The Big Meow

Her eyes met his in the dark, widening in realization. And down at the end of the cavern, the door opened and ehhif started filing in.

Swiftly and silently Rhiow and Hwaith fled for the walls, staying in the shadows. Those writhed and darkened now in the light of the tall torches some of the ehhif were bearing in with them. In and in they came, making for the circle of stones, the line of approaching ehhif parting around it as they came near: one to the left, the next to the right, left, right… They were all dressed in long dark blood-colored garments, and the embroidery on these caught the torchlight here and there with brief glints of gold and silver as the ehhif moved to surround the rings of stones.

Robes, Urruah said softly. They’re wearing robes with ‘arcane’ symbols on them. Do you believe this?

You were the one who was wanting this situation to get more filmic! Rhiow said. But I wouldn’t mock. Anything that makes it easier for whichever of them is really behind this sordid business isn’t to be ridiculed, much though we might feel like it. And these people live in Drama Central, by definition. Her tail lashed. But Ruah, feel for yourself! Not one of these people is a wizard —

A last shape came in through the door at the cavern’s end, himself carrying something in his hands that Rhiow couldn’t make out, something small and dark and hard to make out against his clothes. Slowly he came, like the person in whose honor the first part of the procession had been staged. He too was wearing a robe, but it was dead black, without any arcana embroidered on it. Elwin Dagenham’s pale hands and his white face, in this dark place, seemed almost to float along by themselves, bodiless, a most peculiar effect.

He took up the one position in the circle that had been left open for him, and stood there a moment, looking around in the torchlit dimness with an expression of supreme satisfaction. Rhiow was astonished again at the difference in Dagenham, for he was now completely unlike the diffident little figure from the party; he was holding himself more erect, looking more prideful, far more in control. Robes or no robes, Dagenham looked like he had a purpose in which he believed implicitly and which made him far greater than he allowed others in the daylight world to believe.

“Friends,” he said, “tonight is the night.” And that pallid little voice that Rhiow had only before heard cajoling, pleading, flattering, now was also completely changed. It filled the place, even in that space where the raw earth of the walls should have deadened sound. “We’ve drunk the cup and welcomed our new member to the society of the friends of the Great Old One.” He nodded in the direction of one small robed figure.

Rhiow looked at her pale face and recognized a woman who she’d last seen being walked out of the upstairs toilet in Dagenham’s: Dorothy, who nodded to all the others, wearing a smile that Rhiow suspected was just this side of going small and scared. Beside her, a taller figure, that handsome face showing above the robes: the man who had been kissing her. Rhiow looked down and thought she saw brown wingtips.

“And now we get down to business,” Dagenham said. “The other friends of the Great Old One, the Strong Ones, have done us many favors in past months. Careers have been rescued, personal harms have been avenged, wealth and influence have been showered on us. And the Strong Ones ask so little of us in return! This month they ask for more than usual… but this week they will give us far more than usual, more than we’ve ever dared to dream. Let’s honor them!”

Everyone in the circle bowed, but it was Dagenham they bowed to. He stood there, his head high, receiving their homage as if he was actually entitled to it. There was something so histrionic, so theatrical, about the gesture, that Rhiow suddenly suspected she understood him as fully as she needed to. The Lone One’s little friends, or sa’Rraah herself, had offered him the one thing that would be sweetest to him: to be a leader, for a change, instead of the one who was forced to follow the rich and powerful and beautiful, arranging their contacts with the news media and picking up what crumbs of gratitude they dropped. Here, among these people, he was more: still a facilitator and a conduit, but one who now stood on the brink of power unimaginable to the people he’d been forced until now to serve.

“This is the night of nights,” Dagenham said. “Now at last the final piece of the puzzle falls into place, and we come into our own…” Under what he was saying, the dark buzzing had fallen into step with the rhythm of his words, reinforcing them, pulsing in time with them, so that the group circled around the stones seemed to start to sway a little in time with the buzzing.