He put down a hand to scratch her behind the ears. If this is it, Blackie, he said, all I can say is, it’s a better end than I’d been anticipating. The last couple of days have been a hell of a ride… and I’d sooner go out knowing what I do, than not knowing at all.
“If we’re lucky…” Arhu said, and then stopped.
Don’t say it, Patches. Just come back, and we’ll laugh about it later. He looked around at the People and Helen. All of you.
“From your mouth to the Spirit’s ear,” Helen said. “Rhiow?”
She flirted her tail“yes”.
They vanished as twilight fell.
The spot that Hwaith had chosen for them was at the end of a long drive that came up the top of Mount Hollywood on the north side. In the middle of the drive stood a high white granite obelisk with a base like a seven-pointed star, in the angles of which stood statues of six ehhif astronomers. On a white pedestal just south of that, a bronze sundial with a steel-strip gnomon pointed at the North Star. At the other end of the drive, facing the mountain’s south slope and set in the middle of a broad green lawn, was the Observatory itself, with its great central dome all sheathed in rectangular greened-copper plates, and the two smaller ones each down at the end of the east-and west-oriented wings. It was a gracious and handsome space, and Rhiowlooked around it and wished she’d had time to see it before the events that were about to unfold.
All around them, the brightening lights of Los Angeles lapped upwards toward the surrounding ridges, fading out into the faint speckling of the sparsely built-up hillside streets and then into complete darkness, with here and there a dark spot lacking any lights at all– virgin slopes not yet seen as useful for anything but the occasional theater or golf course. In the fading light of evening, the view across the ridges and canyons toward Cahuenga Peak with the sunset behind it was particularly lovely. The white of the sign that said HOLLYWOODLAND was clearly visible, in this lighting, despite all the dust kicked up in the air by the previous evening’s quakes.
Rhiow stood there for a while just looking at it, and watching the lights twinkle to life on the hillsides to westward.“Some days,” Hwaith said, “you can’t see that from here at all. A last glimpse…”
“You were right about the view from here, anyway,” Rhiow said. Reluctantly she turned away from it, looked at Urruah. “By my preference, I’d set up the gate right here on this entry lawn. I take it we’re past closing time now – “
“The last visitor-ehhif have just gone home. There are a few observatory staff, but Sif is going to make them feel like they want to leave. Maybe a little tremor to suggest there’s about to be an aftershock from last night.”
Urruah was paying this discussion no mind. He was looking behind them at the noble domed building with its white Deco columns, and his expression was distressed.“This is all wrong,” he said, “it’s just not fair – “
Rhiow looked at him in great bemusement.“What? What’s the matter?”
“Do you know,” Urruah said, sounding unusually mournful, “how many times this building’s been destroyed in ffihlm?”
“A lot,” Aufwi said.
“Yes. Aliens and monsters and Iau knows what else… It never occurred to me that I might be involved in doing something similar!”
“I know. Life,” Aufwi said, “it’s full of little surprises.”
Toms! Rhiow thought in near-desperation.“Cousins…” she said.
Urruah sighed.“The gate,” he said, and turned to get busy.
From around the corner of the building came Ith, with Arhu still riding on his head.“Everything’s clear up here,” Arhu said.
“Good,” Rhiow said. “’Ruah – “
From where Urruah stood, the spell circle that would contain the rerooted LA worldgate was flooding outward across the observatory’s lawn and walks to its full size, several hundred feet wide. As it manifested, Siffhah went over to the empty space prepared for her – now nearly twenty feet wide – and spoke the brief sentences in the Speech that activated the small dome-shield that would keep her and the claudication safefrom whatever energies might assault them until they were needed.
Hwaith looked over at Aufwi.“Let’s go get the gate,” he said.
The two of them vanished. Ith came stalking over to Rhiow, who had been joined by Helen, and the three of them spent a few moments looking out over the hills, and the many little sparkling lights that spoke of human habitation.“They are going to see some terrible things tonight,” Ith said. “And leaving the strictly physical destruction aside, considering the fragility of human minds in the face of multidimensional phenomena, many of them may die of what they see…”
“I’ve done what I can about that,” Helen said. “I’ve spoken to my ikheya, and the powers of the Earth know what’s coming, especially after last night. The Elder Spirits of the Earth, the ikhareya, are awakening and putting forth their strength. A lot of people will feel the urge to go to bed early tonight. Many others who have to be awake will find their senses dulled and their interest in the sky or the hills minimal. It’s all that can be done for the people, at least before the fact. Afterwards, what we have to patch, we’ll patch. And as for the Earth itself… it’ll stay where it is the best it can: and we’ll help it.”
A few moments later Hwaith and Aufwi returned, transiting directly into one of the non-active parts of the spell circle. Between them hung the nonpatent gate, just a tall, narrow, shadowy veil of rippling force in this growing dusk.
“Right there – “ Hwaith said, indicating a container-circle near the center of the diagram. The two of them busied themselves tethering the gate into the language-recepticle prepared for it. A few moments later the borders of the gate sprang out clear and sharp as Hwaith touched one of the activator strands in the spell-circle with one paw and brought it online.
He stood studying its conformation for a few moments, watching the faint polychromatic light of a gate’s normal standby state run up and down the warp and weft of the hyperstrings woven into it. “Looks steady,” he said.
Aufwi walked around the gate and looked it up and down.“Agreed. Let’s do it.” He stepped into the circle and touched another of the control lines.
The gate blazed up bright as a spotlight, throwing long sharp shadows away from Rhiow and her team and from Ith and Helen. The interwoven hyperstrings of the gate’s pseudosurface throbbed with the power pouring through them, brighter with every passing second. It was an alarming sight. If any gate Rhiow was managing had started to behave this way, she would either have locked it to some location and activated it or would have taken it offline instantly, terrified that it would burn out while being held in the nonpatent state. But this one’s been reinforced against that, she thought. And even if it did burn out, we could build another. Assuming there’s a planet left to attach it to –
Then something made Rhiow shiver.“Ith,” she said, looking over toward where Ith and Helen had been standing near the edge of the terrace, where the mountain slope dropped away southward. “Ready?”
Helen was standing with the condor feather wands in each hand, looking south with a listening expression. As for Ith, without warning he was now about ten times his everyday size, a towering fanged apparition from which any sensible tyrannosaurus would have fled; and his stripes were burning paler, fading to match the hot underlying gold. It was one of the ways Ith appeared when roaming the plains of the Old Downside with the saurians he had redeemed and brought out of the darkness with him. But the other, more ancient form he wore at need, Rhiow suspected he was holding in abeyance. Trust him, he’ll know the moment —
She turned her attention back to the gate. It kept throbbing brighter and brighter, and Rhiow looked over at the control characters written underneath the spot where it hovered in the spell-circle.