Diane Duane On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service

– Children's rhyme

In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life's service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fitting to do so – looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded …

– the Wizard's Oath, species-nonspecific recension

– and then suddenly light broke through again, the watery gray light of the morning he had just left: a few spits and spatters of rain reached him even here in the tunnel, blown in on that chilly wind. Some part of Patel's mind had now begun to go round and round with thoughts like How the heck is there daylight down here, I must be fifty feet underground and The smell, what is that smell?? – but that part of him felt strangely far away, like a mind belonging to someone else, in the face of what he saw before him. A street, and the gray day above it, those made sense: buildings pressing close on either side, yes, and the enamelled metal sign set high in the brick wall of the building opposite him, saying Coopers' Row, that was fine too: the math/business building of the University was up past the end of the Row, in Jewry Street, and he would have been heading there after meeting Sasha. But there was no pavement to be seen. There was hardly any road visible, either: it was covered ankle deep in thick brown mud, the source of the godawful smell. Must have been a sewer break, said some hopeful part of his mind, steadfastly ignoring the basic issue of how he was suddenly standing at ground level.

Patel walked forward slowly, trying not to sink into the mud, and failing – it came up over the tops of his shoes: boy, these trainers are going to be a loss after this, and they were only three weeks old, how am I going to explain this to Mum … ? Squelch, squelch, he walked forward, and came to the corner of Cooper's Row and George Street, looked down toward Great Tower Street in the direction of the Monument Tube station –­It was not there. The road was lined with old buildings, three– or four-story brick edifices all crowded together where multi-story office buildings should have been. The traffic was gone, too. Or rather, it was all replaced by carriages, carriages pulled by horses, their hooves making a strangled wet clopping noise as they pounded through the mud, up and down Great Tower Street. Patel staggered, changed the bag mechanically from the right hand to the left, and took a few more steps forward, looking away from the traffic, don't want to see that, doesn't make sense, and across to the Tower.

It at least was still there: the great square outer walls defining the contours of Tower Hill stood up unchanged, the lesser corner towers reached upward as always, "the windvanes on them wheeling and whirling in the gusts of wind off the river – the wind that bore the stink forcefully into Patel's nostrils and the rain, now falling a little harder, into his face, cold and insistent. That wind got into his hair and tried to find its way under his jacket collar; and around him, the few trees sprouting from the unseen pavement rocked in the wind, their bare branches rubbing and ratcheting together. Bare. That was wrong. It was September. And other things were moving, rocking too –­Momentarily distracted by the motion, he looked past the Tower, down toward Lower Thames Street and the great bend of the river which began there. A forest, he thought at first, and then rejected the thought as idiotic. No trees would be so straight and bare, with no branches but one or two sets each, wide crosspieces set well up the trunk: nor would trees be crowded so close together, or rock together so unnervingly, practically from the root. The "trees" were masts … masts of ships, fifty or seventy or a hundred of them all anchored there together, the wind and the water pushing at the ships from which the masts grew; and the bare shapes silhouetted against the morning gray were all rocking, rocking slightly out of phase, making faint uneasy groaning noises that he could hear even at this distance, for they were perhaps a quarter of a mile down the river from where he stood. From that direction too came a mutter of human voices, people shouting, going about their business, the sound muted by the wind that rose around him and rocked the groaning masts together –­That groan got down inside Patel, went up in pitch and began to shake him until he rocked like the masts, staggering, falling, the world receding from him. The bag fell from Patel's hand, unnoticed.

A man came round the corner right in front of Patel and looked at him, then opened his mouth to say something.

Patel jumped, meaning to run away: but his raw nerves misfired and sent him blundering straight into the man. As Patel came at him, the strangely dressed man staggered hurriedly backward, panic-stricken, tripped and fell – then scrambled himself up out of the mud with an unintelligible shout and ran crazily away. Patel, too, turned to flee, this time getting it right and going back the way he had come. He ran splashing through the stinking mud, and, for all the screaming in his head, ran mute: ran pell-mell back toward sanity, toward the light, and (without knowing how he did it) finally out into the bare– bulb brilliance of the Underground station, where he collapsed, still silent, but with the screaming ringing unending in his mind, insistently expressing what the shocked and gasping lungs could not.

