On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service fw-2

by Diane Duane

  “Cease to exist,” said Hugin.

  “Of course the place would fall without us,” said another of the ravens. “We’ve always been here. It doesn’t know how to be here without us.”

  “How long is always?” Arhu said.

  “How long does it have to be?” Hardy said. He was a little thinner than the others, a little smaller, which might have been deceptive: but the eye, that black, wise eye, seemed to say that this was the eldest of them. “Since there were buildings. And before that: since there were humans, what you call ehhif. We saw your People come, too: we saw them go, when the city first was burned … We stayed, and the dead … no others.”

  Arhu controlled his desire to shudder. With their great ax-like beaks, there was no mistaking these birds for anything but what they were—meat-eaters—and there was no mistaking what they would have eaten, from time to time, in this city where there had so often been large numbers of dead ehhif. Or People, for that matter … Arhu thought.

  “It’s all right,” another of the ravens said. “By the time we eat somebody, they don’t mind any more. And these days we mostly don’t, anyway. The Wingless Raven gives us chicken breast.” The raven clattered its beak with pleasure. “Very nice …”

  “If you’ve been here that long,” Arhu said, “you must have seen a lot …”

  “Even if we hadn’t been,” Hugin said, “we would still be seeing it now. William the Conqueror: I see him walk by a puddle, right over there, and a cart goes through it and gets his hose wet, and he swears at the man driving the cart and pulls him out of his seat … throws him down into the water, too. The Romans: I see them walking their city wall, looking at the cloud of dust as Boudicca and her chariots come riding. Over there.” She gestured with her beak at the remains of the wall, like a bumpy sidewalk, that stretched from past the Wardrobe Tower to the Lanthorn Tower, along the green that had once been the site of the Great Hall. “And poor Ann Boleyn. There she goes, over to the block. Over there.” She turned and pointed with her beak in the other direction, over toward Tower Green. “Very dignified, she was. That used to be a great concern for them. And there he goes running by, one of them who didn’t care about dignity so much.” She pointed over to the little corner building which was presently the Tower gift shop, but which once was the home of the Keeper of the Jewels. “Colonel Blood, with the Crown stomped flat and hidden under his wig, and the Rod with the Dove down one boot. He almost gets away with that, too …”

  “And it was you saw that then?” Arhu said. “You must be pretty old.” He let the skepticism show in his voice a little.

  “Oh, not us,” said Hardy. “Our ancestors. Though we see what they see: that’s our job. And eventually the humans noticed that we were always here, and for once they came to the right conclusion, that the place needed us. They started trying to protect us … very self-enlightened, that. Though there have been times when the population has dropped very low.” He glanced up at the sky. “During the war—the last big one here—almost all of us died except old Grip. The humans got very worried. And well they might have, with the V2s and the buzz-bombs coming down all around them. But we knew it would be all right. We saw it then, as we see it now …”

  “That’s why I’ve come,” Arhu said. “It may not be all right, soon, in a very large-scale sort of way. We need help to find out how to stop what we thing is happening from happening.” He looked around him. “All this could be gone …”

  “No,” said Hardy, “of course it won’t. This will still be here.” He squinted up at the pale stones of the Tower. “It will be dead, of course. No people … and eventually, even no ravens. No nothing, just the dark and the cold, and the thin black cloud high up that the Sun can’t come through. The wind crying out for loneliness … and nothing else.”

  “You mean it’s going to happen,” Arhu whispered, shocked.

  “I mean it already has happened,” said Hardy. “Now it’s just a matter of seeing how it happens otherwise. You know that: for you have the Eye too, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m not very good at it yet,” Arhu said, suddenly feeling a little humble in the face of what was plainly another kind of mastery than his own.

  “Oh, you will be, if you live,” said another of the ravens. “Give it time.”

  “I’m not so sure I’m going to have a lot of time to give it,” Arhu said.

  “Of course you will,” Hardy said. “We’re here in strength now, after all. Nothing will fall that we don’t see fall first. And the more of us there are, the more certain the vision. When there was only one to see … that was a dangerous time.”

  “But there are a lot of you now.”

