter struck, Queen Iau said.

Rhiow was still thunderstruck.

The Tom and I spoke, Madam, Hwaith said. I couldn’t stay: I had to come here to make sure that all went well. And he looked at Rhiow. My Royal Sire was willing to allow me to join him and assist him… after some encouragement.

Rhiow’s eyes went wide.

Iau’s whiskers went forward. Mostly, my son, she said, it’s wiser to keep such assistance to a minimum. We are in very special circumstances here: but your body will not be able to bear much more. You should go.

She waved Her tail at them. Go on, she said. On this plane and on others, there’s a lot of cleaning up to do. But we’ll talk again.

Rhiow and Hwaith bowed to the Queen, and vanished–

…back into reality.

Rhiow sat up straight as a Person will who’s dozed off sitting up, and stared around her in near-panic at the thought of what she might find. The air was full of dust and smoke and the smell of burning, but empty of that loathsome dark curdling that had sucked the life and color out of everything up here. Normal evening was reasserting itself, though after a quake of this size there was understandably little else that was normal about the night. Cracks spread all across the Observatory terrace’s paving, and all around Rhiow could hear little rustles of falling dirt from tiny landslides in the canyons down the mountain’s side, as the abused earth tried to settle itself down. That wasn’t going to happen for a while yet: right then an aftershock shook the ground under her paws.

But Rhiow, who just a few days before had clung to a tree limb like a scared squirrel on feeling such a thing, now hardly noticed it at all as she stared around. There was Ith, sitting down on his haunches by the north-facing Observatory wall. There were Urruah and Aufwi sitting shocked-looking in the middle of the now deactivated spell-circle, talking excitedly to each other, and Siffha’h, looking very smug as she sat and had a wash: and Helen Walks Softly, sitting on one of the white granite park benches near the edge of the terrace, taking the condor feathers out of her hair.

And sitting by himself only a few feet away, in the shadow of the white granite obelisk and just under the majestic robed form of some ehhif physicist, was Hwaith…looking at her.

“Oh, what did you do,” Rhiow said to Hwaith. “What did you do!”

“What I had to,” Hwaith, said, “for my queen.”

Rhiow went straight to him and butted his head, hard. Abashed, he started washing Rhiow’s ear.

She let him.

The Big Meow: Chapter Thirteen

The cleanup was going to take days: that much was obvious from the start. Not even half the world’s wizards could develop a custom timepatch for such a cosmically destabilizing event, and implement it, in a hurry. But that was not Rhiow’s problem, and for that night at least she was glad to let it be someone else’s.

They made their way back to the Silent Man’s house via transit circle, since every bit of strictly physical movement through this space would add to the already significant difficulties that would accompany the patching. While Aufwi was building the circle, though, Rhiow paused with Urruah to look westward. The Old Downside, having done its job and kept the solid earth solid, was gone now, and the Pacific was once more lying in its bed. But over on Cahuenga Peak, the results of other events of the evening were plain to see. That white sign that Urruah had made so much of earlier when they’d landed under it had not escaped the attention of the angry skies. HOLLYWOODLAND it had said earlier. But now by cityglow they could see how the last four letters lay shattered and smoking on the ground, and the brush they’d fallen onto smouldered yet. “Oh dear,” Rhiow said. “That’s probably going to take a while to fix.”

Urruah, though, was looking across at the broken word, and his whiskers were pushed right forward.“You know,” he said, “even if they do fix it, somehow I suspect it’s not going to matter…”

They walked away.“What an incredible mess,” Rhiow said. “The patching’s going to be a nightmare.”

Urruah shrugged his tail.“It could have been worse,” he said. “Try patching a whole planet, or a whole region of space. But the Planetary’s on it, and he won’t dawdle: not with as many casualties as there were. Bad enough that they happened, and people suffered them. But after the master patch team’s done, things here will be back to normal instantly… as far as any ehhif here can tell. They’ll just reset the whole LA basin to sunset local time.”

“’Just!””

Urruah chuckled.“I’m not minimizing the work involved,” he said. “But it beats the alternative…”

“No argument,” Rhiow said.

Aufwi finished the circle, and everyone crowded into it, even Ith, who curled his tail carefully into it with a sigh, and Arhu promptly walked up it and sat on his head again. A second later they were in the Silent Man’s back yard, and he came out the French doors and looked at them, shaking his head.

