The Big Meow

“Though not where intended,” Ith said, regretful. “When I had the data I needed, I was trying to transit directly to your location. But the executing spell was spitting out so much energy that no transit could have arrived here without being deranged. And along with the warping of local hyperstring structure by the gate that was attempting to form – and then being shredded –“ He scraped for a moment at a smear of tar on one long wrist that he and Arhu hadn’t managed to spell off on the way back. “My transit was knocked a hundred yards or so off target. Fortunately the built-in offset function cut in so that I did not materialize inside a crowd of upset humans…”

“I was half hoping that the sudden physical presence here of a being so senior in the middle of that spell, even at a distance, could have so completely changed the local running conditions that the spell would exhaust all the energy pumped into it by the serial murders,” Rhiow said. “But the Whisperer tells me that the disruption just wasn’t sufficient. Unfortunately, my cousins, a spell always works, and this one intends to do just that. It’ll try to complete before the end of the date cycle it was tuned to – the dates that we found in the first tablets.”

“Meaning tonight,” Helen said.

“Late tonight, yes. It can’t do it exactly where the spell was started: the local space has been too deranged by the destruction of the cavern. What we have to do now is plot out all the places nearby where the locus seems likely to reroot, stake them out with spell-sensors, and be ready to move when the spell tries to finish executing.”

“Probably the place where a gate has rooted most strongly in recent times,” Siffha’h said.

Rhiow sighed. “Working that out is going to take yet more time away from what we really need to be doing. Which is trying to figure out some way to keep this world and all its surrounding space from being torn apart when the spell finishes running…”

She fell silent for a moment, for the problem was truly rather bigger than that. Everything we had wasn’t enough just now, Rhiow thought. We assumed we were going to be able to stop the spell completely and prevent the Outside’s incursion that way… and failed. So what will we have tonight that we didn’t have a few hours ago? And when is one of these guys going to call me on this? Because I can’t be the only one that this problem has occurred to, and I don’t see how what Ith has brought us is going to make any difference…

“Rhi,” Hwaith said, “why not be a little more proactive? Why let Tepeyollotl and the Lone One pick the ground that suits them? Force the issue.”

She looked over at him, bemused. “How, exactly?”

He was looking at Auwfi with his whiskers forward. “Take advantage of local circumstances. Get our local long-term, allegedly fixed gate to do what it always wants to do anyway.”

Aufwi’s eyes opened, and he dropped his jaw in a big grin, and he and Hwaith said in unison, “Get uprooted and move around…”

“We’ll pull up the fixed gate and put it someplace where the ground suits us,” Hwaith said, “and then pump it so full of energy that the spell won’t have any choice but to execute there.”

“Ideally,” Arhu said, “somewhere mostly away from ehhif, so that we don’t have to worry about a lot of collateral damage.”

“Plenty of empty hillsides around here…” Hwaith said.

Rhiow put her rightside whiskers forward in ironic amusement at the sound of toms contemplating doing what they secretly loved best: destroying things with impunity. But truly it’s not a bad idea… “The concept has merit,” she said.

“Great. And then what?” Siffha’h said, and yawned.

Rhiow knew what, or rather knew what she didn’t know, and was about to speak up at last because she had no other option. But then she became aware of Urruah sitting like a statue at the edge of the reconstruction of the uptime tablets — his tail curled around his toes, his head bent down, and staying so still that Rhiow was wondering whether he had dozed off. But after a moment he spoke. “Ith,” he said. “Hheh’len. What do you make of that?”

They both looked at the spot he had been gazing, a place at the edge of the last clay-tablet fragment in one row. There was another serpent figure there, the front part of it twisted around in several tightly-coiled S shapes, and underneath it a peculiar funnel-shaped figure, with a coiled and back-flexed end. “What does that say?” Urruah said, leaning down further and staring at the characters next to the funnel shape.

Helen leaned over and studied the characters. “It’s something about how the Nine-Wind God comes to the place of the serpent rope – “