The Big Meow

Urruah was looking a little dubiously at Helen’s gun. “You wouldn’t have needed that to deal with burglars, though–”

Helen nodded. “On my own time, of course not. But I came straight here from work, as I said.” She reached into her pocket and brought out a wallet, flipped it open. The bright sun glinted on the badge there.

“L.A.P.D.?” Urruah said.

“That’s right.” Helen put the wallet away, glancing up the hill at the waving of the grass as Arhu and Siffha’h came bounding down. “Not that an armed officer would be allowed here without permission. But I have dispensation, since this is my tribal ground.”

Rhiow’s eyes widened at that. “You’re one of the ffih-ehhif,” she said, “the First Humans–”

“That’s right,” Helen said, as Arhu and Siffha’h came out of the grass nearby. “My people are the Chumash: this is all our land, here along the shoreline, from Santa Barbara down to the City.”

“I guess other ehhif would say it ‘was’ your land,” Urruah said.

Helen threw an amused glance at him. “It still is,” she said, “in all the ways that matter. Not that most of them would notice.” She grinned. “We’re still here: and we take care of things the best we can. Haku, young cousins–”

There was a pause while introductions were made and names exchanged: but even afterwards, Siffha’h was still wearing a suspicious look. “That spell up there–” she said. “Just what exactly were you doing?”

“’Letting the earthquake off the leash,’” Helen said. “Triggering a controlled tremor. Or trying to.”

“’Trying’?” Arhu said, looking at her oddly. “I thought ‘a spell always works.’”

“It does if a force equaling or surpassing the power of the wizardry isn’t being purposefully leveled against it,” Helen said. “Which seems to have been the case lately, and I haven’t been able to understand what that force was. Finally I asked my ikhareya about it, and He said He didn’t know either. He said, ‘Go have a look, and some of your cousins will come along and help you find out what the answer was…’” Helen looked a little bemused. “He was using a temporal-conditional tense, though. There’s going to be an answer…but it’s in the past?”

“That’s what we were told,” Rhiow said. “We’re on our way there after this.”

“Do you mind if I go with you, then?” Helen said. “Seems like that’s what’s required…”

“You’re more than welcome on the journey,” Urruah said, “believe me. It’s a relief to know we’re not going to have to do this all by ourselves, anyway…whatever ‘this’ is.”

“We’re going to set up a separate portal for the timeslide,” Rhiow said. “We don’t want to take the chance of deranging the L.A. gate: it’s already acting badly enough. Would there be a problem if we gated from here? Or might it interfere with your spell up in the cave?”

Helen shook her head. “It’s built to stay completely quiescent until someone it recognizes activates it,” she said. “I’ll kill its sensor components to make sure it doesn’t get confused.”

“Is that going to be enough to keep such a complex spell out of trouble?” Siffha’h said. “And one so old? You don’t sink power conduits like those overnight.”

“Of course not,” Helen said. “The basic wizardry’s a fixture: a team of our shamans sang it into place hundreds of years ago. But, yes, just pulling the sensor web out of contact will work fine– that’s how we keep it quiet when we’re not actually using it. Wizards who know this terrain well, or have a connection to it, come up and at least once a week to bleed off some of the excess force, the way you start small controlled brushfires every now and then to keep a really big forest fire from destroying everything wholesale. I’ve taken over this job, the last couple of years, because my connection to this terrain’s much better than that of any other wizard around here. This is my native space, after all: the Chumash have lived here since before the Ice.”

Helen sighed and stretched out her legs in front of her. “But I might as well come from Dubuque, for all the good that spell’s done me lately. Over the last two weeks, I must have run it seven or eight times, trying to provoke any old kind of local discharge, especially from the big fault right under the mountain. But it just wasn’t working.” She looked up at the mountain as if she could see straight into it. “It was driving me nuts. I could feel the power building up, but I just couldn’t bleed it off. It was almost like something was leaning against the fault, holding the force in…” Helen shrugged. “But then this morning, around when I went off duty, it seemed like something blinked, and the fault let loose. Good thing, too.”

Rhiow thought of Hwaith’s description of something leaning against the world, and the fur started to rise on her back. “Yes, you said you were relieved,” Rhiow said. “Forgive me, but after what I’ve been through this morning, the word seems a little unusual…” She shook herself all over, trying to get the fur to lie down again.