I did not think I was going to see you people again, he said. When the hillside started falling down, I pretty much thought that was it. Yet it didn’t fall down, quite. Or on any of the other houses around here.

“Oh well,” Arhu said, clambering down off Ith again and heading for the house with his tail up, “we didn’t want to mess things up too much.” He paused by the Silent Man and gave him a sassy look. “But you should have some better cracks in your front walk now.”

To Rhiow’s astonishment, and also to Arhu’s, the Silent Man picked Arhu up and dangled him in front of him like a doll, grinning from ear to ear. And I thought I was a cat person before, he said. I want to hear about everything that happened. But first you should all come in and have something to eat.

There was no arguing with that. They did.

The storytelling went on late into the night, despite how wrecked the wizardly exertions should normally have left them all.“I have a feeling,” Helen said, stretched out luxuriously again on the white couch with Sheba on her lap, “that the Queen has been busy awarding dispensations of energy to the deserving…”

The Silent Man had been taking notes nonstop for at least three hours when they ran out of details for him, or at least details that would make sense. He looked at the pile of flip-notebook pages full of shorthand and shook his head, and stretched, being careful to avoid Ith’s head where it lay sticking into the living room through the open French doors. I have no idea what to make of most of this.

“I’m not sure we do either,” Urruah said. “It’s going to take a year’s worth of digesting.”

But will I be able to do that? the Silent Man said. If your‘patching wizards’ are going to put everything back the way it was before the big quake started… will I remember?

“Everything that happened up to then, surely,” Arhu said. “But you might want to leave town before the reset… and take your notes with you. Otherwise you won’t know how it came out.”

“I’ll let you know when it’s about to happen,” Hwaith said.

The Silent Man looked surprised. What– you’re not going back to the future with Blackie?

Rhiow looked away.“No,” Hwaith said. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.” He was sitting up with his tail curled around his toes: now he became very interested in the end of the tail. “Sometimes we just have to do our job, that’s all.”

The Silent Man said nothing for a while. Then he looked at Rhiow. I need to let you know, he said, that the tinkering you did with my innards has just about worn off. That tells me that it’s about time I left town and headed back east. He glanced around. Sheba and I were just about finished with this town, anyway….

“There’s no harm in letting you know,” Urruah said, “that they won’t be finished with you for a long, long time. And you’ll make a lot of ehhif happy over time.”

The Silent Man bowed to him from where he sat in the wooden chair by the desk. There is no higher praise, he said.

Urruah sighed.“Someone’s going to have to go get the gate set up for the slide tomorrow.”

“That’ll be me,” Hwaith said. He glanced around at the others. “I’d sooner not move it: there are diagnostics to do, and anyway the patching teams wouldn’t thank me – “

“Hwaith, don’t bother,” Aufwi said. “I’ll handle it. You get some rest.” He glanced around at the others. “No point in wishing anyone the luck of the hunt: we’ve had it! I’ll see you all in the morning. Two hours after Eyerise?

“That sounds fine,” Rhiow said.

Aufwi vanished.

And what about you? the Silent Man said to Helen Walks Softly. What about your film career? What about your agent?

“I’ve already called him,” Helen said. “I’ve explained an urgent need to go home to see relatives in the Midwest. Which I do really have.” She smiled. “He made up half the story for himself before I could even finish misdirecting him – he’s used to having starlets break without warning under the strain of public attention.” Helen shrugged, and then smiled a little sadly. “I will miss LA, though. This LA. It’s been… a trip down Memory Lane.”

The Silent Man nodded slowly: then stood up at last. No long goodbyes, he said, and looked around at them all. If I don’t see you in the morning — I’ll see you in the papers.

“Not the funny ones?” Urruah said.

The Silent Man smiled. Never my style, he said.

He went from one to another of the People, petting them goodbye, and finally stopped by Rhiow. Don’t suppose you’d thank me if I picked you up and held you upside down… he said.

She dropped her jaw at him in the human-smile gesture.“Perhaps not,” she said. “Go very well, cousin; see you around the Worlds.” Who knows, it might be true…

He stroked her head, then straightened up to take Helen’s hand. You would’ve been great in the movies… he said. Oh well. Be a good cop.

