On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service fw-2

by Diane Duane

  She made her way down to the Tower Hill Underground station with her head still buzzing with Hhuhm’hri’s briefing. It was unnerving, the way thinking about ehhif affairs for four or five hours straight could make you start looking at the world the way they did. Rhiow wasn’t sure she liked it. Oh well … an occupational hazard. But the one word which seemed to have come up most frequently in Hhuhm’hri’s reminiscences was “war”. Try as she might, Rhiow could not understand why ehhif could kill each other in such large numbers for what seemed to her completely useless purposes. Fighting for land to live on, for a territory that would provide food to eat, that she could understand. All People who ran in prides, from the microfelids to the great cats of this world, did the same. But they usually didn’t kill each other: a fight that resulted in the other pride running away was more than sufficient. If they tried to come back, you just drove them away again.

  Ehhif, though, seemed not to find this kind of fighting sufficient. What troubled Rhiow most severely was tales of ehhif killing one another in large numbers for the sake of land that was nearly worthless—going to war simply because they had said that a given piece of land was theirs, and some other ehhif had disputed the claim. Or when they went to war for the sake of prestige or injured pride: that was strangest to her of all. And it seemed to her, from what Hhuhm’hri had told her, that the pride-of-prides, which its ehhif called Britain, had gone to war for all these reasons, and for numerous other ones, over the past couple of centuries. Granted, they had done so genuinely to preserve their own people from being killed as well: the second of the great conflicts of this century had been one of that kind, and the British had defended themselves with courage and cleverness at least equal to their enemies’. Nevertheless, Rhiow was beginning to think she knew who most likely would have blown up atomic weapons on the Moon in 1875, if they’d had access to them.

  And how did they get them? And how can we undo it?

  It was going to take time to work that out. At least they had a little time to work with … but not much.

  She made her way among the ehhif at the Underground ticket machines and past them, under the gates and down to the platform where the malfunctioning gate and its power source were being held. Hhuhm’hri had told Rhiow that thousands of ehhif had hidden in tunnels and basements near here during the bombings of London in that second great war. That had resolved, for Rhiow, the question of something she had been feeling since she came down here first—a faint buzzing in the walls, as if at the edge of hearing: the ghost-memory in the tunnels and the stones of ehhif not just passing through here, but staying, and sleeping near here in the faintly electric-lit darkness. Their troubled and frightened dreams still saturated the bricks and mortar and tile of the tunnels—and “behind” them, if you were sensitive to such things and you listened very hard, you could just catch the faintest sound of the shudder and rumble of falling bombs. That un-sound, intruding at the very edge of a sensitive’s consciousness, could easily get lost in or confused with the rumble of present-day trains through the stone.

  At least I know what it is now, Rhiow thought, making her way to the platform, and jumping up. A relief. I thought I was going a little strange…

  Only Urruah and Arhu were there just now. “Luck,” Rhiow said, going over to breathe breaths with Urruah, who was sitting and looking at his timeslide-spell, apparently taking a break after having doing an afternoon’s worth of troubleshooting. The timeslide was presently lying quiescent on the platform floor, in a tangle of barely-seen lines. “How’s it going?”

  “Slow,” he said. “I wanted to have another look at the disconnected gate’s logs before I started changing my own settings around.”

  “Find anything useful?” Rhiow said, glancing over at Arhu. He was tucked down in “meatloaf” configuration with his eyes half-closed, unmoving.

  “No,” Urruah said, following her glance and looking thoughtful. “But, Rhi, I think the logs are being tampered with.”

  She sat down, surprised. “By whom?”

  “Or what,” Urruah said. “I can’t say. Normally when a gate’s offline, its logs are ‘frozen’ in the state they were in when the gate was taken off. I hooked the gate up again briefly to the catenary to have a look at the way the source has been feeding it power—and found that some of the logs weren’t the way I remembered them. In particular, the logs pertaining to Mr. Illingworth’s access were in a different state than they were when I left them. Specifically, temporal coordinates were not the same.”

