Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

The lion screamed again. The sound was matched by more ehhif screams, male and female, as the huge tan-and-dark shape leapt clear over the spell-circle and came down hard on the far side, between the rings of stones.

Rhiow stared in wonder, caught a flicker of those eyes. Rhi, their owner said, laughing grimly, what’s the matter? Don’t you recognize me when I’m not wearing Elie Saab? And Helen Walks Softly pushed herself up from her landing crouch and made for Anya Harte and Dolores.

The circle broke, ehhif fleeing into the dark in all directions, one torch falling over. One of the ehhif holding Dolores let go of her and fled. The other pulled her out of the circle a short distance, followed by Anya Harte in a flurry of swirling robes, a brief, violent tangle. Arhu, Hwaith, Rhiow cried silently, look for the word, listen for it — !

All the minds around her were in turmoil, ready for rummaging. Rhiow looked around for Dagenham. When things started to happen, he’d stepped back hastily into the darkness: now she spotted him heading for the door —

There already, Urruah said from the shadows down that way. One of the robed figures who’d made it to the door ahead of the others was yanking on it fruitlessly, unable to budge it: Urruah had spoken to the door and its frame and convinced them to be one piece for the moment.

The lion-scream behind them broke up the brief struggle between Anya, Dolores and the acolyte who’d been holding Dolores still. Anya and the other robed figure now fled into the darkness in two different directions: Dolores fell. Helen leapt past her, after Anya, batted at her with one huge paw, missed –

Hwaith! Rhiow called. Arhu! What have you got, there has to be something–

Nothing, Rhiow! It’s not a word –

Can’t See anything, Arhu said, sounding distressed. Wait, Rhiow, look out, Dagenham — !

Helen skidded, turned, leapt toward him, but not quite fast enough. Dagenham was running back toward the circle, with that small dark object in his hand. He threw it —

The dark thing flew across the circle and came down on the last spot, the one still-empty receptor site, drawn there as certainly and immediately as steel to the magnet. It looked like it had been a heart once. Now it was a stone. It hit the spell diagram and the stone cracked open lke an egg. Sluggish black blood gushed out —

Rhi. The strings — !

As quickly as if a switch had been thrown, the hyperstrings all around them were bending inward, writhing toward the stones as they’d seemed to have been writhing away from them before. This is it! Hwaith said. This is when the one from outside’s supposed to come through –

He flung himself at the strings. Not on my watch! Aufwi!

Aufwi threw himself into the tangle of strings on the opposite side of the circle, and, like Hwaith, began grabbing clawfuls of every nearby string and pulling them out of their present configurations. The purpose wasn’t so much manipulation toward a specific effect as wholesale disruption, the kind meant to result in a gatecrash. Rhiow watched them with astonishment and fear, for what they were doing was beyond dangerous, as they tried to force the kind of result that a worldgate technician normally went to all possible lengths to avoid. But these two were the ones best suited to attempt a gate shutdown under circumstances like these: both expert in the LA area gates and the local conditions, though they might be looking at the problem from six decades apart.

But it wasn’t working. The hyperstrings continued to writhe together, weaving into a gate structure as fast as Hwaith and Aufwi ripped them apart. Despite everything they could do, the spell that the Dark Lady had built was enacting. The night-swathed shell of her soul stood like a pillar, unable to move, the power flowing out of it, driving the spell that could not work without her —

Dagenham watched it happen, laughing. A second later he went down hard just outside the outer ring of stones as Helen came down on top of him and with one huge paw batted him unconscious. But his unconsciousness made no difference whatsoever. The spell kept working. The hyperstrings were knitting together into a gate with a structure like nothing Rhiow had ever seen before, and down all the strings of it, an ugly throbbing darkness was running…

Helen, forget them! Rhiow said. She’s the key. She’s got to get into a body and remake her connection with the Powers — take her wizardry back. Then this will fail —

One of us could share bodies with her, Aufwi said silently as he kept ripping at the forming gate. It’s not easy to do in a hurry — but if one of us slipped out of body and into someone else’s for a few moments, it would leave a body untenanted, and she could remake the Oath –

Rhiow’s tail lashed. The shock of finding herself in a Person’s body might leave her unable to do what needed doing —

Forget it. She needs a human body, Helen said. Mine won’t work for her: it’s too different. And though I can think right now of a way to give her one – she looked over her shoulder toward Anya Harte, who was struggling with the door like all the others — it’d would play straight into the Lone One’s hands. We need another way —

As Rhiow looked desperately around her, over her shoulder she saw something that briefly froze her heart…until she realized what else it might mean. Sprawled on the ground lay Dolores, blood seeping out from under her – none of it, fortunately, spilled anywhere near the spell circle: Iau only knew what that would have done. Rhiow ran over to the ehhif, touched her pulse point with a paw.

Tell me she’s not dead! Urruah said, running over to join Rhiow. .

She’s in shock, Rhiow said. Not stabbed too deeply: I think we can save her. But first she can save the Dark Lady, and us. Quick, get her over there!