Later those screams would burst out at odd times: in the middle of the night, or in the gray hour before dawn when dreams are true, startling his mother and father awake and leaving Patel sitting frozen, bolt upright in bed, sweating and shaking, mute again. After several years, some cursory-psychotherapy which did nothing to reveal the promptly and thoroughly buried memory causing the distress, and a course of a somewhat overprescribed mood elevator, the screaming stopped. But when he and his wife and new family moved to the country, later in his life, Patel was never easy about being in any wooded place in the wintertime, at dusk. The naked limbs of the trees, all held out stiff against the falling night and moving, moving slightly, would speak to some buried memory which would leave him silent and shaking for hours. Nor was he ever able to explain, to Sasha, or to his parents, or anyone else, exactly what had happened to his copy of Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. Mostly his family and friends thought he had been robbed and assaulted, perhaps indecently: they left the matter alone. They were right: though as regarded the nature of the indecency, they could not have been more wrong.

Patel fled too soon ever to see the men who came down along Cooper's Row after a little while, talking among themselves: men who paused curiously at the sight of the dropped book, then stooped to pick it up. One of them produced a kerchief and wiped the worst of the mud away from the strange material which covered the contents. Another reached out and slowly, carefully peeled the slick, thin white stuff away, revealing the big heavy book. A third took the book from the second man and turned the pages, marveling at the paper, the quality of the printing, the embossing on the cover. They moved a little down the street to where it met Great Tower Street, where the light was better: as they paused there, a ray of sun suddenly pierced down through the bleak sky above them, that atypical winter's sky here at the thin end of summer. One of the men looked up at this in surprise, for sun had been a rare sight of late. In that brief bright light the other two men leaned over the pages, read the words there, and became increasingly excited. Shortly the three of them hurried away with the book, unsure whether they held in their hands an elaborate fraud or some kind of miracle. Behind and above them, the clouds shut again, and a gloom like premature night once more fell over the Thames estuary … a darkness in which those who had ears to hear could detect, at the very fringes of comprehension, the sound of a slowly stirring laughter.

– and she was through, into what looked like a much older area, a brick-lined hallway on the far side of the door, lit by bare bulbs hanging .from the ceiling, all very much different from the clean shining fluorescent-lit station platform outside.

Rhiow looked over her shoulder, and Urruah came through after her. From the far side of the door, there were a couple of soft bumping noises.

Urruah put his whiskers forward and looked ahead of them at Huff, who had paused to see where they were. "He has a little trouble with this one sometimes," Urruah said. Bump, and Arhu abruptly came blooming through the metal, spitting and growling softly to himself. "Vhai'd stuff, why doesn't it get out of the way when I tell it – "

"Language," Rhiow said, rather hopelessly: but for the moment, Urruah just laughed. "Telling it won't help," he said: "you've got to ask nicely. Most things in the Universe react positively to that. Sass them, and they get stubborn."

Arhu threw Urruah an unconvinced look as he padded by him in Huff's wake. Old wooden doors opened into side rooms off this hallway: storerooms, Rhiow thought – a smell of electrical equipment and tools hung about the place. "There are workshops down here," Huff said: "and there's an access to the tunnel junction where the Tower Hill station's tracks run near the access stairs to the Fenchurch Street railway station. That's where the number-four gate is – "

He led them down one more stairway, a spiral one this time. It let out onto a small, dimly-lit platform which ran for maybe ten yards along a double line of track, the track stretching away into darkness on both sides. Above the platform hung the faintly glimmering oval of an active gate matrix. In front of it sat three People, one of them up on his haunches and working with the gate's control strings: a youngish tabby torn who, except that his tabbying was marmalade rather than silver and gray, would have reminded Rhiow somewhat of Urruah.