  Rhiow looked around her and then said privately, Fhrio?

  I don’t think so. For one of us to tamper with a gate’s logs would normally leave “marks” that an expert can see … alterations in the relationships between the hyperstrings of the gate. Now, I’m an expert … and I can’t find any “marks”.

  The Lone Power … Rhiow thought.

  Urruah hissed softly. Rhi, I know It’s been meddling in the larger sense. The contamination of the 1875-or-thereabouts timeline is certainly Its doing. But by and large It’s not going to do something like this. It’s still one of the Powers that Be, and has Their tendency not to waste effort Itself when It can get someone closer to the problem to do the dirty work.

  She had to agree with him there. “So what are you going to do?”

  He shrugged his tail. “Try the altered coordinates,” he said. “Or at least lay them into my timeslide and see what happens when we try to access them.”

  “It could very well be a trap of some kind …” Rhiow said.

  “Yes, but we don’t have to put our foot right into it,” Urruah said. “We can look before we jump. A habit of mine.”

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward. “All right. Anything else?”

  “Well, one other possibility,” Urruah said. “I think our problem in finding Mr. Illingworth’s home universe, or not finding it, may have to do with the timeslide still being powered out of the malfunctioning gate’s power source. We noted from what few logs were left from the “microtransits” earlier that the far end of the gate-timeslide was lashing around in backtime, like the end of some ehhif’s garden hose when they let it go with the water running at full pressure. The end whiplashes around, coming down first here, then there … never the same place twice. I think the fault for that could possibly lie in the power source rather than the gate.”

  Rhiow blinked at that. “I can’t see how. The power source isn’t supposed to have any coordinate information in it, or anything like that …”

  “I’m not sure how either,” Urruah said, “but what else am I supposed to think at this point? The gate itself wasn’t connected to the power source, but we still had a failure in my timeslide, although it was a small one. Big enough, though, in terms of what we were trying to do.” He sighed. “I think the next time we try this, we should keep the timeslide off the gate’s power source and power it ourselves.”

  “That’s going to be hard on you,” Rhiow said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t see that we have the option,” Urruah said.

  “Excuse me,” someone said pointedly from behind them.

  They both looked over their shoulders. Siffha’h was sitting there behind them.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing,” she said. “But you do have a power source. What about me?”

  Urruah blinked. “Uh. I hadn’t—”

  “—thought about it? Or maybe you just don’t trust me, because I’m young yet.” Her tone was very annoyed.

  “Siffha’h,” Rhiow said, “give us the benefit of the doubt, please. We’re very aware that our being here at all imposes on your team somewhat. We’re unwilling to impose further when there’s any way that—”

  “Look,” Siffha’h said, “our whole reality is going to be rubbed out if we can’t stop what’s happening, and you’re telling me you don’t want to impose? Come on.”

  Rhiow glanced at Urruah, rueful but still somewhat amused. “Well,” she said, “you’ve got a point there. Ruah?”

&
nbsp; He looked at her with his tail twitching slowly. “You are unquestionably hot stuff,” he said, “and any time you want to power a timeslide of mine, you’re welcome.”

  “You build it,” Siffha’h said, “and I’ll see that it takes you where you want to go. When’ll you be ready?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, I think.”

  “Good. I’ll be here.”

  She strolled off, tail in the air. Rhiow glanced over at Urruah. She really does remind me of Arhu sometimes.

  Yeah, Urruah said. In the tact department as well.

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward. You know how it is when you’re young, she said. Life seems short, and all the other lives a long way away … You want to be doing things.

  So do I, Urruah said. Preferably things that’ll solve this problem. He looked rather glumly at the spell diagram for the timeslide.

  “All right,” Rhiow said. “Anything else that needs to be handled?”

  “He said he wanted you to see what he saw,” Urruah said, glancing over at Arhu, who was still crouched down in meditative mode. “I’m going to look at it later: right now this is more of a priority.”

