“That sounds like a good idea,” Rhiow said. “Would he be available today, do you think?”
“More than likely. Probably your best bet is simply to go out there and meet with him.”
“All right. What’s his name?”
“Humphrey.”
Rhiow blinked.“That’s not a Person’s name …”
“It is now,” Huff said, amused. “Wait till you meet him.”
“Meanwhile, I think the rest of us will be minding the other gates,” Fhrio said, “and watching to see if they start betraying any sign of instability. If they start acting up, we’ll know we have less time to deal with our troubles than we thought.”
Rhiow nodded.“And as for the rest of it,” she said, “we’ll meet again when it’s dark, and see who’s best sharpened their claws on the problem before us.”
The others agreed, then got up and shook themselves, preparatory to heading off in their various directions.
“Now look at this,” Arhu said, crouched down again, and oblivious. “ ‘Princess Christiana of Schleswig-Holstein visited His Majesty and remained to lunch—’ ”
Urruah looked up.“Does it say what they had?” he said, coming to gaze at the paper over Arhu’s shoulder.
Rhiow glanced over at Huff and wandered over to him.“You look tired,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m well enough,” he said. “Rhiow, we’re all too old for this! Except forthem—”and he indicated Arhu, and off on the other side of the room, already heading for the back door, Siffha’h. “But no matter … we’ll cope.” He sighed, looked at her, as Auhlae came wandering over and laid her tail gently over his back. “It’s just hard, sometimes, discovering that after a long period of steady and not terribly dangerous work, your reward for getting it right is that you get to save the universe …” His look was dry.
“It’s always dangerous to demonstrate talent,” Auhlae said. “Least of all to Them. But that’s our job: we accepted it when it was offered us .…and what can we do now?”
“Do it the best we can,” Rhiow said. “There’s nothing else.” She rubbed cheeks with Huff, when he offered, and did the same, a little more tentatively, with Auhlae. The two of them headed off toward the front of the pub: and Rhiow made her way out toward the back, and the cat-door, thinking thoughts of quiet desperation … but determined not to give in to them.
Half an hour or so later, Rhiow was padding down a street in one of the northern suburbs of London, looking for a specific house in one small street. She had a description of the house, and a name for a Person: or rather, that peculiarehhifnickname which Huff had given her. According to the Knowledge, the nickname (bizarrely) came from anehhif television show, and was a reference to an astute but extremely twisty-minded politician. Rhiow was uncertain whether any Person, no matter how jovial, would really want to be called by such a name.
She found the house, at last. It was actually bumped sideways into another house, in a configuration which theehhifhere called“semidetached.” There was a narrow wall of decorative concrete blocks about four feet high separating the two houses’ front yards and driveways. Rhiow jumped up onto this and made her way back to where it met another wall, taller, one which divided the houses’ two back gardens from one another. This was actually less a wall than a series of screens of interwoven wood, fastened end to end. Rhiow jumped up onto the nearest of them and paced along it and the subsequent screens carefully, looking down on the left-hand side, as she had been instructed.
The right-hand garden was less a garden than a tangle of weeds and rosebushes run amuck. The left-hand one, though, had a lawn with stepping-stones in it, and carefully trimmed shrubs, and small trees making a shady place down at the far end. There was a birdbath standing in the shade, but no bird was fool enough to use it: for lying near the birdbath, upside down in the sun, was a black-and-white Person with long fluffy fur.
Rhiow paused there for a moment looking at him as he dozed, wondering how to proceed. From a tree nearby, a small bird appeared, perched on a nearby branch, and began yelling,“Cat! Cat! Cat!’ at Rhiow.
She rolled her eyes. One of the great annoyances associated with becoming a wizard was, oddly, identical with one of its great joys: learning enough of the Speech to readily understand the creatures around her. It was very hard to eat, with a clean conscience, anything you could talk to and get an intelligible answer back.“In your case, though,” she said to the small bird, “I’m willing to make an exception …”
Except that she wasn’t, really. Rhiow sighed and turned her attention away from the bird, to find that the black-and-white Person’s eyes had opened, at least partially, and he was looking at her, upside down.
“Hunt’s luck to you!’ she said. “I’m on errantry, and I greet you.”
He looked at her curiously, and rolled over so that he was right side up again.“You’re a long way from home, by your accent,” he said. “Come on down, make yourself comfortable.”
Rhiow jumped down form the wall and walked over to the respectable-looking Person, breathed breaths with him, and then said,“Please forgive me: I don’t know quite what to call you …”
“Which means you know the nickname,” he said, and put his whiskers forward. “Go ahead and use it: everyone else does, at this point, and there’s no real point in me trying to avoid it.”
“Hhuhm’hri, then. I’m Rhiow.”
“Hunt’s luck to you, Rhiow, and welcome to London. What brings you all this way?”
She sat down and explained, trying to keep the explanation brief and non-technical. But Hhuhm’hri was nodding a long time before she finished, and Rhiow realized that this was one of the more acute People she had met in a while, with a quick and deep grasp of issues for all his slightly ditzy, wide-eyed looks.
“Well, that’s certainly adifferentsort of problem,” Hhuhm’hri said. “At first I’d thought perhaps you were one of the People who’s just been added to the standing committee on rat control.”
Rhiow restrained herself from laughing.“No, the problem’s a little different from that …”
“Certainly a little more interesting. I must say I wouldn’t want our timeline to be wiped out, either, so I’m at your disposal. Though I must admit that the temptation to alter just one piece here or there, with an eye to improving things, must be very strong …”
“By and large it doesn’t work,” Rhiow said. “There are conservation laws for history as well as for energy. Remove one pivotal event without due consideration, and another is likely to slip in to take its place—often one that’s worse than the one you were trying to prevent.”
“Conservation of history …” Hhuhm’hri mused for a moment. “That’s the only odd thing about this, to me: if such a principle exists, why isn’t it protecting you in this case?”
“Because of the nature of the Power which has intervened to cause the change,” Rhiow said. “Mostly time heals itself over without a scar if the change is small, or made by a mortal. But when the Powers that Be become directly involved … and in this case, one of the oldest and greatest of them—the fabric of time is entirely too amenable to Their will. It’s unavoidable: Theybuilttime, after all …”
Hhuhm’hri blinked. “Yes,” he said. And then he added, “You’ll forgive me a second’s skepticism, I hope. One doesn’t often expect to run into one of Them, or Their direct deeds, in the normal course of the business day.”
“Of course,” Rhiow said, at the same time thinking that, from the wizard’s point of view, that was all anyoneeverran into: but this was not the moment for abstract philosophy.