One of the other two turned their heads to look at the new arrivals. She was a slender gray shorthair queen, about Rhiow's own size but slimmer, with the most beautiful eyes Rhiow thought she had ever seen: they were a blue as deep as the skies on one of those perfect autumn days you sometimes got in the City, and the set of them was both indolent and kind. As she looked at Huff, the expression got kinder, and Rhiow knew immediately that the two of them were mates. The fourth Person, apparently concentrating on what the young tabby was doing, didn't move.

– and someone stumbled out of it. An ehhif.

The two teams sprang back in horror as the man crashed to the concrete almost on top of them. He lay there moaning, then grew quiet.

"Well," Arhu said, his eyes big with surprise and his voice full of badly hidden satisfaction, "you wanted it to fail the same way? There you go."

Fhrio gave Arhu a look suggesting that he would be seeing him later, outside the line of business.

"He's got a point, Fhrio," Rhiow said hurriedly. "You said you wished for an incursion … and a wizard has to watch what he wishes for. The Universe is listening … "

Fhrio gave her an annoyed look, but then almost visibly let the mood go, aware that they had more important issues to deal with. They all bent down together over the sprawled ehhif: Fhrio patted him gently on the face with one paw. There was no response. "Unconscious … "

– which suddenly was gone, and she fell down. Into the mud –

Rhiow struggled to her feet, opened her eyes enough to register that they were in some kind of street: buildings stood up on either side. Off to one side, Arhu was pulling himself to his feet as well. Beside her, Urruah was standing up, and swearing.

– abrupt, quicker than she was used to: but that was very much in Arhu's style. One moment they were looking at the dirty river flowing between its sludgy banks, and the foul air snuggling down against it: then everything went black and white.

And brown. She had not been prepared for the brown: it was a strange note. They were standing on a high place, one of the Lunar Carpathians, she thought, a fairly level spot scattered with small grainy rocks and the powdery pumice dust typical of even this area, which had suffered its share of meteoric impacts, exclusive of impacts of other types. The sphere of air held around them by the spell shed frozen oxygen and nitrogen snow around them at the interface between it and vacuum: the snow sifted out and down a little harder, sliding down the outside of the invisible sphere invoked by the spell, when any of them moved slightly and changed the way the wizardry compensated for their presence.

The brown lay streaked over the white and gray-black of the craters around them. It was ejecta from another impact, a much larger one, some miles away if Rhiow was any judge. She looked all around them for its source, but the crater was well over the short lunar horizon.

More than six miles away, anyway, she thought, glancing over at Arhu. He was licking his nose repeatedly. "Are you all right?" Rhiow said.

– and suddenly things were dark again, and Auhlae and Fhrio were looking at them, bemused, from outside the circle.

– gone. The Eye closed, and Arhu stood and shook his head, trying to clear it: and an ehhif, not seeing him since he was sidled, tripped over Arhu, caught himself, and went on, looking behind him to try to see the cobblestone he thought he had stumbled on.

"Ow ow ow ow," Arhu spat, and took himself over to the left-hand wall to recover himself a little. From inside the left-hand wall came a harsh cawing, a little like ehhif laughter, as if someone thought it was funny.

While he stood there and panted, Rhiow shivered all over at the thought of the burden Arhu was bearing. Better him than me, she said, somewhat ungraciously, to the Whisperer. The vision Arhu had been trying to describe to her turned out to be more like half-vision, and all the more maddening for it. For Arhu was looking, just briefly, through the eyes of Someone Who saw everything in the world as whole and seamless: thoughts, actions, past causes and present effects, the concrete and the abstract all welded into a single staggering completion. Rhiow understood a little of Arhu's confusion and anger now, for trying to extract one piece of information from the all– surrounding vastness of the Whisperer's perception seemed impossible, like trying to fish one drop of water out of your water bowl with your claw. You would always get a little bit of something else along with it: or a lot of something else. Rhiow thought with embarrassment of the facile way she had been telling him to concentrate, and grab hold of one part of it …

