Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

The Silent Man came back inside and stood by his desk for a moment, looking rattled: the first time Rhiow could remember seeing him wearing such an expression. I’m sorry, he said, rubbing his face. But there appears to be a dinosaur in the back yard. I assume he’s something to do with you?

Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi and Helen and Rhiow all looked at each other. A moment later, a huge saurian face was looking in one of the French doors, and Arhu jumped down off his head and slipped inside, shouldering the door open so that Ith could get at least his head in.

“I found him on Hollywood Boulevard, asking directions,” Arhu said, “and got him out of there before too much damage was done.” He shrugged his tail. “He was right over by the Chinese. They’ll probably think he was some kind of promotion.”

Rhiow got up again and went over to the door, gazing up at Ith. “What on Earth brought you all the way back here?” she said.

“It was the tablets,” Ith said, sounding very somber.

“What about them? You could just have mind-spoken me, Ith, told me what you’ve found, you didn’t have to come all the way back here – “

“I did,” he said. “I did not dare even whisper what I’ve found: I didn’t dare take the chance that a word or two might leak out into the space between times and worlds. But whatever has been done tonight, Rhiow, it has not been enough. You are not finished. There is one thing yet to be done.”

“What??”

He pushed his head in the door and put it right down by Rhiow’s.

“Join forces with the Lone Power,” he whispered. “And end the world.”

The Big Meow: Chapter Twelve

Everyone looked at Ith in profound concern, not least the Silent Man.

You’re going to have to forgive me, he said, glancing over at Rhiow, but I thought things were pretty much handled.

“Well,” Rhiow said, unnerved. “We were about to start dealing with that issue. What we saw tonight suggests that there’s still considerable unfinished business. We stopped the initial incursion… or rather, it was stopped.” She looked over at Ith. “I think you may have had more to do with that than any of us expected. But the timings laid out in the tablets we saw suggested that the worst is yet to come. And what happened tonight – “

“Wasn’t quite bad enough?” Arhu said as he clambered up onto Ith’s back and walked up to sit on top of his head.

The Silent Man watched this performance with a slightly cockeyed look. You’ve got to forgive me, but I had the idea that cats and lizards didn’t usually like each other much.

“They’re twins,” Urruah said. “Separated at birth.”

The Silent Man blinked.

“He means that mostly in the spiritual sense,” Rhiow said. “Someone will explain it to you eventually, as far as we understand it, anyway. But what Arhu’s saying is that, despite everything we went through, we got off rather easily… which confirms that the worst is still to be dealt with. Ith, I take it after Aufwi told us where to look, you did find the remaining tablets – “

“I did,” Ith said. He had hunkered down, now, with his head and just the tops of his shoulders pushed into the room through the open French doors, and was more or less wearing the sprawled-out Arhu like a hat. “Some of them were in very bad state and had to be reconstructed, but they were willing enough to be reminded of what they had been once. Indeed, they were eager to become what they had been, even if only temporarily. They were full of urgency to be read. But when I read them…” He trailed off. “I did not know what to make of what I was seeing.” Even as Ith leaned on his elbows, those long slender claws of his were scissoring together, clenching, flexing, clenching again in great nervousness.

“Elder brother,” Rhiow said, “what is it? What did you find?”

Ith’s voice dropped again to a whisper, and despite the awful tension of the moment, Rhiow couldn’t help but be tempted toward laughter by a whisper that nonetheless filled the whole room. “The tablets said that darkness must fight darkness, that only the dark can save us: that wizards must turn to their oldest enemy, and only so will the worlds be saved…”

Rhiow’s tail lashed. “Turn to her how?” she said, horrified. It was completely counterintuitive, utterly impossible, almost certainly a lie. At least that’s the conclusion that reasonable thought would lead you to… “It’s some trap,” she said to the others, unable to believe anything else. “Some stratagem of Hers, to get us to fall in with Her plans and do exactly the opposite of whatever will stop Her.”

Urruah was sitting with eyes slitted, very still. “It’s always been a favorite tactic of the Lone One,” he said, “to get wizards to do Her dirty work for Her.”

“But She knows we’d know that,” Arhu said. “She might think we’re annoying, but when has She ever thought we were stupid?”

“You’re sure about the translation?” Siffha’h said, looking at Ith a little suspiciously.

“There was no mistaking it. Look for yourself.”

A moment later, replicas of the uptime tablets and annotations of their carvings had appeared in the middle of the living room floor. Everyone gathered around to study them. But Ith was right about the words, insofar as the Speech sufficed to read them, and right about the absolute flatness of the language in the inscriptions, and the inability to construe it in any other way. The carvings that ornamented the texts even looked a little hasty, as if the ancient artisan was unnerved by what he or she had been carving. With reason… Rhiow thought. If the artist was a wizard, this message can’t have made any more sense to him or her than to us…

Helen Walks Softly was sitting on the floor in jeans and an LAPD sweatshirt with her legs curled under her, and now she leaned over the glowing simulacra of the carvings on the tablets, gazing at them thoughtfully. “Isn’t this interesting,” she said, and tapped a finger on one of the reconstructed tablets. “See this?”

