Arhu had gone back to reading the back page of his paper. Rhiow watched this process with amusement that she hoped was well concealed. Besides being useful, the paper had given him an excuse not to try to speak or even to look at Siffha'h for the whole early evening so far. "Hey, listen to this," he said, and began reading aloud with some difficulty, not so much because of the words themselves as because of how odd some of them seemed in context. "It's who Mr. Illingworth was talking about."
"What?" Rhiow said. Even Siffha'h sat up at that.
"I think it is, anyway. 'Maskelyne and Cook— Dark Seance. The latest novelty and most startling performance ever presented to the public... the seance includes the floating of Luminous Instruments, distribution of flowers with dew, appearance of materialized spirit forms, spirit hands, spirit arms, strange and apparently unearthly voices, music extraordinary, the inexplicable Coat Feat, all accomplished by Messieurs Maskelyne and Cook while bound hand and foot, the ropes secured with knots executed by the most perfect adepts in the art of rope-tying, elected by the audience.' " He paused and looked up. "That doesn't sound like such a big deal."
"It does if you're an ehhif and not a wizard," Urruah said. "We have ehhif like that at home: they do shows where they pretend to be wizards. Without the ethical element, anyway. It's 'magic' rather than wizardry; mostly they pretend to do things that would normally kill them, and make things disappear."
Fhrio muttered something under his breath. Rhiow, having occasionally shared what she suspected was Fhrio's sentiment, had to put her whiskers forward just a little. " 'In addition to the great sensation, the Dark Seance of exposés of so-called spiritualism,' " Arhu read, " 'the following leading features amuse the audience at the present program: Mr. Maskelyne's extraordinary comical illusions, extraordinary Chinese plate-spinning, lady floating in air, the animated walking-stick, the Tell Tale Hat, etc.: the original and inexplicable Corded Box Feat is performed at every representation. Every afternoon at three, every evening at eight.' " Arhu looked up again. "Spiritualism?"
Rhiow shook her head and started to tilt her head sideways to listen to what the Whisperer might have to say, but Siffha'h said suddenly, "It's where ehhif used to think that their dead still stayed around to speak to them after they were gone. The live ehhif would try to get advice from their dead ones, and ask them what was going to happen in the world... things like that."
"But it doesn't work that way for ehhif, surely," Auhlae said, sounding dubious. "When they go, they're gone, aren't they?"
A pang went through Rhiow. She stared at the floor for a moment while trying to manage it, aware of Urruah looking at her but not saying anything, just being there.
"And no matter what happens to them, I wouldn't think the advice of the dead would do the living much good in any case," Auhlae said. "Surely that must have occurred to even ehhif. Their priorities would be very much different."
"Nonetheless, some of them wouldn't care," Rhiow said. "Some of them miss each other very much, and they don't have the kind of knowledge we have, it would seem, about what happens to them afterwards. All they have are a lot of different stories that mostly disagree with one another." She swallowed. "It makes them feel very afraid, and very alone."
Auhlae was looking at her. "I'm sorry," she said. "My apologies, Rhiow. I hadn't realized..."
"It's all right," Rhiow said, though how long this statement would stay true, she wasn't sure: she tried to keep a grip on herself. "She's somewhere safe, my ehhif, though I haven't any idea of what she does there, how she is or what she knows, probably any more than she would normally have had of what awaited me after any given life. Maybe it's a privacy thing that the Powers preserve between species and species. Our paths cross, we live together, we part— is it really our business where ehhif go? Or theirs, what happens to us?"
Auhlae said nothing, merely looked at Rhiow with eyes thoughtful and a little sad. Rhiow sat still for a moment and did her best to master herself, while the back of her mind shouted Yes it is, yes! She held very still and concentrated on her breathing, and on not looking like an idiot in front of the others.
"Well," Huff said after a moment, "we still have a fair number of problems to deal with."
"You're not kidding," Urruah said. "I'm still trying to work out what in the worlds the 'Tell Tale Hat' might be."
