The Big Meow

The Lone One’s purring laughter came rumbling through the darkness. “I wouldn’t be so quick to laugh,” Rhiow said. “Let me put a possibility to you, Queen’s Daughter: something that’s been occurring to me this last day or so. That in the deeps of time, when you discovered the existence of this terrible Power from Outside — the force for which Tepeyollotl is merely an avatar — you thought you might be able to use It for your own purposes. You found a way to reach It, and you entered into what the ehhif would call a ‘deal with the Devil’ with that power. In exchange for your help in making a gateway into our worlds, it would destroy the Powers that had been hindering your will for so long. Then, after the ‘Great Old One’ had come plunging into our sheaf of universes and wrecked everything, It would leave you in peace to rule what remained of the Queen’s domain. A delightful thought! Revenge and mastery, all at once, after all these aeons of being balked. …But then you discovered that the Darkness from Outside was far bigger than anything you had imagined – a force that not even the Queen, not even all the avatars of the One right across every known universe joined together, could thrust out of reality once It had got in. And somehow or other, You got wind of its real intent: that You, no less than everything else in reality, from the littlest speck of dust up to the One, would be drowned in Its darkness and unmade.”

As she spoke, the laughter had trailed off, gone silent. Now, all around her in the darkness, Rhiow could hear a low ugly yowl starting way down in sa’Rraah’s throat.

“And possibly you even found that It had played you,” Rhiow said. “Not merely that It intended to use you as a tool, and then to destroy you – but that It was laughing at you.” Rhiow put down that one lag and put the other one over her shoulder. “And that, of course, could not be borne under any circumstances. So you began to consider… unusual levels of intervention.”

Rhiow started washing again. The growl in the blackness went on, but she ignored it; and after a while it began slowly to subside.

Back off a little now, Rhiow thought, and let Her have some stretching space. “In the cavern,” she said, “though they were thick as ants on a dead rat, Your little friends didn’t attack us. Why would that have been?”

Because the One from Outside thinks I am Its friend, sa’Rraah said, I have been acting a certain part…

“’Acting’! Spare me.”

Perhaps it would be as well to admit that initially, the position I took was in earnest. Not even the slightest hint of rue at being forced to make the admission. Yet if It’s to be overthrown, if– and she laughed a laugh not entirely devoid of humor – the Big Meow, as your colleague called it, is not to be heard in this world and bring about its downfall and that of all others – it must trust Me enough to do the thing that will both allow it entry and make it vulnerable. You know the law.

“Remind me,” Rhiow said, scrubbing her face. “There are so many laws, and you’ve broken most of them at one point or another.”

To interact successfully with matter, the Lone One said, Gods must descend into its realm, and join with matter, take it into Themselves. Rhiow could heard the distaste in her voice, like that of a Person forced to use a particularly dirty litterbox and step in the old waste. Nasty stuff that matter is, and the sordid business of mixing it with the purity of spirit, so awful —

This particular snobbery of the Lone One’s, Rhiow knew about quite well. “The point you’re making,” Rhiow said, “is that when a Power descends into the mortal sphere, it becomes vulnerable to physical attack and other such strategies that work on mortal beings.”

Yes.

This was certainly one aspect of the attack on the Outside One that Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi were contemplating. Urruah hadn’t been overstating the potential effects on anything physical that tried to use a gate that was being subjected to a double eversion. Yet I have to be sure. She is still the Lone One, after all…

“You’re being unusually forthcoming of late,” Rhiow said. “Is this what you did with Dagenham, Queen’s daughter? Instead of sending one of your little jackals to whisper to him, did you perhaps do it yourself, as you’re doing it with me now? Did you tell him where to find poor Laurel, how to catch what remained of a soulsplit wizard after her body was gone, and what to do with her? A wizard that perhaps you yourself drove to madness and suicide?”

And if I did? said the darkness. Would that be so much worse than a thousand million other things I’ve done before?The worlds are My plaything, as you surely know. My Dam may claim the primacy of creation, but I have found another – one she has spent all of time contesting without success.