  “Oh, after this century’s second war, all fortunes turned, if slowly,” said Hardy. “Certainties returned. Also, we felt like breeding again. It’s not like it is with your People … we don’t do it unless we feel like it. And also, some of us came from other places to live here. The humans thought they brought us, of course: but we knew where we were going. We chose to come: we chose to stay.”

  Arhu wondered if this wasn’t possibly slightly self-deluding. “But your wings are clipped,” he said, rather diffidently, not knowing whether they might be insulted. “You couldn’t fly away if you wanted to.”

  The ravens looked at each other in silence for a fraction of a second … then burst out in loud, cawing laughter, so that some of the tourists on the other side of the Tower grounds turned to stare. “Oh, come on now,” said Hugin, “surely you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “Uh,” Arhu said. “I’m not sure I know what to believe.”

  “Then you’re a wise young wizard,” said another of the ravens. “Why, youngster, we can go anywhere we please. We’re the ‘messengers of the gods’, of the Powers that Be, don’t you know that? Even the humans know it. They’re confused about which god, of course: they’re confused about most things. But they still managed to give us use-names that are the same as the ravens they think served one of their gods, and went between heaven and Earth carrying messages. Hugin—” That raven pointed at Hugin with its beak. “Actually she’s Hugin II, after another one who went before her. And there’s Munin II over there.” The raven speaking pointed at a third one.

  “We go where we please,” said Hugin. “You’ve been working with the People who manage the gate under the Tower, so you must know how we do it.”

  “You worldgate?” Arhu said.

  “We transit. And we don’t need spells for it, if that’s what you mean,” said another of the ravens. “We don’t need to use a gate that’s been woven ahead of time and put in place, either. We see where to go … and we go. We find out what’s happened … and we bring the news back. That’s all.”

  Arhu sat down and licked his nose. “A long time now we have served Them,” said Hardy. “We come and go at Their behest. That would be why you are here: for you’re Their messenger, as we are.”

  “Uh,” Arhu said.

  Cawing came from further up the wall: a noise of laughter. “Oh, come on, Hardy,” said another raven-voice, “less of the oracular crap. Cut him some slack.”

  One more raven flapped down beside Arhu, rustled his wings back into place, and paced calmly over to Arhu, looking him up and down. “No rest for the weary,” it said. “But it’s about time you got here. I got tired of waiting.”

  Arhu wasn’t sure what to make of this, or of the amused way the other ravens looked at the newcomer. “Odin,” said Hardy, “have you been in the pub again?”

  Odin snapped his beak. “The Guinness over there is improving,” he said. They’ve cleaned out the pipes since last month.”

  There was much muffled caw-laughter from some of the other ravens. “Odin,” said Hardy a little wearily, “is our local representative of the forces of chaos.”

  “You mean the Lone Power?” Arhu said, looking at Odin rather dubiously.

  “No, just chaos.” Hardy sighed. “Well, we all act up while we’re still in our first decade,
I suppose. Odin thinks it’s fun to upset the Wingless Raven by getting up on the outer wall and gliding off across the road to The Queen’s Head, when everybody knows perfectly well that none of us should be able to fly or glide that far at all. He walks in there and scares the landlord’s dog into fits, and then the humans feed him hamburgers and try to get him drunk.”

  Arhu looked at Odin with new respect: any bird that could scare a houff was worth knowing. “Hey, listen,” Odin said, “sometimes the Yeoman Ravenmaster needs to have his world shaken up a little. This way there’s more to his life than just checking us over every morning and handing out chicken fillets. This way, he wakes up in the middle of the night, every now and then, and thinks, “Now how in the worlds did he do that?” ” The raven chuckled, a rough gravelly arh arh arh sound. “And it keeps him on good terms with the locals, because he has to keep coming over to the pub to get me back. After all, I can’t fly or anything …”

  He roused his wings and waved them in the air, managing to make the gesture look rather pitiful and helpless. The other ravens all laughed, though some of them sounded a little annoyed as well as amused.

  “You saw me coming here? I mean, you See me coming?” Arhu said.