"Besides that," said Huff, "Mr. Illingworth, who has been to see Maskelyne and Cook, is another problem. You said you didn't find any trace of him in that universe."
"No," Urruah said, "and I'm at a loss to know why. The most likely possibility that occurs to me is that that wasn't the universe we were heading for, but a close congener."
"An alternate alternate universe?" Siffha'h said.
"You might as well call it that," Urruah said. "When you start messing with timelines, altering them, whole sheaves of new universes are created from each branching point— some of them very likely, some of them less likely, some of them hardly there at all. The more likely they are, the more likely you are to come across them. Think of them as 'waves' in a wave tank that is chiefly populated by the two universes that are trying to achieve equilibrium. You get troughs and crests of probability and possibility as the two universes attempt to absorb one another's energy— and matter, though that's a more problematic process. The sheaves of alternates don't persist for long. As one universe or the other starts winning the argument, the other's 'alternates' vanish. Then, last of all, the universe that spawned them vanishes too; dissolves into the other one, all its energy absorbed. I think Illingworth came from the sheaf of 'possibles' surrounding the main one."
"So you're going to have to alter your timeslide's settings to find the 'core universe,' the one that engendered all these others," Fhrio said.
"Yes," Urruah said, "and as yet, I don't know how they're going to have to be altered, or how to construct a spell to tell it how to manage the alteration. Also, I don't understand why the settings I saved from Illingworth's gating didn't lead us straight back to his home universe. Add that to your list of problems."
"You seem to know more about timeslide theory than the rest of us," Huff said to Urruah. "Do you have any sense of how much time we might have to work in, at this end of things, before that other reality starts to supersede ours?"
"Maybe as long as a month, but I wouldn't care to bet on it," Urruah said. "My guess would be more like days— at least I think it'd be safest to play it that way."
"But, but it's just dumb!" Siffha'h burst out. "The Powers wouldn't just let an entire reality be wiped out! They'd send some kind of help!"
"They did," Rhiow said. "They sent us."
Siffha'h opened her mouth and shut it again. "But if we can't do anything about it, They'll help: They have to!"
"Do they?" Huff said. "Where does it say that in the Whispering? Listen hard."
She did, and her mouth dropped open one more time.
"You need to understand it," Rhiow said. "We are all the help there is. The seven of us are, apparently, the best answer the Powers That Be can offer up to this particular problem. If we fail, we fail, and our timeline fails with us. It would be nice to assume that if something goes wrong, one of the Powers will drop down out of the depths of reality to pull us up out of trouble by the tail. But such things don't normally happen: the Powers have too little power to waste. There is nothing particularly special about our timeline, except to us, because we live in it: it has no particular primacy among the millions or billions of others. For all we know, other timelines have been wiped out because of such attacks, and because their native wizards couldn't act correctly to save them. Myself, I wouldn't much care to ask the Whisperer about that at the moment: the answer might depress me. Let's just assume we must do the job ourselves, and get it right. Huff?"
He thumped his tail once or twice on the floor in disturbed agreement. "There's nothing I can add to that."
For a few moments everyone looked in every possible direction but at each other, unnerved. T
hen Arhu sat upright and stared toward the front room of the pub. "Oh, no, here he comes."
Rhiow looked around to see what he was talking about, but no one but their own two groups was anywhere near them. "What?" she said.
"I See him a few minutes ago," Arhu said, sounding slightly put out. "I was hoping he might change his mind, or the Seeing might turn out to be inaccurate, but no such luck. Get sidled."
They all did but Huff, who looked curiously at Arhu, then turned his head, distracted. A young ehhif was heading over toward the fruit machines. He was one of a type that seemed common in that part of the city, a suit-and-tie sort with a loud voice and his tie thrown over his shoulder. As he came, he was suddenly distracted by the presence on the floor of a sheet of paper. The Times. He bent down to pick it up.
