The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

Another breath of wind, even more slight this time. Aufwi, she thought. Or Urruah. I shouldn’t wait, I should go… “There’s no time left for that,” Dagenham said, against more clinking. “You of all people should know. You’ve got all your choices made, even this last-minute one – “

“Well, why not?” said the second ehhif, and Rhiow could hear the shrug in his voice. “If They want her, fine. If not, I’ll have the use of her for a while…” He paused: clink, clink. “Red or white?”

Wait, Rhiow thought. Wait, I do know him –

“For this?” Dagenham chuckled. “Red. Don’t want to dilute the color scheme…”

They started back toward her. No more time: she had to go. Rhiow activated the transit spell with the greatest care —

Darkness, and a space small for her, as Rhiow could tell by the feeling she got from her whiskers even without moving to check the impression. In front of her, a crack-defined square with faint light coming through it. Warmth from above: that would be the water heater Arhu had shown her. And partly between her and the light, something was swiftly fading into solidity —

Images of possible lurking shadow-imps flooded over her. Rhiow fumbled hastily in her mind for a spell as the dark thing came darker, came real…

It dropped its jaw at her, and bronze eyes glinted in the light from the crack around the door. It was Hwaith.

Rhiow sagged with relief, but also annoyance. “How does this keep happening?” she said. “You’re just stalking me, that’s all…”

“I promise you, it was an accident,” Hwaith said, and Rhiow was surprised to hear that he sounded as testy as she felt, at least for the moment. “Took the coordinates our young cousin gave me and never gave it a second thought. So blame him. Or blame it on sa’Rraah if you feel the need, and we’ll take it out of Her hide later.”

Rhiow crouched there and tried to manage her annoyance. “All right,” she said, and for the next few moments sat quiet and listened.

She could hear a faint buzzing at the edge of hearing. She glanced up at the water heater, wondering if the noise had something to do with its electrical system. But that didn’t seem to be the source. “Hwaith,” she said, “you have the Ear…”

“It’s them, all right,” he said. “What Arhu heard.” His ears were flicking with his own annoyance. “They’re like rats in the walls here. Disgusting things…”

Rhiow tried to calm herself down a little, concentrating on her breathing, which sounded loud to her. Nothing to do now but wait until Arhu reports in… Yet at the same time she was quite aware of how not so much as a hair of Hwaith’s fur was touching hers, despite how small this space was. Without looking as if he was crowding away from her, nonetheless he was; and after that first glance he wouldn’t now look at her.

Rhiow stayed crouched down and breathed for a while, waiting to see if the tension would relax at all. It didn’t. And there’s spellwork coming, she thought. This isn’t good. It could interfere with the way the team operates, and most especially now that can’t be allowed…

“Hwaith,” she said.

He turned one ear in her direction, didn’t move otherwise, didn’t speak.

“About before…”

The ear flicked, but that was all.

Rhiow sighed. “Hwaith…” She wasn’t quite sure where to begin. “And what you said. It’s not that I’m not honored…indeed, flattered…”

He finally flicked a lazy glance at her. She eyed Hwaith’s whiskers carefully in that darkness, judging how far forward they were set. Hwaith’s look was entirely neutral.

“But you have to know it’s impossible,” Rhiow said, as gently as she could. “Leaving aside the issue of our separate times – it’s just not a thing that can happen….”

“’Impossible,’” Hwaith said, giving Rhiow a challenging look. “If we were younger wizards, it’s not a word either of us would be using.”

“Of course that’s where the youngest of us get their advantage,” Rhiow said. “But we’re both well past that stage now: not just lives along, but years. Wizards our age have to rely on expertise rather than mere blunt power.”

“And always run the risk of forgetting how our own definitions of possibility limit what we can do,” Hwaith said. The tone wasn’t accusatory: he might have been discussing the weather. “And as for the lives: that’s exactly the point. Neither of us is in a place in our travels where we can afford to just say ‘Maybe next time will work out better.’ Are we?”

For some seconds Rhiow was silent. Her soul was suddenly full of the echoes of her shock at discovering, not so long ago, that Saash — Saash who she thought she’d known so well — was nine lives along and nearing that final threshold that no wise Person approached without some unease. No one had any way to know whether he or she was one of those whose lives had brought them so closely into tune with the Powers’ way of being that they would inherit the gift that Aifheh and Sehau had won in sa’Rraah’s despite. Many People made light of that gift, saying that nine lives should be enough for anybody, and that an eternity of service afterwards was more than even the Gods had a right to demand. But Rhiow wasn’t one of these.