  “How would I not?” Odin said. “You’ve been busy. Worldgating of any kind attracts our attention: it’s our business. Maybe it’s why we’re here. As for you, you were on the Moon recently,” Odin said. “I See you there. Took you a while to manage that, too. I could get there quicker than you could, puss. And without needing spells.”

  “Oh yeah,” Arhu said. “Well, maybe you could, birdie. In fact, maybe you’ll show me how right now, because time’s running out of things while we sit here and talk.”

  “He’s right,” said Hardy. “Well, Odin, will you make good your boast?”

  “Of course I will,” said Odin, sounding genuinely annoyed. “I Saw me doing it this morning, and so did you.”

  “You, though, weren’t sure,” said Hardy, “and you said as much at the time. You owe me a chicken breast.”

  Odin clattered his beak, and then said, “I’m going to get a bite out of it first … you see that too, don’t you.”

  Hardy dropped the lower half of his beak, a gesture that looked to Arhu like a smile. He certainly hoped it was.

  The place I need to See,” Arhu said, “it’s an alternate universe. You do know that?”

  Odin laughed. “Of course. So was the place where you went to the Moon. It’s not a problem.”

  It’s not? thought Arhu. Iau, I hope he’s right … because it would sure make things a lot easier.

  “I can tell you the coordinates for the world I’m trying to See,” Arhu said. “If that’s any help to you.”

  “You don’t need to,” Odin said. “I know where you’re going, because I can see that we’ve been. All I was waiting for is you.”

  Time paradoxes, Arhu thought. I thought they were kinda neat, but these guys don’t seem to think any other way. I hope to Iau I don’t get like this … I like keeping the past and future separate.

  “Can you ride me?” said Odin.

  “Huh? I think I might fall off,” Arhu said.

  “Not that way, puss. In mind.”

  “Since you ask, yes I can,” Arhu said, somewhat annoyed. “And my name is Arhu.”

  “I knew that,” Odin said. “But I couldn’t know until you told me. Ready?”

  The raven huddled down under a nearby bush with his wings slightly spread out—a peculiar-looking pose. Hugin came soaring down from the stone wall, flapping her wings, and came to rest in the bush just above him. “Just a precaution,” she said. “The tourists will come along while you’re in the middle of something and tell their babies to go pet the pretty birdie.” She snapped her beak suggestively. “Sometimes we have to disabuse them of the notion.”

  Arhu stepped through the bars and hunkered down not too far from Odin: closed his eyes, and felt around him in mind for the other’s presence—

  —and was caught, like a mouse, in a razory beak and claws. He struggled for a moment as something bit his neck, hard: he yowled, turned to get his claws into it—

  —and everything settled into a kind of silvery darkness: no more discomfort—he was on the inside of the beak and claws now. He was soaring through what looked like cloud, faintly lit as if with twilight: the sense of day about to dawn, but in no hurry about it. The feeling was unlike skywalking, which Arhu enjoyed well enough: but this was less passive. He had wings, and the wind was in a dialog with them.

  Nicely done, something said in his head. We could probably make a raven of you, with about fifty years’ work. Now show me the place you were in. Not the Moon, but the street—

  Arhu tried to see it again in mind as he had seen it in reality: but most of what he remembered was the smell. People’s noses are wonderfully accurate and delicate. They can tell where another Person has been, or where an ehhif or houff has passed, for months afterward. But the blunting, smashing, awful weight of the smell in the London they had visited had ruined Arhu’s ability to taste or smell most things for the better part of a day. Now he recalled that smell better than any other part of the experience: sickening, disgusting, like a shout inside your head, horse-bird-houff-ehhif-smoke-soot-garbage-shit-of-every-description … Sorry, Arhu gasped from inside the wings, inside the beak and claws.

  Don’t apologize, it’s perfect, said the one who shared the inside-beak-and-claws with him. A tolerant young mind, wry, dry, somewhat disrespectful of form but respectful of talent and wisdom and wit, a fearless seeker of strange new experience like the inside of a cat’s mind, or half a pint of Guinness poured into an ashtray: that was Odin. Arhu put his whiskers forward, or tried to and then discovered he had no whiskers: he dropped the lower half of his beak instead. As he did so, he got the faintest whiff of another name … and carefully turned his nose away from it. At least he still had a nose of sorts.