"Oh, for Iau's sake," Arhu growled, and put one invisible paw down on the paper. Rhiow watched with interest as the ehhif failed to get the paper to come up off the floor: tried to pick it up again, and failed, and failed again. He got really frustrated about it, trying to get even just a fingernail under one of the newspaper's corners and peel it up, and failed at that as well, managing only to break a couple of nails. The ehhif straightened up again and walked off swearing softly to himself.
"Nice one," Auhlae said. "How'd you do that?"
"Made it heavy for a moment, that's all," Arhu said. "It was part of a tree once, after all. I just suggested that it was actually the whole tree." He put his whiskers forward. "Paper fantasizes pretty well."
"You'd better make it invisible as well," Huff said mildly. "He'll be back here with my ehhif in a moment. I know what that kind gets like when they're confused, or balked."
Arhu shrugged his tail. A moment later, when Huff's tall, dark-haired ehhif came back, there was no paper there, or seemed to be none, only Huff, lying at his ease and finishing his wash. Huff's ehhif took one look at the floor and saw nothing but his cat lying there and looking at him with big, innocent green eyes. Huff blinked, then threw his rear right leg over his shoulder and began to wash. His ehhif raised his eyebrows, and headed back to the bar.
Huff finished the second bit of washing, which had been purely for effect, and glanced over at Arhu. "Does that happen to you often?" Huff said.
"You mean Seeing? Once a day or so... sometimes more. I wish it was always about important things," Arhu said, looking rather annoyed, "but usually it's not. Or I can't tell if they're important, anyway, till they happen. The trouble is, they all feel important... until it turns out they're not."
"How very appropriate," Siffha'h murmured, and looked away.
Arhu gave her a look that had precious little lovesickness about it: it smelled more of claws in someone's ears. He opened his mouth, probably to emit something unforgivable, and Rhiow, concerned, opened her mouth to interrupt him; but at the same moment Huff said, "Arhu, have you thought of going to see the Ravens?"
"Who?"
"The Ravens over at the Tower. They have a problem rather similar to yours."
"Are they wizards?" Rhiow asked, curious.
"No," Huff said, "but they have abilities of their own that are related to wizardry, though I'd be lying if I said I understood the details. They are visionaries of a kind, though I wouldn't know if they describe the talent to themselves in precisely those terms. In any case, the few times I've talked to them, they've sounded very like Arhu. Rather confused about their tenses." He put his whiskers forward to show he didn't mean the remark to be insulting. "They might be of use to you... or to us, possibly, with this problem."
Arhu looked thoughtful. "Okay," he said. "It can't hurt."
"No, I would think not. Now, Urruah will be working on resetting his timeslide, recalibrating it— "
"It'll take me a day or so," Urruah said. "I want to explore as many of the possibilities as I can, as many of the universes in the sheaf, when we do our next run."
"And meanwhile there are a couple of other things we're going to need to find out," Rhiow said. "First, if there's any way to manage it at all, we must find the original contaminating event or events. If it happened using your gates, the logs may give us some hints... if we can ever get them to yield that data, which Urruah hasn't yet been able to do. If we can't find evidence from the gates, then we're going to have to go back to that alternate time again, much as I dislike the prospect, and search for information there. The other thing we must discover is the nature of this attack on the ehhif-queen, Victoria"—Rhiow went out of her way to try to get her pronunciation as close to the ehhif word as she could— "and also discover whether this great change in the past-world we saw would have happened anyway, or has something specific to do with her death or life."
"It very well could," Auhlae said. "She was a tremendous power in her time, though she had very little direct power— compared to some of the pride-leaders who went before her, anyway. Certainly they would have gone to war had she been assassinated, and if they were able to prove that some other pride they knew of had been involved. There was fierce rivalry between them for a long time: the shadows of it remain, though most of the ehhif powers in Europe are supposed to be working together now."
"Huff," Rhiow said, "how much do you know about ehhif history of that time? The eighteen seventies, say?"
"Very little," he said. "It's hardly my speciality: like most of us, if I need to know something I go to the Whisperer." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "But you know," he said, "there are People for whom it is a speciality. And they don't live far from here. In fact, there's one in particular who's famous for it. He used to live at Whitehall, but now he's out in the suburbs. You should go to see him. I'll show you the coordinates, and you can lay them into one of the other gates."
