They dived again, were briefly lost in the silvery twilight, the billow of possibility. When they came out, they looked down into a muddy street and saw a young dark-complexioned man in casual clothing of the late twentieth century come lurching out of the middle of the air, carrying something heavy in a bag. He came staggering through the darkness, out into the street: another ehhif came along and frightened him. He dropped the bag, turned and fled once more into the darkness. A few moments later, other ehhif came along and picked up the bag, peeled it away from what it contained. A book, a very large book. The ehhif stared at the cover. Another one took the book from the one who held it: opened it, turned the pages, looking at the equations and the delicately drawn diagrams, and the dense small print.
One of them glanced up into the cloudy sky, with that thin layer of darkness streaming along above everything, as a brief welcome ray of sun shot down through the dull day. The light fell on the book. Arhu looked at the silver ehhif letters on the book’s cover. It said Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia.
Arhu looked down at the ehhif and heard, very softly, all about them, the laughter: the quiet amusement of Something which had given the world, just now, a brief foretaste of what was waiting for it later, in far greater intensity, when the seed it had just planted finally came to fruit. This darkness would fall again, but many times magnified: this cold would come … but would be permanent. By the time it passed, and the planet warmed again, all its intelligent life would be long dead.
Arhu had heard that laughter before. Once upon a time, when he was a kitten, he had found himself in a garbage bag in the East River, one which slowly filled with water, while he and his brothers and sisters clawed and scrabbled desperately on top of each other, trying to stay above the terrible cold stuff that was slowly climbing high enough around them that they would have no choice but to breathe it, and die. Only Arhu lived, saved by chance—some ehhif coming along and seeing the sinking bag in the water, and hearing the last faint cries of despair from inside, had fished it out, torn it open, and dumped the sodden bodies of the kittens out onto the bike path. All the while he had been in that bag, and even afterwards, all the while the ehhif warmed him in his coat while taking the last small survivor to the local animal shelter, Arhu had sensed that laughter all around him. It was Entropy in Its personified form, the One Who invented death, sa’Rrahh as the People knew Her, the disaffected and ambivalent Power which wizards called “Lone”: and It had laughed at the prospect of his one small death as It was now laughing at this far greater one. The fury Arhu had felt when first he recognized that laughter’s source, he felt now, and it roared up in him like the voice of one of the Old Cats from the Downside, a blast of pure rage that sent Odin tumbling through the silvery twilight as if blown off course by a gust of wind.
They were not off course, though. They came out of the twilight more quickly than even Odin had expected, so that for a moment he almost lost control, dropping some hundreds of feet before he could get his wings under him again. As they tumbled, Arhu had a brief confusion of which way was up and which was down. They were high above the Earth again, but as they tumbled the lights blurred, and there seemed to be stars in the dark side of the Earth as well as in the sky—
Odin fought for stability, found it. Arhu looked down, through the raven’s Eye, and saw that there were lights on the dark side of the Earth, indeed, but they were not stars.
Europe was in shadow. London was dark. But on the Continent, from north to south, eye-hurtingly bright lights had broken out, a rash of points of fire. Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, every one was a point of light. Others blossomed as Arhu watched—Hanover, Lyon, Geneva, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and many more: seeds of fire growing, paling, each one with its tiny pale growth above it. Arhu did not need to dive any closer to see the mushroom clouds. The seeds were planted. It would be no spring that came with their growth, but a winter that would last an age…
Arhu closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them again, he was crouched down on the ground, on the green grass near the bush in the Ravens’ Enclosure, and beside him, Odin was standing up and shaking his feathers into place. Hardy was sitting down on the nearby tree, now, near Hugin.
“The beginning and the end,” Arhu breathed, and had to stop and try to catch his breath, for he was finding it hard just to be here and now again.
“It will pass,” said Hardy. “Meanwhile, be assured: you did a good job. You see strangely, but your way might be something that we could learn in time, if you could teach us.”
“Me teach you?” Arhu said, and gulped for air again. “Uh—I’ll have to ask.”
“Ask Her by all means,” said Hardy. “In the meantime, I see the nature of your problem. She was the core of that whole time, the old Queen, Victoria: the events of that whole period crystallized out around her personality, and the qualities which her people projected onto her. Any universe in which she was successfully assassinated would be a threat to all the others anywhere near it in its probability sheaf. And I would suggest to you,” Hardy said, bending down a little closer to Arhu, “that if the Lone One wished to make doubly sure of your universe’s demise, that it would see to it that she died in your universe as well.”
Arhu stared at him. “By making the ehhif here assassinate this Queen Victoria?”
“Indeed. It might well happen anyway, for as the two universes begin the process of exchanging energy and achieving homeostasis, that ‘core event’ will be one of the first things that will try to happen in your universe.” Hardy blinked and looked thoughtful. “If I were in your position, I would be sure that this world’s Victoria is protected from the fate you have seen befall her counterpart. Otherwise, with two universes with dead Queens, the alternate universe will gain a great entropy advantage over the other. Should both Queens die, I doubt very much whether this world would long survive …”
“Oh, great, another problem,” Arhu said, rather bitterly. “And how can you be so calm about it?”
“Well, for one thing, it has already happened,” said Hardy mildly. “For another thing, you are the ones who will cause it not to happen … if indeed you do. How should I not be calm, when I know I am giving my advice to the right person?”
Arhu blinked and turned to Odin. “Can you translate that for me?” he said, rather helplessly.
Odin blinked too. “It made perfect sense to me,” he said. “Which part of it specifically did you need translated?”
Arhu hissed softly. “Never mind.”
“When I say ‘it has already happened’,” Hardy said, “I speak of the entire chain of events from first to last: from your arrival here to work on the gates, to your final departure. Not that I know the details of that: you will soon know them better than we ever could. But I think that, in this timeline, this universe, Queen Victoria has ‘not yet’ been assassinated. I would suspect that fact of being what has so far kept this timeline in place, and as yet largely undamaged … and it may also be that the difficulty you were experiencing with the oscillation of the far end of your colleague’s timeslide also has to do with the unusual stability, under the circumstances, of this one. You must complete whatever consultations you have planned with speed. And at all times, the Queens must be your great care. Whatever happens, protect them.”