“Look at this name that keeps popping up,” Huff said after a moment. “In a few places. Different forms—but it’s the same personality that’s meant. The ‘Bright Serpent’.”
“It’s not the ‘Old Serpent’, though,” Auhlae said, looking curiously down the length of the spell. “That would be written differently, wouldn’t it.”
“Yes,” said Huff. “And here, the ‘Great Shining Lizard’. And another name still. ‘Sebek’.”
“ ‘The one who binds together’?” Auhlae said. “Would that be it?”
“I think so.” Huff sat down to look at it a little more closely. “Well, it’s interesting, but as spells go it’s long on nouns and short on verbs. Or more specific routines like power-expenditure instructions …”
“Power,” Rhiow said, “yes …” She glanced back over toward the timeslide. Siffha’h had stood up just long enough to drag herself out of the pattern, while Urruah was starting work on it: then she had flopped down again, and was lying on her side. “Is she all right?”
“Oh, I think so.” Auhlae looked over her shoulder.
“I’ll check,” Huff said, and got up to head over that way.
“I just … Don’t think I’m trying to intrude, please, but I worry about her a little,” Rhiow said. “She seems to push herself very hard.”
“Yes,” Auhlae said, “she does.” She sighed. “She came to us very young. Just after her Ordeal, it was. She never said much about the details: well, as you know, that’s not information one asks about—it’s offered, or not, the way you would treat the question of how many lives along someone is. Finally she decided she wanted to work with us, and she settled in. But she was always …” Auhlae broke off for a moment, thinking, her tail twitching. Then she said, “There was always a sense that there was something still unfinished, Ordeal or not. Something she was still looking for … and it drove her. It drives her still … and all this unfocused energy of hers jumps out and ‘bites’ people, sometimes. Or makes her bite them herself …”
Rhiow sighed. “The ‘unfinished business’ theme turns up often enough,” she said. “It happened to me, for example.”
“And did you find what you were looking for?”
“I think so,” Rhiow said, “though, Auhlae, to tell you the truth, sometimes even when you have what you were looking for, you can get confused because it doesn’t look anything like the images you got yourself used to when you were still looking.” She put her whiskers forward. “Well, that’s another day’s problem … we have enough of our own at the moment.”
“You’re right there, cousin,” Auhlae said, and sighed once more. “Let me go see if the child needs anything. She tends to give off her power in these big bursts, and then needs a lot of time to recuperate. I keep telling her she should pace herself, but does she listen … ?”
“I know the problem,” Rhiow said.
Auhlae went off to tend to Siffha’h, and Rhiow stood up and had a good stretch and went to the young ehhif: Arhu came along behind her, and behind him, Urruah. “Are you all right, Artie?” Rhiow said.
“I’m rather hungry,” he said, very woefully. “I was on my way to get a bun for lunch when I saw you.”
“Well, I’ll get you something,” Rhiow said.
“Where?” Arhu said. “You’re going to have to steal.”
“No. Well, not exactly.” Rhiow sighed. “Artie, would you like a sandwich?”
“A what?”
“Never mind,” Rhiow said. “Do you like cheese?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get you a pizza.”
“From where?” Arhu said.
“Hey, bring me one too,” Urruah said.
Rhiow gave him a look. “Get your own pizza. I have enough problems. Are you and Fhrio in agreement about the timeslide?”
“He’s looking at it for the moment,” Urruah said. “The idea of him catching something in the spelling that I missed seems to appeal to him.”
She put her whiskers forward at him. “Now who says you’re all good looks and no brain?” she said. “I’ll be back in a little.”
Rhiow trotted over to where Auhlae was lying by Siffha’h. “Auhlae, where’s one of the gates that is functioning? I need to run an errand.”
“Back up the stairs the way we came,” Auhlae said, “down the hallway and turn left to the access for the northbound Circle Line train. It’s down off the left-hand end of the platform.”
“Great. Right back,” said Rhiow.
Sidled, she followed Auhlae’s instructions and made her way up to the Circle Line platform, past the unnoticing travelers waiting for the Tube train, and down the stairs at the very end of the platform. The gate’s tracery was very visible: some other wizard passing through had just used it, she saw from the status-and-log weft, for a transit to Vladivostok via Chur. She reached into the control weave, got her claws into the spatial location webbing, and wove its hyperstrings together until they matched the string-coordinate qualities of the roof of her apartment building.
Normally Rhiow preferred not to do gatings of this kind: they were wasteful of energy, when you could walk. But at the moment, walking was out of the question, and everything seemed to be happening at once, and she couldn’t spare the time. Rhiow pulled the control weave taut, watching as the scene within its oval boundaries snapped into place. Gray gravel, ventilators sticking up…
Rhiow locked the gate coordinates in place, set it for selective nonpatency except for her own return, and jumped through: came down on the gravel. Hurriedly she sidled, then trotted over to the square shape which was the outlet for the building’s fire stairs. The door was locked from the inside.
She walked through it, feeding the atoms of her body past the atoms of the door, and ran down the stairs a couple of flights: then walked through a second door, the one which led to the hallway where her apartment’s front door was. Rhiow galloped down the hall, and walked through one last door, her own.
There was no sign of Iaehh, which was just as well. Rhiow ran over to the refrigerator, did a very small-scale skywalk up to the handle of the freezer, and put one paw through it, pulling hard. No good. She sat up on her haunches, put both forefeet through, and pulled again. This time the freezer door came open, almost knocking her down. She ducked sideways out of the reach of the swinging door and looked inside. Thank you, Iau, she thought, for there were about five pizzas stacked up in there. Hmm. Pepperoni … not for a first-timer. Meatball … no. Pieces might fall off in transit. Plain with extra cheese…
Her mouth was watering as she levitated the pizza out of the freezer down onto the counter. It’s been too long since I had pizza, Rhiow thought; but the hunger in Artie’s eyes suggested to Rhiow that it was going to be a while longer. She first did a small wizardry which would release the catch of the microwave oven and push the door back: then, while that was working, she spoke to the coefficient of friction at the end of the pizza box where the glue was, then levitated the box up on its side and shook. The pizza slid neatly out onto the rotating tray in the oven.
Rhiow ran her wizardry backwards and shut the microwave door: then jumped down to the counter and stared at the controls. You have to be a rocket scientist to run these things, she thought, annoyed, trying to work out which control pad to push. Finally she succeeded in programming in five minutes’ run on “high”, and started the microwave going: then took a moment to take the empty pizza box and push it down into a briefly opened pocket in spacetime, off in a corner of the kitchen. She would empty the pocket out and get rid of the box later.
The air started to fill with a very appetizing smell indeed. Rhiow’s mouth watered more earnestly. The only bad thing about this, she thought, is that he’s going to notice it’s gone. I think. Iaehh could be slightly vague about the contents of the freezer: he and Hhuha had had some pretty heated discussions on the subject. Either way … I’m going to have to replace it with one of the same kind as soon as I can. One more thing to think about…