The Big Meow

She eyed him with amusement, then looked at Rhiow. It seems that your friend learned something from the bargain you and my Eldest Daughter struck, Queen Iau said.

Rhiow was still thunderstruck.

The Tom and I spoke, Madam, Hwaith said. I couldn’t stay: I had to come here to make sure that all went well. And he looked at Rhiow. My Royal Sire was willing to allow me to join him and assist him… after some encouragement.

Rhiow’s eyes went wide.

Iau’s whiskers went forward. Mostly, my son, she said, it’s wiser to keep such assistance to a minimum. We are in very special circumstances here: but your body will not be able to bear much more. You should go.

She waved Her tail at them. Go on, she said. On this plane and on others, there’s a lot of cleaning up to do. But we’ll talk again.

Rhiow and Hwaith bowed to the Queen, and vanished –

…back into reality.

Rhiow sat up straight as a Person will who’s dozed off sitting up, and stared around her in near-panic at the thought of what she might find. The air was full of dust and smoke and the smell of burning, but empty of that loathsome dark curdling that had sucked the life and color out of everything up here. Normal evening was reasserting itself, though after a quake of this size there was understandably little else that was normal about the night. Cracks spread all across the Observatory terrace’s paving, and all around Rhiow could hear little rustles of falling dirt from tiny landslides in the canyons down the mountain’s side, as the abused earth tried to settle itself down. That wasn’t going to happen for a while yet: right then an aftershock shook the ground under her paws.

But Rhiow, who just a few days before had clung to a tree limb like a scared squirrel on feeling such a thing, now hardly noticed it at all as she stared around. There was Ith, sitting down on his haunches by the north-facing Observatory wall. There were Urruah and Aufwi sitting shocked-looking in the middle of the now deactivated spell-circle, talking excitedly to each other, and Siffha’h, looking very smug as she sat and had a wash: and Helen Walks Softly, sitting on one of the white granite park benches near the edge of the terrace, taking the condor feathers out of her hair.

And sitting by himself only a few feet away, in the shadow of the white granite obelisk and just under the majestic robed form of some ehhif physicist, was Hwaith…looking at her.

“Oh, what did you do,” Rhiow said to Hwaith. “What did you do!”

“What I had to,” Hwaith, said, “for my queen.”

Rhiow went straight to him and butted his head, hard. Abashed, he started washing Rhiow’s ear.

She let him.

The Big Meow: Chapter Thirteen

The cleanup was going to take days: that much was obvious from the start. Not even half the world’s wizards could develop a custom timepatch for such a cosmically destabilizing event, and implement it, in a hurry. But that was not Rhiow’s problem, and for that night at least she was glad to let it be someone else’s.

They made their way back to the Silent Man’s house via transit circle, since every bit of strictly physical movement through this space would add to the already significant difficulties that would accompany the patching. While Aufwi was building the circle, though, Rhiow paused with Urruah to look westward. The Old Downside, having done its job and kept the solid earth solid, was gone now, and the Pacific was once more lying in its bed. But over on Cahuenga Peak, the results of other events of the evening were plain to see. That white sign that Urruah had made so much of earlier when they’d landed under it had not escaped the attention of the angry skies. HOLLYWOODLAND it had said earlier. But now by cityglow they could see how the last four letters lay shattered and smoking on the ground, and the brush they’d fallen onto smouldered yet. “Oh dear,” Rhiow said. “That’s probably going to take a while to fix.”

Urruah, though, was looking across at the broken word, and his whiskers were pushed right forward. “You know,” he said, “even if they do fix it, somehow I suspect it’s not going to matter…”

They walked away. “What an incredible mess,” Rhiow said. “The patching’s going to be a nightmare.”

Urruah shrugged his tail. “It could have been worse,” he said. “Try patching a whole planet, or a whole region of space. But the Planetary’s on it, and he won’t dawdle: not with as many casualties as there were. Bad enough that they happened, and people suffered them. But after the master patch team’s done, things here will be back to normal instantly… as far as any ehhif here can tell. They’ll just reset the whole LA basin to sunset local time.”

“’Just!””

Urruah chuckled. “I’m not minimizing the work involved,” he said. “But it beats the alternative…”

“No argument,” Rhiow said.