"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."
"Fhrio? 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 alternate 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 that 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 of the gate; 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 backward, 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 the 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 asked, 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. "Anytime."
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 farther 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 popu
lated 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 'goodwill'... 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 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 that 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?"
They all looked at each other. No one looked willing to suggest that 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 in the Alps 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 awhile," 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 that 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.