The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

The second it touched Laurel, Rhiow felt as if she’d been hit by lightning: transfixed, in terrible pain, unable to move. The Dark Lady had been surrounded with a shell meant to prevent this very possibility. And behind Rhiow, the dark gate kept forming. The dirt of the floor inside the stones started to fade, go dark, opening a window into something else, a fathomless empty space of cold — Aufwi was blasted back from the almost-formed gate structure as if it was some living thing that had shaken him off its black hide. Hwaith was hanging on –

Sif!

Here, Siffha’h said, and a moment later Rhiow was struck by lightning again: but this time it was lightning she understood and sympathized with, a blast of sheer wizardly power that ran through her, down the cord to Dolores’s body, up the cord to the Dark Lady. All around her a skin of white fire formed, eating its way inward. She screamed –

Then vanished. Rhiow, released by the forces Siffha’h had channeled through her, fell over, unable to move.

Beside her, Dolores moaned.

“Come on,” Urruah said, the first time any of them had spoken aloud in so long. “Come on!”

Behind them, the dark gate was nearly complete. Hwaith was hanging on to the last normal hyperstring strands, trying to keep the interface from forming, yowling in pain and effort. But he couldn’t hold it. A second later he was knocked away from the gate and hurled through the air to smash into one of the larger stones. Limp, he fell at the foot of it, didn’t move.

Rhiow struggled to get to her feet, fell back again, unable. The darkness from the gate was spreading all through the cavern, now. And as the darkness started to flood out of the circle toward them, something else began to stir in the ground under their feet. A rumbling… a shaking…

The earth began to quake.

The screams of the ehhif by the door suggested that they were no longer quite so eager to linger here to meet the Great Old One. The torches fixed in the ground fell over, one by one, as the shaking got worse. Dislodged clods of earth began falling from the roof. There was no light, now, but the burning dark forming and spreading from inside the gate locus, and across the cavern, a white fire in the shape of a black and white Person, sitting still, concentrating, pouring out power. “Come on, Laurel!” Urruah was shouting in the Speech. “You know what you need to do, what you want to do!”

The noise was starting to build up in the cave as the shaking got worse, as bigger chunks of the ceiling started to fall, as the ehhif screamed and beat on the door, trapped and in terror of their lives. The earth was starting to roar as Helen had roared, the low sound of a great cat, hungry, bending over its prey, jaws opening. Rhiow, dazed and deafened, kept working to push herself to her feet. Hwaith, who’s looking after him, and what about Arhu, and Aufwi, and Helen, Urruah, you have to get them out —

But the voice that answered her was not Urruah, or Hwaith.

“In – Life’s – Name,” it said, slowly and with great effort, “and for Life’s sake – I say that I will use the Art – for nothing but – the service of that Life…”

She trailed off. The hill roared around them. “Come on,” Urruah said, and “Come on,” said Helen, “come on, cousin, you can do it, come on — !”

Dolores’s body with Laurel’s spirit in it was gasping for air. “Come on, Sif, push it,” Urruah was saying, “Helen, quick, her oxygen levels, I’ll hold that bleeding – “

“I will guard growth – and ease – ease pain – I will fight to preserve – what grows – lives well in its own – own way…”

She trailed off again. The ground under them all shook. The dark from the gate was getting closer, and Rhiow could feel it, a cold that burned worse than vacuum, because at least vacuum was in the real world and had a temperature, and this had nothing, was nothing, Nothing Itself, coming for them as it had wanted to forever –

Rhiow pushed herself up onto her forefeet, all she could manage. “Laurel! Come on!”

“Change no – no object or – creature unless its growth and life – or – or – “

“ – the system!”

“The system of which it is part – are threatened – “ A long, long pause. And then a last gasp.

“Laurel!”

The ceiling was starting to come apart above them, now. The shimmer of a forcefield that Urruah had erected was holding the downfalling chunks away for the moment, but it wouldn’t last: the cold blackness from the gate was eating at the edges of it. Not until I’m on my feet, Rhiow thought, and hauled her hind legs under her, and pushed herself up, and wobbled, and fell down, and pushed herself up again. I am a Person, and if I die here I’ll do it standing up before the Queen as befits one of Her children –

“ – To these ends – in the practice of my Art – I will put aside fear for courage – “ Another gasp, a long pause. “—And death for Life – “

The ceiling came down on them, stopping the ehhifs’ screams. The forcefield held, but it was buckling. Sif’s light was going out. Around them, the walls of the cavern were flowing like water, running downhill toward them –

“ – when it is right to do so – “

Something pushed itself against Rhiow, supporting her in the dark. She leaned on it, pushing herself straighter. Across the circle, Sif’s light was dimming, going out. Rhiow glanced to see what she was leaning on: caught a last glimpse of bronze eyes before the light went out and the earth’s roaring all around them drowned out everything else.

