“You seem to know more about timeslide theory than the rest of us,” Huff said to Urruah. “Do you have any sense of how much time we might have to work in, at this end of things, before that other reality starts to supersede ours?”
“Maybe as long as a month … but I wouldn’t care to bet on it,” Urruah said. “My guess would be more like days … at least, I think it’d be safest to play it that way.”
“But, but it’s just dumb!’ Siffha’h burst out. “The Powers wouldn’t just let an entire reality be wiped out! They’d send some kind of help!”
“They did,” Rhiow said. “They sent us.”
Siffha’h opened her mouth and shut it again. “But if we can’t do anything about it, They’ll help: They have to—”
“Do they?” Huff said. “Where does it say that in the Whispering? Listen hard.”
She did … and her mouth dropped open one more time.
“You need to understand it,” Rhiow said. “We are all the help there is.The seven of us are, apparently, the best answer which the Powers that Be can offer up to this particular problem. If we fail, we fail, and our timeline fails with us. It would be nice to assume that if something goes wrong, one of the Powers will drop down out of the depths of reality to pull us up out of trouble by the tail. But such things don’t normally happen: the Powers have too little power to waste. There is nothing particularly special about our timeline, except to us, because we live in it: it has no particular primacy among the millions or billions of others. For all we know, other timelines have been wiped out because of suchattacks, and because their native wizards couldn’t act correctly to save them. Myself, I wouldn’t much care to ask the Whisperer about that at the moment: the answer might depress me. Let’s just assume we must do the job ourselves, and get it right. Huff … ?”
He thumped his tail once or twice on the floor in disturbed agreement.“There’s nothing I can add to that.”
For a few moments everyone looked in every possible direction but at each other, unnerved. Then Arhu sat upright and stared toward the front room of the pub.“Oh, no, here he comes—”
Rhiow looked around to see what he was talking about: but no one but their own two groups was anywhere near them.“What?” she said.
“I see him a few minutes ago,” Arhu said, sounding slightly put out. “I was hoping he might change his mind, or the seeing might turn out to be inaccurate … but no such luck. Get sidled—”
They all did but Huff, who looked curiously at Arhu, then turned his head, distracted. A youngehhifwas heading over toward the fruit machines. He was one of a type which seemed common in that part of the City, a suit-and-tie sort with a loud voice and his tie thrown over his shoulder. As he came, he was suddenly distracted by the presence on the floor of a sheet of paper …The Times.He bent down to pick it up.
“Oh, for Iau’s sake,” Arhu growled, and put one invisible paw down on the paper. Rhiow watched with interest as theehhiffailed to get the paper to come up off the floor: tried to pick it up again, and failed, and failed again. He got really frustrated about it, trying to get even just a fingernail under one of the newspaper’s corners and peel it up, and failed at that as well, managing only to break a couple of nails. Theehhifstraightened up again and walked off swearing softly to himself.
“Nice one,” Auhlae said. “How’d you do that?”
“Made it heavy for a moment, that’s all,” Arhu said. “It was part of a tree once, after all. I just suggested that it was actually thewholetree.” He put his whiskers forward. “Paper fantasizes pretty well.”
“You’d better make it invisible as well,” Huff said mildly: “he’ll be back here with myehhif in a moment. I know what that kind gets like when they’re confused, or balked.”
Arhu shrugged his tail. A moment later, when Huff’s tall dark-hairedehhifcame back, there was no paper there, or seemed to be none, and only Huff, lying at his ease and finishing his wash. Huff’sehhiftook one look at the floor, and saw nothing there but his cat lying there and looking at him with big innocent green eyes. Huff blinked, then threw his rear right leg over his shoulder and began to wash. Hisehhifraised his eyebrows, and headed back to the bar.
Huff finished the second bit of washing, which had been purely for effect, and glanced over at Arhu.“Does that happen to you often?” Huff said.
“You mean, seeing? Once a day or so … sometimes more. I wish it was always about important things,” Arhu said, looking rather annoyed, “but usually it’s not. Or I can’t tell if they’re important, anyway, till they happen. The trouble is, they all feel important … until it turns out they’re not.”
“How very appropriate,” Siffha’h murmured, and looked away.
Arhu gave her a look that had precious little lovesickness about it: it smelled more of claws in someone’s ears. He opened his mouth, probably to emit something unforgivable, and Rhiow, concerned, opened her mouth to interrupt him: but at the same moment, Huff said, “Arhu, have you thought of going to see the Ravens?”
“Who?”
The Ravens over at the Tower. They have a problem rather similar to yours.”
“Are they wizards?” Rhiow said, curious.
“No,” Huff said, “but they have abilities of their own which are related to wizardry, though I’d be lying if I said I understood the details. They are visionaries of a kind … though I wouldn’t know if they describe the talent to themselves in precisely those terms. In any case, the fewtimes I’ve talked to them, they’ve sounded very like Arhu. Rather confused about their tenses.” He put his whiskers forward to show he didn’t mean the remark to be insulting. “They might be of use to you … or to us, possibly, with this problem.”
Arhu looked thoughtful.“OK,” he said. “It can’t hurt.”
“No, I would think not. Now, Urruah will be working on resetting his timeslide, recalibrating it—”
“It’ll take me a day or so,” Urruah said. “I want to explore as many of the possibilities as I can, as many of the universes in the ‘sheaf’, when we do our next run.”
“And meanwhile there are a couple of other things we’re going to need to find out,” Rhiow said. “First, if there’s any way to manage it at all, we must find the original contaminating event or events. If it happened using your gates, the logs may give us some hints … if we can ever getthem to yield that data, which Urruah hasn’t yet been able to do. If we can’t find evidence from the gates, then we’re going to have to go back to that alternate time again, much as I dislike the prospect, and search for information there. The other thing we must discover is the nature of this attack on theehhifQueen,Victoria—” Rhiow went out of her way to try to get her pronunciation as close to theehhifword as she could—“and also discover whether this great change in the past-world we saw would have happened anyway, or has something specific to do with her death or life.”
“It very well could,” Auhlae said. “She was a tremendous power in her time, though she had very little direct power—compared to some of the pride-leaders who went before her, anyway. Certainly they would have gone to war had she been assassinated, and if they were able to prove that some other pride they knew of had been involved. There was fierce rivalry between them for a long time: the shadows of it remain, though most of theehhifpowers in Europe are supposed to be working together now …”
“Huff,” Rhiow said, “how much do you know aboutehhif history of that time? The eighteen seventies, say?”
“Very little,” he said. “It’s hardly my speciality: like most of us, if I need to know something I go to the Whispering.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “But you know,” he said, “there are People for whom itisa speciality. And they don’t live far from here. In fact, there’s one in particular who’s famous for it. He used to live at Whitehall, but now he’s out in the suburbs. You should go to see him. I’ll show you the coordinates, and you can lay them into one of the other gates.”