The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

Arhu sighed. “Not then,” he said. “He was way too full of ehhif sex-think for me to See anything else right then. Which is why I left.”

Rhiow caught the set of growing annoyance in Siffha’h’s ears. “It was wise of you to stay behind,” she said. “Thanks for that.”

Sif’s ears went forward. “So you went back to the house–” Rhiow said.

“They were plenty of them still partying,” Arhu said. “So I just got sidled and walked around poking my nose into things. I wanted to see if I could figure out where the group was going after they met.”

“Are you absolutely sure you weren’t noticed?”

“Of course I wasn’t,” Arhu said. “The ones that weren’t trying to get into each other’s clothes were mostly busy wrapping themselves around as much alcohol as they could find. And not just alcohol, either.”

Helen looked alert. “Drugs?”

“Just hhash,” Arhu said. “There was a little room back in the wing of the building that runs along the hillside. The inside was furnished sort of the same way as the library we saw: and it had a fireplace. Everyone was gathered around that and blowing their smoke into it.”

“Smart enough, I guess,” Urruah said. “That way any smell would vent out up the chimney rather than out into the hallway.”

“Not that one of us couldn’t smell it,” Arhu said. “That’s what brought me down there first. But then I thought, ‘Who knows, maybe the ehhif who owns this place has some other little secrets stashed down here as well.” And sure enough, down that hall a little way is a doorway that looks just like more wall paneling until you Look at it really hard.”

“Show us,” Rhiow said.

A blink later they were no longer in the Silent Man’s living room, but looking at the wall paneling in the hallway of Elwin Dagenham’s house. To the normal visual sense, there was no break in the expensive hardwood paneling at all. But Rhiow and the others now saw what Arhu had seen when he bent the Eye on the paneling. A faint fizz of power described a door-shape in the wood, hiding the actual razor-thin space between door and jamb.

“Wizardry,” Aufwi said, looking shocked.

“Too underpowered,” said Helen, peering at it through Arhu’s eyes. “It’s a charm.”

Auwfi looked confused. “You haven’t run into this kind of thing before?” Helen said. “Granted, you don’t see these a whole lot in urbanized societies. There are some Speech-words for simple things, like the states of visibility or cohesion, that are so powerful they don’t need to be built into a spell by a wizard to work: you can attach them to some physical object and get a fairly good result, though it’s usually pretty low-powered. Even nonwizardly humans can use charms – if they can find the word they need, and learn how to tether it to the right kind of object. People in rural cultures, or lifestyles with strong verbal transmission traditions – and a lot of superstition – tend to hang onto them longest.”

Rhiow’s fur stood up a little. That someone in that house would have the knowledge to use such a thing, combined with what they already knew about the place, disturbed her. “Anyway, as soon as I saw that,” Arhu said, “I went in – “

With him they slipped through the wood of the door as Rhiow had done with the Silent Man’s door that morning. Here was another room like the library and the smoking room, but this one was windowless. More wood paneling lined the walls, there was thick dark red carpeting, and two big comfortable chairs stood in the near corners of the room. The far end of it was dominated by a desk on which lay several very large manila folders.

The viewpoint changed abruptly as Arhu leapt up onto the desk to look more closely at what it held. “You didn’t open them, did you – “ Urruah said.

Arhu hissed in adolescent annoyance. “Why would I need to?” he said. He Looked down at the bigger of the two folders on the desk.

From his point of view, its cover simply melted away, leaving Arhu looking at the top page of the contents. The page was covered with fuzzy black markings that it took Rhiow a moment to recognize as rubbings of some kind. This page had been laid down on some carved surface and rubbed with some soft dark substance, leaving a positive print.

Rhiow squinted at them a little. The designs that covered the page were almost all squarish, each one a little different from the others. There were strong-featured ehhif faces adorned with feathery headdresses, as well as birds and animals crammed into the square shapes: even a few that were feline – big-cat faces, perhaps pumas. All the rest of the designs on the top rubbing were round shapes, intricately carved with smaller designs she had trouble making out. “These are all from the central part of this continent, aren’t they?” Rhiow said. “The part that’s south of here.”

“Mayan,” Helen said immediately, leaning forward to look at them more closely. “Yet with some Azteca features. Strange: those two cultures were pretty clearly separated from one another in time – it’s odd to see the symbologies combined. Arhu?”

