“Luck, Fhrio,” Rhiow said, as she walked over to him. “Everything working satisfactorily?”
“Insofar as anything can be ‘satisfactory’ when it’s all ripped up like this,” Fhrio said, “yes.” For once he sounded merely tired rather than actively quarrelsome.
“You were up all night,” Rhiow said.
“Yes I was,” said Fhrio, and gave her a glance as if looking to see whether she was mocking him.
All Rhiow could do, hoping he wouldn’t misunderstand the gesture, was lower her head and bump his briefly. “I appreciate the effort,” she said: “we all do.” And she moved away before either of them would have a chance to be embarrassed.
She went over to the timeslide spell to have a look at her own name, checking the arabesques and curls of it in the graphic form of the Speech as it and the“personality” stratum to which it was attached wove in and out among the power-management routines and the “entasis” structures which controlled how tightly spacetime was bent back on itself. Everything looked all right, though she checked again just to be certain: she was not about to forget one spell some years ago, worked in haste by Urruah, which had been perfect in ninety-nine per cent of its detail, but in which he had changed the sign on one minor symbol. The spell would have worked all right, but Rhiow would have exited it pure white, blue-eyed, and possibly deaf. She had beenteasing Urruah aboutthatone for a long time, but—judging by the intent look on his face—today might not be the best time to do it.
Auhlae got up and came over to greet Rhiow: they breathed breaths for a moment.“Oh, Auhlae,” Rhiow said, “moresausages—I don’t know how you cope with all this rich food. I’d be the size of ahouffby now.”
Auhlae put her whiskers forward.“I control myself mostly,” she said, “but since things started to misbehave, my appetite’s been raging … and I confess I’ve been humoring it. I can always eat grass for a few days, later on …”
Arhu came over.“You satisfied with the way your name looks?” Rhiow said.
“It looks fine. At least, it looks the way it looks in our gate at home.”
“The way it did yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Always check it frequently. Lives change without warning: names change the same way.”
“Yeah.” He licked his nose. “Auhlae, is Siffha’h going to be here today?”
“No, Arhu, she’s off with Huff making an adjustment to one of the other gates,” Auhlae said. “Fhrio and I will be standing guard over this end of your timeslide while you’re downtime.” She craned her neck a little to look at it. “Does he do this often?” Auhlae said to Rhiow. “He’s very good at it.”
“He’s never done it before, to the best of my knowledge,” Rhiow said, glancing over that way too as Urruah sat down, apparently to take one last overview of the whole structure. T have a feeling he’s been waiting for the chance, though.” The intricacy and tightness of the spell-structure suggested to Rhiow that he had been working on this spell, or something like it, for a long time. There was no disputing its elegance: Urruah was an artist at this kind of thing. Unfortunately, there was also no disputing its dangerousness.It’s a good thing we finally have an excuse to do something like this,Rhiow thought.Otherwise who knows what he might have done some day…
Then she dismissed the thought. He might sometimes be impatient and reckless, by a queen’s standards anyway, but Urruah was a professional. He would not tamper with time unless and until the Powers sanctioned it …and then when he does,she thought, as Urruah looked up from the spell with an extremely self-satisfied expression,he’ll have the time of his life…
“Nice work, huh?” Urruah said, getting up.
“Beautiful as always,” Rhiow said. “Did you get your name right?”
He put one ear back, notquitehaving an excuse to comment.“Uh, yes, I checked.”
“That being the case,” she said, “hadn’t we better get going? You wouldn’t want to leave a spell like this just sitting around for long: it wants to work. Waste of energy, otherwise …”
Urruah grinned at her, then turned to Auhlae and Fhrio, who had finished checking the catenary and had strolled over to them.
“I’ve structured this so that, once we pass through, it’ll seal behind us,” Urruah said: “if this is some kind of trap, I don’t want whatever might be waiting on the other side jumping straight back down your throats. The spell will continue running on this side, though, as usual, whilesealed. Afterwards, say as soon as ten minutes after opening, there are three ways it can be activated. From this side, by either of you waking up this linkage—” he patted one outside-twining branch of the “hedge” with one paw—“which will make the slide bilaterally patent. You’ll be able to see through, or to pass through if you need to. You’ll see I’ve left a couple of stems unoccupied on the “personality” stratum for you to add names to. It can also be activated from our side by one of us pulling a “tripwire” strand of the spell which will extend back along the timeline trace—that’s in case we need an early return. Otherwise, it’s programmed to reopen to bilateral patency again in two hours: that’s as long as I prefer to stay, for a first ‘scouting’ visit.”
Auhlae and Fhrio both examined the linkages which Urruah had indicated.“All right,” Auhlae said, “that’s straightforward enough. If you’re not back in two hours—?”
“Intervention at that point will have to be your decision,” Urruah said. “Myself, I’d say wait an extra hour before letting anyone come after us. But you may decide against that … and if you do, I wouldn’t blame you. The slide will remain workable for a full sun’s day, in any case. If we don’t return by then—” He shrugged his tail. “Better check with the European Supervisory wizard for advice, because my guess is you’ll need to.”
Auhlae and Fhrio nodded.
“Then let’s do it,” Urruah said to Rhiow. She flicked her tail in agreement and leapt into the circle, found the spot which Urruah had marked out for her to occupy in lines of wizardly fire: behind her, Arhu jumped too, a little more clumsily, and found his spot.Nerves. Poor kitting …she thought: but Rhiow’s fur was not lying entirely smooth, either. She licked her nose, and tried to keep her composure in place.
Urruah jumped into the circle, dead onto his spot, as if he had been practicing for this for years. His whiskers were forward, his tail was straight up with confidence.Disgusting,Rhiow thought, and resisted the urge to lick her nose again.
Urruah reached out for one of the traceries of words and fire laced through the“hedge’, hooked it in both his front paws, and pulled it down to the spell’s activation point, standing on it.
The sensation came instantly: not of passage, as in a normal gating, but of being squeezed.Claudication is right,Rhiow thought, as a feeling of intolerable pressure settled in all around her, seeming to compress her from every direction at once. It was as if giant paws were trying to press her right out of existence. And perhaps they were.This existence, anyway—
She could not swallow, or breathe, or lick her nose, or move any part of her in the slightest. The world reduced itself to that terrible pressure—
—which suddenly was gone, and she fell down.
Into the mud—
Rhiow struggled to her feet, opened her eyes enough to register that they were in some kind of street: buildings stood up on either side. Off to one side, Arhu was pulling himself to his feet as well. Beside her, Urruah was standing up, and swearing.
“What?” Rhiow said, “what’s the matter?”
“Is your nose broken?” he said. “Sweet Dam of Everything, this smells like sa’Rrahh’s own litterbox. Themud!”
Rhiow’s face was trying to contort itself right out of shape at the smelclass="underline" she could only agree. The street was at least four inches deep in a thick black mud that, to judge by the smell, was mostly horse dung: but there was rotten straw in it too, and soot, and garbage of every kind, and a smell thatsuggested theehhif’ssewers had discovered a way to back up so thoroughly that they ran uphill. The air was not much better. It was brown, a brown such as Rhiow had not seen since she last visited Los Angeles during a smog alert: but this was far, far worse—the concentrated, inversion-confined smoke from ten thousand chimneys, most of them burning coal. You could see this air in the street with you: it billowed faintly, like smoke from a burning building in the next block. But nothing was burning—or rather,everythingwas: wood, coal, coke, trash…