by Diane Duane
Arhu looks. For a while all he can see is that scarred and leering Moon, the promise of destruction. It is meant to distract him. When he realizes this, he turns his attention away. Show me what happens to her, he says to the listening world. Show me the ones who kill the Queen.
The darkness swirls and does not quite dissolve…
There is little enough to see of them. They fear the daylight. In the room where they sit, talking in whispers, the curtains are drawn against the possibility of anyone seeing in. Sight they may defeat, but not vision. “The time has come. Our people can suffer this unjust rule no longer. We must go forward with the plan.”
“Are the conditions all correct? Are we sure?”
“As certain as we can be. The relationship with Germany could hardly be expected to worsen, excepting that they declare war … which they dare not do. Any more than the French. But both have been saber-rattling: and France has made several statements in the past few weeks that seem to threaten the monarchy. There is no point in waiting any further.”
More whispers, hard even for a Person’s ears to pick up. “The Mouse is in place.”
“Well, then let the Mouse run,” says another voice, and it chuckles.
The voices fade. Resistance rears itself against Arhu. Something knows he is watching and listening. Something is trying to push him away, back where he belongs.
The feeling of Arhu pressing back, pushing against the resistance, fighting it.
…To no effect. It pushes back harder. It is winning.
A deep breath … and then a different tack. The raven’s way.
Don’t push against it. Rise above it. Don’t fight with the vision: let it bear you. The wings and the wind are a dialog…
Arhu lets go and soars: and the Eye opens fully…
The letter came. The small ehhif picked it up, without any particular fanfare, from the kitchen of one of the wings of the castle: a letter from his sister in Edinburgh, he said to the cook, and carried it away whistling. Still whistling, he headed for the potting shed where most of his day’s work took place these days—and then stepped into a thick bed of rhododendrons near the shed. Concealed there, he stood stock-still and silently tore the letter open.
He knew what it meant: he did not have to read it. All he had to do was make sure that the contents said what he had been told to expect. Dearest John, I hope you are well. I write to tell you that I have received the ten shillings you sent, and thank you very much. If you—
It was correct: it was all correct. The man folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, unaware with what fierce interest a Seer’s eyes looked through his, and puzzled out the postmark. July 9, 1874.
“Tonight,” the man whispered.
The vision whirled aside, shifted.
…And the resistance came back. Pressing him away. Not to see the next part…
Come on, he said. Help me.
No answer.
Siffha’h, come on! This is what will make the difference!
No—do it yourself!
You said it, Arhu said—not angrily, but pleading. I’ll take you anywhere you need to go. This is where we need to go!
A long, long silence, while the pressure increases.
…All right…
A shuffling of paws on the power-point, to make room for another. She rears up. Terrified, terrified, she comes down—
A blast of power runs down through the linkages, runs into Arhu. The pressure before him fails, melts away: the wind blows him past it—
Arhu whirls along with the wind, lets it bear him. Darkness now: not the darkness among the rhododendrons, but black night. In the silence, the man creeps along, under the cosseted trees of the Orangery, along the North Terrace. There are many doors into the silent castle, most locked, but few guarded: after all, the walls are guarded, and no one is inside the walls by night except trusted retainers of the household. There are no lights outside, on the inside of the wall: there is no need for such.
The man stops by a door just east of George the Fourth’s Tower, on the bottom level: the servants’ quarters and the kitchens. This is a door which is rarely ever locked—a little secret: even servants like to be able to escape now and then. The man waits for a few minutes outside it to make sure that no candle is burning inside, harbinger of some servant girl having a tryst in the midnight kitchen by the slacked-down coal fire of the biggest stove. But no light comes: and he needs none. He knows how many steps wide the kitchen is, how many stairs lead up from it to the first floor, and then how many steps, in the darkness, lead along the hallway to the second landing and the small winding stair which leads up into the eastern end of the State Apartments. It is a path he has walked five or six times now by night, and has memorized with the skill that used to let him ransack complex commercial premises in the City, in the dark, after just one walkthrough by daylight.
He unlatches the door with one gloved hand, slips in through it, shuts it gently behind him. Stands still in the darkness, and listens. A faint hiss from the hot-water boiler behind the coal stove: no other sound.
Twelve steps across the kitchen: his outstretched hand finds the shut door. He eases its latch open, slips through this door too, pulls it gently to behind him. No need to leave it open: he will not be coming back this way. Six stairs up to the hallway. Two steps out into the middle of the carpet in the hall: turn left. Sixty steps down to the second landing. The carpet muffles his footsteps effectively, though he would go silently even without it: he is wearing crepe-soled shoes which his employers would have judged most eccentric for a gardener. Well, they will have little chance to judge him further, in any regard. Others will be going to judgment tonight.
Fifty-nine steps, and he hears the change in the sound. Sixty. His toe bumps against the bottom step. Five stairs up to the landing: turn right: three steps. He puts his hand out, and feels the door.