  “Right …”

  Rhiow went softly over to Arhu: then, as he didn’t react, she sat down by him and began to wash—not only because she didn’t want to interrupt him in whatever he was doing, but because she felt she badly needed it. She was tired, and needed to do something to keep herself from falling asleep. Rhiow had just finished her face and was starting on one ear when she felt something thumping against her tail. It was Arhu’s tail: he had come out of his study and had rolled over on his side to look up at her.

  “You wash more than anybody I know,” he said. “Are you nervous or something?”

  She looked at him, then laughed. “Nervous? I’m terrified. If you had a flea’s brain’s worth of sense, you would be too.”

  “I’m scared enough for all of us,” he said. “Especially after what I saw today.”

  “You went to see the ravens,” Rhiow said. “How was it?”

  “Weird.” He put his ears back. “I’m not sure I understood most of it … but I put it all in the Whispering, the way you showed me.”

  “Good,” Rhiow said. “I’ll have a listen, then.” She crouched down, tucking her paws under her in the position which Arhu had been using: comfortable enough to let go of the world around and concentrate on the inner one, not so comfortable that she would fall asleep. Well, she said silently to the Whisperer, what has he got for me?

  This…

  Normally the voice you heard whispering was Hers, the familiar, steady, quiet persona, ageless, deathless and serene. But material the source of which was a mortal being would come to you strongly flavored with the taste of its originator’s mind. Knowing Arhu as well as Rhiow did, this was a taste with which she was also familiar. But now, as the point of view changed to early afternoon on the riverbank, suddenly Rhiow found herself immersed in the full-strength version of it—a quick, excitable, excited turn of mind, by turns cheerful and annoyed at a moment’s notice, interested in everything and with a taste for mischief … though also with a very serious side that would come out without warning. Rhiow actually had to gasp for a moment to catch her breath as she bounded, with Arhu, down the walkway that led to the main gateway to the Tower: past the ehhif who were lined up at the gate, letting the security guards there check their bags and parcels: through the gateway, looking up at the old, old stones of the arch, and through into a cobbled “street” which Arhu’s memory identified as “Water Lane”.

  This little street ran parallel to the river inside the main outer wall. To the left, as Arhu went, was another wall studded down its length with several broad circular towers: this ran on for about an eighth of a mile, to where the outer wall came to a corner and bent leftwards. The stones in the left-hand wall were mostly rounded, as if they had come out of a river, but some had been cut down roughly into squarish shape, and they looked and smelled ancient. From them, as Rhiow had from the bricks and stones of the Underground, Arhu caught a faint sense of much contact with ehhif, but the flavor was strange, a compendium of old, faded triumph, and equally old abject fear. Arhu paused for a moment, feeling it on his fur, feeling it especially strongly from the right side where he passed a latticework gateway of metal that let out onto an archway leading down to the river. Traitor’s Gate, the Whispering said in his mind: and just briefly, as he did then, Rhiow saw, in a flicker, the way Arhu saw with the Eye.

  A flicker, there and gone. Ehhif standing up, ehhif lying down and being brought up to the gate in boats, ehhif dying and in fear of dying coming in, ehhif dead going out: queen-ehhif and tom-ehhif, proud, dejected, defiant, afraid, bitter, reluctant, confident, desperate: plots and schemes, offended innocence, furious determination, all rolled together in a moment of vision, all spread out over long years of history, circumstance, and confusion; the conflicting needs and desires, the long-planned machinations of the powerful and the requirements of the moment, terror-horror-resignation-life-death-brightness-sickness-cold-blood-release-darkness—

  —gone. The Eye closed, and Arhu stood and shook his head, trying to clear it: and an ehhif, not seeing him since he was sidled, tripped over Arhu, caught himself, and went on, looking behind him to try to see the cobblestone he thought he had stumbled on.

  “Ow ow ow ow,” Arhu spat, and took himself over to the left-hand wall to recover himself a little. From inside the left-hand wall came a harsh cawing, a little like ehhif laughter, as if someone thought it was funny.

