The Big Meow

Rhiow lay there, feeling the claw in her heart, and knew whose it was. Even after everything that’s happened, she said to sa’Rraah, you’re not off my case, are you?

After what you and I have just been through, said the Lone Power, what would you expect? How should I allow a mortal to put me through such indignity without suffering for it?And anyway… this was all about putting things back to the way they usually are. Now you will have your wish. Make the best of it.

She fell silent.

“Rhiow…”

He stretched, looking at her, the bronzy eyes pale in the reflected glow from the streetlights outside.

“For the Queen’s sake don’t apologize,” she said.

“I wasn’t planning to. I’m done with that. The way things are… is the way things are.”

She bent down and rubbed his face against his: but then she had to stop.

“Will you stay a little while longer?” he said. “Just another day or two – “

“I can’t,” Rhiow said. “You know I can’t. It’s not just the issue of the timeslide, and the buildup of the effects of being out of my right time – though that’s part of it. If I stay longer, it’s just going to be harder for both of us. We should take pity on each other and end it now.”

He sighed. “She does love her little vengeances,” Hwaith said, “doesn’t she.”

“Yes she does,” Rhiow said, and looked away from Hwaith, finding it difficult to bear the pain in his eyes, which he was trying to manage for her sake.

“Well then,” Hwaith said. “It’ll just have to be another life, then.”

“So it seems,” Rhiow said, doing her best to sound cheerful.

“All right,” Hwaith said. “Then let’s cuddle.”

She fell asleep on the windowsill as she had never fallen asleep with another Person: with one of Hwaith’s forelegs thrown over her, protective, something she’d seen Arhu and Sif do. At first she found it hard to bear. Then Rhiow put her own foreleg over his and hugged it to her. This is going to have to last, she said. There’s always memory, at least.

It was cold comfort. But sometimes, after saving the world, that was all you had left.

Dawn came too soon. Two hours later came too soon.

But two hours later they were all standing outside the Observatory as the sun looked over the low mountains to the east, and struck fire from the sundial by the white obelisk. It was still too early for ehhif tourists — not that there were likely to be any here this morning, considering what the night before had been like – and the worldgate lay out on the terrace again, just by itself now and not enclosed in any unnecessary spell-structure.

“I set it up for Grand Central in our time,” Aufwi said: “easier to drop everyone in the same place when there’s a timeslide hooked into the weave. The track 33 off-hours access area, an hour after you left the original uptime coordinates be all right for everybody?”

“Fine,” Rhiow heard Urruah say. It was not fine with her: nothing seemed fine at the moment. She stood off to one side with Hwaith, looking at the gate, even though there was nothing she wanted to look at less – except perhaps Hwaith’s eyes.

He put his head up against hers. You should go, he said silently.

No I shouldn’t! Rhiow cried. …Except I must.

Aufwi glanced at them, no more; then away again. Quietly the air went prickly with the feel of a gate going active when it had a timeslide augmentation.

Hwaith pushed his face in front of hers so that she couldn’t avoid seeing it. Cousin and love, he said, …go well.

Cousin, Rhiow said. And love. Always go well.

With you wishing it so, Hwaith said, it has to be.

And he turned his face away.

Rhiow walked over to the gate more unwillingly than she had ever gone anywhere in her life. Helen, in LAPD uniform again, was stepping through as she came up: Arhu and Ith went through after her, and then Siffha’h. Urruah glanced over his shoulder and went through, followed by Aufwi. By the gate, knowing it would close after her, Rhiow paused as Hwaith came along behind her.

“Don’t forget to disengage the slide conduit before you close it down,” she said.

“Rhiow,” Hwaith said. “Am I a complete idiot? …Just go.”

“Yes,” she said.

She took one last long glance, one that was going to have to last her a lifetime: then turned and stepped through.

A second later she was surrounded by the sooty, metal-smelling dark of the track 33 platform-end, all full of locked empty postal parcel cages and little pallet-moving trucks. Rhiow had seen this spot a thousand times, and it now all looked inexpressibly alien to her — dirty and unfriendly and miserable. Around her, her team and Ith and Helen were looking up and down the platform, making sure of their own personal invisibility routines before stepping out into the public areas.

Helen Walks Softly smiled at them all. “My cousins, we’ll meet again on the journey, I know,” she said. “But I shouldn’t linger: I have a shift this evening.”