“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?