To Visit The Queen

TWO

She was out early the next morning, as (to her relief) Iaehh was: on mornings when the weather was fair, he did his jogging around dawn, to take advantage of the City’s quietest time. Rhiow had already been awake for a couple of hours and was doing her morning’s washing in the reading chair when he bent over her and scratched her head.

“See you later, plumptious—”

She gave him a rub and a purr, then went back to her washing as he went out, shut the door behind him and locked all the locks. Iaehh was pleased with those locks—their apartment had never been broken into, even though others in the building had. Rhiow smiled to herself as she finished scrubbing behind her ears, for she had heard attempts being made on all those locks at one time or another during the day when she happened to be home. Some of those attempts would have succeeded, had there not been a wizard on the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the low-maintenance spell which made access to the apartment impossible. Should anyone try to get in, the wizardry simply convinced the wall and the door that they were one unit for the duration: and various frustrated thieves had occasionally left strangely ineffectual sledgehammer marks on the outside, the whole door structure having possessed, for the duration of the attack, a non-gravitic density similar to that of lead. Rhiow was pleased with that particular piece of spelling: it required only a recharge once a week, and kept her ehhif’s routine, and hers, from being upset.

Rhiow finished washing, stretched fore and aft, and headed out the cat-door to the hiouh-box on the terrace. There she went briefly unfocused in the cool darkness as she did her business, thinking about other things. She had reviewed the basic structures and relationships of the London gates in the Knowledge, the body of wizardly information which the Whisperer held ready for routine reference: she had looked at the specs for the gates under normal circumstances. Being rooted in the Old Downside’s gates, the London “bundle” had similarities to them … but being a continent away and subject to much different spatial stresses, there were also significant differences. She would assess those more accurately when she was right down in the gating complex with their hosts.

Rhiow finished with the box, shook herself, and stepped out onto the terrace and then down onto the brick “stairway”, making her way down to the roof of the next building. There she made her way across the gravel again, this time to leap up on the Seventieth Street side of the roof’s parapet and balance there for a moment, breathing the predawn air. For once it was very quiet, no car alarms going off, even the traffic over on First muted, as yet. The low soft hhhhhhhhhh of the City all around her was there: the breathing of all the air-conditioning systems, the omni-directional soft sound of traffic. Only during a significant snowstorm did that low breathing hiss fade reluctantly to silence … and even then you imagined you heard it, though softer, as the breathing in and out of ten million pairs of lungs. It was the sound of life: it was what Rhiow worked for.

She looked eastward toward the River. Her view was partially blocked by the buildings of Cornell Medical Center and New York Hospital: but she could smell the water, and faintly she could even hear it flowing, a different soft rushing noise than that of the traffic. Past the East River and the hazy sodium lights of Brooklyn on the far side, she could smell the dawn, though she couldn’t yet see it. Another job, Rhiow thought, another day…

She closed her eyes most of the way, in order to clearly see more and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, Rhiow thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: they will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always. I shall walk through Their worlds as do the Powers that Be, seeing and knowing with Them and for Them, tending Their worlds as if they were mine: for so indeed they are. Silently shall I strive to go my way, as They do, doing my work unseen; the light needs no reminding by me of good deeds done by night. And in this long progress through all that is, though I will know doubt and fear in the strange places where I must walk, I will put these both aside, as the Oath requires, and hold myself to my work … for if They and I together cannot mend what is marred, who can—? And having done my work aright, though I may know weariness at day’s end, come awakening I shall rise up and say again, with Them, as if surprised, “behold, the world is made new … !”

There was more to the Meditation, of course; it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case … a reminder of priorities, a “mission statement’. It was perhaps also, just slightly, what ehhif might term “a call to arms”: there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.

Rhiow got up, shook herself and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down. The joke is, she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air, that knowing the Powers are there, and listening, doesn’t really solve that many problems. It seemed to her that ehhif had the same problem, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their Gods existed, or not very sure at all: and those who were most certain seemed to be no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The City was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in which ehhif gathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers that Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious—as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).

She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than most ehhif works he heard live in concert in town. He’d gone to one service in the great “cathedral’ in midtown to do some translation of the music’s verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by the ehhif there to the Powers that Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery which even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors—but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers’ countenance—even, amazingly, the One’s—and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings which did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things some ehhif did…

Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry-cleaners’ there, waiting for the traffic to finish passing so that she could cross. They’re scared, she thought: they feel they need protection from the Universe. Nor does it help that though they may know the Powers exist, ehhif aren’t even sure what happens to them when they die. There was an unsettling sense of permanence about ehhif death, in which Rhiow was no expert despite her recent brush with it. The ehhif themselves seemed to have been told a great many mutually exclusive stories about what happened After. Her own ehhif was somewhere benevolent, Rhiow knew. But where? And would Hhuha ever come back, the way you might expect a Person to, during the first nine lives at least … ? Not that—certainties aside—it wasn’t always a slight shock when you looked into the eyes of some new acquaintance and suddenly saw an old one there, and saw the glint of recognition as they knew you too. Rhiow’s fur had stood up all over her, the first time it had happened, a couple of lives back. You got used to it, though. Some People tended to seek out friends they had known, finishing unfinished business or starting over again when everyone had moved a life or so on, in new and uncontaminated circumstances…

She crossed Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, the last against the brightening sky, yellow streetlights stuttered out. Rhiow crossed Second diagonally at Sixty-Seventh and kept heading south and west, using the sidewalk openly for as long as the pedestrian traffic stayed light. It was unwise to attract too much attention, even this early: there were always ehhif out walking their houiff before they went to work. But you can’t really feel things as clearly when you’re sidled, Rhiow thought, and anyway, there’s no houff I couldn’t handle … If the sidewalk got too crowded, Rhiow knew five or six easy ways to do her commute out of sight. But she liked taking the “surface streets”: more of the variety of the life of the city showed there. There were doubtless People who would feel that Rhiow should be paying more attention to her own kind … but by taking care of the ehhif, she took care of People too.

Southward and westward: Park Avenue and Fifty-Seventh … Here there was considerable pedestrian traffic even at this time of morning, people heading home from night shifts or going to breakfast before work, and the two greenery-separated lanes of Park were becoming a steady stream of cabs and trucks and cars. Though she was fifteen blocks north of Grand Central proper, Rhiow was now right on top of the Terminal’s track array: at least the part of it where it spread from the four “ingress” tracks into the main two-level array, forty-two tracks above and twenty-three below. As she stood on the southwest corner of Fifty-Seventh and Park, beside one of the handsome old apartment buildings of the area, Tower U was some fifteen or twenty feet directly below her: from below came the expected echoing rumble, the tremor in the sidewalk easily felt through her paw-pads—one of the first trains of the morning being moved into position.

Five twenty-three, Rhiow thought, knowing the train in question. She looked up one last time at the paling sky, then headed for the grate in the sidewalk just west of the corner by the curb.

She slipped in between the bars, stepped down the slope of the grainy, eroded concrete under the grating, and paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Ahead of her the slope dropped away suddenly.

It was a moderately long drop, ten feet: she took a breath, jumped, came down on top of a tall cement-block wiring box, and jumped from there another eight feet or so to the gravel in the access tunnel. Rhiow trotted down the cast-cement tunnel, all streaked with old iron-stains, to where it joined the main train tunnel underneath Park. There in front of her was the little concrete bunker of Tower U, its lights dark at the moment. To her left were the four tracks which almost immediately flowered into ten—seven active tracks, three sidings—by the time they reached Fifty-Fifth.

Rhiow looked both ways, listened, then bounded over to the left-hand side of the tracks and began following them southward, along the line of the eastward sidings. Ahead, the fluorescents were still on night-time configuration, one-quarter of them on and three-quarters off, striping the platforms in horizontal bands of light against the rusty dimness. She trotted toward them, seeing something small move down by the bottom of Track Twenty-Four: and she caught a glimpse of something that didn’t belong down here, a glitter of white or hazy blue light concentrated in one spot…

Bong, said the ghost-voice of the clock in the Main Concourse, as Rhiow cut across a few intervening tracks and jumped up onto the platform for Twenty-Four. There was Urruah, sitting and looking at the dimly-seen warp and weft of the worldgate, the oval of its access matrix a little larger than usual.

“Luck, Ruah,” Rhiow said, and stood by him a moment with her tail laid over his back in greeting. “Where’s the wonder child?”

“Upstairs ‘begging’ for pastrami from the deli guy.”

Rhiow sighed. “There’s one habit of his I wish you wouldn’t encourage.”

“Oh, indeed? I seem to remember where he got it. Someone took him upstairs and—”

“Oh, all right.” Rhiow grinned. “We all slip sometimes. Did you open this?”

“No, he did, while he was ‘waiting for us’.”

“For us? You weren’t here?”

“He was early. Got impatient, apparently.”

Rhiow put one ear back. “Not sure I like him doing this by himself, as yet …”

“How were you planning to stop him? Come on, Rhi, look at it. The synchronization’s exact. He would have stayed here to keep an eye on it,” Urruah added, forestalling her as she opened her mouth, “but I told him to go on upstairs and get himself a snack. The guy likes him: he won’t get in trouble,”

Rhiow put her ear forward again, though she had a definite feeling of being “ganged up on by the toms”. It may be something I’m going to have to get used to … “All right,” she said, studying the gate. It was open on London, set for nonpatency and a nonvisible matrix on the far side: this side would have been invisible to her, too, except that she could see where Arhu had carefully laid in the “graphic” Speech-form of her name, and Urruah’s and his own, in the portion of the spell matrix which controlled selective visibility and patency configurations. Beyond the matrix, light glittered off the river that ran by the big old stone building on which the view was centered: a huge square building of massive stone walls, with what appeared to be more buildings inside it, like a little walled city.

“The Tower of London,” Urruah said.

“Doesn’t look like a tower …”

“There’s one inside it,” Urruah said, “the original. The gating complex proper is a little to the north: this is a quieter place for a meeting, the Whisperer suggested. Local time’s four hours or so after sunrise.”

“Ten thirty …” Rhiow said. “Is this a good time for the gating team there?”

“Don’t know how good it is,” Urruah said, “but it’s what She specified. She may have spoken to them already. Ah hah, here he comes.”

The small black-and-white form came trotting insouciantly down the platform, not even sidled. “Arhu,” Rhiow said as he came up to them, “come on. You know how they are about cats in here—”

“Not about cats they can’t find,” Arhu said, licking his chops, and sidled. Rhiow sighed, leaned over and breathed breaths with him: and she blinked. “Sweet Iau in a basket, what’s that?”

“Chilli pickle.”

Rhiow turned to Urruah. “You have created a monster,” she said.

Urruah laughed out loud. “Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first.”

“Yes, but you encourage him all the time, and—”

“Hey, come on, Rhi, it’s good,” Arhu said. “The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke.” Arhu grinned. “Now the joke’s on him: I like it. But he’s good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chillies for him the other day. He thinks it’s cool: he makes other people come and see me eat it.”

“Not the transit police, I hope,” Rhiow said.

“Naah. I wouldn’t go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they’re down on the tracks,” Arhu said.

Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary. “All right. Are you ready?”

“I was ready an hour before you got here.”

“So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: you did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let’s go.”

Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side-effect of the patency.

“Go ahead,” Arhu said. Urruah, already sidled, leapt through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.

The darkness stripped away behind her as she leapt through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, more busy, one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, and ehhif were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate which led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on to another expanse of cobblestones which sloped down toward the river.

As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him, and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.

“That’s our tripwire,” Arhu said. “Pull it and it activates the gate to open again.”

“And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we’re gone?” Rhiow said.

Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself. “It won’t interfere … the gate proper’s back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string of the selective-memory ‘woof’.”

“Very good,” Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.

They looked around them for a few moments more in the sun. It was a breezy morning: clouds raced by, their shadows patterning the silver river with gray and adding new shades to the gray-brown-silver dazzle-painting of the battleship which was moored on the other side of the river. Arhu had no eyes for that, though, or for the traffic, or the ehhif passing them by. He was looking at the stone walls of the Tower, and his ears were back.

“It’s old here,” Arhu said. His ears went forward, and then back again, and kept doing that, as if he was was trying to listen to a lot of things at once … things that made him nervous.

“It’s old in New York, too,” Urruah said.

