The Big Meow

Rhiow wandered out into the back yard. There were People eating the buffet on the concrete by the house, and Rhiow greeted them casually in passing: but most of them were fluffed up, and looking repeatedly over their shoulders between bites. This was due to the presence of Ith, who was reclining in the middle of the back lawn amid a scatter of white cold-cut wrappers. Beside him, Arhu lay on his back with his paws in the air and his gut visibly bulging.

“How much pastrami?” Rhiow said, looking with some dismay at all the garbage lying around.

“Not too much,” Ith said. “Only four or five pounds. It would not have been polite to deprive everyone else of their sandwiches…”

“You should clean this up,” Rhiow said. “You’ll attract rats.”

Ith gave her a droll look that wordlessly suggested rats were the very least of their problems.

“And you,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Isn’t there something you should be doing? Something Sight-related?”

“Nothing to See right now, Rhi,” Arhu said. “It’s either all light, or all dark… So I’m taking the afternoon off.”

Rhiow snorted. “Greed and sloth,” she said. “No doubt the other ehhif sins will be along shortly…”

She strolled over to sit down by Ith’s head. “You’re likely to be the key to all this,” she said.

“I thought it more likely you would be,” he said.

Rhiow suddenly got the feeling that Ith knew about her conversation in the darkness with the Lone One. “We’ll have to see about that,” she said. “But your presence back here definitely changes things in our favor. Not even sa’Rraah anticipated the way you were going to come out of the Old Downside, or that you’d turn her Old Serpent avatar against her and drag it up with you into the Light. Now you’re not only the White Serpent, but also a living connection between the Old Downside and the other complex-state worlds ‘beneath’ the world, the foundations of Earth’s physical reality.”

Ith looked thoughtful, his claws twiddling together. “Yet this time I am not meant to be just a connection,” he said, “but an anchor. The Serpent wrapped around the roots of the Tree…”

Rhiow waved her tail gently in agreement as Urruah came out to join them. “The dimensional and physical dissociation that will accompany the incursion of Tepeyollotl’s master will rip the planet apart if it can’t be held stable,” she said. “That stability’s going to have to be sourced from the more central dimensions, the Old Downside being the most easily accessible. You’re a direct and powerful link to a more senior and more ancient Earth, and you’re going to take most of the strain when the Outside One breaks through.”

“When it breaks through,” Urruah said, sounding disturbed. Arhu had rolled over as Helen came wandering out as well.

Rhiow’s tail waved gently, a gesture of uneasy agreement. “It has to,” she said. “And It will anyway. There’s no way we can stop It. Not Queen Iau Herself could stop It. However – once It’s through, we have a weapon it won’t be expecting.”

“Ith,” Arhu said.

“In part. After all, he’s Tepeyollotl’s rightful enemy: his battle’s a matter of legend that runs deep in local spacetime.”

“Even though it has not happened yet…” Ith said, sounding a little dubious, though he wasn’t arguing the point.

Urruah stretched. “But that’s the way things go in the greater field of being, isn’t it,” he said. “Echoes from the great battles travel both forward and backward in the local timeflow. We know that you’re going to fight him because the legends say you did…”

“All we need to determine now,” Ith said, his jaw dropping in a grin, “is whether I won or lost.” He glanced over at Rhiow. “On that count the tablets were, if nothing else, equivocal…”

Rhiow looked up at Helen. “And your presence here is vital as well, because you’re of this place, in both the past and the future. You and your folk are profoundly connected to this land in ways we can’t be: rooted in ways that People aren’t and not even ehhif usually are. You’ll be our other link to the deep world, Earth’s inner realities. If you and Ith between you can’t keep Earth in one piece around here, I don’t know what can, for you’re a shaman as well as a wizard. There are powers answering to you that we don’t fully understand… but we know they’ll be on your side.”

Helen nodded. “I think I have an idea of what to do,” she said. “I’ll start getting ready when we’re done here.”

“One thing,” Hwaith said.

Rhiow hadn’t heard or felt him appear between Urruah and Ith, but that was par for the course. Surprised, for they hadn’t heard him either, everyone else looked at him. But Hwaith’s his eyes were on Rhiow. “You’re not saying much about what your part in this is going to be,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “to produce the result we’re after, sa’Rraah is going to have to act as opener of the way. And to do it most effectively, she’s going to need someone to channel through. That will be me.”

Her team stared at her. “Why you?!” Urruah said.