If there were any, they were briefly derailed as the air down at the end of the platform tore softly, and a taloned shape stepped through.
“Ith!” Artie cried, jumped up and ran to him, and shook Ith’s claw in a manner so suddenly and incongruously ehhif-adult that Rhiow burst out laughing, and had immediately to pretend to have a hairball. While this was going on, Ith greeted Artie and came pacing over to the teams. He crouched down on those long back legs, the great-claw of each foot grating on the stone.
“How did you do?”
“Ith hissed, a most satisfied sound. The spell is complete,” he said. “I did not stop with the Museum in London. New York and Berlin, also, I visited, and the new Egyptian wing of the museum in München, apparently the biggest such collection in the world now. I am afraid a security camera might have caught me in Berlin: I was in a hurry.” That toothed jaw dropped in a slight smile. “I will be interested to see how they explain what the videotape may show. But first tell me how you fare.”
They told him: and Arhu, finally, looked at Ith for a long moment in which he seemed to say nothing. Ith listened, with his head on one side, and then knitted his foreclaws together in that gesture which could mean contemplation or distress—in Rhiow’s experience, Ith’s claws were more to be trusted as an indicator than his face or his eyes, which did not work like a Person’s.
“So our old Enemy puts Its fang into your heart again, brother,” Ith said, working the claws together so that they scraped softly against one another. “It is folly. The same venom will not work twice—you will begin to develop an immunity.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Arhu said bleakly.
“Gladness is far from you just now,” Ith said, “but we will see. Meanwhile, Huff, Rhiow, tell me what we must now do to save the Queen.”
They outlined the plan to him, and Ith listened to it all, his foreclaws working gently at each other the while. At last, when they were done, he bowed agreement to what they had said.
“It all sounds well,” said Ith. “But there is another possibility for which you must also prepare. Your plan, no matter how well laid, may nonetheless fail. If you do not get it right the first time, there is little chance that the Lone Power will let you into that timeline again. It will erect such barriers against you that half the world’s wizards brought to bear against them at once would not prevail. Then the Queen will die, and the consequences will begin …”
The People, and Artie, all looked at one another. “That possibility must be prepared for,” Ith said. “If nothing else, the Winter must be prevented. That at least. No matter if our timelines die, and all of us, and all the ehhif and all the People, and even all my people—if we can only keep the Winter from happening, then there will be survivors, and the world will eventually grow green again.”
“He’s right,” Huff said, looking over at Auhlae. She waved her tail in agreement.
“Well, you have the complete spell,” Urruah said. “So we’re all right in that regard …” He caught the look in Ith’s eye. “Aren’t we?”
“The spell is indeed complete,” Ith said. “But I am less certain than I was when I started that it will function.”
“What?” Rhiow said. “Why?”
“Here,” Ith said, and moved a little aside to make a clear space on the floor.
He constructed the spell for them as Urruah had constructed the timeslide, as a three-dimensional diagram in the Speech. It was more than just six-parted as he had suggested. It was a fourth-dimensional expression of a truncated icosahedron; a near-spherical array of hexagons, each one surrounded by five pentagons. Arhu was not the only one squinting, now: everyone was having trouble grasping the spatial relationships of the thing.
“Iau, it makes my head hurt just looking at it,” Fhrio said, though with a certain amount of admiration.
“To achieve this construct,” Ith said, “I unwrapped four hundred and thirty-eight mummies, and extracted spell fragments from some sixty or seventy amulets. It is a great help to be able to use one’s wizardry to see into the mummy first before you must unwrap it: otherwise I would be claw-deep in bandages yet.” He tilted his head this way and that, bird-like, admiring his handiwork. “It is, as you see, something of a power-trap. Fives and sixes … That structure traps wizardly energy within it, confining and concentrating it for use. But there is a problem.” The claws began to fret gently at one another again. “The recitation parameters of the spell—you see them there, reflected in each ‘wing’ of the construct—require the physical presence of a threshold number of mummies: a massive, strictly physical reinforcement. Originally, that would have been the main cat-mummy burial site at Bubastis. But that is now gone, as we know.”
“Are you saying that this won’t work?” Fhrio said, peering at the spell.
“No. I am saying that it may work, but if it does, I will not understand how. And you may be right: it may not function at all … in which case there is no protection against the Winter. And in that case, you must succeed.”
Silence fell among the gathered People. Arhu kept studying the spell-construct, and his gaze went vague … but Rhiow, looking over at him, became less sure that it was the construct on which he had his eye, or Eye.
He turned to her all of a sudden. “Eight hundred thousand People, you said, was the threshold number for gating to start in an area,” Arhu said. “How big an area? And do those eight hundred thousand People have to be alive … ?”
Rhiow didn’t know what to make of that one. But, Three hundred thousand cat-mummies at Beni-Hassan alone, Budge had said. And there were probably many more…
“I don’t know,” Rhiow said at last. “Normally, you would think so. But the Egyptians” relationship with their cats plainly didn’t stop when the cats were dead. Indeed, they didn’t think they were dead, not in the sense that ehhif use the word now: the whole idea of preserving the body itself indicates that someone thinks you might need it again,”
Rhiow fell silent and thought about that for a moment. Until now she had been holding this particular ehhif belief as somewhat barbaric, almost funny, the result of a misunderstanding—for indeed People had told the ehhif of those long-past days how their own lives went: nine lives, nine deaths, and if you had done more good in your life than evil, there followed a tenth life in a body immune to the more crass aspects of physicality, like injury, decay and age—the fully-realized Life of which the previous nine had been rough sketches. The ehhif, as so often happened, had gotten some of the details of this story muddled, and thought “their” cats were telling them about immortality after life in a physical body. With this understanding, the ehhif of Egypt, an endlessly practical people, had started working on ways to preserve the bodies of the dead—human as well as feline—with an eye to making sure those bodies would last until they were needed again. Over nearly a millennium of practice, mummification had become a science (as these ehhif regarded such things), elaborate, involved … and here and there, with a touch of wizardry about it.
Now, though, this set of circumstances seemed less silly to Rhiow … and much more intriguing. The One, and Her daughters the Powers that Be, rarely did anything without a purpose. Could it be that all the magnificent sarcophagi and paintings, all the riches piled and buried in all the tombs, the folly and the glory of it, were all a blind … a distraction, meant for the one Power which was less than kindly disposed toward life? A feint, a misdirection, a behavior which externally seemed humorously typical of the stupidities of ehhif … but one concealing something far more important? The mummified bodies of hundreds of thousands of People, lying in the sand, forgotten: a resource, a well of potential…