“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?”
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 taiclass="underline" 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”.