The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

“None too fond of it myself,” Siffha’h muttered.

“Well, you’d best get that way,” Rhiow said, “since the Whisperer seems to feel it’s what we need to be doing right now.” She sighed, then, for as she looked down at the spell-symbols surrounding her personalized part of the transit circle, she realized she was going to need to brush up on the conditional tenses and plug-in syntaxes that the Speech used to deal with travel back and forth through time. Arhu had all the pertinent symbology laid out here, probably having saved it from their last paratemporal work, but it didn’t do to rely too completely on someone else’s transcription of your personality data. They might transpose a character, somewhere along the line, and inadvertently change your nature. Not the best way to start a job…

“Is it all right?” Arhu said.

He didn’t exactly sound uncertain– that wasn’t in his style– but Rhiow knew he was being careful, which was a development worth reinforcing. She put her whiskers forward. “Mine seems to be in order,” she said, “and nicely done. ’Ruah?”

Urruah was standing in the middle of his circle, carefully checking the strung-out Speech-characters that defined his subsidiary branch of the spell. “Looks fine,” he said. “You’re getting the hang of this, youngster. A lot less clutter in the design than there used to be.”

Arhu looked smug, sitting down in his own section. “Told you so,” he muttered to Siffha’h.

“Yeah, well, the way I wanted to do it was better. If you’d taken that last set of conditionals and combined them with–”

“Can we please just pop?” Urruah said. “You two can go back to shredding each other’s egos after we get where we’re going.”

Rhiow flicked an ear at him in amusement and reached over the border of her own circle to put a paw down on the nearest control structure. The words of the wizardry flared up around them into fierce contrast with the cracked and oil-stained blacktop underfoot. “Ready?” she said.

The other three looked down at the spell diagram, began to recite along with her. All around them, the sounds of L.A. traffic, the sound of the mariachi band starting to play in the Olvera Street plaza, the distant scream of a jet overhead, began to thin and fade to nothing in the silence that always accompanied the universe starting to listen to a spell. Their words in the Speech filled that silence to overflowing, spilled out of it, drowned it in colorless fire–

And then both fire and silence were gone, with the circle, and both light and air around them were utterly changed. Rhiow put her nose up into a wind that had nothing to do with their transit, and breathed deep. It was blowing toward them from the westward, and it smelled of the Sea.

They were standing to one side of the entrance to yet another parking lot. This one, though, was very unlike the Olvera Street parking lot, which had been hemmed in by buildings, old and new, on all sides. This space was broad, bare, and bright in the sun, under the hazy blue sky. Pale concrete painted with parking stripes stretched away from them on all sides. Directly in front of them, as they looked westward, was a broad arch– two fifteen-foot pitch-pine poles spanned by a long carved signboard that said:

SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS NATIONAL RECREATION AREA — SATWIWA

Rhiow glanced around. Under her feet she could feel a strange trembling sensation, almost a buzzing. It was like a stronger version of the peculiar uncertainty she’d felt in her limbs in the plaza tree.

“What’s a Satwiwa?” Siffha’h said, looking up at the sign.

“Some ehhif placename,” Urruah said. “Never mind that. Feel it, Rhi?”

How could I not? Rhiow thought. That sense of terrible uncertainty coming up out of the ground felt like it was shouting right down her bones. “Is it the last earthquake we’re feeling,” she said, “or the next one?”

“I don’t think it’s either,” Arhu said.

Siffha’h’s ears flicked back, then forward. “Ahead of us,” she said. “That’s where the power is…”

“Come on,” Urruah said.

Inside the arch, there were only a few cars parked here and there, and no sign of the ehhif who’d left them. Urruah in the lead, the four wizards trotted past the cars to a sidewalk that surrounded the parking lot. This led to a beaten-down dirt trail winding off through an upsloping grassy meadow dotted here and there with stands of taller grasses and brush.

“A long way up…” Arhu said under his breath. Several miles further along the way the path ran, foothills clad in dark-green chaparral and sagebrush rose toward a mountain studded with outcroppings of red stone. The peak was bare; high above it, small winged dots circled in the haze-blue sky, working an early updraft.

“We don’t have to go up there,” Siffha’h said. She shot off across the meadow northwestward, a small black and white shape bounding through the grass. With a racketing clap and clatter of wings, a covey of small plump brown and white birds burst up out of the waving green-gold of the longest grass. Ignoring them, Arhu ran hot on Siffha’h’s track, and Rhiow and Urruah after him; and as they plunged past underneath the fleeing quail, Rhiow had to laugh at herself, because for all her unease, her mouth still watered to see them go.