“That’s the way I roll,” Helen said. “Go well…”

The Silent Man picked up the sleepy Sheba and headed down the bare little hall, and the bedroom door closed behind him.

“I don’t know about you,” Rhiow said, “but I’m ready for my nap.” She glanced idly over the others, but not too closely, all too aware of the sorrow or pity they were keeping from showing in their eyes, and unwilling to see it surface to everyone’s embarrassment. “Hwaith?” she said, turning to him. “A last debrief?”

“Of course,” he said.

And the two of them walked down the hall to the guest bedroom, tails high, as if everything was fine.

They were, after all, People.

Much later, in the guest bedroom, Rhiow was lying on the broad windowsill, looking out into the dark: and Hwaith was beside her, sprawled, snoring gently.

It was all over; over at last. Yet now there was something that wasn’t over. Or over before it’s fairly begun…

Rhiow looked out the window into the street, where in other houses lights were ablaze as people picked up after the quake. To think, she thought, that I sat there telling the story of Aifheh and Sehau so casually. How did I never see that this was coming for me?

Yet now that she did, she felt unable to know how to react, like some Person who’s never seen traffic before and freezes in the middle of the road when she sees the first headlights. I’m caught in something that sounds just like a Middle Lives tale for the Two of them, Rhiow thought. For there were endless variations of the basic story, regional variations, some of them even verging on the comedic – since when the Two began playing sa’Rrahh’s ugly Play back at her, humor was unquestionably part of the strand.

Then why doesn’t this feel funny, Rhiow thought. After tomorrow morning – this morning! – we won’t see each other again. The Powers don’t permit casual commuting between the past and the future: there’s too much chance of one contaminating the other. So forget about that.

And as for other possible remedies… Rhiow’s tail lashed. Our times are too far apart. Even if Hwaith wanted to stay for me, tried to stay for me, as Sehau did for Aifheh… The distance in moons is just too far. No one could do it. The winds at the edge of Life would sweep any Person-to-be over the border into Itself eventually. And even if he had more lives to spend, and every one of them should last as long as it possibly could before the body breaks down at last… he still couldn’t do it. The time between us is just too wide.

And why would he want to do it? He met me three days ago, as his time goes! He can’t possibly know what he wants in so short a time.

Though he says he does…

Impossible as that seemed, perhaps he did. If so, it just made the story worse, especially as she was herself trapped right in the middle of the tragedy of it, and was understanding its issues better than she ever had. So very unconcerned she’d been about the tale in past years: one more legend, one more part of an educated Person’s knowledge – and nothing to do with her, since she was long ago safely spayed. But now the reality had her by the scruff indeed, and though she might kick and yowl as she liked, there was no escaping it.

And possibly the worst aspect of the whole situation was that even with this sudden unseasonable longing rearing up inside her, there was nothing Rhiow could do about it. No kittens for you, she thought. Not even wizardry could grow back a womb for them to kindle in now: your body’s become too used to the way things have been for all these years. It would quickly reject any attempt to clone new material from neighboring tissue. And the ovaries were gone too: so no chance ever again to experience the ecstasies of heat, the mad hormone-driven flirtations, the chase and the always-intended capture, the hot flush of satisfaction after fulfillment. And to think how I teased Siffha’h about this. Well, that’s come back to bite me hard now.

Rhiow squeezed her eyes shut and crouched there in the dark for a long time.

Dear Queen about us, what do I do?!

No answer. But that was the problem with serving a deity who was also a Person. Independence, the right to make one’s own choice no matter how far down the scale of power you were, was always a given. In the legend, everything had rested on sa’Rraah’s freedom to come and go, and Her casual choice an aeon ago to wander back to the much-missed Hearth and taunt Queen Iau one more time. Without that freedom, there would be no tenth life, no chance for immortality.

And we have no way to be sure of that chance, Rhiow thought, miserable in the darkness, shivering with anguish. There’s no way to tell if it that last Life will ever be offered, or even achieved, no matter how hard you strive for it. Like wizardry itself, it comes or it doesn’t… and that’s just the way things are.

Rhiow lay there, feeling the claw in her heart, and knew whose it was. Even after everything that’s happened, she said to sa’Rraah, you’re not off my case, are you?

