She gave Arhu a look. “Very cute,” she said. “If you’re demonstrating that you’ve learned to keep a gate patent when there’s vacuum on the other side, I take your point. Otherwise … you know what I told you.”
“And what Urruah keeps telling me,” Arhu says. “Yeah, I know …”
Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again, remembering what Urruah had said about Arhu’s early morning gate work the other day. And slowly she put her whiskers forward. If he was going to go, she thought, how would we stop him? And: Not so long ago, this was the kitling we were worried wasn’t doing enough wizardry. He’s finding his way. Let him be…
“We’ve no business there today,” Rhiow said, working to sound lazy about it. “Maybe later this week, we’ll go. I’ll see you off, in fact, if you’d rather do it on your own. Meanwhile, let’s get going: they’ll be waiting for us. Urruah will catch up.”
The look Arhu threw her was a little odd: but very featly he flipped his paws and changed the configuration of the strings again, and the view through the gate shifted to that of darkness again, but this time it was the unstarred darkness of the Underground tunnels near Tower Bridge.
“I’ll let it snap back into its default settings afterwards,” Arhu said. “Urruah’ll be able to pull this setting out of memory and alter it for changed time with no problem.”
“Right,” Rhiow said, and stepped through: Arhu followed her.
They made their way over to the platform where the malfunctioning London gate hung, shimmering dully in a non-patient configuration. Only Fhrio was with it at the moment, sitting by it and yawning.
“Luck, Fhrio,” Rhiow said. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Half the night, but don’t let that bother you,” the orange tabby said, and tucked himself down into what Rhiow’s ehhif called the “meat loaf shape.
Rhiow threw an amused glance at Arhu, who was looking off into the darkness to avoid having Fhrio see him rolling his eyes. She felt a little sorry for him on his first outcall, having half the team they were working with turn out to be such difficult cases: but this kind of thing happened occasionally. She still thought often of one of the Brasilia team who, though a wizard of tremendous talent, was also so scarred by some old trauma that he would jump up in the air hissing any time you spoke to him before he could see you, and would come down with claws out and fur standing on end, ready to murder anyone who was standing too close. Working with him had driven her nearly insane, and as for Urruah, it had been all Rhiow could do to keep him from walking off that job every day, at the occurrence of the first jump-and-hiss. At least Fhrio wasn’t quite so unnerving to work with, but Rhiow was increasingly wondering what his problem was, or, if there was no problem, why he was this way all the time.
“No incursions, I take it,” Rhiow said, sitting down in front of the gate and eyeing it thoughtfully.
“Nothing,” Fhrio said. “I almost wish for one: at least it would make sitting here a little less boring.”
She twitched her tail in agreement. “Have Auhlae or Huff been along yet today?”
“Auhlae’s home with her ehhif,” Fhrio said. “He’s sick or something. Huff was here earlier and then went off.” Fhrio yawned. “I think probably to take a nap: he was up watching the gate all night.”
Arhu was standing behind Rhiow now, looking over her shoulder at the shimmer of light in the gate-web. She wasn’t sure how much he was able to make out of its function as yet just from the configuration of the light-patterns and the juxtaposition of the various braids and bundles of hyperstrings. Reading a gate that way took time to learn.
“It’s changed since yesterday,” Arhu said.
“Of course it’s changed,” Fhrio said, and yawned again. “The Earth’s not where it was yesterday, is it? Basic changes in spacetime coordinates show in the web as a matter of course—”
“I don’t mean that. I mean the sideslip and tesseral string bundles in the control weft have changed position slightly. And one of the sideslip sub-arrays has a string loose.”
“What?” Fhrio sat up, looked at the part of the gate-web that Arhu was staring at. “Where are you—oh. No, that’s all right, this gate does that sometimes. It’s a locational thing—I think it has to do with the gravitational anomaly in the substrate under the Hill. The loose ends always weave themselves back in after a few minutes: this isn’t a static construct, after all, it ‘breathes’ a little.”
“I know, our gates do that too. But look at the way the sideslip bundle is interweaving with the hyperextensor braid—”
Fhrio was beginning to look confused. “Yes, as I say, it does that. I don’t see what the—”
“Well, look,” Arhu said, padding forward, and Rhiow gave him a Now-you-be-careful look, which he ignored. “See the way this is hanging out—shouldn’t it be tucked in? I mean, it has no anchor. If you just—”
“No, don’t pull that!”
It was too late. Arhu had already snagged a claw around the string in question, and pulled.
The gate shimmered: a brief storm of many-colored light ran down it—
—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 …”
“Not for long, I think.”
“But, great Queen of us all, where did he spring from?” Fhrio said.
“From his clothes, I’d say not our time, that much is certain,” Rhiow said. “And no time close to it. I’m no expert on ehhif styles, but this looks more like what tom-ehhif wear for formal wear in our time. It used to be everyday clothing once, though, so Urruah told me—”
The ehhif was mostly in black: long narrow trousers, a white shirt with a peculiar cloth wrapped around the neck and tucked into the shirt’s collar: then a sort of short close coat that came down only to the waist, and over that a bigger coat, dark again. The ehhif himself was tall, and fair-furred, and had a lot more fur around the face than was popular these days: he might have been in middle age.
“He’s stopped breathing—” Fhrio said suddenly.
Rhiow looked at him more closely. “It might just be a sigh,” she said. “But just in case, we’d better spell-fence him. He’s going to need support spelling anyway when he wakes up—”
She started walking the beginning of a wizard’s circle around the ehhif and the gate together. Arhu had dropped the string he had pulled and was looking off down the old train runnel. “Now what in the Dam’s name,” said a voice from a little distance down the tunnel, and a second later Auhlae jumped up onto the platform, with Siffha’h in tow. Arhu looked at her, then turned and sat down hurriedly and began to wash.