“Clarifying it’s going to take time,” Hwaith said, “and it’s what we don’t have much of, where I am. But here, you have all the time in the world…for the time being.” He had slipped into the Speech for the moment, and the conditional tenses he was using were a lot more conditional than Rhiow would have liked. “All I know for sure, all the Whisperer told me, is that my problem is your problem. Or, shortly, it will be. Solve mine, you’ll solve yours. But if my problem isn’t solved, you’re going to find yourself dealing with it– and it’ll be a much tougher fix, She said. If not nearly impossible.”
Rhiow and her team, and Jath and Aufwi, looked at one another.“Cousins, please,” Hwaith said, getting up and shaking himself all over, “I shouldn’t be here any longer: I have to get back and make sure my gate’s all right — I don’t trust it out of my sight for more than a few minutes at a time, the way it’s been acting. There’s so much more to tell, but this is the wrong end of time to be telling it in! You have the coordinates where I’ll meet you–”
Rhiow could feel them lying at the back of her mind, ready to be used. There was the indicator that the proposed intervention had been sanctioned, and at a very high leveclass="underline" when the Whisperer was so direct with you, it didn’t do to start arguing the fine points of an intervention until you’d begun it and had a better idea of exactly what was involved. Yet the choice to go or not lay with her — the “dignity” of co-creation lay once again dumped in front of Rhiow for her attention, bloody and twitching, like a half-dead rat. And speaking of twitching, there was poor Hwaith, watching her with those narrowed brassy eyes, waiting for her choice. She found herself wondering whether this kind of nervous tic was part of his normal mode of operation — the way Saash had never been able to stop scratching while she was still inside her ninth life’s skin– or simply transient discomfort at being in the middle of a forward timeslide, an enterprise naturally fraught with all kinds of danger. He caught her look, held it for a second, then looked away again, as if embarrassed —
“…We’ll come,” Rhiow said at last. “We have to make some preparations of our own, you’ll understand. But we’ll be with you shortly.”
“Thank you!” Hwaith said. “Well met on the Journey–”
And he was gone.
The brief inrush of air to the place where he’d been caused a gust of wind in the peppertree’s branches. From above them all, the grackles screeched again, more loudly now, reading the breeze– unusually rationally, for birds so far down the food chain — as something that was somehow the cats’ fault. Everyone rolled their eyes.
Everyone but Urruah, at least. He was looking at Rhiow with an expression that normally meant (when he was going to agree with her) that he was going to find a way to improve on what she’d already decided, or (when he wasn’t in agreement) that he was trying to find a better plan without being overtly offensive.
“Is anyone really buying this?” he said.
Oh, well, Rhiow thought, tucking herself down on the branch in a neutral pose that kept the paws folded in, so as not to show what might be in their claws, so much for not being offensive! Did he have enough breakfast, I wonder? He always starts growling when his stomach does…
“You can buy what you like,” Arhu said, “but if the Whisperer’s selling, I’m in.”
“What he said,” said Siffha’h, hunching herself down beside her brother.
Rhiow closed her eyes, hearing the challenge:“I’ll see your offensiveness, and raise you ten claws and a jawful.” So much for Urruah’s seniority! But the two kits were young and still in the first flush of their power, and when they closed ranks and started reinforcing each other’s sometimes wildly uninformed but emphatic opinions, there was often trouble.
Jath’s ears were already flat at such disrespect to a more senior wizard, and he had an eye on Rhiow, waiting to see what she was going to do. Rhiow removed her sidelong glance from him very slowly, as if not officially noticing his expression — the way you “took back” a move in hauissh. The look she turned on Arhu and Siffha’h was a dam’s look, patient for the moment, but meant to communicate that the big hard clout behind the ear was waiting. “You two want to relocate your manners,” she said, “before I slice some holes in your hides and install new sets.” Not waiting for anyreaction, she then glanced over at Urruah. “Meanwhile, perhaps you want to take the time to explain your concerns to these two experts. Though if you’d rather just knock them out of the tree, I’m sure I’ll understand.”
Arhu and Siffha’h had the grace to look a little chastened. Strangely, though, so did Urruah. “I don’t know,” Urruah said. “It just all sounded a little dubious to me, somehow. And sketchy.”
“A hunch? Well, we don’t always have a lot of data under our paws when we start an intervention,” Rhiow said. “Granted, that can make decisions harder. But I don’t doubt Hwaith’s sincerity. And he dropped into the Speech for the part of the conversation that mattered…so there’s no question of this being any kind of fabrication on his part.”
“Misapprehension, though,” Urruah said, “is always a possibility–”
And then something very, very large kicked the tree, and the world heaved upwards and then sank away again…
The grackles burst up out of the tree and into the milky blue, screeching. Below, from the ehhif in the plaza, there were some muffled exclamations at the shake, and some not at all muffled. Over on the main road they’d crossed, tires screeched and some horns blew. In the parking lot on the northern side of Olvera Street, behind the oldest part of the pueblo, car alarms started to go off in a sporadically augmented cacophony of hoots, honks, and warbles. Rhiow closed her eyes and hung onto her branch of the tree, as the vibrations from the kick started to fade away. Then there was another one.
What vhai’d kind of bark do these things have! Rhiow thought in fury as the shaking went on, and on… She dug in her claws as hard as she could, but the bark was too smooth, she was starting to slip–
The shaking gradually faded away. Arhu and Siffha’h and Urruah and Aufwi and Jath were all still hanging on and looking around them as if waiting for one more punchline to the cosmic joke: but nothing came.
“Five point one or so,” said Aufwi, as Rhiow pushed herself upright from the branch, more by force of will than anything else. What she really wanted to do was get down out of this tree and put herself flat against the ground, where there would be no further she could fall. Except it wouldn’thelp! The ground could still start bouncing around —
Urruah looked up through the branches at the cloudless sky.“All right, all right, I get it!” he shouted at the Silent One. “Have you ever heard of subtlety??”
Aufwi cocked his head to one side.“Different epicenter on that one,” he said after a moment.
“Oh?” Urruah said. “Where was it?”
How can you possibly sound so casual after something like that? Rhiow said silently to him, once again forcing herself to sit still and keep from indulging in a fit of composure-grooming.
When I’m covering for you, Urruah said. So for Iau’s good sake just shut up and put yourself right!
“Rancho Sierra Vista,” said Aufwi. “It’s thirty miles or so up the coast, at the top of one of the big coastal canyons– five miles or so inland from Malibu. The first one’s epicenter was up in the Hollywood hills–”
“Near Beachwood Canyon, by any chance?” Arhu said.
Aufwi looked thoughtful.“Now than you mention it, about halfway up–”
“Uh huh,” Urruah said. He looked over at Rhiow. “This last one was worse, though. We’d better have a look at Sierra Vista first. Then when we go back, we can compare this quake to one or more of Hwaith’s, and see if they’re somehow similar. And if it is–”