The Big Meow

The other three looked down at the spell diagram, began to recite along with her. All around them, the sounds of L.A. traffic, the sound of the mariachi band starting to play in the Olvera Street plaza, the distant scream of a jet overhead, began to thin and fade to nothing in the silence that always accompanied the universe starting to listen to a spell. Their words in the Speech filled that silence to overflowing, spilled out of it, drowned it in colorless fire–

And then both fire and silence were gone, with the circle, and both light and air around them were utterly changed. Rhiow put her nose up into a wind that had nothing to do with their transit, and breathed deep. It was blowing toward them from the westward, and it smelled of the Sea.

They were standing to one side of the entrance to yet another parking lot. This one, though, was very unlike the Olvera Street parking lot, which had been hemmed in by buildings, old and new, on all sides. This space was broad, bare, and bright in the sun, under the hazy blue sky. Pale concrete painted with parking stripes stretched away from them on all sides. Directly in front of them, as they looked westward, was a broad arch– two fifteen-foot pitch-pine poles spanned by a long carved signboard that said:

SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS NATIONAL RECREATION AREA — SATWIWA

Rhiow glanced around. Under her feet she could feel a strange trembling sensation, almost a buzzing. It was like a stronger version of the peculiar uncertainty she’d felt in her limbs in the plaza tree.

“What’s a Satwiwa?” Siffha’h said, looking up at the sign.

“Some ehhif placename,” Urruah said. “Never mind that. Feel it, Rhi?”

How could I not? Rhiow thought. That sense of terrible uncertainty coming up out of the ground felt like it was shouting right down her bones. “Is it the last earthquake we’re feeling,” she said, “or the next one?”

“I don’t think it’s either,” Arhu said.

Siffha’h’s ears flicked back, then forward. “Ahead of us,” she said. “That’s where the power is…”

“Come on,” Urruah said.

Inside the arch, there were only a few cars parked here and there, and no sign of the ehhif who’d left them. Urruah in the lead, the four wizards trotted past the cars to a sidewalk that surrounded the parking lot. This led to a beaten-down dirt trail winding off through an upsloping grassy meadow dotted here and there with stands of taller grasses and brush.

“A long way up…” Arhu said under his breath. Several miles further along the way the path ran, foothills clad in dark-green chaparral and sagebrush rose toward a mountain studded with outcroppings of red stone. The peak was bare; high above it, small winged dots circled in the haze-blue sky, working an early updraft.

“We don’t have to go up there,” Siffha’h said. She shot off across the meadow northwestward, a small black and white shape bounding through the grass. With a racketing clap and clatter of wings, a covey of small plump brown and white birds burst up out of the waving green-gold of the longest grass. Ignoring them, Arhu ran hot on Siffha’h’s track, and Rhiow and Urruah after him; and as they plunged past underneath the fleeing quail, Rhiow had to laugh at herself, because for all her unease, her mouth still watered to see them go.

“Haven’t I been telling you there was more to life than canned cat food,” Urruah said as she galloped along beside him.

“Don’t tempt me,” Rhiow said. “They had those in the Market this other morning, roasted and ready to go–”

“Did they now! Must stop by there on the way home. I know the roast-poultry lady.”

“Of course you do,” Rhiow said, resigned.

“And by the way, why are we running?”

“Because she is?” Rhiow said, as ahead of them Siffha’h started to slow, and Arhu caught up with her. “Because it’s a nice day for it?”

Siffha’h, though, had now paused, and was sniffing around in the grass. Rhiow could see her briefly paw at the ground, then look up again, and her expression wasn’t that of someone who’d been running for enjoyment. As Arhu caught up with her, and then Urruah and Rhiow, she glanced around at them. “The power was here,” Siffha’h said. “But it’s moved…”

“The earthquake?” Rhiow said. Standing here, she could feel it burning in the ground through the pads of her paws. But as Siffha’h had said, she couldn’t tell whether it was the quake just past, or some tremor in the future.

Arhu’s tail was lashing now. “No,” he said. “Something to do with it, though. Something involved with the earthquake was here. Something that wants to be here again…” He straightened up, looking around him with the same kind of questing expression. “The water,” he said. “It’s here somewhere nearby. Once we find the water, we’ll be close–”