More, she now understood much better his confusion about tenses: for in the Whisperer's mind, the world was finished, a made thing, a completed thing … though one that was constantly changing. It was a harrowing point of view for a Person to try to assimilate, or for any mortal being who lived in linear time and generally thought that one thing happened after another, and that the future was still indeterminate. It was not, to Her. The Whisperer, in Her mastery, saw it all laid out. The only place where Her uncertainties lay was in what you would do to change the future … in which case everything you did also became part of the ongoing completion, a law of the universe, as if it had been laid down so from the very beginning. The two visions of the future did not exclude one another, from Her point of view: they actually complemented one another, and made sense. To Rhiow, that was the most frightening concept of all.

She breathed out, wondering how she would apologize to Arhu for so completely misunderstanding what he had been dealing with, while Arhu got back his breath and his composure, and headed on down Water Lane again. Just across from Traitor's Gate was an opening into the central part of the Tower complex, through a building called the Bloody Tower. He went under this archway as well, and turned immediately left.

Built into the wall here was a house with many long peaked roofs, the Queen's House: and in front of it were arches with iron bars set in them. Behind those arches were some low, wizened trees and shrubs … and in the trees, and under at least one of the shrubs, sat the ravens.

Arhu had known they would be large, but he hadn't thought they would be as large as a Person. Most of them were, though, and at least one of them which perched on that stone wall, above the bars, was as big as Huff: as big as a small houff. They were all resplendently glossy black, and they looked down at him and, to Arhu's astonishment, saw him perfectly well, even though he was sidled.

– and everything settled into a kind of silvery darkness: no more discomfort – he was on the inside of the beak and claws now. He was soaring through what looked like cloud, faintly lit as if with twilight: the sense of day about to dawn, but in no hurry about it. The feeling was unlike skywalking, which Arhu enjoyed well enough: but this was less passive. He had wings, and the wind was in a dialog with them.

Nicely done, something said in his head. We could probably make a raven of you, with about fifty years' work. Now show me the place you were in. Not the Moon, but the street –

Arhu tried to see it again in mind as he had seen it in reality: but most of what he remembered was the smell. People's noses are wonderfully accurate and delicate. They can tell where another Person has been, or where an ehhif or houff has passed, for months afterward. But the blunting, smashing, awful weight of the smell in the London they had visited had ruined Arhu's ability to taste or smell most things for the better part of a day. Now he recalled that smell better than any other part of the experience: sickening, disgusting, like a shout inside your head, horse-bird-houff-ehhif– smoke-soot-garbage-shit-of-every-description … Sorry, Arhu gasped from inside the wings, inside the beak and claws.

Don't apologize, it's perfect, said the one who shared the inside– beak-and-claws with him. A tolerant young mind, wry, dry, somewhat disrespectful of form but respectful of talent and wisdom and wit, a fearless seeker of strange new experience like the inside of a cat's mind, or half a pint of Guinness poured into an ashtray: that was Odin. Arhu put his whiskers forward, or tried to and then discovered he had no whiskers: he dropped the lower half of his beak instead. As he did so, he got the faintest whiff of another name … and carefully turned his nose away from it. At least he still had a nose of sorts.

Now then, said the other, either missing all this, or ignoring it. The path's clear.

They soared for a good while, circling. Every now and then Arhu would get a glimpse, through the silvery twilight, of a landscape below them: always the features were the same – the oxbowed bends of the river, the great loop of the Thames that held the Isle of Dogs, not quite an isle but a fat and noticeable peninsula. Then the cloud would close in again. Probability, Odin said. Or the lack of it …

And suddenly the cloud cleared, and they dropped from the heavens together like a stone. The city below them was filthy. The Moon above them was scarred.

