To Visit the Queen (15 page)

"Now what in the worlds," said another voice down the tunnel. Heads turned. A moment later Huff jumped up onto the platform, and looked at the bizarre tableau before him: the half-sitting, frozen
ehhif,
Urruah once again up to his armpits in the hyperstrings of the gate, Siffha'h sitting on the power junction and washing nonchalantly, Auhlae and Rhiow looking on in bemusement and distress, and Fhrio and Arhu.

Fhrio turned and glared at Huff, his ears still back. "Well, about time you got back here! While you've been off having one of your little catnaps, your precious imported
vhai
'd 'senior gating team' has— "

"Fhrio,"
said Huff. Fhrio subsided and sat down, though his ears stayed flat.

Huff sat down too. "For one thing, I was not having a catnap, much as I would have liked to be. I was off having a talk about this gate with Hni'hho." Rhiow immediately recognized this as the name of the present Senior Wizard for Western Europe, an
ehhif
living just across the water in one of the low countries near the sea. "And for another, I think you may owe Rhiow and her team an apology. They were brought here to produce the results. They are apparently producing them"—and he flicked a glance over at the wretched unconscious
ehhif
— "whether you like them or not. We were specifically instructed to expect 'somewhat unorthodox technique.' Or weren't you listening to Her?"

"Oh, I heard Her, it's just— "

"It isn't 'just.' If you're feeling obstructive, take it up with Herself, but you've got to resolve whatever conflicts you have about this work before you do anything further."

Fhrio turned away and began to wash. So did Arhu, with great intensity and speed.

Rhiow breathed out in relief.
"Somewhat unorthodox technique,"
she thought then, slightly amused.
Well, Arhu's off the sharp end of the claw for the moment. But what if "unorthodox" means me and Urruah too?

Huff got up and walked to the edge of the circle, looking at the sleeping
ehhif
half sitting there. "
He's
a long way from home," he said.

"I'd say he's from the middle of the century before last, as
ehhif
count time," said Urruah. "The location is nearly congruent with this one, at least, but the exact time is proving elusive. It's somewhere within the spread of the previous micro-openings, though. No guarantee of whether it coincides with any of them."

"He spoke of bombings," Auhlae said, going over to stand by her mate.

"He was talking about the Queen, too," Arhu said, looking up from his own composure-washing and sounding a little bemused. "I wouldn't have thought
ehhif
knew about Iau."

"With him wearing those clothes, I would say he probably meant the
ehhif
-queen who was ruling then," Huff said. "A different usage of the same word we use for Her, and for shes. Hffich'horia, this queen's name was. A lot of the
ehhif
on this island count themselves as of the same pride, though they're not blood-related except distantly: and they have a kind of
hwio-rrhi'theh
, a 'pride of prides,' who're supposed to care for all the other
ehhif
, help them find food and do justice among them and so forth, though as usual for
ehhif
, it's never quite that simple. This
ehhif
-queen was a daughter of that chief-pride, which the
ehhif
then apparently found a little unusual: for a long time toms had run that chief-pride, not queens."

"Peculiar," Rhiow said. "Even among
ehhif
, queens still run things a lot of the time, no matter that the toms say otherwise."

Huff grinned at that. "I've never understood that myself. You'd think they'd be glad to have someone relieve them of the responsibility." He threw an affectionate look at Auhlae: she half-closed her eyes in amusement. "Anyway, this
ehhif
-queen is still famous for the things done by her pride and the great ones of the prides under her: today's
ehhif
call that whole time period after her."

"He said she was assassinated, though," Urruah said.

Huff twitched his tail back and forth. "Certainly other
ehhif
tried to kill her several times," he said, "but none of them ever succeeded. She died of age and illness... in our world. But in his..." Huff looked at the
ehhif
.

"We really need to know when he comes from," Siffha'h said, "if this is going to make any sense."

"Yes, but if you've already had to tranquilize him, I don't think he's going to be much more help," Huff said. "If we try to get more information out of him, we might damage him, which contravenes the Oath, no matter how much we think may ride on what he knows."

"I'd have to agree," Rhiow said. "He was getting very distressed indeed."

"Well, at least we have other ways to get this information, since now we have a positive lock on where this particular
ehhif
came from. We can put him back where he belongs, and we can compare the gate's present configuration to the older gate logs, then see if we can find out how or why they've been malfunctioning and giving us less than useful records of these transits. Any other thoughts on this? 'Hlae?"

Auhlae waved her tail in negation. "Let's do it."

"Fhrio? Siffha'h?"

Fhrio said, "I don't like this gate being locked open, and even less do I like it when the other end may be anchored in an alternate reality. One gate stuck in the open position can begin to affect all the others in odd ways, and our sheaf of gates is sensitive enough in that regard."

"I understand your concern," Huff said, "and you're right. But in this particular case, we're going to have to take the chance. As soon as we can put someone through to confirm the temporal coordinates at the other end and get them home again, we can close it down again. Sif?"

"Sounds like a good idea to me," Siffha'h said.

Huff turned to Rhiow. "Do you concur?"

"Absolutely," she said.

"All right," Huff said. "Let's send this pastling home, then. Do you think you need to alter his memories, Rhiow?"

"It wouldn't be easy," she said, "for the same reason Auhlae wasn't willing to go after abstract information. I might mess something up, and leave him worse off than he would have been if I hadn't meddled. But from the way he was answering us, I think it's likely enough that he
will
dismiss all this as a dream."

"All right. Siffha'h, you like the big showy physical spells."