“Until Universe’s end — !”

It was almost a cry of triumph.

And then everything happened at once.

A great rent of light tore down the middle of the black gate, and something like lightning came lashing out of it, lighting the whole cavern in frozen strobe-flashes, long-seeming moments full of slabs of earth and stone held still in mid-fall. The black wizardry in the center of the ring of stones went up in an eye-hurting pulse of fire and deconstructed itself in a breath’s space, lines of light eating themselves away into darkness, finally the outermost containing circle erasing itself until there was no light left in the cavern anywhere but the faint shimmer of the forcefield that was still keeping the ceiling off them, but wouldn’t for much longer. “Out,” Rhiow yowled, “everybody out!!”

Her own transit spell was lying ready in her mind as always, but with someone leaning against her and no more likely than she was to be able to move in a hurry, Rhiow spoke her transit locus to twice its normal size and turned the spell loose, hoping Hwaith’s tail was close to his body. In a roar of downplunging pressure, the roof’s final collapse, everything went dark –

…And after what seemed forever, light again. At least, normal night seemed bright compared to where they had been, and the far more awful darkness they’d just seen. Rhiow looked up from under some trees on the slope they’d climbed what seemed a lifetime earlier, glimpsing through the branches of the shaking pine trees the dusty, dirty, blessedly light-polluted sky above Los Angeles, all aglow with grimy white streetlight-glow.

Rhiow staggered to her feet, wobbling. Her nerves didn’t seem to be working right, but after what she’d just been through, that was understandable. “Hwaith – “

He was sitting just by her again, a little hunched. “I’m all right,” he said. “Well, not the shoulder. I hit that stone pretty hard. Later we’ll fix it – “

The two of them staggered and limped three-legged partway up the hill, where they saw a faint light glowing. It was a wizardlight, and under it Urruah and Aufwi were sitting, and Arhu was bent down licking Siffha’h’s head urgently. Beside them, Helen Walks Softly was bending over the unconscious form of Dolores, putting pressure on her chest wound. Rhiow went up to them, and her eyes met Helen’s.

“Laurel – “

Helen shook her head, smoothing the dirty hair away from Dolores’s face. “The minute she was a wizard again and in her right mind,” she said, “she finished what she’d come for and then died properly to go settle matters with the Powers.” She sighed. “The cord’s broken. We’ll sing her home later. But first we’ll get this poor lady down to the hospital.”

Hwaith, for his part, had gone on past Rhiow up the hill, limping up to where it stopped very suddenly. “Wow,” he said.

Rhiow went up to join him. The cavern had fallen in completely, and taken most of Elwin Dagenham’s house with it: only the front porch and the driveway remained, and behind the house, a cracked swimming pool tilted over on its side, from which water was pouring into the crater where the hill and its cavern had been. Every few breaths, little cascades of dirt fell down into the crater from what remained of the hillside around, for the ground under them was still trembling slightly: doubtless there would be aftershocks later.

“None of this is going to be very stable,” Rhiow said. “We should get off this, and get back to the Silent Man’s… see how he’s doing there.”

She turned away from the newly-formed crater and looked down the hill again. Aufwi was sitting by Urruah, looking a little dazed, but otherwise all right. Arhu was still licking the prone Siffha’h’s head… until he stopped.

“What??” he said.

The others all looked at him. Arhu didn’t sound afraid: just puzzled. Then he sat bolt upright. “What??”

He looked down at Sif, who opened her eyes. “What?” she said to Arhu after after a moment.

Arhu simply vanished.

Rhiow and Hwaith looked at each other. “Don’t ask me,” Rhiow said. “I want a drink. And a bath. Let’s go: he’ll explain himself to us soon enough.”

One after another, the People and Helen vanished from the shattered hillside; where, after a decent interval, now that the cats were gone, the evening birds recovered their voices and their composure and began to sing.

