To Visit the Queen (23 page)

"Nice one," Auhlae said. "How'd you do that?"

"Made it heavy for a moment, that's all," Arhu said. "It was part of a tree once, after all. I just suggested that it was actually the
whole
tree." He put his whiskers forward. "Paper fantasizes pretty well."

"You'd better make it invisible as well," Huff said mildly. "He'll be back here with my
ehhif
in a moment. I know what that kind gets like when they're confused, or balked."

Arhu shrugged his tail. A moment later, when Huff's tall, dark-haired
ehhif
came back, there was no paper there, or seemed to be none, only Huff, lying at his ease and finishing his wash. Huff's
ehhif
took one look at the floor and saw nothing but his cat lying there and looking at him with big, innocent green eyes. Huff blinked, then threw his rear right leg over his shoulder and began to wash. His
ehhif
raised his eyebrows, and headed back to the bar.

Huff finished the second bit of washing, which had been purely for effect, and glanced over at Arhu. "Does that happen to you often?" Huff said.

"You mean Seeing? Once a day or so... sometimes more. I wish it was always about important things," Arhu said, looking rather annoyed, "but usually it's not. Or I can't tell if they're important, anyway, till they happen. The trouble is, they all feel important... until it turns out they're not."

"How very appropriate," Siffha'h murmured, and looked away.

Arhu gave her a look that had precious little lovesickness about it: it smelled more of claws in someone's ears. He opened his mouth, probably to emit something unforgivable, and Rhiow, concerned, opened her mouth to interrupt him; but at the same moment Huff said, "Arhu, have you thought of going to see the Ravens?"

"Who?"

"The Ravens over at the Tower. They have a problem rather similar to yours."

"Are they wizards?" Rhiow asked, curious.

"No," Huff said, "but they have abilities of their own that are related to wizardry, though I'd be lying if I said I understood the details. They are visionaries of a kind, though I wouldn't know if they describe the talent to themselves in precisely those terms. In any case, the few times I've talked to them, they've sounded very like Arhu. Rather confused about their tenses." He put his whiskers forward to show he didn't mean the remark to be insulting. "They might be of use to you... or to us, possibly, with this problem."

Arhu looked thoughtful. "Okay," he said. "It can't hurt."

"No, I would think not. Now, Urruah will be working on resetting his timeslide, recalibrating it— "

"It'll take me a day or so," Urruah said. "I want to explore as many of the possibilities as I can, as many of the universes in the sheaf, when we do our next run."

"And meanwhile there are a couple of other things we're going to need to find out," Rhiow said. "First, if there's any way to manage it at all, we must find the original contaminating event or events. If it happened using your gates, the logs may give us some hints... if we can ever get them to yield that data, which Urruah hasn't yet been able to do. If we can't find evidence from the gates, then we're going to have to go back to that alternate time again, much as I dislike the prospect, and search for information there. The other thing we must discover is the nature of this attack on the
ehhif
-queen, Victoria"—Rhiow went out of her way to try to get her pronunciation as close to the
ehhif
word as she could— "and also discover whether this great change in the past-world we saw would have happened anyway, or has something specific to do with her death or life."

"It very well could," Auhlae said. "She was a tremendous power in her time, though she had very little direct power— compared to some of the pride-leaders who went before her, anyway. Certainly they would have gone to war had she been assassinated, and if they were able to prove that some other pride they knew of had been involved. There was fierce rivalry between them for a long time: the shadows of it remain, though most of the
ehhif
powers in Europe are supposed to be working together now."

"Huff," Rhiow said, "how much do you know about
ehhif
history of that time? The eighteen seventies, say?"

"Very little," he said. "It's hardly my speciality: like most of us, if I need to know something I go to the Whisperer." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "But you know," he said, "there are People for whom it
is
a speciality. And they don't live far from here. In fact, there's one in particular who's famous for it. He used to live at Whitehall, but now he's out in the suburbs. You should go to see him. I'll show you the coordinates, and you can lay them into one of the other gates."

"That sounds like a good idea," Rhiow said. "Would he be available today, do you think?"

