On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service fw-2

by Diane Duane

  Finally she brought Ith over to Artie. “And this is our ‘pet’ ehhif,” Rhiow said, with some amusement. “Artie, this is Ith.”

  “Oh, rather,” said Artie, very impressed indeed. “Are you a Thunder Lizard?”

  Ith dropped his lower jaw and flickered his long blunt tongue slightly in what Rhiow had come to recognize as a smile. “I have not thundered at anything very recently,” he said, “but in the past I have occasionally done so.”

  He crouched down on his back legs next to Arhu, who leaned against him companionably. “Your summons was opportune,” Ith said to Rhiow, “for I was thinking of coming to see you anyway. The master gate matrices in the Old Downside, the ones which service Grand Central and many other gating complexes have been showing signs of strain, these last few days. Gatings have not been progressing as they normally do.”

  “It’s not just strain,” Arhu said. “Let me show you—”

  For a few seconds they were silent together. It was not vision, Rhiow thought, but rather something to do with their old history together: they had been in one another’s minds in extremely harrowing circumstances, involving their jointly completed Ordeals, and there were times when the communication between them seemed so complete and effortless that Rhiow wondered whether some kind of permanent connection between them had been wrought by the anguish and triumph they’d shared.

  Ith looked up, then, and said, “You have been having a busy time.” He clenched his claws together, interlacing them. “And now this business of the Longest Winter. Very interesting indeed.”

  He looked up over at the London team. “That was what killed my people in the ancient days,” he said to Huff. “The Lone One, the Old Serpent, brought that fate down on us when we made our first Choice as a species. It said if we accepted Its gift, we would rule the Earth so long as the Sun shone on it. And so we did: until the blow fell burning from the sky, and the dust and the smoke of its impact rose up and hid the sun. It killed all my ancestors except the very few who, by accident or by grace of the Powers, managed to find their way into the Old Downside and take refuge in the caves there, down where the catenaries spring up from their ultimate power source. There we lived for ages, and there the Lone One ruled us, saying that someday It would lead us up into the Sun again, and we would conquer all the puny creatures that lived there and take the Earth for our own once more.” He smiled, showing most of his teeth. “Well, they conquered us instead, to our great good: and my people lost their old false Father, and gained a new one. Mostly due to my brother, my father here.” He glanced down at Arhu. Arhu looked away, and purred.

  “But the thought of the Winter has not been far from my mind, or my people’s,” Ith said to Rhiow. “It is a charged subject for us, as charged in its way as humankind’s old story that you told me about the apple and the garden: and there is a serpent in that story too, though I am afraid it is not the Bright one Who is a shape I wear these days sometimes, or Who wears me—whichever. In any case, we are eager that the Winter should not come back, from whatever cause … for if it returns to the upper world, that will eventually affect the Old Downside as well. Since we have no guarantees from the Powers that this fate would never befall us again, I thought that we might seek to put guarantees of our own in place.”

  “You could get caught up in that kind of thing to the exclusion of everything else,” Auhlae said, “if you weren’t careful …”

  “Oh, indeed. We know well enough that every race dies,” Ith said. “That alone has become obvious enough from studying other species’ history. Entropy is running …” The young-old, wise eyes looked a little tired already. “We cannot stop it. But this does not mean we need instantly to enter into a suicide pact with the Universe. We may forestall the event as long as possible … indeed the Powers would prefer that we do.”

  “Getting familiar with Them, are you?” Urruah said.

  “No less than you,” Ith said mildly. “Your good friend, Saash of the unending itch, now herself walks the floor of Heaven about the One’s business, and the depths of reality echo to the thumping when she sits down to scratch. And she thought of herself as ‘nothing special’. I am nothing special either, but I am also Father of my people now, and so I find myself chatting often enough with my people’s Grandparents as I try to make some sense out of this terrible mass of data They’ve wished on me, and try to claw it into some shape which our new wizards will be able to handle.”

