The Big Meow

From his point of view, its cover simply melted away, leaving Arhu looking at the top page of the contents. The page was covered with fuzzy black markings that it took Rhiow a moment to recognize as rubbings of some kind. This page had been laid down on some carved surface and rubbed with some soft dark substance, leaving a positive print.

Rhiow squinted at them a little. The designs that covered the page were almost all squarish, each one a little different from the others. There were strong-featured ehhif faces adorned with feathery headdresses, as well as birds and animals crammed into the square shapes: even a few that were feline – big-cat faces, perhaps pumas. All the rest of the designs on the top rubbing were round shapes, intricately carved with smaller designs she had trouble making out. “These are all from the central part of this continent, aren’t they?” Rhiow said. “The part that’s south of here.”

“Mayan,” Helen said immediately, leaning forward to look at them more closely. “Yet with some Azteca features. Strange: those two cultures were pretty clearly separated from one another in time – it’s odd to see the symbologies combined. Arhu?”

“The next one?” he said. Arhu’s view shifted to the page underneath the first. It was similar to the one on top: densely packed symbols, pretty clearly transferred to the paper. But there were spots on this sheet where the images underneath hadn’t transferred correctly to the rubbings. “Some missing stuff here…” Aufwi said.

Rhiow was looking narrowly at the images, waiting to see what the the Whisperer would make of them. In her mind they slowly gained context. “Numbers,” she said. “This is… some kind of calendar?”

“Not so much that,” Arhu said, “as a date book… I think. A schedule for things to happen.”

“Or of when things are supposed to happen,” Siffha’h said.

“They were great ones for calendars,” said Helen, “both of those peoples. But seeing their two writings together like this – “ She shook her head. “Next page?”

Arhu’s view of the contents of the folder shifted, shifted again. There was another page of pictures-that-were-dates, just a list of them as far as Rhiow could tell. Here, too, there were some gaps in the data. Rhiow blinked as she looked at them, for she kept getting the impression that other nearby characters were moving a little, trying to squirm out of their own boundaries and squeeze their way into the gaps. “It’s strange,” she said. “Is anyone else seeing these moving?”

Though she couldn’t see him while looking through Arhu’s Eye, Rhiow could feel Urruah tilting his head to one side, gazing at the page. “I am,” he said, “and I don’t like it.”

There was no question in Rhiow’s mind that there was something faintly unwholesome about the way the images on the pages were behaving. “And it’s worse,” Hwaith said, “because just when you think you’ve caught them doing it, that they’re actually about to slide over into the next gap, that then they hold still.”

“Like they know you’re watching,” Auwfi said under his breath.

“The next page?” Rhiow said.

The view shifted. The second-to-last rubbing in the folder was not of more of the squarish ideographs. It was a single image that was so tangled that Rhiow at first had trouble sorting out what was going on in it. But finally she could make out two figures. One was a gigantic serpent with wings, wearing a peculiar headdress. It was wrapped around another similarly adorned animal figure that struggled and slashed with huge taloned paws. Its ears were small and rounded, the muzzle blunt and wrinkled, exposing terrible fangs: behind it a long sinuous tail lashed in rage.

This time all the fur on Rhiow’s back that hadn’t stood up on sight of the charm-effect finished the job. “Now here,” Rhiow said softly, “I think we’re on familiar ground.”

“It looks like this was from a different source than the first few pages,” Helen said. She peered at the image. “Maybe from a later period than the first few. But the Feathered Serpent is known all through the Mesoamerican cultures. Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl, the Nine-Wind God: he has so many names.”

“One of the Powers that Be — ” Aufwi said.