After what you and I have just been through, said the Lone Power, what would you expect? How should I allow a mortal to put me through such indignity without suffering for it?And anyway… this was all about putting things back to the way they usually are. Now you will have your wish. Make the best of it.

She fell silent.

“Rhiow…”

He stretched, looking at her, the bronzy eyes pale in the reflected glow from the streetlights outside.

“For the Queen’s sake don’t apologize,” she said.

“I wasn’t planning to. I’m done with that. The way things are… is the way things are.”

She bent down and rubbed his face against his: but then she had to stop.

“Will you stay a little while longer?” he said. “Just another day or two – “

“I can’t,” Rhiow said. “You know I can’t. It’s not just the issue of the timeslide, and the buildup of the effects of being out of my right time – though that’s part of it. If I stay longer, it’s just going to be harder for both of us. We should take pity on each other and end it now.”

He sighed.“She does love her little vengeances,” Hwaith said, “doesn’t she.”

“Yes she does,” Rhiow said, and looked away from Hwaith, finding it difficult to bear the pain in his eyes, which he was trying to manage for her sake.

“Well then,” Hwaith said. “It’ll just have to be another life, then.”

“So it seems,” Rhiow said, doing her best to sound cheerful.

“All right,” Hwaith said. “Then let’s cuddle.”

She fell asleep on the windowsill as she had never fallen asleep with another Person: with one of Hwaith’s forelegs thrown over her, protective, something she’d seen Arhu and Sif do. At first she found it hard to bear. Then Rhiow put her own foreleg over his and hugged it to her. This is going to have to last, she said. There’s always memory, at least.

It was cold comfort. But sometimes, after saving the world, that was all you had left.

Dawn came too soon. Two hours later came too soon.

But two hours later they were all standing outside the Observatory as the sun looked over the low mountains to the east, and struck fire from the sundial by the white obelisk. It was still too early for ehhif tourists— not that there were likely to be any here this morning, considering what the night before had been like – and the worldgate lay out on the terrace again, just by itself now and not enclosed in any unnecessary spell-structure.

“I set it up for Grand Central in our time,” Aufwi said: “easier to drop everyone in the same place when there’s a timeslide hooked into the weave. The track 33 off-hours access area, an hour after you left the original uptime coordinates be all right for everybody?”

“Fine,” Rhiow heard Urruah say. It was not fine with her: nothing seemed fine at the moment. She stood off to one side with Hwaith, looking at the gate, even though there was nothing she wanted to look at less – except perhaps Hwaith’s eyes.

He put his head up against hers. You should go, he said silently.

No I shouldn’t! Rhiow cried. …Except I must.

Aufwi glanced at them, no more; then away again. Quietly the air went prickly with the feel of a gate going active when it had a timeslide augmentation.

Hwaith pushed his face in front of hers so that she couldn’t avoid seeing it. Cousin and love, he said, …go well.

Cousin, Rhiow said. And love. Always go well.

With you wishing it so, Hwaith said, it has to be.

And he turned his face away.

Rhiow walked over to the gate more unwillingly than she had ever gone anywhere in her life. Helen, in LAPD uniform again, was stepping through as she came up: Arhu and Ith went through after her, and then Siffha’h. Urruah glanced over his shoulder and went through, followed by Aufwi. By the gate, knowing it would close after her, Rhiow paused as Hwaith came along behind her.

“Don’t forget to disengage the slide conduit before you close it down,” she said.

“Rhiow,” Hwaith said. “Am I a complete idiot? …Just go.”

“Yes,” she said.

She took one last long glance, one that was going to have to last her a lifetime: then turned and stepped through.

A second later she was surrounded by the sooty, metal-smelling dark of the track 33 platform-end, all full of locked empty postal parcel cages and little pallet-moving trucks. Rhiow had seen this spot a thousand times, and it now all looked inexpressibly alien to her— dirty and unfriendly and miserable. Around her, her team and Ith and Helen were looking up and down the platform, making sure of their own personal invisibility routines before stepping out into the public areas.

Helen Walks Softly smiled at them all.“My cousins, we’ll meet again on the journey, I know,” she said. “But I shouldn’t linger: I have a shift this evening.”