“Yeah, but not like this …”

“It’s the ehhif,” Rhiow said. “They’ve been here so long … first thousands, then hundreds of thousands of them, then millions, all denning on the two sides of this river. A thousand years now, and more …”

“There’s more to it than that,” Arhu said. He was staring at the Tower. “I smell blood …”

“Yes,” said a big deep voice behind them. “So do we …”

They turned in some surprise, for he had come up behind them very quietly, even for a Person. Rhiow, taking him in at first glance, decided that she should revise her ideas about bigger cats being needed in the world: they were already here. This was without any question one of the biggest cats she had ever seen, not to mention the fluffiest. His fur, mostly black on his back, shaded to a blended silver-brown and then to white on his underparts, with four white feet and a white bib making the dark colors more striking. He had a broad, slightly tabby-striped face with surprisingly delicate-looking slanted green eyes in it, and a nose with a smudge: the splendid plume of gray-black tail held up confidently behind him looked a third the thickness of his body, which was considerable. If this Person was lacking for anything, it wasn’t food.

“We are on errantry,” Rhiow said, “and we greet you.”

“Well met on the errand,” said the Person. “I’m Huff: I lead the London gating team. And you would be Rhiow?”

“So I would. Hunt’s luck to you, cousin.” They bumped noses in meeting-courtesy. “And here is Urruah, my older teammate: and Arhu, who’s just joined us.”

Noses were bumped all around: Arhu was a little hesitant about it at first. “I won’t bite,” Huff said, and indeed it seemed unlikely. Rhiow got an almost immediate impression from him that this was one of those jovial and easy-going souls who regret biting even mice.

“I’m sorry to meet you without the rest of the team,” Huff said, “but we had another emergency this morning, and they’re in the middle of handling it. I’ll bring you down to them, if you’ll come with me. Anyway, I thought you might like to see something of the “outside” of the gating complex before we got down into the heart of the trouble.”

“It’s good of you,” Urruah said, falling into step on one side of him, Rhiow pacing along on the other: Arhu brought up the rear, still looking thoughtfully at the Tower. “Did I see right from the history in the Whispering, that the gates actually used to be above ground here, and were relocated?”

“That’s right,” Huff said as he plodded along. He led Rhiow and her team through an iron gate in a nearby hedge, and down onto a sunken paved walk which made its way behind that hedge around the busy-street side of the Tower, and into an underpass leading away under that street. “See this grassy area over to the right, the other side of the railings? That was the moat … but much earlier, before the Imperial people were here, it was a swamp with a cave nearby that led into the old hillside. That was where the first gate formed, when this was just a village of a few mud-and-wattle huts.”

“How come a gate spawned here, then,” Arhu said, “if there were so few ehhif around?”

“Because they were around for two thousand years before the Imperials turned up,” Huff said, “or maybe three. There’s some argument about the dates. It’s not certain what kept them here at first: some people think the fishing was good.” Huff put his whiskers forward, and Rhiow got, with some amusement, the immediate sense that Huff approved of fish. “Whatever the reason, they stayed, and a gate came, as they tended to do near permanent settlements when the Earth was younger.” He flicked his ears thoughtfully as they all stepped to one side to avoid a crowd of ehhif making their way up to the admission counters near the gateway they’d come in.

“It’s had a rocky history, though,” Rhiow said, “this gating complex. So Urruah tells me.”

“That’s right,” Huff said, as they turned the corner and now walked parallel to the main street with all the traffic. “This has always been the heart of London, this hill … not that there’s that much left of the hill any more. And the heart has had its share of seizures and arrests, I fear, and nearly stopped once or twice. Nonetheless … everything is still functioning.”

“What exactly is the problem with the gates at the moment?” Rhiow said.

Huff got a pained look. “One of them is intermittently converting itself into an unstable timeslide,” he said. “The other end seems to be anchoring somewhere nearby in the past—it has to, after all, you can’t have a slide without an anchor—but the times at which it’s anchoring seem to be changing without any cause that we can understand.”

“How long has it been doing this?” Urruah said. His eyes had gone rather wide at the mention of the timeslide.

“We’re not absolutely sure,” Huff said. “Possibly for a long time, though only for micro-periods too small to allow anyone to pass through. In any case, none of the normal monitoring spells caught the gate at it. We only found out last week when Auhlae, that’s my mate, was working on one of the neighboring gates … and something came out.”

“Something?” Arhu said, looking scared.

“Someone, actually,” Huff said, glancing over at the Tower as a shriek of children’s laughter came from somewhere inside it. “It was an ehhif … and not a wizardly one. Very frightened … very confused. He ran through the gate and up and out into the Tube station—that’s where our number-four gate is anchored, in the Tower Hill Underground station—and out into the night. Right over the turnstiles he went,” Huff added, “and the Queen only knows what the poor ehhif who work there made of it all.”

“Have you made any more headway in understanding why this is happening since our meeting was set up?” Rhiow said. She very much hoped so: this all sounded completely bizarre.

But Huff flirted his tail “no”, a slightly annoyed gesture. “Nothing would please me better than to tell you that that was the case,” he said.

Rhiow licked her nose. “Huff,” she said, “believe me when I tell you that we’re sorry for your trouble, and we wish we didn’t need to be here in the first place.”

“That’s very kindly said,” Huff said, turning those green eyes on her: they were somber. “My team are—well, they’re annoyed, as you might imagine. I appreciate your concern a great deal, indeed I do.”

Huff and Rhiow’s team turned leftwards into the underpass, which was full of ehhif heading in various directions, and one ehhif who was tending a small mobile installation festooned with colored scarves and T-shirts: numerous prints of the Tower and other pictures of what Rhiow assumed were tourist attractions were taped to the walls, and some of what Rhiow assumed were tourists were studying them. “Huff,” Urruah said, “what did the gate’s logs look like after this ingress?”

“Muddled,” Huff said, as they walked through the underpass, up the ramp on its for side, and fumed toward a set of stairs leading downwards into what Rhiow saw was the ticketing area of the Underground station: above the stairway was the circle-and-bar Underground logo, emblazoned with the words tower hill. “We found evidence of multiple ingresses of this kind, from different times into ours … and egresses from ours back to those times. The worst part of it is that only one of those egresses was a “return”: all the others were “singles”. The ehhif went through, in one direction or another, but they never made it back to their home times …”

Urruah’s eyes went wide. “This way,” Huff said, and led them under one of the turnstiles and off to the right.

Rhiow followed him closely, but Urruah’s shocked look was on her mind. “What?” she said to him, as Huff leaped up onto the stainless-steel divider between two stairways.

“Single trips,” Urruah said, following her up. “You know what that means—”

Rhiow flirted her tail in acquiescence. It was an uncomfortable image, the poor ehhif trapped in a time not their own, confused, possibly driven mad by the awful turn of events, and certainly thought mad by anyone who ran into them—But then she started having other things to think about as she followed Huff steeply down. The steel was slippery: the only way you could control your descent was by jumping from one to another of the upthrust steel wedges fastened at intervals to the middle of the divider, almost certainly to keep ehhif in a hurry from using the thing as a slide. Rhiow started to get into the rhythm of this, then almost lost it again as Arhu came down past her, yelling in delight. Various ehhif walking up on one side and down on the other looked curiously for the source of the happy yowling in the middle of the air.

“Arhu, look out,” Rhiow said, “oh, look out, for the Queen’s sake look—”

It was too late: Arhu had jumped right over the surprised Huff, but had built up so much speed that he couldn’t stop himself at the next wedge: he hit it, shot into the air, fell and rolled for several yards, and shot off the end of the divider to fall to the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Rhiow sighed. He was so good there, she thought: … for about ten minutes…

She caught up with Huff as he jumped down. “Huff, I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, watching Arhu do an impromptu dance as he tried to avoid crowds of ehhif stepping on him. It was something of a challenge: they were coming at him and making for the stairs from three directions at once. “He’s a little new to all this, and as for being part of a team—”

“Oh, it’s all right,” Huff said, unconcerned. “Our team has one his age: younger, even. She’s left us all wondering whether we aren’t too old for this kind of work. With any luck, they’ll run each other down and give us some peace. Come on, over this way …”

Huff led them from one hallway into another, where several stainless-steel doors were let into the tiled wall. “In here,” said Huff, and vanished through the door: “through it” in the literal sense, passing straight into the metal with a casual whisk of his tail.

It was a spell that any feline wizard knew, and even some non-wizardly People could do the trick under extreme stress. Rhiow drew the spell-circle in her mind, knotted it closed. Then inside it she sketched out the graphic form of her name, and the temporary set of parameters which reminded her body that it was mostly empty space, and so was the door, and requested them to avoid one another. Then she walked through after Huff. It was an odd sensation, like feeling the wind ruffling your fur the wrong way: except the fur seemed to be on the inside—

—and she was through, into what looked like a much older area, a brick-lined hallway on the far side of the door, lit by bare bulbs hanging .from the ceiling, all very much different from the clean shining fluorescent-lit station platform outside.

Rhiow looked over her shoulder, and Urruah came through after her. From the far side of the door, there were a couple of soft bumping noises.

Urruah put his whiskers forward and looked ahead of them at Huff, who had paused to see where they were. “He has a little trouble with this one sometimes,” Urruah said. Bump, and Arhu abruptly came blooming through the metal, spitting and growling softly to himself. “Vhai’d stuff, why doesn’t it get out of the way when I tell it—”

“Language,” Rhiow said, rather hopelessly: but for the moment, Urruah just laughed. “Telling it won’t help,” he said: “you’ve got to ask nicely. Most things in the Universe react positively to that. Sass them, and they get stubborn.”

Arhu threw Urruah an unconvinced look as he padded by him in Huff’s wake. Old wooden doors opened into side rooms off this hallway: storerooms, Rhiow thought—a smell of electrical equipment and tools hung about the place. “There are workshops down here,” Huff said: “and there’s an access to the tunnel junction where the Tower Hill station’s tracks run near the access stairs to the Fenchurch Street railway station. That’s where the number-four gate is—”

He led them down one more stairway, a spiral one this time. It let out onto a small, dimly-lit platform which ran for maybe ten yards along a double line of track, the track stretching away into darkness on both sides. Above the platform hung the faintly glimmering oval of an active gate matrix. In front of it sat three People, one of them up on his haunches and working with the gate’s control strings: a youngish tabby torn who, except that his tabbying was marmalade rather than silver and gray, would have reminded Rhiow somewhat of Urruah.

One of the other two turned their heads to look at the new arrivals. She was a slender gray shorthair queen, about Rhiow’s own size but slimmer, with the most beautiful eyes Rhiow thought she had ever seen: they were a blue as deep as the skies on one of those perfect autumn days you sometimes got in the City, and the set of them was both indolent and kind. As she looked at Huff, the expression got kinder, and Rhiow knew immediately that the two of them were mates. The fourth Person, apparently concentrating on what the young tabby was doing, didn’t move.

“Has it failed again?” Huff said, as they walked toward the others.

“It tiling well has not,” said the tabby, sounding very annoyed. “But that’s what you’d expect, isn’t it, since People are coming to look at it?”

Well, so much for any concerns about Arhu’s language, Rhiow thought with resignation.

The handsome queen chuckled. “Huff, you weren’t really expecting this gate to oblige you, were you? The cranky thing.”

“No, I suppose not … Rhiow,” Huff said over his shoulder, “come meet Auhlae, my mate.”

“You’re very welcome,” Auhlae said, touching noses delicately with Rhiow, “and well met on the errand. And this is—”

“My older partner Urruah,” Rhiow said: “my younger partner Arhu.”

Noses were bumped all round: Rhiow was privately amused to note how shyly Arhu did it. He was apparently not immune to physical beauty in a queen. “And this is Fhrio—” Auhlae said.

“Rrrrh,” Fhrio said, a sound of general disgust, and dropped back down to all fours again, turning to the others. “Yeah, hunt’s luck to you, hello there, well met.” He bumped noses peremptorily, then sat down and started in on a serious bout of composure-washing, the action of a Person so annoyed that he didn’t trust his reactions with others for the moment.

“And Siffha’h,” said Auhlae.

The smallest of the London team got up, turned away from her single-minded concentration on the gate, and looked at Rhiow and the others. This little queen was maybe a couple of months younger than Arhu, Rhiow thought, and like him, was a huw-rhiw, though a paler one: her coat had much more white than black, and two black “eyebrow’ marks over her eyes gave her a humorous look. Her eyes were large, golden and thoughtful, and the look she gave Rhiow was surprisingly mature and measuring for someone who still had most of her milk teeth.

“I greet you,” Rhiow said, “and hunt’s luck to you.”