“The next one?” he said. Arhu’s view shifted to the page underneath the first. It was similar to the one on top: densely packed symbols, pretty clearly transferred to the paper. But there were spots on this sheet where the images underneath hadn’t transferred correctly to the rubbings. “Some missing stuff here…” Aufwi said.

Rhiow was looking narrowly at the images, waiting to see what the the Whisperer would make of them. In her mind they slowly gained context. “Numbers,” she said. “This is… some kind of calendar?”

“Not so much that,” Arhu said, “as a date book… I think. A schedule for things to happen.”

“Or of when things are supposed to happen,” Siffha’h said.

“They were great ones for calendars,” said Helen, “both of those peoples. But seeing their two writings together like this – “ She shook her head. “Next page?”

Arhu’s view of the contents of the folder shifted, shifted again. There was another page of pictures-that-were-dates, just a list of them as far as Rhiow could tell. Here, too, there were some gaps in the data. Rhiow blinked as she looked at them, for she kept getting the impression that other nearby characters were moving a little, trying to squirm out of their own boundaries and squeeze their way into the gaps. “It’s strange,” she said. “Is anyone else seeing these moving?”

Though she couldn’t see him while looking through Arhu’s Eye, Rhiow could feel Urruah tilting his head to one side, gazing at the page. “I am,” he said, “and I don’t like it.”

There was no question in Rhiow’s mind that there was something faintly unwholesome about the way the images on the pages were behaving. “And it’s worse,” Hwaith said, “because just when you think you’ve caught them doing it, that they’re actually about to slide over into the next gap, that then they hold still.”

“Like they know you’re watching,” Auwfi said under his breath.

“The next page?” Rhiow said.

The view shifted. The second-to-last rubbing in the folder was not of more of the squarish ideographs. It was a single image that was so tangled that Rhiow at first had trouble sorting out what was going on in it. But finally she could make out two figures. One was a gigantic serpent with wings, wearing a peculiar headdress. It was wrapped around another similarly adorned animal figure that struggled and slashed with huge taloned paws. Its ears were small and rounded, the muzzle blunt and wrinkled, exposing terrible fangs: behind it a long sinuous tail lashed in rage.

This time all the fur on Rhiow’s back that hadn’t stood up on sight of the charm-effect finished the job. “Now here,” Rhiow said softly, “I think we’re on familiar ground.”

“It looks like this was from a different source than the first few pages,” Helen said. She peered at the image. “Maybe from a later period than the first few. But the Feathered Serpent is known all through the Mesoamerican cultures. Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl, the Nine-Wind God: he has so many names.”

“One of the Powers that Be — ” Aufwi said.

“That’s right,” Helen said. “He’s a cognate of the one that Western tradition calls the Michael Power, and the One’s Champion – though as usual the correspondence isn’t exact. There are legends all through the Mesoamerican lands of how he lived for a while in one or another of the civilizations, teaching the ehhif the arts of peace. But he attracted the Lone Power’s enmity under one of Its many names – Texcatlipoca maybe is the best known. So rather than enter into a battle that would destroy the surrounding civilizations, the Serpent moved on and made his home elsewhere. That was how he came to the Mayans, the story says, after leaving the Toltec lands.” She shook her head. “In the old stories, the Serpent never stays long — just for enough time to bring his gifts to mortals and make sure they’ve mastered them. After that he’s always on the move, always eager to get back to the homeland of the Gods. He doesn’t fight unless he’s forced to it, because in this particular manifestation he’s too powerful. An all-out battle could have destroyed everything he was trying to save.”

“Well, he has another name in our time,” Rhiow said. “And I have a feeling we may need to introduce you. But that’ll wait for the moment. The Serpent’s enemy– That’s one of our bigger cousins, surely.”

“A jaguar,” Helen said, looking more closely at the rubbing. “Normally there would be spots in the drawing, but there aren’t, which can mean a couple of things.” She sounded uneasy. “But the headdress makes the identification easier. It’s a god called Tepeyollotl.”

Suddenly everyone was exchanging glances. “There’s a name we’ve heard recently…” Rhiow said.

“From the Lady in Black?” Helen said. “Yes. I remember the epithets she was attaching to the name. The Devourer of Worlds…” She shook her head. “But they’re not the usual descriptions attached to the Black Leopard. Originally Tepeyollotl was the personification of the Dark at the Heart of the Mountains. He ruled caves and deep places, and the Mayan eighth hour of night, when they felt that darkness had completely fallen.” Helen paused, swallowed. “But most importantly, he was the lord of echoes and earthquakes.”

