“Because they were around for two thousand years before the Imperials turned up,” Huff said, “or maybe three. There’s some argument about the dates. It’s not certain what kept them here at first: some people think the fishing was good.” Huff put his whiskers forward, and Rhiow got, with some amusement, the immediate sense that Huff approved of fish. “Whatever the reason, they stayed, and a gate came, as they tended to do near permanent settlements when the Earth was younger.” He flicked his ears thoughtfully as they all stepped to one side to avoid a crowd of ehhif making their way up to the admission counters near the gateway they’d come in.
“It’s had a rocky history, though,” Rhiow said, “this gating complex. So Urruah tells me.”
“That’s right,” Huff said, as they turned the corner and now walked parallel to the main street with all the traffic. “This has always been the heart of London, this hill … not that there’s that much left of the hill any more. And the heart has had its share of seizures and arrests, I fear, and nearly stopped once or twice. Nonetheless … everything is still functioning.”
“What exactly is the problem with the gates at the moment?” Rhiow said.
Huff got a pained look. “One of them is intermittently converting itself into an unstable timeslide,” he said. “The other end seems to be anchoring somewhere nearby in the past—it has to, after all, you can’t have a slide without an anchor—but the times at which it’s anchoring seem to be changing without any cause that we can understand.”
“How long has it been doing this?” Urruah said. His eyes had gone rather wide at the mention of the timeslide.
“We’re not absolutely sure,” Huff said. “Possibly for a long time, though only for micro-periods too small to allow anyone to pass through. In any case, none of the normal monitoring spells caught the gate at it. We only found out last week when Auhlae, that’s my mate, was working on one of the neighboring gates … and something came out.”
“Something?” Arhu said, looking scared.
“Someone, actually,” Huff said, glancing over at the Tower as a shriek of children’s laughter came from somewhere inside it. “It was an ehhif … and not a wizardly one. Very frightened … very confused. He ran through the gate and up and out into the Tube station—that’s where our number-four gate is anchored, in the Tower Hill Underground station—and out into the night. Right over the turnstiles he went,” Huff added, “and the Queen only knows what the poor ehhif who work there made of it all.”
“Have you made any more headway in understanding why this is happening since our meeting was set up?” Rhiow said. She very much hoped so: this all sounded completely bizarre.
But Huff flirted his tail “no”, a slightly annoyed gesture. “Nothing would please me better than to tell you that that was the case,” he said.
Rhiow licked her nose. “Huff,” she said, “believe me when I tell you that we’re sorry for your trouble, and we wish we didn’t need to be here in the first place.”
“That’s very kindly said,” Huff said, turning those green eyes on her: they were somber. “My team are—well, they’re annoyed, as you might imagine. I appreciate your concern a great deal, indeed I do.”
Huff and Rhiow’s team turned leftwards into the underpass, which was full of ehhif heading in various directions, and one ehhif who was tending a small mobile installation festooned with colored scarves and T-shirts: numerous prints of the Tower and other pictures of what Rhiow assumed were tourist attractions were taped to the walls, and some of what Rhiow assumed were tourists were studying them. “Huff,” Urruah said, “what did the gate’s logs look like after this ingress?”
“Muddled,” Huff said, as they walked through the underpass, up the ramp on its for side, and fumed toward a set of stairs leading downwards into what Rhiow saw was the ticketing area of the Underground station: above the stairway was the circle-and-bar Underground logo, emblazoned with the words tower hill. “We found evidence of multiple ingresses of this kind, from different times into ours … and egresses from ours back to those times. The worst part of it is that only one of those egresses was a “return”: all the others were “singles”. The ehhif went through, in one direction or another, but they never made it back to their home times …”
Urruah’s eyes went wide. “This way,” Huff said, and led them under one of the turnstiles and off to the right.
Rhiow followed him closely, but Urruah’s shocked look was on her mind. “What?” she said to him, as Huff leaped up onto the stainless-steel divider between two stairways.
“Single trips,” Urruah said, following her up. “You know what that means—”
Rhiow flirted her tail in acquiescence. It was an uncomfortable image, the poor ehhif trapped in a time not their own, confused, possibly driven mad by the awful turn of events, and certainly thought mad by anyone who ran into them—But then she started having other things to think about as she followed Huff steeply down. The steel was slippery: the only way you could control your descent was by jumping from one to another of the upthrust steel wedges fastened at intervals to the middle of the divider, almost certainly to keep ehhif in a hurry from using the thing as a slide. Rhiow started to get into the rhythm of this, then almost lost it again as Arhu came down past her, yelling in delight. Various ehhif walking up on one side and down on the other looked curiously for the source of the happy yowling in the middle of the air.
“Arhu, look out,” Rhiow said, “oh, look out, for the Queen’s sake look—”
It was too late: Arhu had jumped right over the surprised Huff, but had built up so much speed that he couldn’t stop himself at the next wedge: he hit it, shot into the air, fell and rolled for several yards, and shot off the end of the divider to fall to the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Rhiow sighed. He was so good there, she thought: … for about ten minutes…
She caught up with Huff as he jumped down. “Huff, I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, watching Arhu do an impromptu dance as he tried to avoid crowds of ehhif stepping on him. It was something of a challenge: they were coming at him and making for the stairs from three directions at once. “He’s a little new to all this, and as for being part of a team—”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Huff said, unconcerned. “Our team has one his age: younger, even. She’s left us all wondering whether we aren’t too old for this kind of work. With any luck, they’ll run each other down and give us some peace. Come on, over this way …”
Huff led them from one hallway into another, where several stainless-steel doors were let into the tiled wall. “In here,” said Huff, and vanished through the door: “through it” in the literal sense, passing straight into the metal with a casual whisk of his tail.
It was a spell that any feline wizard knew, and even some non-wizardly People could do the trick under extreme stress. Rhiow drew the spell-circle in her mind, knotted it closed. Then inside it she sketched out the graphic form of her name, and the temporary set of parameters which reminded her body that it was mostly empty space, and so was the door, and requested them to avoid one another. Then she walked through after Huff. It was an odd sensation, like feeling the wind ruffling your fur the wrong way: except the fur seemed to be on the inside—
—and she was through, into what looked like a much older area, a brick-lined hallway on the far side of the door, lit by bare bulbs hanging .from the ceiling, all very much different from the clean shining fluorescent-lit station platform outside.