“You too,” said Siffha’h, and stepped over to touch noses, first with Rhiow, then with Urruah. Arhu, coming back from nosing Fhrio, met her last: they bumped noses cordially enough, and then, slightly to Rhiow’s surprise, Siffha’h repeated the touch. She looked up at Arhu and said, “What’s that?”

“Uh, chilli pickle,” Arhu said.

“Hhehhh,” Siffha’h said scornfully, nose wrinkled and lips pulled back—the feline equivalent of an ehhif of tender years saying Euuuu. She turned away, leaving Arhu looking rather stricken.

“I had wondered,” Huff said genially to Arhu. “Remind me to take you along some night when I do Indian.”

“Huff has been telling us about your problem,” Rhiow said to Auhlae. “I take it there’s been no improvement.”

Fhrio looked up from his he’ihh. “I’ve been trying to get it to fail all morning,” he said, “and I might as well have saved my time. The logs don’t give us enough data about what the strictly physical conditions were doing when the last failures occurred. I’m going to have to sit down with the Whisperer and get Her to make me a list.”

“That won’t stop the problem, though,” Siffha’h said. “You’re going to have to shut the gate.”

“I would rather not do that,” Fhrio said, and began washing furiously again.

Auhlae looked over at Rhiow and Urruah with a sympathetic expression. “Fhrio is our gating specialist,” she said softly. “He tends to take these things rather personally.”

“I know the feeling,” Urruah said. “Well, do you have any specific recommendations for us? Or should we just start running some diagnostics and see if there’s any data we can add to what you’ve got already?”

“The only recommendation we have on which we’re all in agreement,” said Huff, “is that the gate has to stop functioning as a timeslide: and probably the simplest way to make it do that is to shut it down. But since we don’t know how the gate’s failing in the first place, we can’t guarantee that this will work. It might make our problem worse, by forcing the malfunction to “migrate” to another gate in the cluster … you know how they get “sympathetic” malfunctions, like organs in a body … That would be pretty serious, if it happened. We’re having enough trouble with just one of these gates presently out of use for transit: a lot of the Northern European wizards depend on transfers through our cluster for access to the big long-range facilities in Rome and Tokyo. If the difficulty should spread by contagion to one of the others—”

Rhiow nodded. “I see your problem. Well, probably diagnostics are the way to go at the moment. Any help you might want to give us would be welcome: or if you prefer to leave us to get on with it—”

Fhrio looked up from his washing. “No one messes with my gates unless I’m here,” he said, and there was a touch of growl in his voice.

“I would hope you’d stay and clue us in on the fine points,” Urruah said. “Gates have a lot more personality than a lot of wizards would give them credit for … and no one knows a gate like its own technician.”

“You sound just like Fhrio,” Siffha’h said, sounding amused. “Are you the best in the business, too?”

Urruah was purring, and trying not to do it too loudly. Rhiow and Auhlae exchanged a look of amusement of their own.

“This is the point at which Urruah makes noises of shy agreement,” Rhiow said, “and the safest thing to do under the circumstances is to make him get to work. Huff, we’re entirely at your disposal. Tell us where you want us to start.”

“The diagnostics sound like a good idea,” Huff said, and then yawned, a prodigious yawn that showed every one of his teeth and made Rhiow reassess her idea that Urruah had the biggest ones she’d ever seen. “I’m sorry … it’s late for me. Fhrio, if you want to stay with them and keep them from duplicating routines you’ve already run—”

Fhrio straightened up from his washing again. “Absolutely. Maybe the gate’ll surprise us by failing in the middle of something. At this point, I wouldn’t care if it did it in mid-transit.”

“Oh yes you would,” Siffha’h said. “You should try it and see. You want me to stay and put the claw in it for you?”

“Sure. She’s our power source,” Fhrio said to Rhiow and the others. “The best in the business.”

“This I want to see,” Urruah said mildly. Rhiow shot him a sidewise glance, trying to keep it from being too obviously a warning look. True, queens rarely worked as power sources in team spelling, but there was nothing sex-linked about it—it seemed to be a preference grounded in the basic nature of the work, which (Urruah had occasionally admitted to Rhiow) was boring by comparison with building the spells themselves. There was a general tendency among People for the females to show more initiative than the males, and to go out of their way to get their paws on the most interesting work.

“You’ll excuse me for a moment, then,” Huff said, and headed up the stairs.

Urruah padded over and started examining the gate matrix in detail, with Fhrio looking over his shoulder and making mostly monosyllabic comments. Rhiow watched them, and watched Arhu watching them: being, for the moment, excessively well behaved. It was hard to believe the same youngster had been busy falling down the stairs not twenty minutes ago.

Auhlae came over to sit down beside Rhiow. “When it comes to diagnostics,” Auhlae said, sounding weary, “there’s no point in me watching what’s happening. I spent all yesterday morning at them, with my teeth clenched so full of strings that they buzzed for the rest of the day …” She shook her head.

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement. “I feel a bit like a sixth claw myself, at the moment,” she said, and strolled over to the edge of the platform, looking down the tracks into the darkness. From here she could still keep a general eye on what was going on, as Huff headed up the stairs again, and Fhrio turned his attentions back to the gate—Urruah and Arhu looking over his shoulder, and Siffha’h slipping one foreleg shoulder-deep into the gate matrix to hook her claws into the strings and the spell, supplying the power it would need. “Are most of you denned near here?” Rhiow said, noticing the interested looks that Arhu was throwing in Siffha’h’s direction, which Siffha’h was ignoring.

“Not all of us,” Auhlae said, following Rhiow’s glance. She put her whiskers forward in a smile. “But when you’re a gating team, there are certain prerequisites … the Whisperer is hardly going to cavil if we need to use the gates to get to work. Anyway, it keeps us alert to their condition: it’s hard to miss something wrong with them, when you use them every day.”

Rhiow did not say out loud that someone seemed to have missed something about the “number-four’ gate, repeatedly, no matter how often it was used. But then, if the failure was happening a fraction of a second here, another fraction there, and nothing was actually passing through the gate, how was anyone going to notice? It would have taken an obsessively thorough review of the logs to find the occurrences—

Which there should have been. That was something else Rhiow was not going to say out loud. Saash had routinely reviewed the complete logs for each of the Grand Central gates once every week, and Rhiow had gotten used to that kind of thoroughness from her teammates. Still, she thought, different teams, different management techniques … And Huff seemed to run his team more casually than Rhiow did hers. She was in no position to complain: if the Powers that Be didn’t care for the way his team was working, Huff would have been relieved long ago.

“I see your point,” Rhiow said after a moment, and lifted one paw to lick at it reflectively. “Do you have a long way to come?”

“Not I, thank the Dam,” Auhlae said. “Fhrio commutes in from Haling, some miles away—he’s with a family pride there, one that lives on gardening land that some ehhif keep, what’s called an “allotment”. Siffha’h, on the other hand, is local, very local in fact—she was born just across the river, in an outdoor den not far from HMS Belfast, that big ship anchored there. She’s nonaligned, and undenned so far. Huff and I aren’t so close, but we’re nowhere near as far as Fhrio is. Huff has a den with an ehhif who owns a pub in the City and lives in a flat above it: I’m denned just around the corner with a futures trader who works at the Securities Exchange. Huff’s ehhif is used to him coming and going as he pleases, and that kind of thing isn’t a problem for me either, fortunately. My Rrhalf keeps such weird hours that he hardly notices that I’m there.”

Then why on Earth do you stay with him! Rhiow was tempted to ask, and didn’t. She couldn’t imagine a Person who was also a wizard going through the inconvenience of denning with an ehhif if it wasn’t because you liked him or her. “Did you two meet locally, then?” Rhiow said.

“Oh, yes, the usual thing. A friend of his is one of the big hauissh players in the area: we ran into each other during a tournament, got friendly. Then I went into heat, and …” She waved her tail, a graceful and amused gesture.

“Kittens?”

“Oh, plenty. My ehhif is very good about finding them good places to live: otherwise I wouldn’t let the heat happen.”

That brought Rhiow’s ears forward. “I used to wonder how a wizard managed when she was in heat,” she said. “I never had the chance, myself: my ehhif took me and had me unqueened before I started.”

“Oh, how terrible for you!’ Auhlae said.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t that bad … Afterwards I tended to see it as an advantage. No interruptions … no toms fighting over me. It looked like a release.”

Auhlae was silent for a moment, and started to wash one ear. “Well,” she said, “I suppose I can see your point of view. But truly, I haven’t found it to be all that much of a problem. You can always use wizardry to adjust your own hormones a little, and delay the onset. But of course it’s not too good to do much of that kind of thing … Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be necessary very often. Only very rarely have I had to be on call while I was in heat … and never while I was kittening. The Whisperer seems to keep track of such things.” Auhlae put her whiskers forward, a demure smile with a slightly wicked edge to it. “I suppose we should be grateful that it’s the Queen running the Universe, and not the Tom: who knows if we’d ever get any rest?”

Rhiow chuckled. “I think you’re right there … in all possible senses of the word.”

“But anyway,” Auhlae said, “Huff and I usually come down in the early evenings and troubleshoot the gates. There’s always trouble,” she said, sounding very resigned. “You know how even inanimate objects can start betraying evidence of personalities, over time—”

“Oh, yes,” Rhiow said.

“Well, the gates have been here a lot longer than we have … and believe me, they have personalities. Mostly annoyed and suspicious ones. I think it may have had to do with their ‘upbringing’, their history. Populations would rise here and then be swept away without warning … and to a certain extent, the gate “learns” to adapt to the pressure of the population around it. Take that population away suddenly, and it must be like suddenly being thrown off something that you’ve always slept on safely before. The shock makes you stop trusting … you don’t know whether things will be the same from one day to the next. So the gates act fairly “calmly” for a period of time—a week, a month—and then—pfft! Auhlae made a soft spitting hiss of the kind that an annoyed Person would use to warn another away. “It can take endless time to calm them down. Do you have the same problem?”

Rhiow flicked her tail “no”. “Oh, they’re alive enough, all right,” she said. “Aaurh Herself made them, after all: I’m not sure anything with that level of wizardry incorporated into it could avoid being alive, to some degree. But fortunately New York grew very steadily, and our gates behave themselves … Except when they don’t,” she added, wry. “Often enough …”

Auhlae purred in amusement. “You must run into the personality problem with other things, though. You sounded pretty definite

“Well, it crops up from time to time …” And glancing over at Arhu again (who was still gazing thoughtfully at Siffha’h, apparently without effect) and at Urruah and Fhrio (now leaning right into the gate’s matrix structure again, with their heads bent close together and almost invisible among the tangle of strings), Rhiow began to tell Auhlae about the diesel locomotives that ran the trains in and out of Grand Central. Theoretically they should have been just great complex hunks of metal and wiring. But they were not, as the ehhif who drove them and took care of them loudly attested. The engines had noticeable personalities which manifested in the ways they worked (or didn’t): some good-natured and easy-going, some spiteful and annoying, some lazy, some overtly hostile. Rhiow had wondered whether she and the engineers and mechanics were all projecting the traits of life onto dead things for which, admittedly, they all felt affection. But finally she had realized that that wasn’t it. She started wondering whether this acquisition of personality might be caused by something specific about the way the locomotives’ complicated shapes and structures affected the local shape of spacetime—the way the atomic and molecular structure of water, for example, manifested itself as wetness. The Whisperer had no answers for her, or none that made sense: and when Rhiow had taken the problem casually to the ehhif Advisory wizards for New York, Tom and Carl, they had shaken their heads and confessed an ignorance on which even their wizards’ Manuals could not shed light. Finally Rhiow had simply given up and started talking to the locomotives in the course of her rounds, despite being unable to tell whether it was making any difference. But certainly something with a personality, no matter how undeveloped, deserves to be talked to as if it exists…

Auhlae looked bemused at that, for a moment. “Now there’s something I hadn’t given much thought to,” she said. “The Underground trains … you get a faint sense of personality off them, but nothing like that. Or is it just because I haven’t been looking … ?”

“Hard to say,” Rhiow said. “But beware. Do you really need another area of interest? The one we share is trouble enough …”

Auhlae laughed softly. “Tell me about it,” she said, as Huff came back down the stairs again.

He came padding toward them. “Problems, hrr’t?” she said.

“Oh, I wanted a look at number three,” Huff said, “since this one’s being worked on.” He sat down beside Auhlae and leaned against her slightly. “You know how they tend to interfere with each other—their catenary links are close together in the power-feed “bundle” from their linkage to your gates—” he waved his tail at Rhiow—“and to the Downside.” He paused a moment, then said, “Is it true that you were there? Down deep, right at the roots of things?”