"More than likely. Probably your best bet is simply to go out there and meet with him."

"All right. What's his name?"

"Humphrey."

Rhiow blinked. "That's not a Person's name...."

"It is now," Huff said, amused. "Wait till you meet him."

"Meanwhile, I think the rest of us will be minding the other gates," Fhrio said, "and watching to see if they start betraying any sign of instability. If they start acting up, we'll know we have less time to deal with our troubles than we thought."

Rhiow nodded. "And as for the rest of it," she said, "we'll meet again when it's dark, and see who's best sharpened their claws on the problem before us."

The others agreed, then got up and shook themselves preparatory to heading off in their various directions.

"Now look at this," Arhu said, crouched down again, and oblivious. " 'Princess Christiana of Schleswig-Holstein visited His Majesty and remained to lunch.' "

Urruah looked up. "Does it say what they had?" he said, coming to gaze at the paper over Arhu's shoulder.

Rhiow glanced over at Huff and wandered over to him. "You look tired," she said. "Are you all right?"

"Oh, I'm well enough," he said. "Rhiow, we're all too old for this! Except for
them,
" and he indicated Arhu and, off on the other side of the room, already heading for the back door, Siffha'h. "But no matter... we'll cope." He sighed, looked at her, as Auhlae came wandering over and laid her tail gently over his back. "It's just hard, sometimes, discovering that after a long period of steady and not terribly dangerous work, your reward for getting it right is that you get to save the Universe." His look was dry.

"It's always dangerous to demonstrate talent," Auhlae said. "Least of all to Them. But that's our job: we accepted it when it was offered us... and what can we do now?"

"Do it the best we can," Rhiow said. "There's nothing else."

She rubbed cheeks with Huff when he offered, and did the same, a little more tentatively, with Auhlae. The two of them headed off toward the front of the pub; and Rhiow made her way out toward the back, and the cat door, thinking thoughts of quiet desperation but determined not to give in to them.

Half an hour or so later, Rhiow was padding down a street in one of the northern suburbs of London, looking for a specific house in one small street. She had a description of the house, and a name for a Person: or rather, that peculiar
ehhif
nickname that Huff had given her. According to the Knowledge, the nickname (bizarrely) came from an
ehhif
television show, and was a reference to an astute but extremely twisty-minded politician. Rhiow was uncertain whether any Person, no matter how jovial, would really want to be called by such a name.

She found the house at last. It was actually bumped sideways into another house, in a configuration that the
ehhif
here called semidetached. There was a narrow wall of decorative concrete blocks about four feet high separating the two houses' front yards and driveways. Rhiow jumped up onto this and made her way back to where it met another wall, taller, one that divided the houses' two back gardens from one another. This was actually less a wall than a series of screens of interwoven wood, fastened end to end. Rhiow jumped up onto the nearest of them and paced along it and the subsequent screens carefully, looking down on the leftward side, as she had been instructed.

The rightward garden was less a garden than a tangle of weeds and rosebushes run amok. The left-hand one, though, had a lawn with stepping-stones in it, and carefully trimmed shrubs, and small trees making a shady place down at the far end. There was a birdbath standing in the shade, but no bird was fool enough to use it: for lying near the birdbath, upside down in the sun, was a black-and-white Person with long, fluffy fur.

Rhiow paused there for a moment looking at him as he dozed, wondering how to proceed. From a tree nearby, a small bird appeared, perched on a nearby branch, and began yelling "Cat! Cat! Cat!" at Rhiow.

She rolled her eyes. One of the great annoyances associated with becoming a wizard was, oddly, identical with one of its great joys: learning enough of the Speech to understand readily the creatures around her. It was very hard to eat, with a clean conscience, anything you could talk to and get an intelligible answer back. "In your case, though," she said to the small bird, "I'm willing to make an exception."

Except that she wasn't, really. Rhiow sighed and turned her attention away from the bird, to find that the black-and-white Person's eyes had opened, at least partially, and he was looking at her, upside down.

"Hunt's luck to you!" she said. "I'm on errantry, and I greet you."

