The oven dinged. Rhiow ran her wizardry again, forward this time, and levitated the pizza out into the air again. It was tricky: the thing was no longer solid, but kept trying to flop over in one direction or another.
Rhiow stood there for a moment considering her options. She might be sidled, but the pizza could not be, not while she was handling it either directly or with a wizardry. She was not going to walk back down the apartment’s hall, invisible, with a visible pizza floating along behind her. Logistics … she thought.
Oh vhai. She walked through the air over to the glass doors that opened on the terrace, the pizza trailing along obediently behind her, and straight out into the air to one side of the apartment. Let the neighbors think they saw a levitating pizza, she thought rebelliously … If any of them are even looking. With the pizza in tow, Rhiow skywalked up to the roof of the building, and back through the worldgate, which she shut down behind her and left in standby configuration.
That only left the Tube station to deal with. Rhiow went down the stairs, then hung an immediate left and walked straight through the wall, trying to keep the directions back to the abandoned platform straight in her head. She took a few false turns, but finally found where she wanted to be: and had the satisfaction of seeing young Artie’s mouth drop open as she walked straight through a wall not far from him, the pizza floating along behind her.
She put it carefully down on the floor. “It’s fairly clean here,” she said: “sorry I couldn’t bring a plate. Here, just pull it apart with your hands. Watch out, it’s still hot.”
Artie pulled his first slice off, bit it tentatively: finished it immediately and pulled off another. “Good,” Rhiow said, and went over to Urruah, who was lying nearby. “Now then. What’s next?”
He looked at the pizza.
“Don’t even think about it,” Rhiow said. “I went to a lot of trouble over that. How’s he doing?” She glanced over toward Fhrio and the timeslide.
“How would I know? I’ll wait until he tells me. He might genuinely be in the middle of something I don’t want to disturb.” Or I might just not want to get my head bitten off.
Rhiow put one ear forward and one back, a wry expression. “Is Siffha’h all right, did Auhlae say?”
“Recovering,” Urruah said. “She’s just exhausted after doing two big power feeds close together—and apparently the fact that something knocked us ‘sideways’ affected her too: she tried to force us through anyway, and so she took the brunt of what hit us.” His tail thumped on the concrete. “She tries real hard. It’s not like she has to prove anything to anyone …”
“I know,” Rhiow said. “If she only—”
“What’s that?” Siffha’h said suddenly from the other side of the platform, pushing herself up again. “Something’s coming—”
Everyone looked up in alarm. Mostly they did it just in time to see the air in the middle of the platform stretch and sheen like pulled plastic wrap, then peel apart.
A dinosaur stepped out.
A casual viewer could have been forgiven for mistaking it for a dinosaur, at any rate. It stood about six feet high at the shoulder, and its long neck arched up another couple of feet to terminate in a long, lean, toothy muzzle: a pair of well-made and delicate forelegs with six claws each were folded decorously in front of the creature’s chest. It stood mostly upright on its long-clawed hind legs, and a tail about five feet long lashed out behind it, helping it keep its balance. The shadowy lighting down here did not show off to best advantage the subtly patterned hide patched in red and orange: but somehow the small golden eye found the light, and kept it.
The London team stared at this apparition in astonishment: the saurian bowed to them gracefully, bobbing forward and back. “I am on errantry,” it said in a soft hissing voice, “and I greet you.”
“You’re well met on the errand,” Huff said, still very wide-eyed. “Rhiow, is this the help you said you were sending for?”
“Indeed so. Ith, let me make you known to the London team.”
She strolled over and took him around, making the introductions. Huff and Auhlae recovered their composure quickly: Fhrio, caught in the middle of doing something technical to the timeslide, simply stood for some moments with his mouth hanging open. Siffha’h gazed at Ith too, and spoke to him politely enough when introduced, but Rhiow couldn’t help noticing her expression … a peculiar look of half-recognition, as if she had seen him before sometime, but couldn’t place where.
Finally she brought Ith over to Artie. “And this is our ‘pet’ ehhif,” Rhiow said, with some amusement. “Artie, this is Ith.”
“Oh, rather,” said Artie, very impressed indeed. “Are you a Thunder Lizard?”
Ith dropped his lower jaw and flickered his long blunt tongue slightly in what Rhiow had come to recognize as a smile. “I have not thundered at anything very recently,” he said, “but in the past I have occasionally done so.”
He crouched down on his back legs next to Arhu, who leaned against him companionably. “Your summons was opportune,” Ith said to Rhiow, “for I was thinking of coming to see you anyway. The master gate matrices in the Old Downside, the ones which service Grand Central and many other gating complexes have been showing signs of strain, these last few days. Gatings have not been progressing as they normally do.”
“It’s not just strain,” Arhu said. “Let me show you—”
For a few seconds they were silent together. It was not vision, Rhiow thought, but rather something to do with their old history together: they had been in one another’s minds in extremely harrowing circumstances, involving their jointly completed Ordeals, and there were times when the communication between them seemed so complete and effortless that Rhiow wondered whether some kind of permanent connection between them had been wrought by the anguish and triumph they’d shared.
Ith looked up, then, and said, “You have been having a busy time.” He clenched his claws together, interlacing them. “And now this business of the Longest Winter. Very interesting indeed.”
He looked up over at the London team. “That was what killed my people in the ancient days,” he said to Huff. “The Lone One, the Old Serpent, brought that fate down on us when we made our first Choice as a species. It said if we accepted Its gift, we would rule the Earth so long as the Sun shone on it. And so we did: until the blow fell burning from the sky, and the dust and the smoke of its impact rose up and hid the sun. It killed all my ancestors except the very few who, by accident or by grace of the Powers, managed to find their way into the Old Downside and take refuge in the caves there, down where the catenaries spring up from their ultimate power source. There we lived for ages, and there the Lone One ruled us, saying that someday It would lead us up into the Sun again, and we would conquer all the puny creatures that lived there and take the Earth for our own once more.” He smiled, showing most of his teeth. “Well, they conquered us instead, to our great good: and my people lost their old false Father, and gained a new one. Mostly due to my brother, my father here.” He glanced down at Arhu. Arhu looked away, and purred.