  “New wizards already?” said Arhu.

  “They are hatching out even as we speak,” Ith said. “Some seem to have been trying to be born for a long time … some say they have tried many times, but were always killed in the ongoing hethhhiiihhh.” Rhiow blinked at the word: the Speech said holocaust in her ear, but there were even more terrible implications in the word, speaking of a people who for many generations had simply been born to be killed, almost all new hatchlings being destined to feed the chosen warriors of the Lone Power’s planned army.

  “Now, though,” Ith said, “there are more than twenty already. Our latency period is fairly short, and besides, there is the time difference between the Upworld and the Downside to consider. We are, in any case, making up for much lost time, which is a good thing, considering the importance of the gates we guard. The Downside will be alive with wizardry before very long, and all the better for it: it is not good for a world to go unmanaged. But our ‘wizard’s manual’ is still in its early stages, and I have been kept very busy trying to codify it.”

  “I would have thought it would have just appeared,” Urruah said. “As if it had always been there, now that your people’s Choice is properly made. I mean, the information’s all in the Speech after all … so your people won’t have trouble understanding it—”

  “Yes, but first there’s the question of what information a wizard of our People will routinely have access to,” Ith said, “and what they’ll have to ask for authorization from Higher Up to get—”

  “I would have thought the Powers would make that distinction themselves.”

  “No,” Ith said. “We—upper-level field operatives—are given more autonomy than you might suspect. Surprising amounts of it.” He opened his mouth to grin slightly, the amiable saurian smile that showed all those teeth. “The Powers’ attitude is plainly, ‘You’re living in this universe: why would you be so dumb as to pull down the ceiling of the cavern on yourself? Be cautious running the place—but take what risks you think need to be taken.’ And does it not say in the Estivations, ‘I shall walk Your worlds as You do, as if they are mine … for so indeed they are’?—So I find I must make these decisions—the Powers apparently feeling that one from inside a native ‘psychology’ will be best fitted to understand wizardry’s best implementation for that psychology. Then there’s the matter of how Seniors and Advisories will be chosen, and a very basic one, how the wizardry itself will manifest to my people. We’ve had all kinds of different modalities—voices heard, visions seen—but they’ve been haphazard, and I’ve been told that we should try to keep it to one or two modalities for the whole species, so that legend and tradition regarding their handling will have time to build up around them. At least we don’t have to try to keep wizardry secret, the way the poor ehhif do. My wizardly children will lead normal lives … as far as any wizard’s life can be considered normal.”

  “You’re getting pretty organized,” Arhu said.

  “Order is a wonderful thing,” Ith said, “when it flows from the roots of a matter rather than being imposed from the top down. And organization usually follows, yes … but not so much so that I can’t slip out for a pastrami sandwich every now and then.” He grinned at Arhu. “And we should try to meet soon in that regard: I’ve found a good place up on Eighty-Sixth between First and Second. Meanwhile, though, I have other business in hand. They tell me you need me,” he said to Rhiow. “And to my people’s Stepmother, I can only say, “Tell me what you need, and it’s yours.” ”

  Rhiow put her whiskers for
ward.

  “Meanwhile,” Ith said, turning his head sideways and giving Artie one of those peculiar looks of his, like a very large bird eyeing a very large worm, “is there any more of that pizza?”

  Rhiow laughed. “No! Get your own. There’s probably a fairly decent pizza place not too close from where you’re getting your pastrami.”

  “No,” Ith said, “I would say Eighty-Sixth is something of a desert as regards pizza. Now if you go a little further uptown—”

  “Don’t!” Rhiow said. He and Arhu looked at her, startled. “Just don’t,” she said wearily. “Later. Later I will go and look for pizza with you. If there’s still a reality left on Earth that involves pizza.”

  “All right,” Ith said. “Back to the subject. While involved in the codification, I have been eagerly searching for a spell which would prevent a second Winter’s fall. Now I see and hear from your interview with Hwallis that there is, or was such a thing. The Whisperer does not know of it, though: or if She did, it is lost.”