The issue of the number of one’s lives behind and the number yet to come was one not lightly discussed by any Person, wizard or not. Rhiow noticed that Hwaith had not volunteered any specific data. But he’s smart enough to read the signs, she thought, being familiar with them in himself… “Hwaith,” Rhiow said at last. “Why me? It can’t be … mere physical issues…”

Hwaith did put his whiskers forward then. “You have a bit of a blind spot,” he said, “for the physical issues.”

Then he hurriedly ducked away from the swipe she aimed at him. “So,” Hwaith said, though good-humoredly, “that prey was well spotted. Rhiow, what would be wrong with someone finding you beautiful? And I’m not talking about just the way you move. Or the wise way you handle your team. Why would it make me an idiot to say that I like your eyes? And what looks out of them.”

She was warmed, and embarrassed, both at once. “You are an idiot,” she said. “And by that measure we’re well matched, because so am I for letting you go on like this! Sweet Iau, Hwaith, consider the circumstances! Ehhif sacrifice, earthquakes, the Lone Power being wooed by some bigger darker power trying to use Her as a tool to destroy the world, and the Queen only knows how many other worlds too – this is not a time to be thinking about romance!”

“If you may never have another chance, it is,” Hwaith said. “Especially when you haven’t seen anybody in this life that you think it might work with, and suddenly they come along. What, am I supposed to bury my Personhood in a hole until circumstances improve? And in a universe where Entropy’s running, when’s that likely to happen, do you think? It’s who I am that makes me of use to the Powers. Or so They keep telling us.”

Rhiow had no immediate answer to that, and had to fall back on a different angle of approach, one that she was a lot less comfortable with. “Hwaith, that’s not the real problem here,” she said. “It’s just that…” She suddenly felt ashamed to say it, and had no idea why. “It’s just not returned,” Rhiow finally said, very low. “It means a lot to me, that you feel so kindly toward me, but I just…”

He looked full at her, and Rhiow was peculiarly relieved to see that Hwaith didn’t look hurt. But the expression in his eyes was strange in other ways. “Kindness has nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said. “The heart spoke, is all. It knew something I didn’t. Knew it the moment I laid eyes on you.” He looked away. “I could almost say I’m sorry. Except wizards don’t lie, and I’m not sorry –”

Rhi, Arhu said.

She licked her nose, looked away too. Ehhif are arriving, Arhu said. Some in groups. And I’ve seen where the first few went as soon as they came in. Down on the level where the wine cellar is, but right on the other side of the house, up against the big hill: there’s a door at the back of another of these little rooms. I can’t see in there very well: it’s heaving with sa’Rraah’s little jackals.

All right, Rhiow said. Pass the news to the others. She thought for a moment about whether it would be wiser to wait until all the ehhif were in, or go early. Early won. Arhu, I need you to go in first, she said. Hide and look around. Then pass us coordinates and we’ll slip into some quiet spot that you recommend.

Fine.

And remind Sif to keep her power-presence low and quiet! Rhiow said. The jackals are going to be twitchy enough at the feel of her just being in the space. The less reason they might have to crystallize their attention out, the better.

She knows that, Arhu said.

Good. Where’s Helen?

Aufwi says she’s sitting on his head. Arhu sounded bemused. Is anybody going to tell me exactly how that works?

If we see the dawn, I’m hoping she’ll tell me, Rhiow said. And ‘Ruah –

He’s closest to the door into the hill. Down the hall and outside. He’ll come in right after me.

Fine. Choose your moment, then send along the coordinates. And if you should hear Dagenham nearby, be very sure not to be seen. There’s something about him – Rhiow bristled a little.

All right. In-mind silence fell again.

The silence outside her mind was far less comfortable to deal with. Rhiow licked her nose again: she couldn’t help it. “Hwaith — ” she said.

“Rhiow, don’t,” Hwaith said. “Let it lie. If dawn comes and we see it, there’s time to take this further. And maybe no need to.”

His tone wasn’t flat or neutral: he genuinely wasn’t upset. Rhiow couldn’t understand it, because she certainly was.

She got busy calming herself down again. I seem to be doing so much of that, she thought. It has to be due to spending such a while in the wrong time…. It was a well-known side effect of prolonged timesliding. A day or so wouldn’t do much harm: the soul fairly quickly forgave you the injury of being briefly decoupled from its proper temporospatial alignment. But the longer the decoupling lasted, the worse the effects, and if you –

I’m in, Arhu said.