Rhiow paced over to look at the carven character Helen was indicating. There seemed to be two heads embedded in it, one a cat’s and one a serpent’s, each with some ornamental scrollwork surrounding it. But then she looked more closely, and saw that the Feathered Serpent was wearing a collar adorned with cat’s heads, and the Great Cat had a collar that looked like a snake…

“An ocelocoatl,” Helen said, “and a Chan-Bahlum. When they turn up at all, theyturn uptogether a lot.”

Rhiow glanced at Arhu and Ith. “Maybe now we know why,” Rhiow said. “It’s been becoming plain that the two of them go a long way back. Or about six months, depending on how you look at it…”

“But that’s not the whole point, Rhiow. Look at the two of them. They’re right next to this – “

Rhiow peered at the carved character Helen was indicating. At first glance it looked like the the Black Leopard’s head, with a constellation of little leopard heads around it. “Now what?” Rhiow muttered. “Is that the Devourer in the Darkness having kittens or something? Isn’t He a tom?”

“Look closer, Rhi. It’s not Tepeyollotl: He’s on the far side of this carving. This is sa’Rraah, with her little friends all around her – right next to the Ocelocoatl, our feline-saurian fusion. And they’re looking at Tepeyollotl together.”

“Not with the friendliest expressions I’ve ever seen, either,” Urruah said.

“Not arguing that point,” Rhiow said, “I still don’t know if I’m going to trust the fate of all known universes to some artist who was practicing carving snarls…”

Siffha’h now came over to look at the carving, especially the part that Helen had identified as sa’Rraah and the shadow-imps. “You know,” Siffha’h said, “Herself’s little jackals were sure down there in strength in that cavern.”

“True,” Rhiow said, bristling. “Something I was trying to avoid thinking about at the time.”

“But that’s the problem, Rhi. Why weren’t they doing anything?”

That gave Rhiow pause. In the cavern, Rhiow had dismissed it the shadow-imps’ nonintervention as a momentary condition, something to be grateful for as long as it lasted: and then everything had gone crazy and she hadn’t had time to spare them further consideration. But now she thought, They should’ve been attacking us. What was holding them back?

“I don’t have any answer for you on that count,” Rhiow said. “But after reviewing what happened, I don’t see that we have any cause to relax at the moment.” She licked her nose. “That wizardry, black as it was, executed before poor Laurel managed to remake her Oath and withdraw enacture from it. The calcified heart that Dagenham threw into it was the product of the last ceremonial murder they needed – the one that would enable the entry of Tepeyollotl into our spaces. That kicked the spell into execution, though we were able to disrupt its running somewhat, and the weaving of the incursion worldgate.” She looked over at Hwaith and Aufwi. “You two were instrumental in that. And then Ith arrived –“

“Though not where intended,” Ith said, regretful. “When I had the data I needed, I was trying to transit directly to your location. But the executing spell was spitting out so much energy that no transit could have arrived here without being deranged. And along with the warping of local hyperstring structure by the gate that was attempting to form – and then being shredded –“ He scraped for a moment at a smear of tar on one long wrist that he and Arhu hadn’t managed to spell off on the way back. “My transit was knocked a hundred yards or so off target. Fortunately the built-in offset function cut in so that I did not materialize inside a crowd of upset humans…”

“I was half hoping that the sudden physical presence here of a being so senior in the middle of that spell, even at a distance, could have so completely changed the local running conditions that the spell would exhaust all the energy pumped into it by the serial murders,” Rhiow said. “But the Whisperer tells me that the disruption just wasn’t sufficient. Unfortunately, my cousins, a spell always works, and this one intends to do just that. It’ll try to complete before the end of the date cycle it was tuned to – the dates that we found in the first tablets.”

“Meaning tonight,” Helen said.

“Late tonight, yes. It can’t do it exactly where the spell was started: the local space has been too deranged by the destruction of the cavern. What we have to do now is plot out all the places nearby where the locus seems likely to reroot, stake them out with spell-sensors, and be ready to move when the spell tries to finish executing.”

“Probably the place where a gate has rooted most strongly in recent times,” Siffha’h said.

Rhiow sighed. “Working that out is going to take yet more time away from what we really need to be doing. Which is trying to figure out some way to keep this world and all its surrounding space from being torn apart when the spell finishes running…”

She fell silent for a moment, for the problem was truly rather bigger than that. Everything we had wasn’t enough just now, Rhiow thought. We assumed we were going to be able to stop the spell completely and prevent the Outside’s incursion that way… and failed. So what will we have tonight that we didn’t have a few hours ago? And when is one of these guys going to call me on this? Because I can’t be the only one that this problem has occurred to, and I don’t see how what Ith has brought us is going to make any difference…