  “How would She lose anything?” Siffha’h said.

  “I do not know. But let us see the spell again, what you have of it.”

  Rhiow showed it to Ith where she had it laid out on the floor. He looked at it for a few moments, and then chuckled, a deep clicking noise in his throat. “Yes,” he said, “there is a piece of my name, and another piece. And the Bright Serpent’s name, which I would have thought was a new thing: but now it seems it is old, and existed from ancient times. Another piece of information lost, or submerged under formerly more aggressive archetypes. And see here—” he put one claw down on one symbol of the spell, which flared briefly brighter in response. “Yes, this is the Ophidian Word in one of its new variants: my people are certainly involved—either the memory of our old tragedy, or the prophecy of our later intervention against repetitions of it. And here is the symbol for the Winter, and the indicator for the conditional branches of the target designation spell. There are definitely pieces missing: and this—” he tapped another symbol—“seems to indicate how many. Five other major parts. The master structure is hexagonal.” He sat back, looking satisfied. “That makes perfect sense, for the Universe has a broadly hexagonal bent: things tend to come in sixes.” He flexed his claws, giving a little extra wiggle to the sixth claw on each forelimb. “Particle arrays, hyperstring structures—”

  Arhu looked accusingly at Rhiow. “I thought you told me everything came in fives.”

  “Not everything,” Rhiow said, in slight desperation. “Things to do with gates.”

  Ith looked at her with a cockeyed expression, a sidewise look that had reminded Rhiow more than once of a robin looking at a worm. “Possibly we have a paired underlying symmetry here,” he said. “Dual symmetries of sixes and fives, conjoined at the functional level as elevens? The even and the odd …”

  “Or the like and the unlike,” Urruah said, interested. “But together, they make a prime …”

  Rhiow rolled her eyes. Since coming into his own, Ith sometimes went off into mathematical conjectures which completely lost her—a side-effect, she thought, of coming of a species which was only now discovering abstract reasoning for its own sake, after having spent so many millennia in the darkness, thinking about nothing but survival and food. It was perhaps some side-gift of his wizardry: or, like Urruah’s never-ending fondness for food and oh’ra, it might just be a hobby. Either way, it tended to make her head hurt.

  “Ith, you’re going to have to take it up with the Powers that Be,” Rhiow said, “because I haven’t the faintest idea. Right now we need someone to help us look for that spell, for the other parts of it, and to get them welded together. We may need it very badly in a very short time.”

  “Then I will come and do that for you,” Ith said. “I will search everywhere I can think of. The Museum here first, as you say: and then the Museum in New York as well, and elsewhere, if I must.”

  Arhu glanced up, looking a little uneasy. “I don’t know if I like the idea of taking the Father of his People away from them just now,” he said. “This could be a dangerous time …”

  Ith looked at him with mild surprise. “Do fathers not go out to find food and protect their young, sometimes? The important thing is to come back afterwards … Besides, events in one universe spread to others, sooner or later. By acting now, perhaps I save myself the need to act more desperately later …”

  “That may or may not be,” Huff said, “but in any case, it’s still very good of you to come and help us. I mean …” He sounded slightly flustered. “We are, after all, People … and you are, after all …”

  “A snake?” Ith dropped his jaw amiably. “Well, People have in the past taken a certain amount of interest in the welfare of another people’s universe: mine. We could have been left to die in the dark, or to live out our lives as slaves, under the Lone Power’s influence. But others risked themselves for us. Perhaps there is no ‘payback’: but paying forward is certainly an option open to us … So let us not speak of it any more.”

  He rocked a little on his haunches, reaching back in mind again to the interview with Wallis which Arhu had shown him, and looking down at the fragmentary spell again. “ ‘A person of Power’,” said Ith, “must enact the spell. Does that mean, perhaps, a Person? One of your People? Or could it be just any wizard?”