– one of the London streets opening out below them, suddenly: in the middle of it, being driven along at a sedate pace, a queen-ehhif out for a ride in a coach pulled by horses. Men ride in front of her, and behind her, riding on other horses as guards. The queen-ehhif is a little stocky, plainly dressed in dark clothes. Her face is one which could have smiled, but does not. The coach turns a corner into one of those broad tree-lined avenues. People passing by pause, and bow, as the coach passes. The queen-ehhif waves occasionally, a very reserved gesture. The coach drives on –­An ehhif is standing at a corner nearby. As the coach passes he pulls out a gun, points it at the queen-ehhif in the coach. Shoots.

Heads turn at the sudden crack of sound. In the coach, the queen– ehhif looks over her shoulder, bemused, as the ehhif driving the coach whips up the horses. They clatter away. Others run or ride toward the ehhif who fired the gun. The queen-ehhif, unharmed, looks back, her white face sharply contrasted against the dark bonnet. This has happened to her before, but she can never quite bring herself to believe it when it does.

– Now the same coach again, driving in through gates surrounding a wide green park in the countryside outside London: and then into the courtyard in front of a massive house, turreted with the same kind of great round towers as are found inside the double walls where the Ravens live. The coach drives up to the doors, and the queen-ehhif gets out, with a younger queen-ehhif, her daughter perhaps, beside her. The two of them go in together, through the great front gate, in the broad low sunset light.

Close, Odin thought, but not quite. Now we find the core –­Several more flickers as the raven and his passenger dive through patches of silvery twilight, and out again: and after a few breaths' time, the yellowy sunset light reasserts itself. But this time everything is very different. A dark carriage comes out of the gates: but its windows are shut, and draped in black. Everything about it is black: the horses, the harness, the clothes of the tom-ehhif who drive. The coach is a long one, long enough to take one of the boxes in which the ehhif put their dead before burying them. The long drive down to the roadway is lined with ehhif, all dressed in black, weeping. Some of them hide their faces in their hands as the coach passes them. Some of them hold ehhif-young up to see the coach as it goes by. Occasionally a cry breaks out from one of the grown ehhif, a terrible sound, as if wrested from a throat that normally would never make such a noise no matter what the circumstances. Otherwise everything is very silent, the only noises the sound of the horses' hoofs, and far away, the bell of one of the houses where ehhif go to entreat the Powers or the One, tolling very slow, one strike in every minute, like a failing heart.

The long black equipage winds away toward London through the brassy sunset light. The raven flashes overhead, passing them, dodging through cloud again, coming out over the City, and veering close to a shopfront in a street that is almost empty. This, in its way, shocks Rhiow more badly than anything else she has seen. She is a city Person: she is used to streets that always have someone walking or driving on them, no matter what time of day or night it is. But this place looks like it has died, or like the heart has been torn out of it. Few ehhif are abroad, and almost all of them are dressed in black or have black armbands, even black rags, tied about their arms. All their faces are grim: many are tearstained.

The raven perches for a moment on a folding board which is set up outside the shopfront. The shop itself is dark and its door is shut. But outside, the piece of paper pasted to the board says, in large black letters, HER MAJESTY'S FUNERAL. It is the front page of The Times of London, and it has no other words on it except the newspaper's masthead, and the date: JULY 14, 1874.

The raven takes wing again before anyone should see it; vaults up into the safety of the silvery twilight again. That is the core which you sought, Odin says. We have just time to see the beginning, and the end.

