“Is that a seeing?” Urruah said.
“No, it’s common sense,” Arhu snapped, “which seems to be in short supply around here at the moment.” He threw Siffha’h another annoyed look.
“Anyway,”Urruah said loudly,“at the moment, there is a problem with the idea of stopping the book transfer. It is that we don’t yet have a definite timing or a proper set of coordinates for that transit, even with what Odin was able to show Arhu. Until we can get a timing, we can’t stop the book getting back into the Victorian era: and it will take some time and work yet for us to generate a timing that we can use … even an educated guess at one. So for the time being we should concentrate on what we presentlydohave a chance to stop, which is the assassination.”
“How closehaveyou been able to get to that timing?” Huff said.
Urruah glanced over at Auhlae.“Eighteen sixteen,” Auhlae said. “That’s when the Whisperer says the volcano happened. It produced something called ‘The Year Without a Summer’.” The usual kind of thing: the volcano spat out a lot of high-altitude ash that produced unusually rapid cooling of the atmosphere. There were places in northern Europe where it snowed in June and July, that year. Harvests failed everywhere.”
“If there was a perfect time to drop a book full of information on high technology into the pre-Victorian culture,” Huff said, “I’d say that would have been it. The scientifically-orientedehhifwould have tried everything in it that they then had the materials technology for, with an eye to solving their problem … and then, when it eventually passed, they would swiftly have started constructing everything else they could, from the ‘instructions’.” He sighed. “I could wish they hadn’t been half so clever …”
Rhiow was in agreement with him about that.“Arhu, as regards the timing of the book’s arrival … could you do anything more with the ravens, do you think?”
Arhu lashed his tail“no”. “Rhiow, one of the things I gathered from Odin was that they can’t spend that much time during a given period in any one timeline or alternate universe. They’re messengers, all right, but they have to do their work at high speed specificallybecausethey do so much out-of-timeline work. Other universes spit them out like a mouse’s gallbladder if they try to stay away from “home” too long.”
She nodded.“What about vision?”
“Theirs is a little more predictable than mine,” Arhu said, “but it’s so different …” He shrugged his tail. “I’ll go and ask them tomorrow, but I wouldn’t bet on them being able to help us that much more.”
Rhiow waved her tail in agreement, though reluctantly. She was still bemused by the ravens’ version of vision, and wondered exactly how they were getting it. Wizards and wizardry talent among birdkind tended to vest in the predators, for some reason: possibly because they were the top of their local food chains … or possibly it was something to do with their level of intelligence. This was not something about which Rhiow had ever queried the Whisperer. She had been bemused enough, when she first became a wizard, to find that there were wizards among thehouifftoo, and that some of them could be as sagacious as any feline. Afterwards she stopped wondering why wizardry turned up in one species or another, and simply saidDai stih?to another wizard when she met one, whether it had wings, or fins, or two legs or four. Now, though, she started to wonder why she had never heard of raven-wizards.Or is it that I just never went looking that hard for the information? There’s so much to know, and so little time…
Never mind.“All right,” she said to Huff. “At least we now have a much better idea of the exact time of the assassination. We have to narrow it down further still, though.”
Huff nodded.“Urruah,” he said, “that’s one of the other time-coordinates you’re going to be trying to access when you use the timeslide next?”
“Absolutely. But there are a few other things we need to look into as well,” Urruah said. “Like the small matter of the logs on the nonfunctioning gate.”
Fhrio looked at Urruah sharply.“What’s the matter with them?”
“They’re not the way they were when we disconnected the gate from the catenary,” Urruah said. The coordinates for the Illingworth access have been changed, and I don’t know how, or why. Any ideas?”
Fhrio stared at Urruah as if he was out of his mind.“They can’t change. You’re crazy.”
Urruah glanced over at Huff: Huff looked back at him, bemused.“All right then,” Urruah said, “I’m crazy.” Rhiow looked with great care at his tail. It was quite still. She licked her nose, twice, very fast. “But I think you should lock that gate in a stasis, Huff, and make sure no one gets at it again. If it can manage to alter itself again while it’s got a stasis on it, then obviously no cause basedhereis at fault.”
Huff stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up and said,“I’ll take care of it. Rhiow—”
She looked over at him.“Our next move?” Huff said.
She was not used to being so obviously deferred to: it made her a little uncomfortable. After a moment’s pause, she said, “Overall, I think at the moment that I have to agree with Fhrio. While I agree it’s important to make sure that our home-timeline’s Victoria is safe, the other one is in greater danger at the moment … or so it seems to me … and her assassination is what seems likeliest to trigger the derangement of our own timeline. I think we must therefore try to get into the ‘altered eighteen seventy-four’ timeline as quickly as we can: tomorrow, I think, since a lot of us are short on sleep at the moment. We’ll try to find out exactly when the assassination was, andfind out what we need to do to stop it. After that we can worry about the book, and last of all, about the stranded pastlings in our own time. Huff?”
He put his ears forward in agreement.“That makes sense to me. Let’s do so.”
“I am going to fuel Urruah’s timeslide tomorrow,” Siffha’h said, as if expecting an argument.
“Fine,” said Huff. “Urruah had some questions about the catenary’s behavior as a power source: this will resolve them. Auhlae and I will be doing general gate duty tomorrow, but we’ll be on call if something else comes up. When should we all meet?”
“About this time?” Urruah said.
“Good enough.”
The group broke up. Fhrio threw a very annoyed look at Urruah as he went out, and Urruah sat down and started washing, while the others, glancing at him, left.
Rhiow touched cheeks with Auhlae and Huff as they went out, then sat down by Urruah while he scrubbed his face.“Well, you seem to have managed to attract a lot of someone’s annoyance today,” she said softly, when the others, except for Arhu, were gone. “What was all that about?”
“Well, I spent a late night working with Auhlae a couple of nights ago,” Urruah said, “and he seems to have taken issue with that.”
“Fhrio? What business is that of his?”
“I’m not sure.”
Rhiow sighed.“It doesn’t take much to get him going in any case,” she said. “Probably it means nothing. Are you all right, though?”
“Oh, I’m fine. It’s just that—” He shrugged his tail, started washing his ears.Rhi, usually there’s a certain level of good humor about these joint jobs. It seems to be missing in this one.
It’s the level of stress, I’d imagine,Rhiow said.This is not your usual“joint job”.
“No,” he said, “I suppose not.” He stopped washing, and sighed, putting his ears forward as Huff came back in. “Huff,” he said, “do you want any help with that stasis?”
“No,” Huff said, “I’ll manage it.” He sat down and looked around him a little disconsolately.
“All right then,” Urruah said. “Rhi, I’ll see you in the morning. Go well, Huff—” He headed out toward the cat-door in the back of the pub.
Rhiow looked at Huff for a moment, then got up and went to sit by him.“Are you all right?” she said.