“We were there,” Rhiow said, “but it’s not a memory I’d call up willingly just now. For one thing, we lost a partner of my age there: if we had her here now, I’d bet we’d have solved your problem already. As it is, we’re all learning new jobs, and everything is so confused …”

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” said Huff: and Auhlae blinked somber agreement, stirring her tail slowly.

“Oh, it wasn’t all sad,” Rhiow said: “not at all. A great many things changed for the better; and the Downside has new guardians …”

“The great cats live there,” Auhlae said, “don’t they? … our ancestors, our ancient selves. The Old People …”

“Yes,” Rhiow said, “and nothing will remove them from where they have been since the Beginning. But there are two Peoples there now.” Maybe this was not the time to start that particular story: but the facts still made Rhiow wake up in the middle of the night, wondering. For all the years there had been dry-land creatures in this world, cat and serpent had expressed in a specific symbolism the two sides of an ancient enmity: creatures of the sun and light against creatures of earth and the dark beneath the earth, warm blood against cold blood, the Powers that Be against the Lone Power that went rogue, both sides battling for the world. But suddenly Rhiow found herself running across new concepts, in which at least some of the great saurians were warm-blooded, and images in which serpent was born of cat (despite the older mythologies which suggested that cat had been born of serpent)—all too predictable a development, since Arhu had become “father” to the Father of the new serpent-kind, the great saurians who had become the new guardians of the Old Downside.

Of course the Universe was full of these jokes and ironies, mostly born of the misapprehension, native to beings living serially in time, that time itself was serial. Naturally, it was not. Time was at least Riemannian, and tended to run both in circles and cycles: outward—reaching spirals which repeated previous tendencies and archetypes reminiscent of earlier ones, but the repetitions came in “bigger’ forms, and with unexpected ramifications. Now time bit its own tail one more time, and in the process of that biting pulled off the old skin, revealing the new shiny skin and the bigger body underneath: more beautifully scaled and intricately patterned, more muscular, and, as usual, harder to understand. Rhiow had seen these hints before the last months’ troubles began, but hadn’t been able to make much of them at the time. Now, with the events and the history behind her, the myth was easier to understand. But it still made her blink, sometimes, and wonder what happened to the good old days, when things were simpler: when cats were cats, and snakes were snakes, and never the twain would meet…

Of course, for most cats, they never would. But as a wizard, Rhiow came of a bigger worldview, one which held that cats were equal, under the One, to any other sentient species—say, whales, or humans, or some dogs or birds of prey, or various other creatures intelligent enough to have emotional lives and to understand the existence of a world outside their own selves. Most People would have trouble with the idea that ehhif were equal to them. And dogs? Birds? They would hiss with indignation at the very idea. Rhiow knew better … but was glad she did not often have to indulge in explanations to her less tolerant kindred.

“It’s been a very strange time,” Rhiow said at last, “and I look forward to telling you about it in detail: for, truly, there are parts of it I don’t understand myself. Ruah … any news?”

Urruah had strolled over to where they sat, and now threw a look over his shoulder at the gate. “I really hate to admit it,” he said, “but at first glance, I’m stumped. Rhi, Huff, I’ll want to examine the logs in detail, of course—’ He looked over his shoulder at Fhrio for approval: Fhrio waved his tail in a “don’t-care” way. “Good. I’ll do that later this evening. I need a break.”

Urruah did sound tired, but that was no surprise: even though the gates had their diagnostic procedures built in, there were other more sophisticated ones that Rhiow’s team routinely used to make sure that a given gate’s own diagnostics were “honest”. It had always seemed a wise precaution to Rhiow, since a deranged gate might conceivably lose the ability to diagnose itself correctly.

“You’ll want to sort your schedule out with Fhrio, perhaps,” Huff said.

“Yes,” said Urruah, “I’ll do that.” He headed back over to the gate, where Fhrio and Siffha’h were withdrawing themselves from the gate matrix and letting the strings snap back into place.

Huff sighed. “We’ll leave it shut down for another day,” he said, “and come and tackle it afresh tomorrow. Rhiow, I think we’ve made a good start.”

“I hope so too,” she said. “I have a feeling that this won’t be one of those quickly solved problems, but we won’t be out of your fur until it’s handled.”

“Then we’ll see Urruah later this evening,” said Auhlae: “and you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow let it be,” Rhiow said, and bumped noses with their hosts … though she threw a look over her shoulder first. Urruah and Fhrio had their heads together again: but Arhu was looking in one direction, and Siffha’h in another, as if they were on opposite sides of the same planet.

Rhiow smiled slightly. “Dai stihó,” she said, the non-species-specific greeting- and parting-words of one wizard to another: go well. “Come on, Arhu, Ruah,” she said, getting up, “let’s call it a day …”

“Very nice People,” Urruah said, as they came out on the Grand Central side of their own gate. “Competent.”

That assessment surprised Rhiow slightly. “You’re satisfied with their inspection routines?” she said.

“They’re much like what I’d be doing if I were stuck with their gate complex,” Urruah said. “I mean, Rhi, look at their transit figures. Three or maybe four times the number of wizards and unaffiliated outworlders use their gates every day as use ours, or the ones at Perm. London is a major on-planet transit center for western Europe, and if you tried to read all the gate logs here once a week, the way Saash did for ours, you’d never have time to do anything else … such as fix the gates when they broke. I’m going to take some time to read those logs in more detail, as I said. But I don’t know what I’m looking for as yet, and I’m hoping the tracers we’ve left in place will pick something up to give me a hint. Without a specific event track to follow, a signature attached to the kind of access we’re looking for, we’re walking in the dark without whiskers.”

Rhiow waved her tail slowly in agreement. “All right,” she said.

“But one thing, Rhi … and this may be more important, even, than the problem with the gate itself. Remember when Huff was telling us about the ‘single’ egresses?”

“Uh, yes—” She paused. “He was telling us that people were going one way, not ‘round trip’.”

“That’s right. Rhi, do you realize how big a problem that is? Times can get imbalanced, just as spaces can: the ‘pressure’ of times against one another has to be kept equal. Those people from other times have to be recovered and put back where they belong, or the gates will become more unstable than they are already. Not just Huff’s gates: all the gates.”

“Ours too,” Rhiow said under her breath.

“Ours would take longest to imbalance,” Urruah said. They’re ‘senior’, and their connection to the Old Downside and the power sources there is direct: that lends them some immunity. But, inevitably, the imbalance will spread. Gating around the planet will start failing without warning and without reason. The rapid-transit system that wizards use so as not to have to waste their powers on minor business like travel spells will go down. The Universe will start dying faster … I just thought I’d mention it.”

“Thank you,” Rhiow said, and her stomach turned over inside her. “What’s your estimate of the time when these imbalances will begin to affect other gates?”

“If there have been only a few imbalanced egresses,” Urruah said, “it would take some weeks. If there have been, say, as many as ten or more, I would expect them within ten to fourteen days. Twenty or so—well, we would already be seeing random failures. So it’s not that bad. But we have to help the London team track down the ehhif from backtime and restore them to their proper periods.”

“And how much diagnosis is that going to take?”

“A fair amount, the longer the ehhif have been loose in a non-native time. There’s a temporal signature you can search for, like a target scent, in someone out of their proper time … but first you need to know exactly which time they’re native to, and the longer they’re in a non-native period, the less detectable it is. A fresh ingress through the malfunctioning gate would be the best thing we could hope for. All ingresses through a given gate would have a similar ‘signature’, like DNA from different members of the same family, and others could be tracked using it.”

Oh gods, Rhiow thought: and I thought things were going fairly well … “All right,” she said: “we’ll take it up with Huff tomorrow.—Arhu? You?”

“Huh?” He was walking along in an unusual state of self-absorption. “Me what?”

“What do you think of the London team,” Rhiow said, “and their gates?” It wasn’t as if he was likely to have a terribly sophisticated assessment at this point, but Rhiow was always careful to make sure everyone had their say after coming back from an “outcall” job.

“Huff and Auhlae are nice,” Arhu said, still looking somewhat distracted. “Fhrio’s a snot: he thinks he knows everything.” And there Arhu fell silent.

Aha, Urruah said privately to Rhiow.

She was inclined to agree. “And Siffha’h?” Rhiow said.

There was a long pause. “I think maybe she doesn’t like me,” Arhu said, “and I don’t know why.”

“Well,” Rhiow said, “it’s early to tell that, yet. You can’t have exchanged more than ten words the whole time we were there.”

“I know,” Arhu said, dejected. That’s the trouble …”

“Give it time,” Urruah said. “It’ll come right in the end. You can’t rush the queens, Arhu, especially the young ones: they have their whole lives ahead of them, maybe as many as nine of them, and they don’t impress easily. Take your time, talk to them …”

“That’s just the problem. She won’t talk to me.”

“So let actions say what words won’t. She probably hears all kinds of bragging these days, if she’s just coming into her day … isn’t she?”

Arhu looked up at Urruah with a kind of heartsick hope that made Rhiow’s heart turn over at the sight of it. “I think so,” Arhu said. “That’s how it smells …”

Rhiow turned her attention away from the conversation and let the toms gain some walking-space in front of her. It was at times like this that she missed Saash most … her slightly sardonic turn of phrase that could make anything, even something as serious as non-round-trip time travel, seem less crucial until you were actually able to get around to handling it. But Saash was out on the One’s errantry now: Rhiow would just have to manage without her, and hold her own against the boys as well as she could. Fortunately, she said to the Whisperer with a pride-queen’s arrogance, it isn’t hard…

From the depths of reality came the feeling of divine whiskers being put forward, and the sound of tolerant laughter.

The whole team made the commute to London the next morning to check the diagnostics and the logs, and found nothing: and they did so the next morning, and the morning after that … with no sign of any unusual ingresses or egresses at all. On the fourth day of this, Rhiow began to wonder whether the Powers had sent her team on one of those useful but temper-fraying jobs which her old mentor and teacher Ffairh would have described as “trying to herd mice at a crossroads”: a lot of trouble to very little effect for a long, long time … until you lost patience and started eating the mice, which might be what the Powers had in mind in the first place. Urruah was beginning to feel the strain, and was getting short with everybody, especially Arhu. Arhu, for his own part, was getting bored.

“He won’t let me do anything,” he said to Rhiow one morning as they went in to work together.

“That’s possibly because he’s not sure of your level of mastery as such,” Rhiow said, “and possibly because it’s other People’s gates we’re working with, not our own. No, Arhu, listen: don’t look that way. If you want to get a job done—that being the whole reason we have to keep going to London—sometimes you have to do it a little more slowly, a little more cautiously, than you otherwise would. At home, with our own gates, it’s usually no big deal. If one of us makes a mistake, she gets her head smacked, we clean up the mess, and the matter stays in the family. But when you’re dealing with other People’s territory, things slow down. And this is their territory … be sure of that.”

“I thought you told me ‘we are guardians and nothing more’,” Arhu said with some annoyance.

“That’s as true of the London team as it is of us. But it’s Her business to tell them that, not ours.”

They paused in front of the number-three gate, which was anchored over by the Waldorf Yard again because of track maintenance going on near its usual location. “Territory,” Rhiow said, “it’s a problem …”

“Yeah. Oh, Urruah said he might be late this morning. Something about the dumpster.”

“I wish he’d tell me these things,” Rhiow said, and sat down in front of the gate. “How late did he think?”

“He didn’t say.”

She waved her tail, resigned. Toms … “You’d better take care of the gating, then,” she said. “They’re going to be wondering where we are.”

“Probably not,” Arhu said, sitting up and slipping his forepaws into the control weave. “I don’t think Fhrio cares one way or the other.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” Rhiow said. “He’s likely enough to care … but not to show it …”

Arhu was busy with the weave, pulling strings out and hooking them under and through one another with his claws. He was getting quick at this work, whatever Urruah might think: after a few days’ practice with the London configuration, the pattern had become second nature to him. Or else the gate itself was beginning to answer his requirements, falling into “heart-configuration” with Arhu—a development very much to be hoped for. It was the kind of sympathy, not quite a symbiosis, which Saash had had with the Grand Central gates: a sort of mutual understanding of what needed to be done, based to be sure on a sound theoretical knowledge, but on something much more in execution. It was as if the gates had liked Saash, and wanted to cooperate with her because she liked them. If Arhu was acquiring that kind of almost-affection, Rhiow thought, there would be little limit to what he could do as a gate technician later in life, or in other lives to come, if the wizardry followed him.

