“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 which 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: 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 backwards, 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 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 said, 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. “Any time.”
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 further 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 “good will” … 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 …”
Rhiow, busy washing her face after finishing a greasy but delectable half of a sausage, was glad of the excuse not to be looking at Huff when he said that. He had already achieved at least “portly” status, but he was not genuinely overweight … yet.
And who am I to stare at him in this regard? If I had unlimited access to food like this, who knows what I’d look like in a few months … All the same, she wished she had the opportunity to find out.