He looked at her curiously, and rolled over so that he was right side up again. "You're a long way from home, by your accent," he said. "Come on down, make yourself comfortable."

Rhiow jumped down from the wall and walked over to the respectable-looking Person, breathed breaths with him, and then said, "Please forgive me: I don't know quite what to call you."

"Which means you know the nickname," he said, and put his whiskers forward. "Go ahead and use it: everyone else does, at this point, and there's no real point in me trying to avoid it."

"Hhuhm'hri, then. I'm Rhiow."

"Hunt's luck to you, Rhiow, and welcome to London. What brings you all this way?"

She sat down and explained, trying to keep the explanation brief and nontechnical. But Hhuhm'hri was nodding a long time before she finished, and Rhiow realized that this was one of the more acute People she had met in a while, with a quick and deep grasp of issues for all his slightly ditzy, wide-eyed looks.

"Well, that's certainly a
different
sort of problem," Hhuhm'hri said. "At first I'd thought perhaps you were one of the People who's just been added to the standing committee on rat control."

Rhiow restrained herself from laughing. "No, the problem's a little different from that."

"Certainly a little more interesting. I must say I wouldn't want our timeline to be wiped out, either, so I'm at your disposal. Though I must admit that the temptation to alter just one piece here or there, with an eye to improving things, must be very strong."

"By and large it doesn't work," Rhiow said. "There are conservation laws for history as well as for energy. Remove one pivotal event without due consideration, and another is likely to slip in to take its place— often one that's worse than the one you were trying to prevent."

"Conservation of history..." Hhuhm'hri mused for a moment. "That's the only odd thing about this, to me: if such a principle exists, why isn't it protecting you in this case?"

"Because of the nature of the Power that has intervened to cause the change," Rhiow said. "Mostly time heals itself over without a scar if the change is small, or made by a mortal. But when the Powers That Be become directly involved— and in this case, one of the oldest and greatest of Them— the fabric of time is entirely too amenable to Their will. It's unavoidable: They
built
time, after all...."

Hhuhm'hri blinked. "Yes," he said. And then he added, "You'll forgive me a second's skepticism, I hope. One doesn't often expect to run into one of Them, or Their direct deeds, in the normal course of the business day."

"Of course," Rhiow said, at the same time thinking that, from the wizard's point of view, that was all anyone
ever
ran into, but this was not the moment for abstract philosophy.

"Sa'Rráhh, eh," Hhuhm'hri said after a moment. "So the bad-tempered old queen's at it again. Well, I'll help you any way I can: we'll play the Old Tom to her Great Serpent, and put a knife or two into her coils before we're done. I may not be walking the corridors of power anymore, but all my contacts are still live... in fact, I have rather more of them since I came out to the green leafy confines of suburbia."

Rhiow cocked her head. "I'd heard something about your retirement," she said, "from the Knowledge: but even the
ehhif
in New York noticed it. A lot of talk about you being thrown out of Downing Street— and then maybe murdered."

Hhuhm'hri put his whiskers right forward and sprawled out, blinking at Rhiow like a politician after a three-mouse lunch followed by unlimited cream: and he smiled like someone who could say a lot more on the subject than he was willing to. "It wasn't that bad," he said. "At least, as far as political scandals go." Though a lot of
ehhif
had thought it was. The new prime minister's wife, a suspected ailurophobe, had dropped a few remarks on moving into Number Ten that indicated that she thought cats were, of all things, "unsanitary." The remarks had provoked so massive an outbreak of
ehhif
public concern for "Humphrey" that an official statement from the government had been required to put matters right, making it plain that Humphrey's normal "beat" was the Cabinet Office and Number Eleven, and his position was not threatened. Shortly after that had come the photo opportunity. Rhiow had been looking over Iaehh's shoulder at the television one night and had chanced to catch some of those images: the lady in question looking conciliatory, but also rather as if she very much wished she was elsewhere, or holding something besides a cat, while "Humphrey" gazed out at the cameras, as big-eyed in the storm of strobe-flashes as a kitten seeing a ball of yarn for the first time. "Glad it wasn't me," Rhiow said. "I wouldn't have known what to do in a situation like that."