And we could use someone with that kind of basic affinity, she thought. For all my theoretical work, I don’t have it: and for all Urruah’s, he’s more an engineer than a technician. Probably it comes of being a power source: of seeing the gate as something to be done to, rather than someone to be done with…

Arhu stopped. “Does that look right?” he said suddenly, sounding rather confused.

Rhiow looked over the gate-weft. The colors were running correctly, the hyperstrings all seemed to be making the correct “itch” in the air, the resonances of sound and texture were all in place. “It looks fine—”

“It doesn’t feel fine. It feels like something’s come unsnagged.”

Arhu was blinking, looking a little vague. Rhiow had learned to recognize that particular danger sign. “Now,” Rhiow said, “or later?”

“I think—’ Arhu’s eyes narrowed, a look of abrupt and uncomfortable concentration. This was always the most difficult part of the work for a visionary, the matter of learning to “ride” the vision rather than simply being ridden by it: though the question of which was finally master, the seer or the seen, was always one which caused most seers a certain amount of unease over their careers. “I think later. But not much later. Short term …”

Oh wonderful, Rhiow thought. “Today? Tomorrow?”

“What am I, some ehhif weather forecaster?” Arhu said, still squinting, with his paws all tangled up with hyperstrings. “Do you want percentages of probability too?”

“Whatever you can come up with,” Rhiow said. “And whatever idiom works for you. I’m not picky.”

“I can see the sun,” Arhu said after a moment, “but I’m not sure which one it is, which day. Just a sense of things … unraveling. Something unsnags, and then everything sorts itself out. Though it smells really bad at first—”

He blinked again, shook his ears until they rattled, and looked at Rhiow. “Gone. I hate it when it does that!”

“Calm down, Arhu, take it easy, don’t let the strings go—”

“I wasn’t going to, do you think I want the whole place to jump off into space … ?” But his ears were flat back, and he hissed softly. “Rhiow,” Arhu said, sitting up still with that unkittenish perfect balance of his, “I can hear Her. I can see what She sees … just for a second. Everything together: images, thoughts in minds, lots of minds all together, a hundred paws’ worth of places all at once … But all broken, like light in water when the wind blows. My brains won’t hold a whisker’s worth of it … and then it’s gone. What’s the use, this becoming one of the Powers, but not enough of one to be any good to anybody, or for long enough to figure it out, long enough to make a difference—!”

Rhiow sighed and paced over to him, balanced on her hindquarters just long enough to bump her head against his. “You know it’s going to be hard at first,” she said, settling down again. “It’s going to take so much practice, and it’s going to be hard for a long time yet. The seer’s talent is one of the worst ones in its way … tough to manage. But if you can stay with it …”

“Do I have a choice?” Arhu said, and the edge of bitterness and sadness was impossible to miss. “If I don’t learn it, I’ll lose it …”

He sat back on his haunches then and said, “Never mind. At least I can still gate.”

He gave one sidewise glance at Rhiow, and gave the strings a quick pull.

The other side of the gate flickered abruptly into black night over a white land—pale silver-and-white dust and stone with every stone’s shadow laid out long and black and razorlike behind it. Over everything hung a shape that burned at first so blue that the eye refused it: then you saw the white swirls, and the shades of green and haze-brown, but the main color was blue, shining down pale on that white desolation, and Rhiow’s abrupt first thought was of the shade of Auhlae’s eyes.

She gave Arhu a look. “Very cute,” she said. “If you’re demonstrating that you’ve learned to keep a gate patent when there’s vacuum on the other side, I take your point. Otherwise … you know what I told you.”

“And what Urruah keeps telling me,” Arhu says. “Yeah, I know …”

Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again, remembering what Urruah had said about Arhu’s early morning gate work the other day. And slowly she put her whiskers forward. If he was going to go, she thought, how would we stop him? And: Not so long ago, this was the kitling we were worried wasn’t doing enough wizardry. He’s finding his way. Let him be…

“We’ve no business there today,” Rhiow said, working to sound lazy about it. “Maybe later this week, we’ll go. I’ll see you off, in fact, if you’d rather do it on your own. Meanwhile, let’s get going: they’ll be waiting for us. Urruah will catch up.”

The look Arhu threw her was a little odd: but very featly he flipped his paws and changed the configuration of the strings again, and the view through the gate shifted to that of darkness again, but this time it was the unstarred darkness of the Underground tunnels near Tower Bridge.

“I’ll let it snap back into its default settings afterwards,” Arhu said. “Urruah’ll be able to pull this setting out of memory and alter it for changed time with no problem.”

“Right,” Rhiow said, and stepped through: Arhu followed her.

They made their way over to the platform where the malfunctioning London gate hung, shimmering dully in a non-patient configuration. Only Fhrio was with it at the moment, sitting by it and yawning.

“Luck, Fhrio,” Rhiow said. “Have you been waiting long?”

“Half the night, but don’t let that bother you,” the orange tabby said, and tucked himself down into what Rhiow’s ehhif called the “meat loaf shape.

Rhiow threw an amused glance at Arhu, who was looking off into the darkness to avoid having Fhrio see him rolling his eyes. She felt a little sorry for him on his first outcall, having half the team they were working with turn out to be such difficult cases: but this kind of thing happened occasionally. She still thought often of one of the Brasilia team who, though a wizard of tremendous talent, was also so scarred by some old trauma that he would jump up in the air hissing any time you spoke to him before he could see you, and would come down with claws out and fur standing on end, ready to murder anyone who was standing too close. Working with him had driven her nearly insane, and as for Urruah, it had been all Rhiow could do to keep him from walking off that job every day, at the occurrence of the first jump-and-hiss. At least Fhrio wasn’t quite so unnerving to work with, but Rhiow was increasingly wondering what his problem was, or, if there was no problem, why he was this way all the time.

“No incursions, I take it,” Rhiow said, sitting down in front of the gate and eyeing it thoughtfully.

“Nothing,” Fhrio said. “I almost wish for one: at least it would make sitting here a little less boring.”

She twitched her tail in agreement. “Have Auhlae or Huff been along yet today?”

“Auhlae’s home with her ehhif,” Fhrio said. “He’s sick or something. Huff was here earlier and then went off.” Fhrio yawned. “I think probably to take a nap: he was up watching the gate all night.”

Arhu was standing behind Rhiow now, looking over her shoulder at the shimmer of light in the gate-web. She wasn’t sure how much he was able to make out of its function as yet just from the configuration of the light-patterns and the juxtaposition of the various braids and bundles of hyperstrings. Reading a gate that way took time to learn.

“It’s changed since yesterday,” Arhu said.

“Of course it’s changed,” Fhrio said, and yawned again. “The Earth’s not where it was yesterday, is it? Basic changes in spacetime coordinates show in the web as a matter of course—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean the sideslip and tesseral string bundles in the control weft have changed position slightly. And one of the sideslip sub-arrays has a string loose.”

“What?” Fhrio sat up, looked at the part of the gate-web that Arhu was staring at. “Where are you—oh. No, that’s all right, this gate does that sometimes. It’s a locational thing—I think it has to do with the gravitational anomaly in the substrate under the Hill. The loose ends always weave themselves back in after a few minutes: this isn’t a static construct, after all, it ‘breathes’ a little.”

“I know, our gates do that too. But look at the way the sideslip bundle is interweaving with the hyperextensor braid—”

Fhrio was beginning to look confused. “Yes, as I say, it does that. I don’t see what the—”

“Well, look,” Arhu said, padding forward, and Rhiow gave him a Now-you-be-careful look, which he ignored. “See the way this is hanging out—shouldn’t it be tucked in? I mean, it has no anchor. If you just—”

“No, don’t pull that!”

It was too late. Arhu had already snagged a claw around the string in question, and pulled.

The gate shimmered: a brief storm of many-colored light ran down it—

—and someone stumbled out of it. An ehhif.

The two teams sprang back in horror as the man crashed to the concrete almost on top of them. He lay there moaning, then grew quiet.

“Well,” Arhu said, his eyes big with surprise and his voice full of badly hidden satisfaction, “you wanted it to fail the same way? There you go.”

Fhrio gave Arhu a look suggesting that he would be seeing him later, outside the line of business.

“He’s got a point, Fhrio,” Rhiow said hurriedly. “You said you wished for an incursion … and a wizard has to watch what he wishes for. The Universe is listening …”

Fhrio gave her an annoyed look, but then almost visibly let the mood go, aware that they had more important issues to deal with. They all bent down together over the sprawled ehhif: Fhrio patted him gently on the face with one paw. There was no response. “Unconscious …”

“Not for long, I think.”

“But, great Queen of us all, where did he spring from?” Fhrio said.

“From his clothes, I’d say not our time, that much is certain,” Rhiow said. “And no time close to it. I’m no expert on ehhif styles, but this looks more like what tom-ehhif wear for formal wear in our time. It used to be everyday clothing once, though, so Urruah told me—”

The ehhif was mostly in black: long narrow trousers, a white shirt with a peculiar cloth wrapped around the neck and tucked into the shirt’s collar: then a sort of short close coat that came down only to the waist, and over that a bigger coat, dark again. The ehhif himself was tall, and fair-furred, and had a lot more fur around the face than was popular these days: he might have been in middle age.

“He’s stopped breathing—” Fhrio said suddenly.

Rhiow looked at him more closely. “It might just be a sigh,” she said. “But just in case, we’d better spell-fence him. He’s going to need support spelling anyway when he wakes up—”

She started walking the beginning of a wizard’s circle around the ehhif and the gate together. Arhu had dropped the string he had pulled and was looking off down the old train runnel. “Now what in the Dam’s name,” said a voice from a little distance down the tunnel, and a second later Auhlae jumped up onto the platform, with Siffha’h in tow. Arhu looked at her, then turned and sat down hurriedly and began to wash.

“Auhlae,” Fhrio said, “where’s Huff?”

“He’ll be along shortly,” she said, walking along to the ehhif and peering at him. “Iau’s name,” Auhlae said, “it’s another one.”

“Yes,” Fhrio said, and said nothing more for the moment: but Rhiow could hear trouble in his voice. She ignored it for the moment. “Has he started breathing again?”

Auhlae looked closely at him, and put her face down close to the ehhif s, feeling for breath. “None at the moment. Siffha’h,” she said. “When Rhiow finishes, put some power into her circle, this poor ehhif is going to need it. I think he’s in shock.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Siffha’h said, coming over to look at the circle Rhiow was building as she paced and assembled the spell in her mind. “Pretty standard,” she said. “Which part do you want me to fuel first?”

“The main strand and the life-support part,” Rhiow said. “I want to feel if there’s anything actually wrong with his body before we start interfering.” She completed the circle, tying the “wizard’s knot” in the air with a flirt of her tail: pale fire followed it briefly and died away—normally she would have preferred to see her guidelines in visible light, but the appearance of strange fires from nowhere was not likely to do this poor ehhif any good when he became conscious.

“Now then—” she said. The basic spell-circle lay traced in ghost lines on the concrete around the ehhif. Rhiow now made one more turn around it, her paws pressing into the circle the graphic forms of those words of the Speech which Rhiow was assembling in her mind, the words which would control the function of the spell. One by one they appeared in graceful ghost curves and arabesques interwoven around the main curve of the circle, like vines twining around a support, until the last few words rooted themselves into the wizard’s knot and became one with it.

“Ready,” she said. Siffha’h looked the circle over, found the power-supply access point and stood on it: the circle flared for just a second with power, then damped down again.

Rhiow, still standing on the control point of the circle at the wizard’s knot, nearly jumped off it at the abrupt access of power into the spell, and secondarily, into her. It was partly the suddenness of its inrush, and partly the sheer volume of it, and the unusual taste of it when it came—mostly the taste of Siffha’h’s mind: young and fierce and bold, surprisingly so for such a young queen, with a great sense of potential unused and potential still developing, and behind everything, driving it all, some huge and dimly-perceived desire. Rhiow shied away from any attempt to look more closely at that—it was none of her business—but was impressed by it all the same. This young queen was going to be quite something as she grew into more certainty about her work and her life.

“That enough to work with for the moment?” Siffha’h said.

