To Visit the Queen (48 page)

Huff took a long breath. "I will not be the kind of wizard that serves what you serve," he cried, "and I will not be the mate to that kind of wizard either!"

And he launched himself straight at sa'Rráhh's throat.

One great paw lifted and slapped him aside as if he were nothing. Rhiow, flinching, heard the bones crack: saw the body fly past her to come down hard on the seamed concrete, which was all that was left of the real world.

Sa'Rráhh looked down at Huff's body, put her whiskers forward, and smiled...

... and the smile twisted strangely. The lips wrinkled. From inside the burning eyes above them, just for a moment, something that might have been Auhlae once looked out: enraged, betrayed. She screamed, a yowling roar that drove Rhiow crouching down to try to escape it, a terrible squall of betrayal and loss—— and then the light broke through.

All around the huge terrible form, like a cage, a four-dimensional figure appeared, a massive icosaract, its "extra" sides 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'Rráhh roared.
It will not avail you! The fire comes now, and then the Winter.

There will be no Winter,
came another great voice— one that 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!

Rhiow and the others stood still and stared as the stars began to fall.

At least they looked like stars at first. There had been none in the impenetrable darkness. But all around the struggling, roaring shape of sa'Rráhh, bright fires started to fall from far above. They fell in pairs. As they came to the ground, they started to acquire shapes of their own: bodies formed around them. Hundreds of bodies, thousands of bodies, tens of thousands of them, all shining each like its own small sun.

Rhiow stared in wonder. They were the People of the ancient days: the hundreds of thousands of cats of the Egyptians, who had mummified them and laid them to rest. Their souls had been in the Tree, or about the One's business, for all these thousands of years: their bodies had lain in the sand for a long long time. Now they were in the gardens of Essex and Sussex, they were under the lawns of the Home Counties, they were in flowerpots outside old townhouses and scattered among the roots of the trees in Green Park: they were all over the city of London, and all around it, for miles and miles in every direction. It did not matter that the mummies of the cats of Egypt had been ground to powder along with the bandages and the amulets that each held its fragment of the protective spell. They had been in contact with them too long, in their long rest in Egypt, not to have become indelibly contaminated by the wizardry. The Great Cemetery of the city of Bubastis was now in England. And its inhabitants remembered the
ehhif
they loved, who had fed them fish and milk, and stroked them, and loved them in return. They would not let these
ehhif
perish simply because they were not the same ones.

The Lone Power struggled in Her cage, while around Her, for what seemed great distances, stars fell thick from the sky, and became People, all burning with glory. The fire of the Sun persisted in their eyes, which they turned on the Lone One where She roared and crashed about in the cage. Softly, a huge and concerted yowl began to go up from the hundreds and thousands assembled. It built until Rhiow had to crouch down again from the sheer weight and rage of the sound...

... and the People of the ancient world leaped in fury into the cage with sa'Rráhh, filling it until the Lone One could no longer be seen: and the cat fight to end all cat fights broke out under the streets of London. The noise soon became like the crash of ocean or of thunder, impossible to hear as anything but a vibration, something that got into the bones and shook the listener into submission. Rhiow lay flat, prostrate with anger but also with wonder. And the yowl, the roar, the noise, went on and on....

She could not really tell when it stopped. What Rhiow did notice, though, was the gradual lightening of the scene. The People of the ancient days were streaming out of the icosaract, now: they pooled around it for a while, and then slowly began to fade, like a promising dawn fading into a gray and cloudy morning. The physical surroundings began to come back, and Rhiow pushed herself to her feet. The icosaract, finally, was empty. The last few sparks of divine fire in the eyes of the ancient People faded away, taking them with them. And in the middle of it all, on what was left of the platform, stood Ith, his foreclaws neatly folded together, and looking thoughtful as usual.

Rhiow staggered over toward him, but someone else was ahead of her. "What took you so long?" Arhu was saying to Ith, rather loudly: he was as deaf as Rhiow at the moment. As Ith lowered his head toward him, Arhu clouted the saurian a good one more or less over the ear, a gesture of affectionate annoyance. "I thought you were never going to get here!"

