“Hold that thought,” Rhiow said. “Don’t lose it, whatever you do.”
“Oh, certainly,” Fhrio said suddenly, sounding very annoyed. “Encourage him. He’s been enough trouble already.”
“Look,” Arhu said, turning, “I tried to tell you—”
“No, you look.” Fhrio leaned close to Arhu and stared at him straight on: leaned over him stiff-necked and tall, the classic posture of the threatening tom. “You may think that you’ve done us a favor by causing this incursion, but who knows if it’s anything to do with the problems we’ve been having? All I see is that you’ve made a sweet mess of things. Don’t you ever touch my gate again unless I specifically tell you to. You hear me? You come in here thinking you’re so vhai’d smart, and you tamper with things that you don’t—”
Arhu was staring right back at Fhrio, and his ears were back: he hadn’t given an inch, and his lips were beginning to wrinkle away from his teeth. Urruah was looking on dispassionately. Oh, dear Dam around us, Rhiow thought, please don’t let Arhu—
“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 a ‘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 at 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 unusuaclass="underline" 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.”
“Thrio? 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 alternative 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?”