“For several hours, if you ask me,” Rhiow said, impressed: “Thanks, cousin!” She turned her attention to the spell. She had no proper name for the ehhif, and so had used one of the species-generic terms and an indicator for his gender: now her mind ran down through that connection to his, and felt about gingerly in the ehhif’s mind. The part of his brain that ran breathing and blood pressure and other functions was undamaged: but the emotional shock had thrown his blood chemistry badly out of kilter, and left him in a “sigh” that was much more prolonged than the usual fifteen seconds. That chemistry was getting worse as she watched, but fortunately the problem was a simple one, already partially rectified. Rhiow cured it by increasing the acidity of his blood ever so slightly, a process already under way, and the automatic response to such an increase took over, so that the ehhif gasped, and then started to breathe normally again.

“Nothing too serious, then,” Auhlae said, putting her ears forward in relief.

“No, just the kind of thing that causes hiccups, but a little more severe,” Rhiow said, relieved, and shook herself a little to get rid of the peculiar cramped narrow feeling of an ehhif’s mind. “It’s his emotional state that I’m more worried about, when he becomes conscious again. He may need quieting. Let’s see how he does …”

The ehhif was stirring a little already. “Hey, sorry I’m late,” said another voice from down the tunnel, and Urruah leapt up onto the platform. “There were some things I had to take care—” He broke off, going wide-eyed as he took in the whole scene in a second. “Hey,” he said then. “So wishing works after all.”

“Whether it does or not, we’d better shut this gate down,” Fhrio said. “The last thing we need at the moment is another access, especially one into a spell-circle when whoever might come through isn’t named in the spell—”

Urruah stared at him. “Are you kidding? Lock it open!”

“What?”

“If we don’t lock it open I won’t be able to get a reading on where the other end is anchored,” Urruah said, “and that’s information we badly need. Are you set up to do it? Then let me.”

Fhrio bristled at that, but Auhlae bumped him from one side, distracting him. “He’s right,” she said. “Rhiow, you’ll want to put his personal information into the spell so that he can step through. Just make sure you lock it in nonpatent configuration, Urruah. Come on, Fhrio, we have other things to attend to. Poor ehhif, look at him, he’s in a state.”

The ehhif’s eyes were open now. He lay there staring around him at the darkness, and tried to sit up once: failed, and slumped back again.

“Where—” he said, and then trailed off at the sound of his own voice in the close darkness of the tunnel.

The wizards exchanged glances. “If this isn’t errantry,” Auhlae said, “what is?”

She padded over to the edge of the circle and sat down where the ehhif could see her. Once again he tried to sit up, and did a little better this time, managing at least to hitch himself up one elbow and look around. The light here was not good, even by feline standards: it was questionable how much he could see.

“Don’t be afraid,” Auhlae said to him in the Speech. “You’ve had a fall. Are you hurt?”

“No, I-I mean, I think not, but where—where is this?” He tried to sit up again. “Where are you?”

“Here in front of you,” Auhlae said, with a look at Rhiow.

She was ready. The ehhif looked around him, and saw Auhlae … then looked past her. “Where?”

“Right here, in front of you,” she said, and even in the rather dire circumstances, Rhiow could hear the sound of slight amusement in Auhlae’s voice. “The cat,” she added, and this time the amusement was genuine.

The ehhif looked at Auhlae, and then actually laughed out loud, though the laughter was shaky. “Oh surely not,” he said. “Some kind of ventriloquism. I’ve seen illusionists’ shows; I know what kind of tricks may be played on an unsuspecting audience—”

Auhlae sighed a little. “In front of an audience, a skilled stage magician can produce all kinds of illusions, I know,” she said, “but this isn’t that kind of thing. Rhiow, maybe you’d better let the light of the circle come up a little.”

She waved her tail in agreement, meanwhile watching the ehhif closely for any signs that he was about to go shocky again.

“Mr…—Illingworth,” said Auhlae after a moment, as the light of the circle grew and the ehhif looked around him, “please don’t believe this a trick. It is something out of your experience, though. Perhaps you would prefer to think of it as a dream. Do you mind if we ask you some questions?”

The ehhif looked around at the circle, and the cat inside it with him, its paws thrust into the glowing webwork which the circle surrounded, and the four other cats outside: and he blinked. “I suppose not, but where are you? And how do you know my name?”

“Please don’t bother looking for any other humans, because you’ll see none here,” Auhlae said. “Just pretend, if you will, that the cats are speaking to you.”

“But how do you know my name?” the ehhif demanded, more urgently now. “Is it—is this some kind of plot—”

Through the spell, Rhiow could feel the ehhif’s blood pressure beginning to spike. She watched it carefully, and felt down the spell for indications of any sudden physical movement: there were too many ways he could damage himself, physically and nonphysically, if he tried to break out of the circle before it was correctly disassembled.

“It’s no plot,” Auhlae said, “though I wouldn’t mind hearing why you would think it was one.”

The ehhif looked around him, still trying to find the source of the voice which spoke to him: and now he started to look suspicious. “There are plots everywhere these days,” he said, and his voice sounded unusually troubled. “Everything used to seem so safe once … but now nothing is what it seems—”

His blood pressure spiked again with his anxiety, and Rhiow could feel his muscles getting ready for a jump. Better not, she thought, and spoke briefly to his adrenal glands through the spell. They obligingly stopped the chemical process which was already producing adrenaline, and instead produced a quick jolt of endorphins that left Mr. Illingworth blinking in slightly buzzed bemusement, and much less prepared to get up and run anywhere. Rhiow was ready to lock his muscles immobile if she had to, but she preferred less invasive and energy-intensive measures to start with.

“How do you mean?” Auhlae said.

“The war,” said Mr… Illingworth, and now his voice started to sound mournful. “What use in being the mightiest nation on the globe when we must be bombed for the privilege? There was a time when no one dared lift a hand to us. But now our enemies have gathered together and grown bold, and London itself is prey …”

At that Auhlae looked sharply at Fhrio. Fhrio’s eyes were wide. Bombed? he said silently, to her and the others. London hasn’t been bombed for fifty years.

“When did this start?” Auhlae said, and for all her attempts to keep her voice soothing, her alarm came through.

“A year or so ago,” said Mr… Illingworth wearily. “There were troubles before then … but nothing like the crisis we face now.” And much to Rhiow’s surprise, the ehhif put his face down in his hands. “Not since the Queen died …”

The Queen? Urruah said then, pausing in his work with the gate. What’s he talking about?

“ ‘The Queen’? Which queen?” Auhlae said.

The ehhiflooked up again, and looked around him with a much less fuzzy air: Rhiow felt his blood pressure start spiking again. “How can you not know about the great tragedy,” Mr… Illingworth said, “for which a whole nation mourns, and at which the whole world looked on amazed? Only spies would pretend not to know how the Queen-Empress was assassinated, treacherously killed by—” He started to struggle to his feet.

Rhiow clamped the spell down on him, shorting out the neurotransmitter chemistry servicing his voluntary musculature, but being careful to avoid his lungs. Still the ehhif gasped, though he couldn’t struggle, and his fear began to grow. “Let me go!’ he said loudly, and then started to shout, “Spies! Traitors! Let me go! Police!”

The sound of that cry could be kept from being heard, of course, but Rhiow had other concerns. Auhlae, she said silently, there’s no point in this. It takes doing for an ehhif to frighten itself to death, but this one’s pretty emotionally labile: he might be able to do it. And he’s been under a lot of stress—

You’re right, Auhlae said. Better put him to sleep.

Rhiow reached into the spell and spoke to the ehhif’s brain chemistry. A moment later his eyes closed, and his head sagged slightly, though he did not move otherwise: she kept the hold on his muscles, just for safety’s sake.

“ ‘Bombed’?” Urruah said then.

“One moment,” Rhiow said. “Urruah, how’s the gate?”

“Locked open but nonpatent, like Auhlae said.”

“Have you got a time fix on the opening?”

“Not yet. The congruency with our present timeframe is not one-to-one, Rhi. The spatiotemporal coordinate readings I’m getting at the moment are not meshing in direct line with our own.” Rhiow twitched at the sound of that, for she thought she knew what he meant … and she didn’t like it. “Additionally, I think something’s been fretting at the gate from the other side while it’s been doing these ‘rogue’ openings … unraveling it. The unraveling’s been starting to manifest itself on this side now …” He put his whiskers back. “And I’m almost afraid to fix it. That might warn whoever’s doing the unraveling, send them under cover …”

I’d wait and talk to Huff about it, Rhiow said silently to him. This is getting to be a jurisdictional matter, and I don’t want to … She glanced in Fhrio’s direction.

Understood, Urruah said. But if something sudden happens, we’re going to have to intervene in the situation’s best interest, no matter what local opinion might be…

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement, though the prospect made her nervous: Urruah went back to “reading” the gate, letting the information in the string configuration sing down through his claws and into his nerves and brain. “Auhlae,” Rhiow said aloud, “you managed enough rapport with him to get a name: could you get in there and find out more?”

Auhlae shook herself. “Names are easy,” she said, somewhat distressed. “They’re so near the surface, in any sentient being. But abstract information is a lot harder to get at, out of species. You know how ehhif minds look and feel inside: the imagery’s all wrong, the language is bizarre and the mindset is stranger still … I’m no expert in ehhif psychologies: I’ll get lost in there as readily as anyone else. And anyway, I can’t do anything useful while our Mr… Illingworth’s unconscious. If he was conscious, I could go in, all right, but I couldn’t be sure I was getting the information absolutely correct. And if we’re hearing from this ehhif what I think we’re hearing—”

“If you think you’re hearing evidence of an alternate timeline,” Urruah said, “then I think you’re right. Leaving aside all the other things he mentioned, most of which I don’t understand, I do know that London hasn’t been bombed recently … and it certainly was never bombed when ehhif wore clothes like that.”

Rhiow suddenly became aware of Arhu looking over her shoulder, most intently, at Illingworth. “He’s the unravelling,” Arhu said softly. “Or a symptom of it: concrete rather than abstract. It’s not a process that’s finished yet. But if something’s not done soon …”

“Hold that thought,” Rhiow said. “Don’t lose it, whatever you do.”

“Oh, certainly,” Fhrio said suddenly, sounding very annoyed. “Encourage him. He’s been enough trouble already.”

“Look,” Arhu said, turning, “I tried to tell you—”

“No, you look.” Fhrio leaned close to Arhu and stared at him straight on: leaned over him stiff-necked and tall, the classic posture of the threatening tom. “You may think that you’ve done us a favor by causing this incursion, but who knows if it’s anything to do with the problems we’ve been having? All I see is that you’ve made a sweet mess of things. Don’t you ever touch my gate again unless I specifically tell you to. You hear me? You come in here thinking you’re so vhai’d smart, and you tamper with things that you don’t—”

Arhu was staring right back at Fhrio, and his ears were back: he hadn’t given an inch, and his lips were beginning to wrinkle away from his teeth. Urruah was looking on dispassionately. Oh, dear Dam around us, Rhiow thought, please don’t let Arhu—

“Now what in the worlds,” said another voice down the tunnel. Heads turned. A moment later Huff jumped up onto the platform, and looked at the bizarre tableau before him: the half-sitting, frozen ehhif, Urruah once again up to his armpits in the hyperstrings of the gate, Siffha’h sitting on the power junction and washing nonchalantly, Auhlae and Rhiow looking on in bemusement and distress: and Fhrio and Arhu.

Fhrio turned and glared at Huff, his ears still back. “Well, about time you got back here! While you’ve been off having one of your little catnaps, your precious imported vhai’d ‘senior gating team’ has—”

“Fhrio,” said Huff. Fhrio subsided, and sat down, though his ears stayed flat.

Huff sat down too. “For one thing, I was not having a catnap, much as I would have liked to be. I was off having a talk about this gate with Hni’hho.” Rhiow immediately recognized this as the name of the present Senior Wizard for Western Europe, an ehhif living just across the water in one of the low countries near the sea. “And for another, I think you may owe Rhiow and her team an apology. They were brought here to produce the results. They are apparently producing them—” and he flicked a glance over at the wretched unconscious ehhif—“whether you like them or not. We were specifically instructed to expect a ‘somewhat unorthodox technique’. Or weren’t you listening to Her?”

“Oh, I heard Her, it’s just—”

“It isn’t ‘just’. If you’re feeling obstructive, take it up with Herself … but you’ve got to resolve whatever conflicts you have about this work before you do anything further.”

Fhrio turned away and began to wash. So did Arhu, with great intensity and at speed.

