The Big Meow

A great rent of light tore down the middle of the black gate, and something like lightning came lashing out of it, lighting the whole cavern in frozen strobe-flashes, long-seeming moments full of slabs of earth and stone held still in mid-fall. The black wizardry in the center of the ring of stones went up in an eye-hurting pulse of fire and deconstructed itself in a breath’s space, lines of light eating themselves away into darkness, finally the outermost containing circle erasing itself until there was no light left in the cavern anywhere but the faint shimmer of the forcefield that was still keeping the ceiling off them, but wouldn’t for much longer. “Out,” Rhiow yowled, “everybody out!!”

Her own transit spell was lying ready in her mind as always, but with someone leaning against her and no more likely than she was to be able to move in a hurry, Rhiow spoke her transit locus to twice its normal size and turned the spell loose, hoping Hwaith’s tail was close to his body. In a roar of downplunging pressure, the roof’s final collapse, everything went dark –

…And after what seemed forever, light again. At least, normal night seemed bright compared to where they had been, and the far more awful darkness they’d just seen. Rhiow looked up from under some trees on the slope they’d climbed what seemed a lifetime earlier, glimpsing through the branches of the shaking pine trees the dusty, dirty, blessedly light-polluted sky above Los Angeles, all aglow with grimy white streetlight-glow.

Rhiow staggered to her feet, wobbling. Her nerves didn’t seem to be working right, but after what she’d just been through, that was understandable. “Hwaith – “

He was sitting just by her again, a little hunched. “I’m all right,” he said. “Well, not the shoulder. I hit that stone pretty hard. Later we’ll fix it – “

The two of them staggered and limped three-legged partway up the hill, where they saw a faint light glowing. It was a wizardlight, and under it Urruah and Aufwi were sitting, and Arhu was bent down licking Siffha’h’s head urgently. Beside them, Helen Walks Softly was bending over the unconscious form of Dolores, putting pressure on her chest wound. Rhiow went up to them, and her eyes met Helen’s.

“Laurel – “

Helen shook her head, smoothing the dirty hair away from Dolores’s face. “The minute she was a wizard again and in her right mind,” she said, “she finished what she’d come for and then died properly to go settle matters with the Powers.” She sighed. “The cord’s broken. We’ll sing her home later. But first we’ll get this poor lady down to the hospital.”

Hwaith, for his part, had gone on past Rhiow up the hill, limping up to where it stopped very suddenly. “Wow,” he said.

Rhiow went up to join him. The cavern had fallen in completely, and taken most of Elwin Dagenham’s house with it: only the front porch and the driveway remained, and behind the house, a cracked swimming pool tilted over on its side, from which water was pouring into the crater where the hill and its cavern had been. Every few breaths, little cascades of dirt fell down into the crater from what remained of the hillside around, for the ground under them was still trembling slightly: doubtless there would be aftershocks later.

“None of this is going to be very stable,” Rhiow said. “We should get off this, and get back to the Silent Man’s… see how he’s doing there.”

She turned away from the newly-formed crater and looked down the hill again. Aufwi was sitting by Urruah, looking a little dazed, but otherwise all right. Arhu was still licking the prone Siffha’h’s head… until he stopped.

“What??” he said.

The others all looked at him. Arhu didn’t sound afraid: just puzzled. Then he sat bolt upright. “What??”

He looked down at Sif, who opened her eyes. “What?” she said to Arhu after after a moment.

Arhu simply vanished.

Rhiow and Hwaith looked at each other. “Don’t ask me,” Rhiow said. “I want a drink. And a bath. Let’s go: he’ll explain himself to us soon enough.”

One after another, the People and Helen vanished from the shattered hillside; where, after a decent interval, now that the cats were gone, the evening birds recovered their voices and their composure and began to sing.

Down in the flatter part of Los Angeles, in the residential neighborhoods just off Wilshire, the earthquake had initially been received with the usual combination of terror and resigned annoyance. In the stores that ran up and down Wilshire and the apartments in the side streets, when things started walking off shelves and windows started jittering and shattering in their frames, people ran out into the street or stood in streetside doorways, waiting to see how bad it would get and how far they needed to run.