  While he stood there and panted, Rhiow shivered all over at the thought of the burden Arhu was bearing. Better him than me, she said, somewhat ungraciously, to the Whisperer. The vision Arhu had been trying to describe to her turned out to be more like half-vision, and all the more maddening for it. For Arhu was looking, just briefly, through the eyes of Someone Who saw everything in the world as whole and seamless: thoughts, actions, past causes and present effects, the concrete and the abstract all welded into a single staggering completion. Rhiow understood a little of Arhu’s confusion and anger now, for trying to extract one piece of information from the all-surrounding vastness of the Whisperer’s perception seemed impossible, like trying to fish one drop of water out of your water bowl with your claw. You would always get a little bit of something else along with it: or a lot of something else. Rhiow thought with embarrassment of the facile way she had been telling him to concentrate, and grab hold of one part of it…

  More, she now understood much better his confusion about tenses: for in the Whisperer’s mind, the world was finished, a made thing, a completed thing … though one that was constantly changing. It was a harrowing point of view for a Person to try to assimilate, or for any mortal being who lived in linear time and generally thought that one thing happened after another, and that the future was still indeterminate. It was not, to Her. The Whisperer, in Her mastery, saw it all laid out. The only place where Her uncertainties lay was in what you would do to change the future … in which case everything you did also became part of the ongoing completion, a law of the universe, as if it had been laid down so from the very beginning. The two visions of the future did not exclude one another, from Her point of view: they actually complemented one another, and made sense. To Rhiow, that was the most frightening concept of all.

  She breathed out, wondering how she would apologize to Arhu for so completely misunderstanding what he had been dealing with, while Arhu got back his breath and his composure, and headed on down Water Lane again. Just across from Traitor’s Gate was an opening into the central part of the Tower complex, through a building called the Bloody Tower. He went under this archway as well, and turned immediately left.

  Built into the wall here was a house with many long peaked roofs, the Queen’s House: and in front of it were arches with iron bars set in them. Behind those arches were some low, wizened trees and shrubs … and in the trees, and under at least one of the shrubs, sat the ravens.
>
  Arhu had known they would be large, but he hadn’t thought they would be as large as a Person. Most of them were, though, and at least one of them which perched on that stone wall, above the bars, was as big as Huff: as big as a small houff. They were all resplendently glossy black, and they looked down at him and, to Arhu’s astonishment, saw him perfectly well, even though he was sidled.

  “Look,” one of them said. “A kitty.”

  “Oh, shut up, Cedric,” said another of them. “You had breakfast.”

  Arhu licked his nose and sat down, trying to preserve some dignity in the face of so many small, black, intelligent, completely unafraid eyes staring at him. “I, uh, I’m on errantry. Hi,” Arhu said.

  “And we greet you too, young wizard,” said one of the ravens. There was a muffled noise of cawing from the far side of Tower Green: Arhu looked over his shoulder.

  “How many of you are there here?” he said. “Should I go over and say hi to them too?”

  “No, they’re minding their territories at the moment,” said the raven. “After all, the place is full of tourists. Later in the day, when the warders chuck them all out and lock the place up, we can all get together in the quiet and the dark and have a chat. Meanwhile, anything you say to me, they’ll know. They can see it, after all.”

  “I’m sorry,” Arhu said, “but I don’t know what to call you. There are ehhif names on the sign over there, but—”

  “No, it’s all right: we use their names,” said the biggest of the ravens. “It’s a courtesy to them, and from them: they’ve made us officers in their army, after all.” She chuckled. “Even if we’re only noncoms. So I’m ‘Hugin’, and that’s ‘Hardy’.” She pointed with her beak at the raven sitting below her. “We have other names that we tell to no one, that come down from the Old Ones … but we can’t give you those. Sorry.”

  “Uh, it’s OK. But look, is it right what the sign says, over there? That the ehhif think this place would ‘fall’ without you? Fall down?”