Rhiow breathed out in relief. “Somewhat unorthodox technique”, she thought then, slightly amused. Well, Arhu’s off the sharp end of the claw for the moment. But what if “unorthodox” means me and Urruah too … ?

Huff got up and walked to the edge of the circle, looking at the sleeping ehhif half-sitting there. “He’s a long way from home,” he said.

“I’d say he’s from the middle of the century before last, as ehhif count time,” said Urruah. “The location is nearly congruent with this one, at least: but the exact time is proving elusive. It’s somewhere within the spread of the previous micro-openings, though. No guarantee of whether it coincides with any of them.”

“He spoke of bombings,” Auhlae said, going over to stand by her mate.

“He was talking about the Queen, too,” Arhu said, looking up from his own composure-washing and sounding a little bemused. “I wouldn’t have thought ehhif knew about Iau—”

“With him wearing those clothes, I would say he probably meant the ehhif Queen who was ruling then,” Huff said. “A different usage of the same word we use for Her, and for shes. Hffich’horia, this Queen’s name was. A lot of the ehhif on this island count themselves as of the same pride, though they’re not blood-related except distantly: and they have a kind of hwio-rrhi’theh, a ‘pride of prides’ who’re supposed to care for all the other ehhif, help them find food and do justice among them and so forth … though as usual for ehhif, it’s never quite that simple. This ehhif-Queen was a daughter of that chief-pride … which the ehhif then apparently found a little unusual: for a long time toms had run that chief-pride, not queens.”

“Peculiar,” Rhiow said. “Even among ehhif, queens still run things a lot of the time, no matter that the toms say otherwise …”

Huff grinned at that. “I’ve never understood that, myself. You’d think they’d be glad to have someone relieve them of the responsibility …” He threw an affectionate look at Auhlae: she half-closed her eyes in amusement. “Anyway, this ehhif-Queen is still famous for the things done by her pride and the great ones of the prides under her: today’s ehhif call that whole time period after her.”

“He said she was assassinated, though,” Urruah said.

Huff twitched his tail back and forth. “Certainly other ehhif tried to kill her several times,” he said, “but none of them ever succeeded. She died of age and illness … in our world. But in his—” Huff looked at the ehhif.

“We really need to know when he comes from,” Siffha’h said, “if this is going to make any sense.”

“Yes, but if you’ve already had to tranquilize him, I don’t think he’s going to be much more help,” Huff said. “If we try to get more information out of him, we might damage him, which contravenes the Oath, no matter how much we think may ride on what he knows.”

“I’d have to agree,” Rhiow said. “He was getting very distressed indeed.”

“Well, at least we have other ways to get this information … since now we have a positive lock on where this particular ehhif came from. We can put him back where he belongs, and we can compare the gate’s present configuration to the older gate logs … then see if we can find out how or why they’ve been malfunctioning and giving us less than useful records of these transits. Any other thoughts on this? Hlae?”

Auhlae waved her tail in negation. “Let’s do it.”

“Thrio? Siffha’h?”

Fhrio said, “I don’t like this gate being locked open … and even less do I like it when the other end may be anchored in an alternative reality. One gate stuck in the open position can begin to affect all the others in odd ways … and our sheaf of gates is sensitive enough in that regard.”

“I understand your concern,” Huff said, “and you’re right. But in this particular case, we’re going to have to take the chance. As soon as we can put someone through to confirm the temporal coordinates at the other end, and get them home again, we can close it down again. Sif?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Siffha’h said.

Huff turned to Rhiow. “Do you concur?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“All right,” Huff said. “Let’s send this pastling home, then. Do you think you need to alter his memories, Rhiow?”

“It wouldn’t be easy,” she said, “for the same reason Auhlae wasn’t willing to go after abstract information. I might mess something up, and leave him worse off than he would have been if I hadn’t meddled. But from the way he was answering us, I think it’s likely enough that he will dismiss all this as a dream.”

“All right. Siffha’h, you like the big showy physical spells—”

“This isn’t showy,” Siffha’h said, and without twitching so much as a whisker, or making any alteration to the “physical” spell-circle she sat on, Mr. Illingworth levitated gently into the air and toward the gate.

“Would you make it patent, and give me visual?” Siffha’h said. “I don’t want to drop the guy …”

Urruah, looking over his shoulder at her, grinned a little and slipped one claw behind into the patency bundle, pulling gently.

A moment later they were looking into a dark vista which might have been a street: walls were visible not too far away, and a faint yellow wobbling light came off from one side.

“Gaslight …” Auhlae said softly, waving her tail in fascination. The ehhif drifted slowly through the gate, into the darkness on the other side: Urruah edged sideways a little to let him pass unhindered. “How far down is the ground?” Siffha’h said.

“About your body’s length.”

The ehhif dropped down below the boundary of the gate, out of Rhiow’s sight: Urruah craned his neck to see. “All right,” he said, “he’s down. I’m going to turn this nonpatent again and leave it locked.” He started pulling strings again. “If we can—”

The gate shimmered and rippled—and all the length of it heaved, a bizarre sight like some huge beast’s skin shivering convulsively to get rid of a biting fly. Even the boundaries of the gate, which should have remained unaffected, twisted and warped. Urruah threw himself backwards, twisted and came down on his feet—just. Behind him, color drained from the warp and weft of the gate, and it steadied: after a moment it hung in the air in its default configuration again, nonpatent, in “standby”—though its colors looked very muted, almost drained.

“What in the Queen’s name was that?” Huff said, staring.

No one had any answers. Fhrio padded up to the gate, looked at it … then looked angrily over at Urruah. “What did you do to it?!”

“Nothing that you didn’t see,” Urruah said, getting up and shaking himself. “I’ve seen catastrophic closures before, but they didn’t look anything like that. I wonder, though, if that was some kind of reaction to Mr… Illingworth being put back where he belonged all of a sudden … ?”

“You mean you don’t think these gatings are accidental,” Siffha’h said. “So it was like whatever engineered the opening, from way back then, didn’t want him back …”

“Meaning that he was meant to increase whatever imbalance in our universe is already present,” said Auhlae, “from the pastlings who’ve come through and not yet been found again …”

There’s another nasty possibility,” Rhiow said. “That transit might have been balanced for him alone … and when someone else either tried to accompany him through it, or follow him to source using the same “settings”, they could have been damaged. Or possibly even killed.”

“You’re suggesting that it was a trap?” Huff said.

There would be no way to be sure of that with the data we have. But I am suggesting that Siffha’h’s right. This was not a malfunction … or not a very likely one. There was someone at the other end managing it … or someone who programmed it and walked away.”

“But how do you open a gate forward in time?” Siffha’h said, her eyes big.

Huff looked at her somberly. “Unless you’ve mastered contemporal existence,” Huff said, “you don’t. But the only ones who have done so, who simultaneously live in all times and none, are the Powers that Be.”

“Including that one other Power,” said Auhlae, “who gives us so much trouble …”

Glances were exchanged all around.

“Well, the circle’s served its purpose,” Rhiow said. She flirted her tail at the “wizard’s knot”: it unraveled, and the rest of the circle vanished with it. “Thanks, Siffha’h. That was nicely done.”

She looked smug. “Any time.”

Fhrio went over to the gate and put one paw into the control weave, hooking out first one string, then another. He hissed softly. “There’s no telling what happened now,” he said. “Those ‘settings’ wiped themselves from the logs when the gate collapsed … that doubtless being the ‘operator’s’ intention. We’re no further along than we were before.”

Urruah, who had stepped away to sit down and have a brief wash while Fhrio was looking the gate over, now glanced up. “Well,” he said, “it’s not that bad. I wove them into the gate’s ‘hard’ memory, stacked underneath your standard default routines, while I was locking the gate open. Just a precaution: I was afraid I might drop something vital when things got busy. But at least that way we could be sure of finding the settings again if something went wrong.”

Fhrio blinked. “How did you get into my hard routines that fast …?”

Urruah smiled one of those smug-tom smiles, and Rhiow said hurriedly, “Huff, I wouldn’t mind taking a break for a little while, if it suits you.”

“Certainly. Let’s go up and get some fresh air … see if we can find some lunch. After that,” and Huff looked grim, “we must plan. If the Lone Power is behind what we just saw … and I can’t think what else could be … then we’ve a nasty job ahead of us. Food first: but then the council of war …”

The food took less time than Rhiow had thought, most of it provided by ehhif whom she found astonishingly willing. Huff had simply led them around to The Mint, the pub where he lived with his ehhif, the pub’s manager. Rhiow was not sure what to expect from a pub, except for thinking that perhaps, like many other things she had glimpsed so far in London, it might be fairly old: but this one was as much like a New York uptown bar as anything else, all plate glass and polished brass and hanging plants. Huff made his way through the pub’s “lounge” area, graciously accepting bits of sausage and burger and sandwich and other treats from the patrons and bringing this food back to the others, who stayed discreetly sidled in one out-of-the-way corner of the pub otherwise populated only by a group of mindlessly dinging and hooting small-stakes gambling machines.

“You’re very popular here,” Urruah said, after Huff came back with a rather large piece of fried fish.

“Oh yes,” Huff said, watching with amusement as Arhu fell on the piece of fish and devoured it almost without stopping to breathe. “They’re a nice enough bunch, by and large: and my ehhif doesn’t mind. He describes it as “good will” … says it helps business. It’s my pleasure, I’m sure.” Huff looked around the place with a satisfied air. “Always nice to be part of a successful undertaking. I just have to watch myself, sometimes: it would be too easy to get fat …”

Rhiow, busy washing her face after finishing a greasy but delectable half of a sausage, was glad of the excuse not to be looking at Huff when he said that. He had already achieved at least “portly” status, but he was not genuinely overweight … yet.

And who am I to stare at him in this regard? If I had unlimited access to food like this, who knows what I’d look like in a few months … All the same, she wished she had the opportunity to find out.

Everyone was washing now but Fhrio: he had finished first and was hunkered down with his eyes half-closed, perhaps consulting with the Whisperer about the status of his gates … or perhaps, Rhiow thought, wondering how much face he’s lost, and how to get it back … She sighed, and scrubbed her face harder.

Urruah was in comfort: after a chunk of burger, two fish sticks from someone’s finicky child, and a big piece of gravy-soaked crust from someone’s steak and kidney pie, he was lying on one side and putting his stomach fur in order. “So, Huff,” he said, pausing and looking up, “let’s consider options.”

“I don’t know that we have many,” Huff said. He was taking his time about putting his broad snow-white bib in order: it had somehow gotten some ketchup on it after that last piece of hamburger, and Rhiow suspected that he would be pinkish there for a day or two. “We’ve got to try to trace back along the same path that Mr… Illingworth came by. But the modality is going to be difficult, considering how our problem gate is behaving …” He sounded meditative.

“I think we’re going to have to construct a timeslide,” Urruah said. “To access what the ehhif wizards call a ‘piece of time’.”

“You started to tell me about that once,” Arhu said suddenly to Urruah. “And then you yelled at him,” he said, turning to Rhiow. “And me.”

“With reason,” Rhiow said. “It wasn’t germane to the problem at hand: and messing around with time without a specific goal, and approval from the Powers, is like playing in traffic. Worse, actually. But temporal claudication theory’s been a hobby of Urruah’s for a long time.”

Urruah shook himself, then sat up and licked a paw as meditatively as Huff started rubbing behind one ear, even though he had already washed there. “I started getting interested in it when I was still freelance,” he said to Arhu. “Sometimes the Whisperer will talk about it, for whatever reasons. Can’t be boredom, I wouldn’t think: maybe it’s her sneaky way of encouraging research … or just curiosity. She’s sneaky that way.”

“Temporal claudication …” Arhu said. “I thought it was supposed to be ‘temporospatial’.”

“It is,” Urruah said. “Oh, there’s no way you can ever completely lose the spatial coordinate-set on any temporospatial transit spell, no matter how still you try to hold it: not a planet-based one, anyway. But a timeslide’s emphasis is always mainly on temporal change. You can either mount it “freestanding”, by bending space locally and temporarily with spells and equipment tailored to that specific spot: or you can start a timeslide in ‘parasitic’ relationship to an existing worldgate, using the gate’s power source to run the slide. There are more involved ‘half and half’ implementations for use when you want some of the gate’s own functions to augment those of the timeslide: but that kind of implementation is kind of fiddly.”

“A claudication is a squeezing, a constriction,” Huff said to Arhu. “Squeeze space, and you enable things to pop from one side of the ‘squeezed’ area to another: that’s worldgating at its simplest. Squeeze time as well—or squeeze the temporal component of the time/space pair harder than the spatial one—and you pop from one time to another. Present to past … and back again. That’s a timeslide.”