Gently, gently he pulls it open. From up the winding stair comes a faint light: it seems astonishingly bright to him after the dead blackness. Softly he goes up the stairs, taking them near the outer side of the steps: the inner sides creak. One makes a tiny sound, crack: he freezes in place. A minute, two minutes, he stands there. No one has noticed. A great old house like this has a thousand creaks and moans, the sound of compressed wood relaxing itself overnight, and no one pays them any mind.
Up the remaining fifteen steps. They are steep, but he is careful. At the door at the top he halts and looks out of the crack in it where it has been left open. In the hallway onto which this stairway gives, next to a door with a gilded frame, a footman is sitting in a chair under a single candle-sconce with a dim electric bulb burning in it. The chair is tilted back against the wall. The footman is snoring.
Down the hallway, now, in utmost silence.
Half a minute later, the footman has stopped snoring … not to mention breathing.
Swiftly now, but also silently. Reach up and undo the bulb from its socket. Wait a few seconds for night vision to return. Then, silently, lift the doorlatch. The door swings open. This is the only part of his night’s work, other than the hallway outside, which he has not been able to pace out in advance. Here sight alone must guide him, and the description he has been given of the layout of the room.
The outer room is where the lady-in-waiting has a bed. She is in it, sleeping sweetly, breathing tiny small breaths into the night.
Half a minute later, her sleep has become much deeper, and the sound of breathing has stopped. The nightwalker makes his way toward what he cannot see yet in this more total darkness, the inner door. He feels for the handle: finds it.
Turns the handle. The door swings inward.
Darkness and silence. Not quite silence: a faint rustle of bedlinens, off to his left, and ahead.
Now, only now, the excitement strikes him, and his heart begins to pound. Ten steps, they told him. A rather wide bed. Her maids say she still favors the left side of it, leaving the right side open for someone who sleeps the
re no more.
Ten steps. He takes them. He listens for the sound of breathing…
…then reaches for the left side.
One muffled cry of surprise, under his hand … and no more. He holds her until she stops struggling, for fear an arm or leg should flail and knock something down. He wipes the wetness off on the bedclothes, unseen, and pauses by the end of the massive bed to tie the slim silken rope around one leg. Then he makes for the windows.
Quietly he slips behind the drapes: softly he pushes the window up in its sash, wider than need be—no need to give anyone the idea that he is a small man. He goes down the rope like a spider, rotating gently as he goes. Without a sound he comes down on the North Terrace again and makes straight off across the Home Park in the direction of the Datchet Road. Where the little road crosses the Broad Water, a brougham is waiting for him. He will be in it in five minutes, and in Calais by morning.
A quiet night’s work … and the pay is good. He will never need to see the inside of a potting shed again … or a merchant bank or a high-class jeweler’s after dark. That part is over. The new part of his life begins.
And at least she’s happy now. She’s with Albert…
—and then the vision snapped back. A moment’s confusion—
—and the vision was centering, bizarrely, on Siffha’h. Herself, she moaned and sank down, covering her eyes with her paws, and Rhiow could understand why: the mirroring must be disorienting in the extreme, self seeming to look at self seeming to look at self, infinitely reflected—
Except that it was not Siffha’h moaning that Rhiow heard. It was Arhu. Crying in a small frightened voice: crying like a kitten. “Oh, no,” he moaned. “It’s you. I didn’t know … I couldn’t help it … How could I help it?”
—an image of blackness. The rustling of a plastic bag as small frightened bodies thrashed and scrabbled for purchase, for any way to stay above what inexorably rose around them. Cold water, black as death. Underneath him, all around him, the sound of water bubbling in … of breath bubbling out…
Arhu fled from the platform, up the hallway: he was gone.
Both the teams and Artie looked after him in astonishment—all but Siffha’h. In her eyes was nothing but implacable hatred.
“I won’t have anything further to do with him,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. I will kill him if he touches my mind again. And why shouldn’t I?” she said. “Since he killed me first …”
SEVEN
Rhiow went out after Arhu at a run, and found him gone. He had done a private transit, not bothering to take long enough to get to one of the gates: she could smell the spell of it in the air of the hallway, and she thought she knew where Arhu had gone, within about ten feet.
Rhiow turned once, quickly, where she stood, and drew the circle with her tail, tying the wizard’s knot with one last flirt of it. Then she instructed the wizardry to lay in identical coordinates to the last transit from this spot, and to execute them. And don’t forget the air! she added hurriedly.
There was a loud clap as she displaced a considerable cubic volume of air from the tunnel, taking it with her. The sound of the clap had barely faded from her ears before she was standing on the cold white pumice-dust of the Moon, looking around.
He was no more than ten feet away.
Arhu looked at Rhiow and opened his mouth to speak the words of another spell, ready to run again.
“Don’t do it,” she said.
Arhu sagged and let the breath go out of him, standing there looking cold and scared and very alone. It was an expression Rhiow had not seen on him since he first came to her and the other members of the team: and she had forgotten how much it hurt to see it.
Tell me what’s happening,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, please.”
“I can’t.”
“You can,” Rhiow said, “or I’ll pull your ears off and wear them as collar jinglies.”
Arhu stared at her in complete misery. “Who needs ears?”
“Arhu,” Rhiow said, “this isn’t the time for self-indulgence. If you’ve seen something that threatens the team, or you—”
“The team?” he said, and laughed bitterly. “It’s a little more personal this time.”