The tense changed once more: now became then again, at least while Odin and Arhu were in transit. They saw more, much more, as the raven flashed in and out through the cloud that always seemed about to break into day. Rhiow could not make sense of most of what she was sensing, and hoped Arhu would be able to do better, or that perhaps the raven Odin could: for occasionally, like a sudden ray of light through the cloud, there would come an image so overladen with context that it was as if a thousand ehhif stood around her, every one of them shouting some piece of information that it was important for her to hear. A group of ehhif, ranged in a big room, facing each other in rows: and all shouting at one another, a terrible noise of rage and confusion, while one ehhif at the front of one group, in the bottom row of the benches, cried out, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay – !" and all the others shouted him down in a crescendo of fury, as another one leapt up and shouted, "Mr. Speaker, they say the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. I can do the same: and I say, 'They have sown the storm, and they shall reap the whirlwind – !' " A roar of approval – and from that, abruptly, to a white-walled room where a broad, squat machine of some kind was being built by ehhif wearing protective suits. Then a bright, blue-skied day, and a missile or rocket leaping up on a tongue of fire from a launch pad bizarrely adorned in the curlicues of the Victorian decorative style. Then a huge aircraft passing over a city landscape, so big that it shadowed the ground, and ehhif looked up and pointed. Then –

– the images were gone again. The twilight returned … and went sinister. It was not silvery any more: it was leaden. The sun could not come through it. Arhu and Odin spun up together on raven's wings, catching an updraft, or what passed for one in vision. This was no normal wind: the air was too thin for wind as high as they were going, as the Earth yielded up her curvature below them. Far down, away in the blue sea, Arhu could see the plume of darkness wafting up from one small point. A volcano, a mother of volcanoes, belching out great clouds of ash and dust into the upper atmosphere: a thin line which became a plume, a plume which became a pall, thin and dark and gloomy, right around the globe of the world. What was bright, and normally gleamed like polished metal where the Sun touched it, now was dull and tarnished: and clouds that should have burned white, were all filmed gray. 1816, said Odin's voice, dry, noticing rather than reacting. He had seen it before: he had seen all this before. The difference, he said, is that I never had to look. Looking is what makes the difference, in vision. Looking makes it so …

They dived again, were briefly lost in the silvery twilight, the billow of possibility. When they came out, they looked down into a muddy street and saw a young dark-complexioned man in casual clothing of the late twentieth century come lurching out of the middle of the air, carrying something heavy in a bag. He came staggering through the darkness, out into the street: another ehhif came along and frightened him. He dropped the bag, turned and fled once more into the darkness. A few moments later, other ehhif came along and picked up the bag, peeled it away from what it contained. A book, a very large book. The ehhif stared at the cover. Another one took the book from the one who held it: opened it, turned the pages, looking at the equations and the delicately drawn diagrams, and the dense small print.

One of them glanced up into the cloudy sky, with that thin layer of darkness streaming along above everything, as a brief welcome ray of sun shot down through the dull day. The light fell on the book. Arhu looked at the silver ehhif letters on the book's cover. It said Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia.

Arhu looked down at the ehhif and heard, very softly, all about them, the laughter: the quiet amusement of Something which had given the world, just now, a brief foretaste of what was waiting for it later, in far greater intensity, when the seed it had just planted finally came to fruit. This darkness would fall again, but many times magnified: this cold would come … but would be permanent. By the time it passed, and the planet warmed again, all its intelligent life would be long dead.

Arhu had heard that laughter before. Once upon a time, when he was a kitten, he had found himself in a garbage bag in the East River, one which slowly filled with water, while he and his brothers and sisters clawed and scrabbled desperately on top of each other, trying to stay above the terrible cold stuff that was slowly climbing high enough around them that they would have no choice but to breathe it, and die. Only Arhu lived, saved by chance – some ehhif coming along and seeing the sinking bag in the water, and hearing the last faint cries of despair from inside, had fished it out, torn it open, and dumped the sodden bodies of the kittens out onto the bike path. All the while he had been in that bag, and even afterwards, all the while the ehhif warmed him in his coat while taking the last small survivor to the local animal shelter, Arhu had sensed that laughter all around him. It was Entropy in Its personified form, the One Who invented death, sa'Rrahh as the People knew Her, the disaffected and ambivalent Power which wizards called "Lone": and It had laughed at the prospect of his one small death as It was now laughing at this far greater one. The fury Arhu had felt when first he recognized that laughter's source, he felt now, and it roared up in him like the voice of one of the Old Cats from the Downside, a blast of pure rage that sent Odin tumbling through the silvery twilight as if blown off course by a gust of wind.