Urruah glanced across at the ehhif clock up against the wall to which the postal cages were chained.“If you pop over to 25,” he said, “the local to Croton will be out of there in about two minutes. The gate comes unshielded as soon as it pulls out.”

“Perfect. All of you – go well!”

“Wait for me,” Aufwi said. “I’ll come with you. Rhiow – Urruah – “

“You’re entirely welcome, cousin,” Rhiow said. “Soon again…”

He headed off after Helen; the two of them vanished into the dark at the end of the platform.

“So much for that,” Siffha’h said, and headed out into the Main Concourse. But Arhu and Ith lingered a moment longer, and Arhu – on top of Ith’s head as usual — went unfocused for a moment before looking down at his counterpart suddenly. “Pastrami?” he said.

“Indubitably,” said Ith.

They vanished.

Rhiow and Urruah were left looking at each other in the noisy dark.“Do you want me to walk home with you?” Urruah said.

“No,” Rhiow said, “it’s all right. I know, ‘Ruah. I’ll be ready to talk about it soon enough. But not just now.”

She sidled herself and headed out into the Concourse. Sif had already taken herself somewhere else, and for all she knew, Arhu and Ith were probably on the upper West Side by now. Out into the busy bustle and stir of ehhifkind Rhiow took herself, and it all sounded just like so much noise to her as she made her way out the station’s side entry and onto Lexington.

She made herself do the walk the long way to the upper East Side, hoping that it would ground her a little. But it was a long way, a hard way, harder than she ever remembered it having been, even right after Hhuha died. Everything seemed as colorless as when the One Outside had been sucking the life out of the landscape. But, This is temporary, Rhiow told herself. You have been through an extraordinary thing. The reaction is normal. This will pass.

She simply couldn’t believe it.

At last Rhiow came to the corner of the street where her ehhif’s apartment building lay, and walked down past the little skinny fenced-in trees, the brownstone doorsteps, the vans making deliveries, the queen-ehhif pushing strollers. None of it meant a thing to her. She came at last to the apartment gate where the garbage cans were locked up until collection day, spoke by rote the air-hardening spell she used every day, and walked up the air to where Iaehh’s apartment’s terrace stuck out. Weary to the bone, she headed toward it…

…and saw that there was someone in her litterbox.

Rhiow froze.

The dusty black shape had its back turned to her, and was scratching busily. Rhiow stood there on the air staring at him as inside her began to grow a joy so extreme that it was very like terror. She was unable to believe what she was seeing, unable to believe what had happened—

Surprise, said sa’Rraah in Rhiow’s ear.

Rhiow sat right down on the air in shock.

You did me a favor, sa’Rraah said. It was with your help that I drove out the one who would have destroyed my universe, and my plans… and Me. So I have done a little favor for you, and did not too quickly sweep across the border into Life a soul that, having come to the end of its current life some time back, very much wanted not to be born just yet. Or indeed for some while. Or at all, until somebody else arrived.

Rhiow held very still, hearing more in the silence that followed the Lone One’s words than she might possibly wish.

I will grant you, sa’Rraah said, sounding just a touch cranky, he was more than usually persistent about staying on the other side. But without My help, he could not have remained. You may now thank me.

Rhiow knew better than most what the next move in the dance usually was. Yet today… today everything was different. It was all about chances: the possibility to do something a different way… and not crush out even what might seem like just a tiny spark of light in the darkness. And what do I owe you for this favor? she said at last.

Nothing… just this once. Did you not help Me and My pride, defend what is ours from the interloper? Be warned: after today, all is as it was. But for today… I remember that you helped me keep what is Mine.

Rhiow was silent a moment. Litter-sister, she said then,…I do thank you. So now I go. And may you also go well.

Sa’Rraah made her no answer.

But now I want to talk to your mother!!

There was a short pause. Arhu knew, Rhiow thought suddenly. He knew as soon as we got here, that’s where the sudden urge for pastrami came from —

But daughter, Queen Iau said quietly, surely you too might have known. After the part you played, at so central a level– and that Hwaith then played in order to be with you — surely you might have suspected that however well or ill-disposed She was toward you, sa’Rraah would discover that there would be no keeping you two from one another. For one lifetime – nine – ten – or however many…

The shock and relief were such that Rhiow could have lain right down and yowled. But this seemed the wrong moment. She pulled herself together and tried for some kind of composure. But what came out was,“After what we’ve just been through, I want a holiday!”