“It’s not—you didn’t see anything like your own death, did you?”
“Oh, no, not mine. Someone else’s.”
“Well, for Iau’s sake, tell me! Maybe we can do something to stop it—”
“You don’t understand,” Arhu said. “It’s already happened,” He laughed again, that bitter sound. “Listen to me, I’m sounding like the ravens already.”
Rhiow shook her head in frustration. “What in Iau’s name are you talking about?”
Arhu flopped down on the powdery moondust. “Rhiow,” he said very softly, “Siffha’h is my sister.”
“What?”
“I saw her,” he said. “I saw her in the bag … with me and the others, when the ehhif threw us in to drown. And she saw it too, through me, just now. She saw it all … But dying didn’t stop her, then. She came straight back. She must have been reincarnated within days of when she died. Maybe hours. And it took me this long to see it. She was my twin, Rhiow, she had my same spots! And she was the one I climbed on top of to keep breathing …”
He was utterly devastated. For her own part, Rhiow could only stand there and look at him in complete astonishment. There always had been that resemblance between Siffha’h and Arhu … it really had been fairly striking. And the way Arhu had been drawn to Siffha’h. And then, Rhiow thought, with the suddenness of a blow, there was the simple matter of her name. Why didn’t I ever think to take it apart, Rhiow thought. But then, who thinks to take “Rhiow” apart for “dark-as-night” … ? For in Ailurin, Siffha’h simply meant “Sif-again”, or, by a pun in Ailurin, “one more time …” the end of a feline phrase similar to the ehhif “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
“What do I do now?” Arhu said hopelessly. “How can I go back? And … I thought it was an accident. Did I maybe kill her on purpose? My own twin? And more importantly … does she think I killed her on purpose?” He laughed again bitterly. “I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t like me. Now it makes perfect sense. How else would you treat the brother who climbed on top of your body, possibly even pushed you further down into the water, to keep on breathing?”
His despair and grief was awful to hear: the sound of it made it difficult for her to think how best to help him. Rhiow was also acutely aware that, to some extent, Arhu’s was the most unusual talent of the team, and the one which the Lone Power was most likely to attempt to directly undermine. In some ways, she and Urruah were simply support for Arhu … the youngest of them, and therefore the most powerful.
But Siffha’h was even younger, and her power might potentially be greater still. Was the Lone One working to impair her effectiveness as well? And why did she reincarnate so quickly? Was it specifically for this job, to do something that had to be done for wizardry’s sake … or was it for revenge?
She had no answers … and she didn’t think she was going to get them by sitting here. Certainly Arhu wasn’t. “Well,” Rhiow said, “what will you do about all this? Are you going to stay here on the Moon? You won’t be making your team responsibilities any easier to fulfill.”
“You’re not taking this very seriously,” Arhu snarled.
“On the contrary,” Rhiow said, “I’m taking it more seriously then you are. There’s a small matter of our home reality being chucked out of the scheme of things like litter-box cleanings if we don’t do something to stop it. You are a key to the solution of this problem, just as Artie is, in his way; just as Siffha’h is in hers. We need to get back down there and handle it.” She glanced up at the gibbous earth hanging above the pristine white surface. “Otherwise, that is going to wind up looking like that other Moon.”
He looked at Rhiow pitifully. “I can’t face her.”
“You already have faced her,” Rhiow said. “I
t just didn’t last long enough. Come back and have another try.”
Arhu looked up at the glowing blue earth. He breathed in, breathed out.
“Besides,” Rhiow said, “now we know how the assassination takes place. We’ve got to lay our plans for how to stop it. We’ll need you for that as well. And then we’ve got to execute those plans … and without you, that’s impossible.”
Arhu sighed and looked at Rhiow again. “You can be a real pain in the tail sometimes,” he said. He was shivering all over, as if someone had thrown him in water.
Rhiow put her whiskers forward and walked over to the boundaries of his spell: let his spell and hers get familiar, and then walked through into his bubble of air. He looked at her fearfully.
She went gently up to him and began to wash his ear. “Come on,” she said between licks. “You’ve had it out with the Lone One before. You thought it had done the worst to you that It could manage: It tried to kill your spirit, and It failed. Now It’s having another try … and It’s trying to steal your sister from you as well, if it can. It would love nothing better to alienate you from one another at this time when, if you can work together, you can defeat It one more time … and It’s depending on your pain doing Its work for it.” She stopped washing for a moment and bent down and around to look Arhu in the eye. “Are you listening to me?”
He looked back at her, still full of grief, and a pang struck through her again, for his pain looked much like hers must have looked when Hhuha died.
“It was so awful,” he whispered.
“Of course it was awful,” Rhiow whispered back. “Its wretched gift, death, that It tricked our People into accepting: how should it not be an awful thing? That was never what the Powers had in mind for us when they built the worlds. Now we have to deal with it as a matter of course. But at least in your case you’ve got a second chance. How many of us get a chance to meet a friend again in another life, let alone a relative? It happens, but not that often. Don’t let It trick you into throwing that away as well!”