"At least you were able to See, on however short notice, what was coming," Ith said calmly. "I did not want to arrive with the spell half set. Our Enemy would have denatured it in a second if it had not arrived already running. Also, I would have found it hard to do so until the Lone One was distracted. And moving such a spell from one place to another while it is active is no small matter." He looked around at where the sea of radiant eyes had surrounded them. "But I must say the effect is most impressive."

Rhiow breathed out in immense relief. Her ears were ringing so badly that she could hardly hear: she and her team would be near-deaf for a day or so, she thought.
But we got away easy,
Rhiow thought sadly, looking down at Huff's body.

"Look at this mess!" Fhrio shouted as he came along to join her, slowly, with Urruah behind him. "What in the world are the
ehhif
going to make of this?" For a huge scoop of tunnel and brick and earth had simply been blasted out of the whole area.

"They'll probably think it's some kind of terrorist bomb or something," Rhiow said, looking around her at the destruction, the torn-up track and tangled, jutting rods of reinforcement-metal sticking out of the concrete. She sighed wearily and looked down at Huff again. "And what will we do with him?"

"I can bring him somewhere where that body may lie easy," Ith said. "Auhlae." He looked around. "There is no trace. She will have surrendered herself willingly...."

"Yes," Rhiow said. "Though by the Queen's mercy, who knows where her soul may be? She and Huff might yet be together sometime, somewhere... and he saved us." She looked one more time, sadly, at his body as Ith picked it up.

"And that worked too," Urruah said, looking at the icosaract. "Nice job."

"The time was right. The place was right. The rest of it— " Ith shrugged. "A spell always works."

"Come on," Rhiow said. "Fhrio, let's check your gates... and then go home."

It was some hours before that happened. The London team was going to need restructuring: Fhrio agreed readily enough, as its de facto team leader, that Rhiow and her team would come in occasionally to assist until new placements were arranged by the Powers. "I think it would have to be that way anyway," he said, glancing over at Arhu and Siffha'h. "I don't think they're going to be apart much for a while."

"No, I think they've got some exploring of roles to do," Rhiow said. "Meanwhile, we'll have your 'bad' gate up and running again within a couple of days. But before we go, there's one more thing we have to do."

Fhrio actually put his whiskers forward at Rhiow. "With pleasure," he said, and went off to bring up the timeslide again so that they could take care of it.

Urruah was standing talking to Ith. Rhiow wandered over to him, and as she came he turned to her and said, " 'Artie'—Don't
ehhif
usually have more than one name?"

"Some places," Rhiow said.

"So what was his? Did we ever find out?"

"Doyle," Arhu said. "Actually he had two last names— unusual. Arthur Conan Doyle."

"A very nice boy," Urruah said. "I wonder what he'll make of himself in the world."

"Hard to say," Rhiow said, "but he certainly likes dinosaurs."

"Rhiow?" said Fhrio. "Ready."

Patel was standing in the entry to the District Line platform, looking around him with astonishment. His trainers were covered with mud, but there was no mud anywhere in sight: nothing but the platform directly in front of him, and a lightbulb high in the ceiling.

He clearly heard a voice say, from somewhere down low, "Sir? You've dropped your book."

He looked for the voice, but saw no one. Only his copy of
Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia
sat in its plastic bag on the floor nearby.

"Uh," Patel said. "Uh, thanks." He picked it up, staring again at his trainers: spent a fruitless moment or so trying to scrape the stinking mud off them, and then went on ahead to the platform.

Behind him, whiskers went forward: and Rhiow went back to fetch her team, with its new part-time member, and go home.

In the preceding narrative, only one liberty has been taken with "genuine" history— the history of our own present timeline, at least. There is no concrete evidence that E. A. Wallis Budge was yet working
officially
at the British Museum at the age of nineteen (which was his age in 1874): but he was often there "behind the scenes." Budge had finished university and was then permanently resident in London, where for several years previously he had been working intensively with museum officials, to whom Budge had been introduced by Disraeli because of an early demonstrated genius for translation. This early foundation-work would lead quickly to Budge's seminal translation of the Theban recension of
The Book of the Dead,
and to a long career at the museum. There he served as curator of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities between 1894 and 1924, meanwhile collecting vast numbers of cuneiform tablets, Egyptian papyri, and Greek, Coptic, Arabic Syriac, and Ethiopic manuscripts, while always remaining at the cutting edge of any effort to decipher newly discovered ancient languages.