This is it!
All right, then. Now we start work. Let us See together—
Rhiow felt the raven close his wings and drop like a stone: and the tense of the vision changed, just that quickly, so that Rhiow found herself wanting to shake her head in confusion. Until this moment, everything happening to Arhu had been in a clearly discernible then. Suddenly, though, it was now, all now: single threads of that seamless whole that the Whisperer saw. But changed—the Eye a bird’s instead of a Person’s, seeing with a more direct and concentrated kind of vision, as if from one side of a brain rather than with the binocular vision of a predator. She was not sure she was seeing everything Arhu had, it all came so quickly. All now, all here, glimpse after glimpse tumbling one after another as the feline/raven mind fell through the cloud of probability—
—one of the London streets opening out below them, suddenly: in the middle of it, being driven along at a sedate pace, a queen-ehhif out for a ride in a coach pulled by horses. Men ride in front of her, and behind her, riding on other horses as guards. The queen-ehhif is a little stocky, plainly dressed in dark clothes. Her face is one which could have smiled, but does not. The coach turns a corner into one of those broad tree-lined avenues. People passing by pause, and bow, as the coach passes. The queen-ehhif waves occasionally, a very reserved gesture. The coach drives on—
An ehhif is standing at a corner nearby. As the coach passes he pulls out a gun, points it at the queen-ehhif in the coach. Shoots.
Heads turn at the sudden crack of sound. In the coach, the queen-ehhif looks over her shoulder, bemused, as the ehhif driving the coach whips up the horses. They clatter away. Others run or ride toward the ehhif who fired the gun. The queen-ehhif, unharmed, looks back, her white face sharply contrasted against the dark bonnet. This has happened to her before, but she can never quite bring herself to believe it when it does.
—Now the same coach again, driving in through gates surrounding a wide green park in the countryside outside London: and then into the courtyard in front of a massive house, turreted with the same kind of great round towers as are found inside the double walls where the Ravens live. The coach drives up to the doors, and the queen-ehhif gets out, with a younger queen-ehhif, her daughter perhaps, beside her. The two of them go in together, through the great front gate, in the broad low sunset light.
Close, Odin thought, but not quite. Now we find the core—
Several more flickers as the raven and his passenger dive through patches of silvery twilight, and out again: and after a few breaths’ time, the yellowy sunset light reasserts itself. But this time everything is very different. A dark carriage comes out of the gates: but its windows are shut, and draped in black. Everything about it is black: the horses, the harness, the clothes of the tom-ehhif who drive. The coach is a long one, long enough to take one of the boxes in which the ehhif put their dead before burying them. The long drive down to the roadway is lined with ehhif, all dressed in black, weeping. Some of them hide their faces in their hands as the coach passes them. Some of them hold ehhif-young up to see the coach as it goes by. Occasionally a cry breaks out from one of the grown ehhif, a terrible sound, as if wrested from a throat that normally would never make such a noise no matter what the circumstances. Otherwise everything is very silent, the only noises the sound of the horses’ hoofs, and far away, the bell of one of the houses where ehhif go to entreat the Powers or the One, tolling very slow, one strike in every minute, like a failing heart.
The long black equipage winds away toward London through the brassy sunset light. The raven flashes overhead, passing them, dodging through cloud again, coming out over the City, and veering close to a shopfront in a street that is almost empty. This, in its way, shocks Rhiow more badly than anything else she has seen. She is a city Person: she is used to streets that always have someone walking or driving on them, no matter what time of day or night it is. But this place looks like it has died, or like the heart has been torn out of it. Few ehhif are abroad, and almost all of them are dressed in black or have black armbands, even black rags, tied about their arms. All their faces are grim: many are tearstained.
The raven perches for a moment on a folding board which is set up outside the shopfront. The shop itself is dark and its door is shut. But outside, the piece of paper pasted to the board says, in large black letters, HER MAJESTY’S FUNERAL. It is the front page of The Times of London, and it has no other words on it except the newspaper’s masthead, and the date: JULY 14, 1874.
The raven takes wing again before anyone should see it; vaults up into the safety of the silvery twilight again. That is the core which you sought, Odin says. We have just time to see the beginning, and the end.
The tense changed once more: now became then again, at least while Odin and Arhu were in transit. They saw more, much more, as the raven flashed in and out through the cloud that always seemed about to break into day. Rhiow could not make sense of most of what she was sensing, and hoped Arhu would be able to do better, or that perhaps the raven Odin could: for occasionally, like a sudden ray of light through the cloud, there would come an image so overladen with context that it was as if a thousand ehhif stood around her, every one of them shouting some piece of information that it was important for her to hear. A group of ehhif, ranged in a big room, facing each other in rows: and all shouting at one another, a terrible noise of rage and confusion, while one ehhif at the front of one group, in the bottom row of the benches, cried out, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay—!” and all the others shouted him down in a crescendo of fury, as another one leapt up and shouted, “Mr. Speaker, they say the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. I can do the same: and I say, ‘They have sown the storm, and they shall reap the whirlwind—!’ ” A roar of approval—and from that, abruptly, to a white-walled room where a broad, squat machine of some kind was being built by ehhif wearing protective suits. Then a bright, blue-skied day, and a missile or rocket leaping up on a tongue of fire from a launch pad bizarrely adorned in the curlicues of the Victorian decorative style. Then a huge aircraft passing over a city landscape, so big that it shadowed the ground, and ehhif looked up and pointed. Then—
—the images were gone again. The twilight returned … and went sinister. It was not silvery any more: it was leaden. The sun could not come through it. Arhu and Odin spun up together on raven’s wings, catching an updraft, or what passed for one in vision. This was no normal wind: the air was too thin for wind as high as they were going, as the Earth yielded up her curvature below them. Far down, away in the blue sea, Arhu could see the plume of darkness wafting up from one small point. A volcano, a mother of volcanoes, belching out great clouds of ash and dust into the upper atmosphere: a thin line which became a plume, a plume which became a pall, thin and dark and gloomy, right around the globe of the world. What was bright, and normally gleamed like polished metal where the Sun touched it, now was dull and tarnished: and clouds that should have burned white, were all filmed gray. 1816, said Odin’s voice, dry, noticing rather than reacting. He had seen it before: he had seen all this before. The difference, he said, is that I never had to look. Looking is what makes the difference, in vision. Looking makes it so…