"That sounds like a good idea," Rhiow said. "Would he be available today, do you think?"
"More than likely. Probably your best bet is simply to go out there and meet with him."
"All right. What's his name?"
"Humphrey."
Rhiow blinked. "That's not a Person's name...."
"It is now," Huff said, amused. "Wait till you meet him."
"Meanwhile, I think the rest of us will be minding the other gates," Fhrio said, "and watching to see if they start betraying any sign of instability. If they start acting up, we'll know we have less time to deal with our troubles than we thought."
Rhiow nodded. "And as for the rest of it," she said, "we'll meet again when it's dark, and see who's best sharpened their claws on the problem before us."
The others agreed, then got up and shook themselves preparatory to heading off in their various directions.
"Now look at this," Arhu said, crouched down again, and oblivious. " 'Princess Christiana of Schleswig-Holstein visited His Majesty and remained to lunch.' "
Urruah looked up. "Does it say what they had?" he said, coming to gaze at the paper over Arhu's shoulder.
Rhiow glanced over at Huff and wandered over to him. "You look tired," she said. "Are you all right?"
"Oh, I'm well enough," he said. "Rhiow, we're all too old for this! Except for them," and he indicated Arhu and, off on the other side of the room, already heading for the back door, Siffha'h. "But no matter... we'll cope." He sighed, looked at her, as Auhlae came wandering over and laid her tail gently over his back. "It's just hard, sometimes, discovering that after a long period of steady and not terribly dangerous work, your reward for getting it right is that you get to save the Universe." His look was dry.
"It's always dangerous to demonstrate talent," Auhlae said. "Least of all to Them. But that's our job: we accepted it when it was offered us... and what can we do now?"
"Do it the best we can," Rhiow said. "There's nothing else."
She rubbed cheeks with Huff when he offered, and did the same, a little more tentatively, with Auhlae. The two of them headed off toward the front of the pub; and Rhiow made her way out toward the back, and the cat door, thinking thoughts of quiet desperation but determined not to give in to them.
Half an hour or so later, Rhiow was padding down a street in one of the northern suburbs of London, looking for a specific house in one small street. She had a description of the house, and a name for a Person: or rather, that peculiar ehhif nickname that Huff had given her. According to the Knowledge, the nickname (bizarrely) came from an ehhif television show, and was a reference to an astute but extremely twisty-minded politician. Rhiow was uncertain whether any Person, no matter how jovial, would really want to be called by such a name.
She found the house at last. It was actually bumped sideways into another house, in a configuration that the ehhif here called semidetached. There was a narrow wall of decorative concrete blocks about four feet high separating the two houses' front yards and driveways. Rhiow jumped up onto this and made her way back to where it met another wall, taller, one that divided the houses' two back gardens from one another. This was actually less a wall than a series of screens of interwoven wood, fastened end to end. Rhiow jumped up onto the nearest of them and paced along it and the subsequent screens carefully, looking down on the leftward side, as she had been instructed.
The rightward garden was less a garden than a tangle of weeds and rosebushes run amok. The left-hand one, though, had a lawn with stepping-stones in it, and carefully trimmed shrubs, and small trees making a shady place down at the far end. There was a birdbath standing in the shade, but no bird was fool enough to use it: for lying near the birdbath, upside down in the sun, was a black-and-white Person with long, fluffy fur.
Rhiow paused there for a moment looking at him as he dozed, wondering how to proceed. From a tree nearby, a small bird appeared, perched on a nearby branch, and began yelling "Cat! Cat! Cat!" at Rhiow.
She rolled her eyes. One of the great annoyances associated with becoming a wizard was, oddly, identical with one of its great joys: learning enough of the Speech to understand readily the creatures around her. It was very hard to eat, with a clean conscience, anything you could talk to and get an intelligible answer back. "In your case, though," she said to the small bird, "I'm willing to make an exception."