That last word brought everyone’s heads up. “Earthquakes…” Aufwi said.

“Yes,” Rhiow said, her fur rising again at the memory of that awful moment in the tree. “There do seem to be a lot of those going around, don’t there…”

“What’s the problem with the lack of spots?” Urruah said.

“It suggests that this image wasn’t of the everyday version of Tepeyollotl,” Helen said. “Earthquakes have their place in the natural order, and the ancient peoples knew that. But they also understood that it wasn’t past the abilities of the Lone Power to cause them when It had reason. The dark pelt would mean that this is also an avatar of Tezcatlipoca, of the Mesoamerican version of the Lone Power: the Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” She rubbed her face. “But he has other names that were supposed to belong to a power even above him: an older one. Ilhuicahua Tlalticpaque, the One who wants to own Heaven and Earth: and Chalchihuihtotolin, the Master of the Sorceries from Outside.”

“Meaning outside our universe,” said Rhiow, feeling as distressed as the Whisperer had earlier sounded.

Once again here was the issue that Hwaith had originally brought to them – slightly better defined, but with no sense of where they were supposed to look for a solution. For a wizard on the One’s and the Powers’ business, there was a tendency to consider Them the rulers or managers of pretty much everything in the known universe-bundle, and the Lone Power the main source of trouble. But it was rare for one’s business to require a wizard to deal with issues that reached outside the Powers’ sheaf of universes, or were sourced outside them.

“Arhu,” Helen said, “were there any more pages in that folder?”

“That’s all I saw,” he said.

“All right,” Rhiow said. “Let the Eye go for now…”

The room came back.

“So first we have the poor soulsplit Lady in Black,” said Urruah after a moment, “with her talk of her friend the Devourer shredding up whole universes, ours very much included. And now a concrete connection between her and the group that’s meeting and doing Iau knows what at Dagenham’s… but something that’s helping her nasty universe-devouring friend: very likely at the very least a string of serial killings. Those are bad enough, but what they’re up to is going to destroy their entire world. Are these vhai’d ehhif completely out of their minds??”

It was almost a yowl. Everyone froze in place for a second, and Rhiow threw a glance at the Silent Man’s bedroom door, half expecting him to emerge and demand to know what the problem was. But nothing happened.

“Sorry,” Urruah said then, and tucked himself down against the floor. His tail was still twice its normal thickness. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I am finding this… disturbing.”

Helen sat back on the sofa and started unbraiding the hair she’s braided earlier. “You wouldn’t be alone,” she said. “But let’s take this piece by piece. Somebody in that house – probably Dagenham – has been studying these images hard enough to want to keep copies where he can get at them easily.”

“That’s causing about half of my freak,” Urruah said. “The ehhif in these particular cultures were big on spilling blood, weren’t they? Lots of it.”

“Not at the beginning of their histories,” Helen said. “But they got that way.”

“That being the connection, you’re thinking, to the serial killings,” Aufwi said to Urruah.

“And at the same time,” said Hwaith, “somebody in that house… maybe Dagenham… has been dabbling in charms.”

Everyone was quiet for a few seconds, considering what this new complication might mean. “What’s bothering me,” Helen said, “is that information that we might need is missing from those pages.”

“The gaps…” Aufwi said.

“We need to see the tablets or whatever that those rubbings were taken from,” Helen said. “If there are just gaps in the originals, we need to know that. But there may be remnants of data that didn’t transfer properly.” She looked thoughtfully at Arhu. “We’re going to have to find out where the original carvings are.”

“Unfortunately there’s no way to tell that by just looking,” Urruah said. “One of the only weaknesses of using the Eye for research…”

Arhu bristled a little. “Calm down,” Urruah said. “I just mean that we’re going to have to go physically touch those documents to find out where they came from.”

“That’s a project for a little later,” Rhiow said. “Helen, you said the two peoples who did this writing were apart from each other in time – “

“The Mayans abandoned their cities in the ninth century,” Helen said. “The Aztecatl, the People from Aztlan as they called themselves, dominated the Mexican region later – the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries as modern Western ehhif culture reckons it. But they started a great migration from the south, so Azteca legends say, a hundred years after the Mayans vanished.”