Down in the flatter part of Los Angeles, in the residential neighborhoods just off Wilshire, the earthquake had initially been received with the usual combination of terror and resigned annoyance. In the stores that ran up and down Wilshire and the apartments in the side streets, when things started walking off shelves and windows started jittering and shattering in their frames, people ran out into the street or stood in streetside doorways, waiting to see how bad it would get and how far they needed to run.

The quake would later be referred to in some parts of the neighborhood as “that really long one”, as its severity had increased slowly over several minutes, and it had reached a point where people started getting really frightened and the screaming broke out from those who’d run into the streets. Some of those who weren’t entirely focused on the ugly and insistent way the earth was moving also noticed a strange cold that settled over the evening, and more than the usual amount of dust kicked up, so that everything got very dim for a while.

But then suddenly something broke, something changed – a shift in the whole atmosphere, the way a thunderstorm changes the whole feel of the air when it finally breaks and lets loose with the lightning. This effect was particularly noticeable down by the corner of Wilshire and South Curzon, where a lot of people who’d run into the park were sitting out on the open ground waiting for the shaking to stop. And it did – but not before something else happened.

Some of them thought lightning actually did strike the small Page Museum facility across the street, and the little fenced-off patch of open ground next to it. Lightning wasn’t unheard of during earthquakes… but what followed struck even the seasoned Angelenos watching as unusual.

The open ground had a low wooden palisade around it, just enough to keep people from falling into the sticky ooze inside. Though there was no light or fire or anything that could normally have been associated with an explosion, nonetheless an explosion happened, throwing mud and water and other noisome-smelling muck for many yards out onto the streets. As usual, the curiosity of a few people overcame their concern over any possible danger, and they ran across Curson Avenue to see what had happened.

The sight of a huge reptilian form shouldering its way up out of the very disturbed contents of the La Brea Tar Pits made most of these people stop right where they were and stand very still to watch… for even the least scientifically-minded of them understood that this was absolutely the reverse of the way things could normally be expected to go. The massive creature was plainly a tyrannosaurus of some kind – an impression reinforced by the fact that they couldn’t see its striking orange, red and yellow stripes, these being almost completely covered by tar.

The man who’d ventured closest to this apparition while it was still standing in the pit and trying fruitlessly to scrape the tar off itself was absolutely sure about the tyrannosaurus part, especially when – while looking around itself as if trying to figure out where it was — it noticed him noticing it, and bent down over him. For a terrible moment the man thought his curiosity was about to be the end of him. As he found himself staring into huge toothy jaws nearly the length of his upper body, the man – a gas station attendant from Pasadena who’d taken the Red Car into town for a night out at the local bars – wondered if he was finally going to find fame and fortune in a manner he’d never contemplated.

The tyrannosaurus, bent down even closer and fixed him with one golden eye. “This is most unfortunate,” it said in a gentle and cultured voice, “most unfortunate. I seem to have disrupted something, but it seems also to have disrupted me. Could you kindly point me, sir, in the direction of Hollywood?”

The man pointed.

“My thanks,” said the tyrannosaurus, walked away up Curson for a few strides, then said something under its breath that the man didn’t understand, and vanished.

The gas station attendant stood there for a moment, flummoxed. Then he muttered to himself, “Typical. Everybody wants to be a star…”

In the Silent Man’s house, it was as if nothing whatsoever had happened: not so much as a glass had walked off the shelves in the kitchen pantry. When Rhiow and the group returned, they found the Silent Man rather more disturbed than this than they’d expected. The neighbors’ places all have cracks in the sidewalks and the walls, he said. You should do something about the sidewalk, anyway… treat it the same. Otherwise people are going to think I’m even weirder than they think I am already…

Urruah laughed at that. “We’ll take care of it.”

So what happened?

“That’s going to take a night’s worth of telling,” Rhiow said. “We didn’t exactly get out without a scratch… but our problems are small compared to what we stopped from happening.” She flopped down on the floor, glad to take the weight off her hind legs: they were still bothering her. “And we’ve brought you another house guest, though only temporarily. After her injury has a little time to stabilize, we’ll need to install some false memories in her to match what the authorities will find once they start cleaning up the site at Dagenham’s.”

“It’ll make sensational reading,” Urruah said, “we can tell you that much. The scandal rags will have a field day with it… at least, the parts they can figure out…”