"This isn't showy," Siffha'h said, and without twitching so much as a whisker or making any alteration to the "physical" spell-circle she sat on, Mr. Illingworth levitated gently into the air and toward the gate.

"Would you make it patent, and give me visual?" Siffha'h said. "I don't want to drop the guy."

Urruah, looking over his shoulder at her, grinned a little and slipped one claw behind into the patency bundle, pulling gently. A moment later they were looking into a dark vista that might have been a street: walls were visible not too far away, and a faint, yellow, wobbling light came off from one side.

"Gaslight," Auhlae said softly, waving her tail in fascination. The
ehhif
drifted slowly through the gate, into the darkness on the other side of the gate; Urruah edged sideways a little to let him pass unhindered. "How far down is the ground?" Siffha'h said.

"About your body's length."

The
ehhif
dropped down below the boundary of the gate, out of Rhiow's sight: Urruah craned his neck to see. "All right," he said, "he's down. I'm going to turn this nonpatent again and leave it locked." He started pulling strings again. "If we can."

The gate shimmered and rippled— and all the length of it heaved, a bizarre sight like some huge beast's skin shivering convulsively to get rid of a biting fly. Even the boundaries of the gate, which should have remained unaffected, twisted and warped. Urruah threw himself backward, twisted, and came down on his feet— just. Behind him, color drained from the warp and weft of the gate and it steadied: after a moment it hung in the air in its default configuration again, nonpatent, in "standby," though its colors looked very muted, almost drained.

"What in the Queen's name was
that?"
Huff said, staring.

No one had any answers. Fhrio padded up to the gate, looked at it, then looked angrily over at Urruah.
"What did you do to it?"

"Nothing that you didn't see," Urruah said, getting up and shaking himself. "I've seen catastrophic closures before, but they didn't look anything like
that.
I wonder, though, if that was some kind of reaction to Mr. Illingworth being put back where he belonged all of a sudden?"

"You mean you don't think these gatings are accidental," Siffha'h said. "So it was like whatever engineered the opening, from way back then, didn't
want
him back."

"Meaning that he was meant to increase whatever imbalance in our universe is already present," said Auhlae, "from the pastlings who've come through and not yet been found again."

"There's another nasty possibility," Rhiow said. "That transit might have been balanced for him alone, and when someone else either tried to accompany him through it or follow him to the source using the same 'settings,' they could have been damaged. Or possibly even killed."

"You're suggesting that it was a trap?" Huff said.

"There would be no way to be sure of that with the data we have. But I
am
suggesting that Siffha'h's right. This was not a malfunction... or not a very likely one. There was someone at the other end managing it, or someone who programmed it and walked away."

"But how do you open a gate
forward
in time?" Siffha'h asked, her eyes big.

Huff looked at her somberly. "Unless you've mastered contemporal existence," Huff said, "you don't. But the only ones who have done so, who simultaneously live in all times and none, are the Powers That Be."

"Including that one other Power," said Auhlae, "who gives us so much trouble."

Glances were exchanged all around.

"Well, the circle's served its purpose," Rhiow said. She flirted her tail at the "wizard's knot": it unraveled, and the rest of the circle vanished with it. "Thanks, Siffha'h. That was nicely done."

She looked smug. "Anytime."

Fhrio went over to the gate and put one paw into the control weave, hooking out first one string, then another. He hissed softly. "There's no telling what happened now," he said. "Those 'settings' wiped themselves from the logs when the gate collapsed, that doubtless being the 'operator's' intention. We're no farther along than we were before."

Urruah, who had stepped away to sit down and have a brief wash while Fhrio was looking the gate over, now glanced up. "Well," he said, "it's not that bad. I wove them into the gate's hard memory, stacked underneath your standard default routines, while I was locking the gate open. Just a precaution: I was afraid I might drop something vital when things got busy. But at least that way we could be sure of finding the settings again if something went wrong."

Fhrio blinked. "
How
did you get into my hard routines that fast?"

Urruah smiled one of those smug-tom smiles, and Rhiow said hurriedly, "Huff, I wouldn't mind taking a break for a little while, if it suits you."

"Certainly. Let's go up and get some fresh air, see if we can find some lunch. After that"—and Huff looked grim— "we must plan. If the Lone Power is behind what we just saw— and I can't think what else could be— then we've a nasty job ahead of us. Food first: but then the council of war."

The food took less time than Rhiow had thought, most of it provided by
ehhif
whom she found astonishingly willing. Huff had simply led them around to the Mint, the pub where he lived with his
ehhif,
the pub's manager. Rhiow was not sure what to expect from a pub, except for thinking that perhaps, like many other things she had glimpsed so far in London, it might be fairly old: but this one was as much like a New York uptown bar as anything else, all plate glass and polished brass and hanging plants. Huff made his way through the pub's "lounge" area, graciously accepting bits of sausage and burger and sandwich and other treats from the patrons and bringing this food back to the others, who stayed discreetly sidled in one out-of-the-way corner of the pub otherwise populated only by a group of mindlessly dinging and hooting small-stakes gambling machines.

"You're very popular here," Urruah said after Huff came back with a rather large piece of fried fish.

"Oh yes," Huff said, watching with amusement as Arhu fell on the piece of fish and devoured it almost without stopping to breathe. "They're a nice enough bunch, by and large: and my
ehhif
doesn't mind. He describes it as 'goodwill'... says it helps business. It's my pleasure, I'm sure." Huff looked around the place with a satisfied air. "Always nice to be part of a successful undertaking. I just have to watch myself sometimes; it would be too easy to get fat."