  “It depends if they call themselves persons or not, I suppose,” Rhiow said. “Ith, your guess is as good as mine … But I think we’re going to need the rest of the spell before we can draw any conclusions about that.”

  “Well enough, then: I will go.”

  “I want to go too!” Artie said suddenly, jumping up. “I haven’t seen any magic practically since I got here. I want to see some more!”

  Rhiow glanced at Ith, about to object: then she stopped herself. Cousin, if you can take charge of him for a while, it would take a worry off our minds. He’s at the wrong end of time, and it’s not good for an ehhif to know too much about its own future without preparation … for which we’ve had no time. The Museum will be a controllable environment, one not too strange to him…

  Consider it done.

  “Well, Ith,” Rhiow said out loud, “if you take Artie with you, he can help you look for the spell, while you keep him invisible. You should have fun with that,” Rhiow said to Artie.

  “You’re going to keep walking into things, though … so be warned.”

  “I will bring him gladly,” said Ith. “Artie, are you willing?”

  “I should say so!”

  “All right, Artie,” Rhiow said, “who are you staying with in London?”

  “My uncle and aunt,” he said, suddenly looking rather concerned. “They were expecting me back for teatime …”

  “Well,” Urruah said, “if we can get the timeslide to work properly, there’ll be no problem returning him to just a few seconds before or after we found him, or he found us.” And if we can’t get the slide to work properly … then shortly it won’t matter one way or the other…

  Rhiow made a face at the thought. And what happens to us then? she thought. We become refugees to some other timeline that hasn’t been ruined. If we can find any such. And Artie will share the same fate…

  No, she thought. No need to give up just yet. There’s a lot more work to be done…

  “Very well,” Ith said, and stood up. “Artie, prepare yourself: we will go to the British Museum, and walk invisible among the displays. Or perhaps—” and that little golden eye glinted—“late tonight, when none but the night watchmen are about, perhaps one of them will look into the Prehistoric Saloon and wonder if he saw one of the displays move, and wink its eye …”

  He winked, and Artie burst out laughing as he dusted himself off, which was about all the preparation he could do. “Ith, you wouldn’t,” Rhiow said, trying to sound severe. Ith seemed to have picked up some of Arhu’s taste for mischief along with the taste for deli food. Unfortunately it was difficult to scold someone who was so old and grave, and
at the same time so young, and whose wickednesses were of such a small and genteel sort.

  “Perhaps I would not,” Ith said, bowing to Rhiow. She put her whiskers forward at the phrasing. “In any case, I will take care of him,” Ith said. “If nothing else, when he needs to rest, I can take him to the Old Downside, where he will see all the ‘thunder lizards’ his heart desires.”

  “How are your people doing?” Urruah said. “Settling in nicely?”

  “They love the life under the sky,” Ith said. “For some of them, it is as if the old life in the caves never happened. And truly, for some of them, it is better that way. For others … they remember, and they look up at the Sun and rejoice.”

  “Have there been any problems with our own People?” Rhiow said. The only other intelligent species populating that ancient ancestor-dimension of Earth were the Great Cats of whom Felis domesticus and its many cousins were the descendants: sabertooths and dire-lions, who had taken refuge in that paradisial otherworld many ages before.

  “Oh, no,” Ith said mildly, and flexed his claws. “None that have been serious. They were unsure whether we were predators or prey, at first. They are sure now.” He grinned, showing all those very sharp teeth.

  Rhiow chuckled. “Get out of here,” she said. “And go well. Artie, be nice to him. He bites.”

  “He wouldn’t bite me,” said Artie.

  “No, I would not,” Ith said. “Artie, come stand by me. Now watch, and take care; when the air tears, it does so raggedly, and the boundaries between here and there are sharp—”

  They stepped into the air together and were gone: the tear in it healed up behind them.

  Huff stared after them. “How does he do that?” he said. “There wasn’t even any noise from the displacement of the air.”