A premade levitation spell picked Dolores up bodily and whisked her through the air to deposit her at the Dark Lady’s feet. She did not stir, did not look down, but she was trembling. Whatever had locked her soul-shell into obedience to Dagenham’s wishes was getting stronger as the black gate started to materialize in the center of the stone circles.

All we need’s a soul-conduit, Rhiow said, setting up the basic spell in her mind and starting to weave the words in the Speech into a mockup of the “silver cord” that expressed the connection between an ehhif’s body and its spirit. She had had to do this occasionally in her work down in the subway tunnels, when she’d found an ehhif dying and needed to buy him or her time until more appropriate help could be summoned. It wasn’t an involved wizardry, but she’d never envisioned using it this way before. Never mind. First implant the body end – It was difficult work, convincing a body whose own soul hadn’t quite left that it needed to host another: but Dolores was safely unconscious and in no condition to argue the point. Reluctantly the cord rooted. Now the other end – Rhiow took hold of the other end of the cord with her mind, reached up to the Dark Lady with it –

The second it touched Laurel, Rhiow felt as if she’d been hit by lightning: transfixed, in terrible pain, unable to move. The Dark Lady had been surrounded with a shell meant to prevent this very possibility. And behind Rhiow, the dark gate kept forming. The dirt of the floor inside the stones started to fade, go dark, opening a window into something else, a fathomless empty space of cold — Aufwi was blasted back from the almost-formed gate structure as if it was some living thing that had shaken him off its black hide. Hwaith was hanging on –

Sif!

Here, Siffha’h said, and a moment later Rhiow was struck by lightning again: but this time it was lightning she understood and sympathized with, a blast of sheer wizardly power that ran through her, down the cord to Dolores’s body, up the cord to the Dark Lady. All around her a skin of white fire formed, eating its way inward. She screamed –

Then vanished. Rhiow, released by the forces Siffha’h had channeled through her, fell over, unable to move.

Beside her, Dolores moaned.

“Come on,” Urruah said, the first time any of them had spoken aloud in so long. “Come on!”

Behind them, the dark gate was nearly complete. Hwaith was hanging on to the last normal hyperstring strands, trying to keep the interface from forming, yowling in pain and effort. But he couldn’t hold it. A second later he was knocked away from the gate and hurled through the air to smash into one of the larger stones. Limp, he fell at the foot of it, didn’t move.

Rhiow struggled to get to her feet, fell back again, unable. The darkness from the gate was spreading all through the cavern, now. And as the darkness started to flood out of the circle toward them, something else began to stir in the ground under their feet. A rumbling… a shaking…

The earth began to quake.

The screams of the ehhif by the door suggested that they were no longer quite so eager to linger here to meet the Great Old One. The torches fixed in the ground fell over, one by one, as the shaking got worse. Dislodged clods of earth began falling from the roof. There was no light, now, but the burning dark forming and spreading from inside the gate locus, and across the cavern, a white fire in the shape of a black and white Person, sitting still, concentrating, pouring out power. “Come on, Laurel!” Urruah was shouting in the Speech. “You know what you need to do, what you want to do!”

The noise was starting to build up in the cave as the shaking got worse, as bigger chunks of the ceiling started to fall, as the ehhif screamed and beat on the door, trapped and in terror of their lives. The earth was starting to roar as Helen had roared, the low sound of a great cat, hungry, bending over its prey, jaws opening. Rhiow, dazed and deafened, kept working to push herself to her feet. Hwaith, who’s looking after him, and what about Arhu, and Aufwi, and Helen, Urruah, you have to get them out —

But the voice that answered her was not Urruah, or Hwaith.

“In – Life’s – Name,” it said, slowly and with great effort, “and for Life’s sake – I say that I will use the Art – for nothing but – the service of that Life…”

She trailed off. The hill roared around them. “Come on,” Urruah said, and “Come on,” said Helen, “come on, cousin, you can do it, come on — !”

Dolores’s body with Laurel’s spirit in it was gasping for air. “Come on, Sif, push it,” Urruah was saying, “Helen, quick, her oxygen levels, I’ll hold that bleeding – “

“I will guard growth – and ease – ease pain – I will fight to preserve – what grows – lives well in its own – own way…”

She trailed off again. The ground under them all shook. The dark from the gate was getting closer, and Rhiow could feel it, a cold that burned worse than vacuum, because at least vacuum was in the real world and had a temperature, and this had nothing, was nothing, Nothing Itself, coming for them as it had wanted to forever –

Rhiow pushed herself up onto her forefeet, all she could manage. “Laurel! Come on!”

“Change no – no object or – creature unless its growth and life – or – or – “

“ – the system!”

“The system of which it is part – are threatened – “ A long, long pause. And then a last gasp.

“Laurel!”

The ceiling was starting to come apart above them, now. The shimmer of a forcefield that Urruah had erected was holding the downfalling chunks away for the moment, but it wouldn’t last: the cold blackness from the gate was eating at the edges of it. Not until I’m on my feet, Rhiow thought, and hauled her hind legs under her, and pushed herself up, and wobbled, and fell down, and pushed herself up again. I am a Person, and if I die here I’ll do it standing up before the Queen as befits one of Her children –