They were not off course, though. They came out of the twilight more quickly than even Odin had expected, so that for a moment he almost lost control, dropping some hundreds of feet before he could get his wings under him again. As they tumbled, Arhu had a brief confusion of which way was up and which was down. They were high above the Earth again, but as they tumbled the lights blurred, and there seemed to be stars in the dark side of the Earth as well as in the sky –­Odin fought for stability, found it. Arhu looked down, through the raven's Eye, and saw that there were lights on the dark side of the Earth, indeed, but they were not stars.

Europe was in shadow. London was dark. But on the Continent, from north to south, eye-hurtingly bright lights had broken out, a rash of points of fire. Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, every one was a point of light. Others blossomed as Arhu watched – Hanover, Lyon, Geneva, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, Warsaw, and many more: seeds of fire growing, paling, each one with its tiny pale growth above it. Arhu did not need to dive any closer to see the mushroom clouds. The seeds were planted. It would be no spring that came with their growth, but a winter that would last an age …

Arhu closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them again, he was crouched down on the ground, on the green grass near the bush in the Ravens' Enclosure, and beside him, Odin was standing up and shaking his feathers into place. Hardy was sitting down on the nearby tree, now, near Hugin.

"The beginning and the end," Arhu breathed, and had to stop and try to catch his breath, for he was finding it hard just to be here and now again.

"It will pass," said Hardy. "Meanwhile, be assured: you did a good job. You see strangely, but your way might be something that we could learn in time, if you could teach us."

"Me teach you?" Arhu said, and gulped for air again. "Uh – I'll have to ask."

"Ask Her by all means," said Hardy. "In the meantime, I see the nature of your problem. She was the core of that whole time, the old Queen, Victoria: the events of that whole period crystallized out around her personality, and the qualities which her people projected onto her. Any universe in which she was successfully assassinated would be a threat to all the others anywhere near it in its probability sheaf. And I would suggest to you," Hardy said, bending down a little closer to Arhu, "that if the Lone One wished to make doubly sure of your universe's demise, that it would see to it that she died in your universe as well."

Arhu stared at him. "By making the ehhif here assassinate this Queen Victoria?"

"Indeed. It might well happen anyway, for as the two universes begin the process of exchanging energy and achieving homeostasis, that 'core event' will be one of the first things that will try to happen in your universe." Hardy blinked and looked thoughtful. "If I were in your position, I would be sure that this world's Victoria is protected from the fate you have seen befall her counterpart. Otherwise, with two universes with dead Queens, the alternate universe will gain a great entropy advantage over the other. Should both Queens die, I doubt very much whether this world would long survive … "

"Oh, great, another problem," Arhu said, rather bitterly. "And how can you be so calm about it?" "Well, for one thing, it has already happened," said Hardy mildly. "For another thing, you are the ones who will cause it not to happen … if indeed you do. How should I not be calm, when I know I am giving my advice to the right person?"

Arhu blinked and turned to Odin. "Can you translate that for me?" he said, rather helplessly.

Odin blinked too. "It made perfect sense to me," he said. "Which part of it specifically did you need translated?"

– And suddenly, there was someone with them in the circle. He was a sorry-looking ehhif indeed, with longish black hair and a hospital gown, and he was looking at them all with dopy astonishment while he rubbed the wrists which were suddenly no longer restrained. He opened his mouth, possibly to shout for help at the sight of seven cats in a circle of light, but Fhrio slipped one paw under one of the control lines of the spell, and the ehhif froze just that way, staring, with his mouth open.

"It's going to start getting crowded in here," Rhiow said, unable to resist being at least a little amused. Blink, blink, blink, blink, went the spell, and she had to start keeping her eyes closed; the effect was rather disturbing, for it was starting to go faster and faster. How many hospitals does this city have, anyway? Rhiow thought.