“Haven’t I been telling you there was more to life than canned cat food,” Urruah said as she galloped along beside him.

“Don’t tempt me,” Rhiow said. “They had those in the Market this other morning, roasted and ready to go–”

“Did they now! Must stop by there on the way home. I know the roast-poultry lady.”

“Of course you do,” Rhiow said, resigned.

“And by the way, why are we running?”

“Because she is?” Rhiow said, as ahead of them Siffha’h started to slow, and Arhu caught up with her. “Because it’s a nice day for it?”

Siffha’h, though, had now paused, and was sniffing around in the grass. Rhiow could see her briefly paw at the ground, then look up again, and her expression wasn’t that of someone who’d been running for enjoyment. As Arhu caught up with her, and then Urruah and Rhiow, she glanced around at them. “The power was here,” Siffha’h said. “But it’s moved…”

“The earthquake?” Rhiow said. Standing here, she could feel it burning in the ground through the pads of her paws. But as Siffha’h had said, she couldn’t tell whether it was the quake just past, or some tremor in the future.

Arhu’s tail was lashing now. “No,” he said. “Something to do with it, though. Something involved with the earthquake was here. Something that wants to be here again…” He straightened up, looking around him with the same kind of questing expression. “The water,” he said. “It’s here somewhere nearby. Once we find the water, we’ll be close–”

He and Siffha’h ran off northwestward again through the long pale golden grass. Rhiow and Urruah watched them go for a moment, then started after them. After the rather unnerving morning, this interlude was a relief: and as she and Urruah followed the younger wizards, Rhiow found herself less troubled by the feeling of quake-trying-to-happen in the ground beneath her, and increasingly fascinated by the sense of old overlays, the remnant energy from wizardries done in this area over centuries, even millennia. Any place where wizards worked repeatedly over time acquired such: but the ones Rhiow felt under her now as she and Urruah trotted off in the youngsters’ wake seemed to lie very light in the ground, for ehhif work– at least in contrast with the concrete-and-steel wizardly environment where Rhiow normally worked. In Manhattan, the remnants of the vigorous and aggressive ehhif wizardries of the last few centuries were more likely to have embedded themselves in concrete than in the underlying bedrock…and henceforth were susceptible over time to having been simply jackhammered up or knocked down, and carted away. Here, though, beneath the insistent buzzing of recent or soon-to-be earthquake in the ground, Rhiow was getting a sense of old earth layered deep in wizardries faded down faint, buried stratum on stratum in ground which had been continuously inhabited by the same people since the Ice withdrew, or earlier. She was reminded of the feel of the ground near the little worldgate in Chur, in the Alps, which had been there since ehhif Bronze-Age days: but those overlays had been noisy and assertive compared to these.

“It’s pretty up here,” Urruah said as he trotted along beside her, glancing off to one side, where a lone queen-ehhif in hiking boots and shorts and T-shirt could be seen wandering along the bark-chipped path to one side. “Pity we don’t have places like this in New York.”

“Oh, come on, of course we do!” Rhiow said. “Go out on the Island, into the winery country. Or out by Montauk Point. Or up to the Poconos..”

Urruah wrinkled his nose, pausing a moment to sniff at a tall leggy bush with long yellow flowers. “Those aren’t New York New York, though,” he said.

Rhiow swung her tail broadly from one side to the other, conceding the point, as they paused to look at a low slant-roofed wooden building off to one side. Arhu and Siffha’h had already run past it, unconcerned: Rhiow stopped to glance at the ehhif characters on a carved sign to one side, then shrugged her tail and went after them. “Since when are you so concerned about ehhif boundaries? And even if you are, what about Coney Island? Or the bottom of the big runway at Kennedy, where it goes into the marsh in Jamaica Bay.” She stopped a moment by a flower bed to rub her face against a downhanging stalk of some spiny, sharp-scented plant, greeting it, and got a sap-slow acknowledgement from the life inside. “But if it’s this kind of quiet you’re looking for,” Rhiow said, flirting her tail and walking on in the direction the youngsters had gone, “you know you’re still not going to find it there. Too much mental background noise from all the lives pushed so tightly together for so long. You want the Poles, or the Moon, where you can hear the planet think…”

They went past the little building along a curved, paved path and suddenly found themselves looking at something odd. In the shadow of a very small hill, out in the middle of some parched looking grass, stood a hut perhaps thirty Person’s-paces wide, built of rushes or reeds, its outer layers shingled down over one another in a series of graceful curves. In front of the hut’s single low door was a wide circle of stumps of age-silvered wood and blocks of stone of varying heights and shapes. In the center of it was another smaller circle of stones, and a further scatter of rocks in the center of it all, some fire-blackened. “At least you’re sounding a little calmer,” he said.