  Now then, said the other, either missing all this, or ignoring it. The path’s clear.

  They soared for a good while, circling. Every now and then Arhu would get a glimpse, through the silvery twilight, of a landscape below them: always the features were the same—the oxbowed bends of the river, the great loop of the Thames that held the Isle of Dogs, not quite an isle but a fat and noticeable peninsula. Then the cloud would close in again. Probability, Odin said. Or the lack of it…

  And suddenly the cloud cleared, and they dropped from the heavens together like a stone. The city below them was filthy. The Moon above them was scarred.

  Keep your eyes open, Odin said then. We can’t stay long. Is this it?

  Arhu looked down, trying to find the street in which they had appeared. He found the Tower quickly enough, and the street that ran by it: and there, just visible to a feline wizard’s eye, the tangle of half-seen strings that meant a sidled Person running across the mud, followed by two others. One of them fell as a motorcar rolled toward and over him—

  This is it?

  This is it!

  All right, then. Now we start work. Let us See together—

  Rhiow felt the raven close his wings and drop like a stone: and the tense of the vision changed, just that quickly, so that Rhiow found herself wanting to shake her head in confusion. Until this moment, everything happening to Arhu had been in a clearly discernible then. Suddenly, though, it was now, all now: single threads of that seamless whole that the Whisperer saw. But changed—the Eye a bird’s instead of a Person’s, seeing with a more direct and concentrated kind of vision, as if from one side of a brain rather than with the binocular vision of a predator. She was not sure she was seeing everything Arhu had, it all came so quickly. All now, all here, glimpse after glimpse tumbling one after another as the feline/raven mind fell through the cloud of probability—

  —one of the London streets opening out below them, suddenly: in the middle of it, being driven along at a sedate pace, a queen-ehhif out for a ride in a coach pulled by horses. Men ride in front of he
r, and behind her, riding on other horses as guards. The queen-ehhif is a little stocky, plainly dressed in dark clothes. Her face is one which could have smiled, but does not. The coach turns a corner into one of those broad tree-lined avenues. People passing by pause, and bow, as the coach passes. The queen-ehhif waves occasionally, a very reserved gesture. The coach drives on—

  An ehhif is standing at a corner nearby. As the coach passes he pulls out a gun, points it at the queen-ehhif in the coach. Shoots.

  Heads turn at the sudden crack of sound. In the coach, the queen-ehhif looks over her shoulder, bemused, as the ehhif driving the coach whips up the horses. They clatter away. Others run or ride toward the ehhif who fired the gun. The queen-ehhif, unharmed, looks back, her white face sharply contrasted against the dark bonnet. This has happened to her before, but she can never quite bring herself to believe it when it does.

  —Now the same coach again, driving in through gates surrounding a wide green park in the countryside outside London: and then into the courtyard in front of a massive house, turreted with the same kind of great round towers as are found inside the double walls where the Ravens live. The coach drives up to the doors, and the queen-ehhif gets out, with a younger queen-ehhif, her daughter perhaps, beside her. The two of them go in together, through the great front gate, in the broad low sunset light.

  Close, Odin thought, but not quite. Now we find the core—

  Several more flickers as the raven and his passenger dive through patches of silvery twilight, and out again: and after a few breaths’ time, the yellowy sunset light reasserts itself. But this time everything is very different. A dark carriage comes out of the gates: but its windows are shut, and draped in black. Everything about it is black: the horses, the harness, the clothes of the tom-ehhif who drive. The coach is a long one, long enough to take one of the boxes in which the ehhif put their dead before burying them. The long drive down to the roadway is lined with ehhif, all dressed in black, weeping. Some of them hide their faces in their hands as the coach passes them. Some of them hold ehhif-young up to see the coach as it goes by. Occasionally a cry breaks out from one of the grown ehhif, a terrible sound, as if wrested from a throat that normally would never make such a noise no matter what the circumstances. Otherwise everything is very silent, the only noises the sound of the horses’ hoofs, and far away, the bell of one of the houses where ehhif go to entreat the Powers or the One, tolling very slow, one strike in every minute, like a failing heart.