It had quite a few, and they got to visit about eight more of them before yet another ehhif, a tall handsome woman in a borrowed nightshirt, found herself standing in the circle. Rhiow could tell that the nightgown was borrowed, since no one from the last century was really that likely to own a nightshirt featuring a picture of a famous gorilla climbing up the Empire State Building. The woman took one look at the cats in the circle, and opened her mouth to scream.

She too froze, and outside the timeslide, the blink blink blink started again. The center of the circle began filling with ehhif, all still as statuary by some eccentric artist, some dressed, some not very, all looking like people who have been through a great deal in a short time.

And on and on the blinking went, until Rhiow had to squeeze her eyes shut again, and even when they were shut, she could still sense the timeslide flickering from place to place, until the mere thought of it made her queasy. Then there came a surprised shout, and suddenly Artie was standing in the circle with them, looking in astonishment at the other ehhif who were already there.

– and once more the pressure built and built, and Rhiow closed her eyes against it, sure it was going to push them straight back in through their sockets. She waited for the release of pressure that would let them all know that the slide had been successful; but it didn't come. It just built, and built, and got worse and worse –

– Can't, said Siffha'h. On the other side of the circle was a terrible feeling of strain, counterbalanced with the sense of some massive force planted in their way, not to be moved.

Don't bother, said someone's voice, Huff's voice, from inside the spell. Let it go, we'll try again later!

I – will not – let It – Siffha'h gasped. There may not be a chance later. We're wizards – what else are we for?

– and the vision was centering, bizarrely, on Siffha'h. Herself, she moaned and sank down, covering her eyes with her paws, and Rhiow could understand why: the mirroring must be disorienting in the extreme, self seeming to look at self seeming to look at self, infinitely reflected –­Except that it was not Siffha'h moaning that Rhiow heard. It was Arhu. Crying in a small frightened voice: crying like a kitten. "Oh, no," he moaned. "It's you. I didn't know … I couldn't help it … How could I help it?"

– an image of blackness. The rustling of a plastic bag as small frightened bodies thrashed and scrabbled for purchase, for any way to stay above what inexorably rose around them. Cold water, black as death. Underneath him, all around him, the sound of water bubbling in … of breath bubbling out …

– and suddenly he simply can't move: he's frozen, as if he were a stick of wood or one of the carved statues downstairs. Like a statue with its pedestal pulled out from under it, he topples, unable even to catch himself, or to turn so that he falls face down and not on his back.

Yet at the last minute he doesn't fall. Some force far stronger than he is stops him, holds him suspended in air. He can't breathe, can't move, can only lie here gripped by something he can't begin to understand, and by the terror that follows.

The pain, at least, drops away from the back of his head. But suddenly there is a pressure on his chest. His eyes, wide already in the dark, go as wide as they can with shock as a face, grinning, like the face of a demon, becomes just barely visible before him.

It is the face of a black-and-white cat. From the very end of its tail, held up behind it, comes the faintest glimmer of light, like a will-'o'-the-wisp. It looks at him with a face of unutterable evil, a devil come to claim him: and, impossibly, in a whisper, it speaks.

– and then the light broke through.

All around the huge terrible form, like a cage, a four-dimensional figure appeared, a massive four-dimensional truncated icosahedron, its "extra" sides and volumes unfolding out all around it. The Lone Power looked around it in first astonishment and then growing rage, and began to throw itself against the "bars" of the cage. The cage shook, but it held.

Sa'Rrahh roared. It will not benefit you! The fire comes now, and then the Winter –­There will be no Winter, came another great voice – one which was, bizarrely, not one voice, but a union of many. This is the land of the Sun. We are the People of the Sun, and of our Mother Whose sigil the Sun is. By this spell worked, and this summons wrought, we ban the Winter, we ban the Unmastered Fire: we ban the One Who bears it!