His tone of mind was unnerved. What? Rhiow said silently.

A long moment’s silence. Rhiow’s fur started standing up. Are you all right…?

You should see this –

Don’t show me! Just wait till ‘Ruah gets in. Then give us the mark to hit.

A few seconds later the coordinates appeared in their minds. Rhiow’s eyes met Hwaith’s. Let’s go –

The Big Meow: Chapter Eleven

They came out in shadow nearly as deep as the little cupboard they’d left. But the feel of the space on Rhiow’s fur and whiskers was instantly different: high, wide, deep. The air was unnaturally cool, unnaturally damp, and utterly still; and except for one faint light away off to Rhiow’s right, everything was nearly as dark as night.

They were in a natural cave that reached up above them into the upper reaches of the hillside behind the house. But the cold rammed-earth floor where Rhiow and Hwaith now crouched, with Arhu and Sif and Urruah and Aufwi behind them, was well below the level of the wine cellar. The hard dirt under their feet felt surprisingly damp, considering how hot and dry everything was just a matter of forty or fifty feet above them on the surface.

With the others, deep in shadow near one of the cavern walls, Rhiow held absolutely still and looked around. The wall behind them was just raw earth mixed with haphazardly buried stone – rocks and boulders that looked like they might have been washed down into pressure-hardened mud many years ago by some flash flood in one of the surrounding ravines. Roots stuck through the raw earth of the walls here and there: in places the wall had crumbled away, leaving little piles of unregarded dirt. Holes in the cavern walls suggested that small creatures had tunneled in or out over time. It was hard to imagine rabbits coming down this deep: the immediate assumption had to be rats.

The space enclosed by the damp earth walls was roughly circular, though the ceiling was higher down toward one end than at the other. In the dimness, maybe fifty feet up, Rhiow could just see some roots hanging down through that ceiling, possibly the roots of one or more trees up on the hillside, all shriveled and dried out from not having found water. Beyond that, the cavern had no unusual characteristics except for what lay in its center.

At first she thought it was just a single circle of rough stones, maybe thirty feet across. They were not carved as far as Rhiow could tell, maybe not even shaped: lumpy, rounded boulders, longer than they were wide, more or less stuck in the ground. Inside them, and outside them, were two matching rings of smaller stones. There were perhaps twenty of the big ones, and maybe thirty of the smaller stones in the outer circle. The inner one was harder to judge, partly because as Rhiow looked at the stones, she found herself having trouble getting a count. There was something about the stones that made her dislike looking at them.

Hunting circle, Helen said silently. Or it started out that way….

This is something to do with your people? Siffha’h said.

It might have been once… a very, very long time ago. But then someone started using the ring for some other purpose. A pause. And then it looks as if at some point a hillside fell on it… which suggests the other purpose might not have been very wholesome.

Did the Azteca ehhif ever come up this far? Aufwi said.

I don’t know, Helen said. It doesn’t have to have been them. Just someone who perhaps had been down into their lands, heard from them about the powerful being they were beginning to worship… then brought the news up north.

Rhiow’s tail lashed. She looked rightward toward the source of the faint light, sniffed the air. Something’s burning –

It’s one of those little camp lanterns ehhif use, Arhu said. It burns one of those petroleum liquids they use. I saw one bring it in a while ago through the door they’re using down there… then he went away. A few others came in too, looked around, then left again. They were talking about the others coming here, getting ready to come in here very soon and do something…

Probably best we should scatter around before they start coming in here in numbers, Rhiow said. Stay by the walls. Their eyes aren’t anything like as good as ours under these conditions: they won’t be able to see much even if they bring more lights in here.

Her team split up and took off in both directions. Off to one side, Arhu was lingering. How many have you seen coming into the house so far? Rhiow said.

Twenty or so.

All right. Go on. And Arhu – He paused. Watch Sif’s back. She’s likely to make the difference between us being able to stop what starts happening here or not making any difference at all.

Don’t worry… I’ll be right with her. He faded off into the darkness.

Rhiow looked at the stones again, trying to force herself to concentrate on the nearest of the large ones. It was hard: she felt her eyes burning as something made her want more and more to look away. Nasty, she said. Come on, Hwaith, no point in lurking there and hoping I won’t notice you. If you’re going to be with me, be with me.