“Not sure I feel that way yet,” Rhiow said. She stretched her neck up a little to try to see where Arhu and Siffha’h had gone: they’d vanished into the tall grass past the hut, apparently on their way up the hillside. “I guess it’s just wizards’ syndrome. You get so used to being able to reason with everything, or at least persuade it. But this is one of the situations where sheer scale gets in the way…”

They trotted past the ring and toward the hillside. “I suppose I can see the Earth’s point,” Urruah said. “We think we’re so important. But what’re we to the world? A minor skin condition. Why should it care about us? It has its own priorities. Tides, gravity, plates sliding… And if a flea starts shouting at you to stop scratching, do you listen?”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “It wouldn’t be high on my list.”

“But still,” Urruah said, “we’re wizards. It’s our job to listen, isn’t it?”

“The next time I see you scratching, I’ll remind you,” Rhiow said, “and we’ll see what you do.” She paused where the slope before them started to get steeper, and the grass longer. “Where’ve those two gotten to now?”

We found the water, Arhu said. There’s a waterfall up higher. But that’s not important. We found a cave, up the hillside about forty leaps, in between two big stones. And somebody’s been doing wizardry in here!

“Oh really,” Rhiow said. “How recently?”

A week or so ago, Siffha’h said. Maybe a little longer, but not much.

“What kind of wizardry?” Rhiow said.

“Uh oh,” Urruah said then, looking behind them.

Someone had come out of the low round hut, and was standing there looking around: a queen-ehhif in dark pants and a short-sleeved blue shirt. “Doesn’t matter,” Rhiow said, looking uphill again as the ehhif walked off around the hut, “we’re sidled. Sif?”

Rhiow heard her hesitating. Not sure I like the look of this, Siffha’h said.

“Why? What’s the matter?”

I can feel what’s left of the spell in the stone, Siffha’h said. It’s full of geological constants– local ones, with really fine adjustments on them. And there were three or four power conduits leading out of the spell and sunk into the rock underneath the mountain.

“A diagnostic?” Rhiow said.

I don’t think so, Siffha’h said, and she was beginning to sound angry. This doesn’t look like someone trying to find out what the earth’s been doing. This looks like someone trying to make it do something–

Rhiow went chilly inside. It wasn’t as if wizards never made mistakes, or did stupid things: but messing around with the earth’s structure in a place where it was already unstable enough struck her as foolhardy. “That’s really odd,” Rhiow said. “Let’s see what you’ve got. ‘Ruah–” She started up the hill.

“Rhi,” Urruah said from behind her, “while we’re on the subject of ‘odd’, you might want to have a look–”

Rhiow turned around. The she-ehhif who’d come out of the hut was heading straight toward them through the grass.

Rhiow glanced over her shoulder to see what the ehhif might be looking at instead of her — but there was nothing there but more of the long grass. Rhiow looked back at the queen-ehhif, ready to run or vanish if necessary, but it was hard to imagine why it would be necessary. The ehhif didn’t look particularly dangerous: she was very small as humans went, with long dark hair tied back, a low belt hanging down over her trousers to one side–

And, hanging holstered from that belt, a gun. Rhiow opened her mouth, prepared to say a single word in the Speech, the trigger for the run-and-hide spell that lay, as usual, ready at the back of her brain. As she did, the ehhif stopped and gazed up the hill, as if seeing something there that she hadn’t expected. Then she looked down at Rhiow.

“Excuse me,” the ehhif said, “but are you People looking for something, or are you lost?” And she said it in the Speech.

Rhiow and Urruah stared at each other. Then Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “Lost!” she said. “Hardly! But looking for something, yes: though until a few moments ago, we weren’t expecting to find another wizard here. Is that your spell up there?”

“Yes,” the ehhif said. “Sorry if it looks alarming at first glance: it’s specialized stuff. Anyway, I’m on errantry: haku, cousins!” She sat down in the grass. “In fact, I suspect you’re why I was sent here. I’m called Helen: Helen Walks Softly.”

Urruah sat down, his whiskers forward too. “You could have fooled me,” he said.