“You still have to control the spatial component very exactly,” Urruah said, “or else you pop out at the right time, all right, but somewhere very different in the planet’s orbit … not forgetting that the planet’s primary has moved too, and taken its whole solar system with it, since the time you’re aiming for. Hanging out there in the cold dark vacuum and feeling very silly … assuming you remembered to bring some air with you.” Urruah put his whiskers forward, amused by the image. Arhu licked his nose, twice, very fast. “You must choose a spot at one ‘end’ of the timeslide,” Urruah said, “ideally your ‘present’ end, as de facto anchor, and the other as the spot to which the anchor chain is fastened … and not lose control of either of them, despite their individual movements through space which continue through the duration of the slide. There has to be enough ‘flex’ in the connection to cope with unpredictable movements of the body … or ‘bodies’, since the temporal element means you have to treat this as a two-body problem. Then when you’re done, you have to unhook both ends of the timeslide without causing temporal backlash at either insertion point. It’s delicate work, my kit: you’ll break a few claws on this one, if it’s what we go for.”

Arhu gave Urruah a look which suggested the usage of claws might be more imminent. “I can handle it,” he said.

“We’ll see,” said Rhiow. “You’re good with static worldgates, for a beginner. Whether you’ll do as well with a timeslide is another question.”

“In any case,” Urruah said, “I think options one and three are closed to us.”

Fhrio looked up from his ruminations at that. “Why?”

“Well,” said Urruah, flicking his tail, “for one thing, how often are we going to have to do this? Does anyone want to give me odds that we’ll find out what’s causing the trouble—from solving the original gate malfunction, to finding out what in Iau’s name Mr… Illingworth was talking about—and fix it all, with just one trip?”

Everyone looked at each other. No one looked willing to suggest they were witless enough to believe that this might happen.

“Right.” Urruah said. “So there’s no sense in running around trying to acquire three or four or five sets of the specialized equipment we’d need to execute a freestanding timeslide repeatedly from the same spot. We’d only waste huge amounts of energy, which the Powers hate, and drive ourselves crazy, which we would hate. Type three, the ‘half and half’ timeslide implementations, are a nuisance to maintain, they get out of kilter at the drop of a whisker, and they fail without warning, which we do not need in these circumstances. This leaves us with type two … which has certain advantages in our case.”

“A parasitic linkage has advantages?” Auhlae said, sounding dubious. “With a malfunctioning gate?”

“It does if you’re trying to fix the malfunction,” Urruah said. “It’ll function as a diagnostic, for the power source, anyway. A clumsy one, but rugged. Nor will it be liable to the same kinds of failures that the malfunctioning gate is having.”

“No … just different ones,” Fhrio said.

Urruah shrugged his tail. “Who wants all mice to taste the same? Variety keeps you young. We parasitize the gate’s power source and use it to power the slide. That at least we’ll be able to control precisely. It’s a simple structure to build and troubleshoot: anything goes wrong with it, we’ll know about it in seconds, and be able to fix it in minutes. You try doing that with one of these gates. They’re complex.”

“Tell me about it,” Huff said wearily. “The others have been failing sporadically because of the extra strain due to this troublesome one being taken offline. They’re just not built for larger access numbers than they’re carrying at the moment.”

“We can get you some help for that,” Rhiow said. “We have authorizations to get assistance from the other congener gates in this bundle. The teams at Chur and its daughter-complex at Samnaun will take some of the strain until we’ve resolved this: we can install a couple of direct access portals in the near neighborhood of the functioning gates.”

“They may have to stay there a while,” Huff said. “We have all these incursions to resolve as well …”

“The Whisperer says we’ll have as much support time from the other gates as we need,” Rhiow said. “It’ll be all right.”

“And meanwhile, at least we have one ‘illicit’ gate transit that we caught live and can use for its coordinates,” Urruah said. “More than that: Mr… Illingworth, whenever he is, will still be carrying some hint of wizardly ‘transit residue’ about him that we can isolate and track … and possibly get a better sense of who or what pushed him through that gate. Maybe even why, if we’re lucky.”

“The oldest lostlings’ residue will have already worn off, though,” Auhlae said. “Even after all the other problems are solved, we’re still going to have to find them somehow. And when we do … are they native to the same universe Mr. Illingworth is?”

It was a problem which had been nagging at Rhiow. Theoretically, the number of potential alternate universes was almost infinite. Even postulating a completely cooperative ehhif, once found—and that itself was none too likely—the two teams would then have to identify correctly which universe was that ehhif’s home. If they accidentally sent the ehhif “back” to the wrong world, their own home universe’s problem would be solved, but the same problem of growing instability would be created for some other world…

“It’s something we’re going to have to sort out,” Rhiow said, “but at the far end of this process, not the near end. I’d say what we must now do is construct Urruah’s ‘parasitic’ timeslide, plug into it the coordinates he saved from Mr… Illingworth’s transit, and see where it takes us: then find out what we can about that universe … especially about this Queen of theirs, and what happened to her. You said there had been other attempts on her life,” she said to Huff.

“At least three or four,” Huff said. “We’ve got to discover whether this assassination is one of the attempts which, in our world, failed: or if it’s a new one, never recorded …”

“Perhaps never recorded,” Urruah said, “because in the past someone else has already stopped it … Us, perhaps?”

“That would be reassuring,” Auhlae said. “But somehow I don’t think we can count on it …”

There was quiet for a moment. Huff sat gazing thoughtfully at the floor, a weary reddish carpet which over much time had become an amalgam of stomped-in chewing gum, spilled beer, and other substances that Rhiow’s nose flatly refused to identify, this far along in their evolution. “Well,” Huff said finally, “I concur. It only remains to decide exactly who makes the first incursion into the past.”

“Assuming that none of you are particularly eager,” Urruah said, “I think it should be us.”

The London team looked at him with expressions varying from Huff’s thoughtful interest to Auhlae’s surprise to Siffha’h’s faint confusion: Fhrio put his whiskers forward, positively (and to Rhiow’s mind, oddly) amused.

“Why?” Huff said. “Though I think probably none of us are all that eager …”

“I am!’ Siffha’h said.

“Hush,” Auhlae said. “You’re young for this kind of work yet, Siffha’h.”

“I am not! I’ve got all my teeth—”

“No.”

“Why not?!”

“Not now.”

“As for the ‘why’—” Urruah said.

“We’re more expendable than you are,” Arhu said dryly.

“Arhu!” Rhiow said.

“I wouldn’t have put it quite that way,” Urruah said, putting his whiskers forward, “but in a way he’s right. When it comes down to the feet and the tail of it, Huff, these are your gates, and you know them better than we do. If something goes wrong with a timeslide anchored to one of your gates’ power sources, you have a better chance to successfully troubleshoot the situation than we would. And another matter: the Powers sent us to intervene. Implicit in that, to my mind, is the suggestion that we may be best equipped, one way or another, to deal with whatever problems we uncover while working with you.”

“Or it might just be ego,” Fhrio said, one ear forward and one ear back. It was a joke, Rhiow thought … just.

“Urruah? Ego?” Rhiow said, and then stopped herself from saying “Perish the thought”, since that could have implied that it wasn’t ego. “Well, Fhrio, if you want to relieve him of the glory, I’m sure you’re welcome to change places with him, and he’ll stay here and mind your gates for you.”

Huff threw Rhiow a very covert and very amused look as Fhrio put his other ear forward. “Oh, no indeed,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to deprive him …”

“All right, then,” Rhiow said to Huff. “I think we’ll need some hours to put together what spells we want to carry with us, and to make sure things back at home are all right before we set out. If you can keep the gate in inactive mode until we get back, that’ll probably be best.”

“No problem with that,” Fhrio said. “I’ll just disconnect it from the power source entirely until you get back—when? tomorrow?—to set up the parasitic timeslide.”

“Tomorrow let it be,” Rhiow said, “about this time, if that suits you all.”

They all got up. “And meanwhile, thanks for the work you’ve done,” Huff said. “We’re further along than we were, though the problem looks worse than it did: at least there’s been a change in status, which you were begging for, Fhrio, as I remember. So you may owe Arhu one after all.”

“Though, Fhrio, I must admit that he overstepped the bounds,” Rhiow said. “And my apologies to you for that.”

Fhrio took a not entirely ceremonial swipe at Arhu’s ear. “Let him behave himself after this, then.”

“I will do so,” Arhu said with abrupt and brittle clarity, “insofar as you so do as well, when we come into the dark and you cannot find the way: when others see the path that you do not, and you rebel …”

Rhiow blinked. It was not anything like Arhu’s usual turn of phrase: she heard foretelling in it, and her fur stood up on her. She hoped Fhrio’s was doing the same, for there was no mistaking the Whisperer’s Dam when She chose to speak out loud … as she sometimes did, using Arhu as Her throat.

The resonances trembling around his words faded themselves out on the air, leaving the London team looking at one another. “I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, “but it’s another recent development. Arhu is a visionary, though the talent is still training. When it comes out so forcefully, though, we’ve learned to listen …”

Fhrio shrugged his tail. “We’ll see what happens,” he said, sounding skeptical, but cheerfully so. “Are we all done? Then I’ve got a gate to see to, and a pride to go home to. See you all tomorrow …”

He stalked out, leaving them all looking after him. Auhlae looked after him with some concern and said, “He goes my way home, for a little distance: I’ll go with him. Siffha’h, come with me?”

“Sure,” said the youngster. Auhlae rubbed faces quickly with Huff, saluted the others with a flirt of her tail, and headed off after Fhrio. Siffha’h trotted off after Auhlae, leaving Arhu gazing after her.

Rhiow lashed her tail once or twice, then said to Huff, “Truly, I am sorry if we’ve caused any trouble—”

“If the way he acts makes you think so,” Huff said, giving her an amused look out of those big green eyes, “don’t. Fhrio’s always like the one flea down in your ear that you can’t get at. But for all that, he’s good at his job. Come on …”

They all made their way out, slipping behind the bar and down a corridor behind it to a heavy metal door with a small cat-door installed in the bottom of it: then out into a small untidy yard stacked high with steel beer barrels and plastic soft-drink crates. At the back of the yard, a corrugated steel gateway in a high wall had a small improvised cat-door cut into the steel and hinged. “Convenient,” Urruah said.

“It is, isn’t it?” said Huff. “But one thing. Urruah, thank you for volunteering.”

Urruah looked at him in surprise. “Well, as I said, it seems appropriate. Doesn’t it, Rhi?”

“It does. Accusations of ego aside.”

Huff laughed at that. “Don’t take him seriously, cousins: please don’t. He’s got ego enough of his own and to spare. But I do thank you.”

“You’re worried about Auhlae,” Arhu said suddenly.

Rhiow sighed, thinking that vision was not Arhu’s only problem: he was perceptive as well, but not about how to use the perception. He needs a tact transplant, she thought, but she suspected that this was something not even wizardry could handle. She and Urruah were just going to have to beat it into him over time … hopefully before he got so big that the corrective administration of educational whackings was no longer a viable option.

Huff looked for a long moment at Arhu before saying, “Yes, I am. I don’t think you’re too young to understand the situation. We’ve been together a while, and she’s dear to me: the thought of her in danger upsets me. If we needed to do something dangerous in the Powers’ service, of course we would … and doubtless will. But I don’t like to think of her anywhere near trouble.”

Rhiow understood completely, though at the same time it seemed to her that for partners who were wizards, and who might be in trouble at the drop of a whisker, such an attitude was likely to cause one or both of them pain sooner or later.

“I know what you mean,” Arhu said, and suddenly looked very young, and painfully dignified, and profoundly troubled, all at once. Oh, dear, Rhiow said privately to Urruah, he has been bitten badly, hasn’t he…

The claw in the ear is the claw through the heart, Urruah said, quoting the old proverb. I just hope she doesn’t rip him ragged before she’s through…

“Yes,” Huff said. “I thought you might. Thank you, anyway: thank you all for volunteering.” And he leaned over and rubbed cheeks with Rhiow.

She was oddly moved. “Cousin, you’re more than welcome. It’s our job, after all. Meanwhile, we’d better get going to prepare what we need. We’ll see you down by the gate, about this time tomorrow.”

They made their way out through the little steel door, into the alley behind the pub, and headed for the gate, and home: and all the way home Rhiow’s fur felt strange to her where Huff’s cheek had brushed it…