She was expecting an argument. What she wasn’t expecting was to hear the Queen of the Universe say, Done. How long?

That brought Rhiow up short. First and foremost, she was a wizard. For as long as the sabbatical lasted, she would be walking away from any chance of active assignment. And though there were times she hated admitting it, active assignment was fun.

Her tail lashed.“I’ll tell You when I’m ready to come back,” Rhiow said.

Well enough, said the Queen. Anything else?

“…I can’t think of anything right now,” Rhiow said. “But I may later.”

Let me know when you do, said Iau.

Rhiow’s ears went back and forth in a momentary flicker of suspicion. “Royal Dam and Queen,” she said, “You’re being unusually accommodating.”

There was a pause before the answer came back from the heart of Creation. Rhiow, she said, you’ve picked up a touch of roughness of manner from My Eldest daughter.

Rhiow declined to allow any embarrassment to show.

Yet that said, said the Queen, if I feel accommodating today, or have a notion to indulge an unusually productive member of My pride… then surely that’s My business. So, as I said: for a little while, when you think of something else — within reason… speak My name.

The sense of quiet approval was overwhelming. Rhiow bowed her head, doing her best to bear it: and silence fell.

Then she turned and ran down the air toward the terrace.“Hwaith!”

He looked up and saw her, and ran up the air to meet her.“Rhiow!!”

They were both sidled, which was just as well. The sight of two black cats leaping on each other in midair, and madly bumping heads and washing each other’s ears, and rolling and tumbling over and over one another as if they were on some kind of invisible floor twelve stories up, would have caused the local ehhif some concern.

“How did you – “

“I told you – “

“You were in my litterbox!”

“Well, I had to go, you wouldn’t want me to just do it there on the concrete – “

“No, I mean you were in it before!”

“Yes. I missed the time. I wanted to see you so very much, and I screwed it up by a few days, I miscalculated, and when I got there you didn’t know me yet – “

“And – wait, I saw you at the Opera! You were looking at me! And I didn’t know you then yet either – Oh, Hwaith, I’m so sorry – “

“What for, it wasn’t your fault!”

More ear-washing ensued. After a while, when the first frenzy of it had calmed a little, Rhiow said, almost nervous to hear the answer,“Hwaith. How many lives did you have to use – “

“Only one,” he said. “It’s hard to remember things from in between, you know how that is… but it seemed to me that when I felt I might have to cross over, something …interfered.”

“And you’ve been here a while – “

“Some years,” he said.

“Such a long time to wait…”

“It was all right,” Hwaith said. “I knew you were coming. I saw you sometimes, from a distance. That always made me feel better. And anyway, after today, it doesn’t feel like a long time at all.” He put his whiskers forward at her. “So can you use a spare gate technician? I’m told that though I’m out of practice, my proficiency rating’s still satisfactory.”

She bumped her head so hard into his that the sound echoed.“Idiot,” she said. “What I can use right now is a tom. My tom. We’ll discuss your other proficiencies later. Meantime, let’s go home!”

They headed down to the terrace and unsidled. Rhiow went through the cat flap in the sliding door first, to show Hwaith the way. Iaehh was home, as Rhiow had half thought he might be, and in the kitchen. He looked over at her without surprise and said,“Well, there you are! Hungry, plumptious one?”

But then the surprise jumped out all over his face as Hwaith came in through the door and paused there, looking around him uncertainly.

Rhiow looked from the ehhif to her new mate, and back to Iaehh again.

My Queen, she said. You did say if there was anything else—

Yes?

Then one last thing.

Yes?

Here, at the very last moment, for fear of being refused when it was so important, Rhiow found herself actually afraid to speak. But the Queen hears hearts as well as minds.

Seeing as how you’re on sabbatical, said Queen Iau, …just this once.

Rhiow’s whiskers went so far forward that her face felt pulled out of shape. Standing there beside Hwaith, her tail twined with his, Rhiow looked up at Iaehh.

“Iaehh,” she said aloud in the Speech, which even an ehhif could understand — and his eyes went very wide — “He followed me home. Can I keep him?”