The Big Meow

Aufwi looked dubious. “Normally I’d have gone right out and caught a rat for Queen Iau as a thank-offering,” he said. “Not like we haven’t been praying for a hundred years that the gate would eventually see fit to settle in someplace! But Mount Lee…?” His tail lashed. “Why on Earth? That’s too much offset for even this crazy gate. There’s no transport center there, and the population’s fairly sparse up that way even now! It’d just have been a couple of hillsides’ worth of brush, back in your time.”

“I don’t have answers for you,” Hwaith said, and his tail was lashing harder than Aufwi’s. “There hasn’t been time to find them. Right when the gate started trying to root, we started having earthquakes, cluster after cluster of them. At least five or six a day, some of them big kicks, some of them just little…but they had that ‘precursor’ feel to them, like they might be the heralds of something big. Half the wizards in L.A. dropped what they were doing and tried to deal with them, but they weren’t having much luck. The only thing that seemed to make a difference was about a week later, when I managed to pry the gate loose from where it was digging itself into the canyon and drag it back down here where it belonged. Then the quakes died down….”

“A coincidence, perhaps?” Rhiow said. “New Moon, or full? That would explain the week’s worth of increased activity–”

Hwaith gave her an exasperated look, and Rhiow glanced away, a touch embarrassed to see a newly-met wizard so openly fraught. “The Moon had nothing to do with it,” Hwaith said, “or at least the Whisperer didn’t think it did. I got suspicious and did a deep diagnostic on the gate, pushing the analysis all the way into the main catenary connection to the Old Downside. I thought that, since that dimension’s so much more central than ours, I’d be able to get a better idea of what was making the gate act so oddly.”

Hwaith licked his nose four or five times in rapid succession. “What I got back was a sense that all that part of spacetime was being leaned against. Something pushing, pressing, from outside, wanting in. And at the same time, it was sucking and pulling at the gate, trying to get it stable and rooted deep, so it could be used for…something.” The fur was standing up on Hwaith’s back now, a long dusty ridge running right down to his tail, which was going fluffy with alarm. “And when I finished the spell, I could tell that Hrau’f Herself had been looking over my shoulder all the time, and the fur on Her back was up too. She said, ‘You will need help to understand this, and to stop it: for it isn’t pointed just at you. Here’s where to go.” And Hwaith looked around him at the tree and the dappled sunlight on the plaza, as if he didn’t quite believe in them: and then at Rhiow.

The fur started to stand up on her too. Rhiow had to look away and wash an ear, and she tried not to have it look more like composure-grooming than it had to: but the ragged look of intensity and fear in Hwaith’s eyes was unnerving her as much as the implications of what he’d said. Anything that can frighten Hrau’f the Silent… she thought. “You’re implying,” Rhiow said, “that whatever has been trying to happen in your time, is also going to try to happen in ours, if it’s not dealt with first in backtime.”

“That’s what She gave me to understand,” Hwaith said, “yes.”

“Why?” Urruah said. “What did She say it was?”

“She didn’t,” said Hwaith. “She said, We won’t know until you do. And you won’t know until they do–”

Urruah swore under his breath, a not-very-restrained yowl. Rhiow gave him a look, and then glanced over at Arhu and Siffha’h, whose expressions were jointly very neutral– meaning that they weren’t sure what was going on, but weren’t going to be caught admitting as much. “This is one of those annoying little courtesies the Powers that Be like to do us,” Rhiow said. “The dignity of joint creation. The Powers aren’t the only ones making our worlds happen: we are, too. But They can be as uncertain about the way events unfold as we are. Oh, living outside time in the full flow of Eternity may seem very nice to us….but beings who permanently reside on the far side of Time tend to have trouble affecting timeflow by themselves. They need someone who lives inside to–”

“Do Their dirty work!” Arhu and Siffha’h said in annoyed unison.

“Somehow,” Jath said, “I doubt the One sees it that way.”

“Jath’s right,” Urruah said. “And though the Powers are creators and caretakers, they’re not omnipotent or omniscient. Sure, They intervene here directly, sometimes, when things get bad — but not more often than They have to. We, on the other hand, live here. We know better how time works than They do: we experience it physically. They can’t do that without help from us….”

“And sometimes they can’t be sure what’s going to happen inside sequential time until we make it happen,” said Rhiow. “This sounds like one of those cases.”