Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

All right, Rhiow said. Pass the news to the others. She thought for a moment about whether it would be wiser to wait until all the ehhif were in, or go early. Early won. Arhu, I need you to go in first, she said. Hide and look around. Then pass us coordinates and we’ll slip into some quiet spot that you recommend.

Fine.

And remind Sif to keep her power-presence low and quiet! Rhiow said. The jackals are going to be twitchy enough at the feel of her just being in the space. The less reason they might have to crystallize their attention out, the better.

She knows that, Arhu said.

Good. Where’s Helen?

Aufwi says she’s sitting on his head. Arhu sounded bemused. Is anybody going to tell me exactly how that works?

If we see the dawn, I’m hoping she’ll tell me, Rhiow said. And ‘Ruah –

He’s closest to the door into the hill. Down the hall and outside. He’ll come in right after me.

Fine. Choose your moment, then send along the coordinates. And if you should hear Dagenham nearby, be very sure not to be seen. There’s something about him – Rhiow bristled a little.

All right. In-mind silence fell again.

The silence outside her mind was far less comfortable to deal with. Rhiow licked her nose again: she couldn’t help it. “Hwaith — ” she said.

“Rhiow, don’t,” Hwaith said. “Let it lie. If dawn comes and we see it, there’s time to take this further. And maybe no need to.”

His tone wasn’t flat or neutral: he genuinely wasn’t upset. Rhiow couldn’t understand it, because she certainly was.

She got busy calming herself down again. I seem to be doing so much of that, she thought. It has to be due to spending such a while in the wrong time…. It was a well-known side effect of prolonged timesliding. A day or so wouldn’t do much harm: the soul fairly quickly forgave you the injury of being briefly decoupled from its proper temporospatial alignment. But the longer the decoupling lasted, the worse the effects, and if you –

I’m in, Arhu said.

His tone of mind was unnerved. What? Rhiow said silently.

A long moment’s silence. Rhiow’s fur started standing up. Are you all right…?

You should see this –

Don’t show me! Just wait till ‘Ruah gets in. Then give us the mark to hit.

A few seconds later the coordinates appeared in their minds. Rhiow’s eyes met Hwaith’s. Let’s go –

The Big Meow: Chapter Eleven

They came out in shadow nearly as deep as the little cupboard they’d left. But the feel of the space on Rhiow’s fur and whiskers was instantly different: high, wide, deep. The air was unnaturally cool, unnaturally damp, and utterly still; and except for one faint light away off to Rhiow’s right, everything was nearly as dark as night.

They were in a natural cave that reached up above them into the upper reaches of the hillside behind the house. But the cold rammed-earth floor where Rhiow and Hwaith now crouched, with Arhu and Sif and Urruah and Aufwi behind them, was well below the level of the wine cellar. The hard dirt under their feet felt surprisingly damp, considering how hot and dry everything was just a matter of forty or fifty feet above them on the surface.

With the others, deep in shadow near one of the cavern walls, Rhiow held absolutely still and looked around. The wall behind them was just raw earth mixed with haphazardly buried stone – rocks and boulders that looked like they might have been washed down into pressure-hardened mud many years ago by some flash flood in one of the surrounding ravines. Roots stuck through the raw earth of the walls here and there: in places the wall had crumbled away, leaving little piles of unregarded dirt. Holes in the cavern walls suggested that small creatures had tunneled in or out over time. It was hard to imagine rabbits coming down this deep: the immediate assumption had to be rats.

The space enclosed by the damp earth walls was roughly circular, though the ceiling was higher down toward one end than at the other. In the dimness, maybe fifty feet up, Rhiow could just see some roots hanging down through that ceiling, possibly the roots of one or more trees up on the hillside, all shriveled and dried out from not having found water. Beyond that, the cavern had no unusual characteristics except for what lay in its center.

At first she thought it was just a single circle of rough stones, maybe thirty feet across. They were not carved as far as Rhiow could tell, maybe not even shaped: lumpy, rounded boulders, longer than they were wide, more or less stuck in the ground. Inside them, and outside them, were two matching rings of smaller stones. There were perhaps twenty of the big ones, and maybe thirty of the smaller stones in the outer circle. The inner one was harder to judge, partly because as Rhiow looked at the stones, she found herself having trouble getting a count. There was something about the stones that made her dislike looking at them.

Hunting circle, Helen said silently. Or it started out that way….

This is something to do with your people? Siffha’h said.

It might have been once… a very, very long time ago. But then someone started using the ring for some other purpose. A pause. And then it looks as if at some point a hillside fell on it… which suggests the other purpose might not have been very wholesome.

Did the Azteca ehhif ever come up this far? Aufwi said.

I don’t know, Helen said. It doesn’t have to have been them. Just someone who perhaps had been down into their lands, heard from them about the powerful being they were beginning to worship… then brought the news up north.

Rhiow’s tail lashed. She looked rightward toward the source of the faint light, sniffed the air. Something’s burning –

It’s one of those little camp lanterns ehhif use, Arhu said. It burns one of those petroleum liquids they use. I saw one bring it in a while ago through the door they’re using down there… then he went away. A few others came in too, looked around, then left again. They were talking about the others coming here, getting ready to come in here very soon and do something…

Probably best we should scatter around before they start coming in here in numbers, Rhiow said. Stay by the walls. Their eyes aren’t anything like as good as ours under these conditions: they won’t be able to see much even if they bring more lights in here.

Her team split up and took off in both directions. Off to one side, Arhu was lingering. How many have you seen coming into the house so far? Rhiow said.

Twenty or so.

All right. Go on. And Arhu – He paused. Watch Sif’s back. She’s likely to make the difference between us being able to stop what starts happening here or not making any difference at all.

Don’t worry… I’ll be right with her. He faded off into the darkness.

Rhiow looked at the stones again, trying to force herself to concentrate on the nearest of the large ones. It was hard: she felt her eyes burning as something made her want more and more to look away. Nasty, she said. Come on, Hwaith, no point in lurking there and hoping I won’t notice you. If you’re going to be with me, be with me.

She headed off toward the nearest of the big stones, being careful to keep it between her and that dim light down by the doorway. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Hwaith said.

I’m not seeing much of anything, Rhiow said as they got closer to the stone: her eyes were bothering her more and more as she tried to focus on the thing.

Not that, Rhiow. Look at the strings!

Unusually for a gate technician, she had been paying little attention to the hyperstring structure in the area. Now Rhiow made the little mental shift necessary to alter the way she was seeing the physical world, and the hyperstrings in the area sprang into view. But she didn’t see the normal relatively straight warp and weft of brilliant lines that grossly marked the structure on which the physical universe was hung. Here the lines of force invisibly filling the air were all warped out of shape, unnaturally bundled together around the circle, as if they were writhing away from the stones in the circle.