“Any quakes there?” Urruah said.
“Not recently,” said Hwaith. “But some months back we had one.”
Helen nodded.“And then there’s this.” She reached out to point at another spot, more westerly and closer to the hills. “Those two six-point intersections are kind of hard to miss. Sunset Boulevard, where Beverly and Crescent cross each other?”
“That’s right,” Hwaith said, peering more closely at the map.
“That’s the Beverly Hills Hotel in your time?”
“Oh yes,” Hwaith said, “but it doesn’t look like the hotel’s the marked spot, does it – “ He put one of his own paws on the map: the streetscape enlarged, but the light stayed the same size, relocating itself as the map changed. “No, it’s one of those little streets behind it. Rochdale, I think. Now why under the Eye would the gate be wanting to put a root down there?”
Or why would it be told to? Rhiow thought.“But it doesn’t matter,” Hwaith said. “I know a Person very close to there who knows everything that goes on inside that place.”
“Perhaps you might introduce us,” Rhiow said.
“As soon as we’re done here, I’ll take you right down,” Hwaith said. “The time of day’s no issue: there are People in and out of her place by light or night. And whoever else is interested should come too…though I assume we’re going to be splitting up to check out the root locationsseparately.”
“It makes most sense, I’d guess,” Urruah said. He glanced up at Helen. “Maybe you want to choose the one where an ehhif wizard could come by the most information,” he said.
Helen looked at the map.“Hard to say where that might be,” she said. But as Rhiow watched her, Helen slipped a hand inside her shirtfront and touched something hidden there that hung from her throat. For a second she held very still.
Though no words of the Speech were spoken aloud, to Rhiow there was no mistaking the slight scent of some kind of ehhif wizardry on the air. Faintly Rhiow thought she heard something odd in the middle distance, like sticks cracking or snapping. No, she thought then, as she smelled smoke, and glanced around her quickly. Like fire in brush. But there wasn’t any fire —
Then Rhiow was jolted out of her analysis by the raucous noise of some kind of bird braying at them all from up in a nearby pine tree. It was an extraordinary noise, suggesting something mechanical rather than biological, and something that needed a session in the shop and a lube job, at that.
Hwaith laughed under his breath, a little audible trill.“Dawn’s coming,” he said. “The jays always know.”
“That was a bluejay?” Arhu said, looking up into the tree, and licking his chops.
“Not one of your little eastern ones,” Hwaith said. “This one’s a crow relative.”
“The melodious voice,” Rhiow said, “is a giveaway.” She sighed. “Well, we should get moving. Aufwi, Hwaith, is this gate likely to move if we leave it here?”
They both waved their tails“no”. “It seems like all its intent’s to stay right where it is,” Aufwi said. “For the moment, that seems just as well. Of course we’ll have to put up some kind of bounding spell to keep it hidden, and keep ehhif and everything else away from it.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Arhu said, as Siff’hah collapsed her map spell.
“Stay clear of its control structures when you ward it,” Urruah said. “You don’t want to jostle it into doing something while you’re setting up the spell.”
“Which brings us to the next question,” Rhiow said. “The roots… Can you keep it from putting any more down? We’ve got enough problems as it is.”
“I should be able to prevent it,” Aufwi said. “I’ll shout if there seem to be any problems.”
Rhiow was somehow sure that there would be. And one more thing to check yet, she thought. But a moment for that. She glanced up at Helen.“Well,” she said, “what did your ikheya say?”
Helen grinned at her.“Caught that, did you,” she said. “He says, Since you People have an ehhif with you, she might as well see what kind of news other ehhif can give her while you folks are discovering what you can from other People. I’ll take myself downhill to the Library and have a look at the papers…see what news the world throws in my way.”
“But not like that – !” Hwaith said, sounding rather distressed all of a sudden. “Queen-ehhif don’t dress that way these days – “
“Oh, no, not like that at all,” Helen said. “I thought I’d wear something like this – “
The change was so abrupt it made Rhiow blink. One moment Helen was standing there in her police clothes, and the next she was wearing a long, tan, belted coat with a patterned dress underneath it, and (what most surprised Rhiow) a hat that actually had a veil attached. Rhiow was no expert in the ins and outs of ehhif fashion, but she recognized the clothing as well out of date for her own time, if only because Helen was so much more covered than most of the ehhif she saw in New York.
Hwaith looked most surprised.“Nice illusion!” he said. “I can’t even see through it – “
Helen took off the hat, wiped a little sweat off her brow, and replaced the hat again.“Not an illusion,” she said. “It’s a full transform. It costs, yes, but sometimes it’s useful to be able to do one in a hurry.”
“I bet you have to do that a lot back up at our end of things,” Arhu said. “Human wizards have to hide what they’re doing all the time…”
“Most of them do,” Helen said, looking down at herself and brushing at the skirt. “But for me it’s not as much of a problem as it is for most. I keep what I’m doing out of view, sure. But if I need some time off to do an intervention, I just tell my colleagues I’m going off to do some wizardry.” Then she laughed at Rhiow’s expression, and Arhu’s. “No, seriously! They know I’m Native American, and a shaman for my band. So anybody I mention it to thinks I’m just going off to do some New Age thing, with drumming or something.”
Rhiow waved her tail, impressed.“I bet a lot of your fellow ehhif wizards wish they had such a good excuse…”
“I’d take that bet,” Helen said, and grinned. “As for the clothes, though – they’re just me being lazy. I got into the habit when I was working Vice a few years ago. Couldn’t be bothered changing them again and again – especially with the clothes they were giving me: who knew where they’d been? — Anyway, Hwaith, will I fit in? How’s the style look?”
“Good,” Hwaith said. “Very modern.”
“That’s fine: I was shooting for just postwar,” Helen said. “So, as I said, I’ll go have some breakfast, wait for the library to open…see what I can pick up. If we’re going to split up, where should we meet up again afterwards?”
“Back up here, I’d say,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi, if anything gets out of hand up here, call and we’ll come running.”
She turned again to look at the gate, hanging there shimmering innocently in the predawn twilight, for all the world as if there had been nothing wrong with it at all. Yet… “I was told to root here,” Rhiow said under her breath, “’and here I will stay.’”
“Yes,” Hwaith said. He had come up beside her and was looking at the gate with an annoyed expression. “I heard something like that too.”
Which reminds me that there was one more thing I wanted to check.“Cousin,” Rhiow said then, “walk with me a little way?” And she headed uphill, under the shadow of more of the evergreen oaks, toward a lesser crest of the hill they stood on.
Hwaith looked at her oddly for a moment, then followed. Rhiow paused under the last of the trees before the upper hillcrest, and as Hwaith caught up with her, she said, Please, Hwaith, forgive me the familiarity–
It’s not a problem, he said silently. You have to ask: how are my relations with my gate?
She put her whiskers forward. You really do have the Ear, she said. And yes, I do have to ask. For gate management was not just a matter of mechanics, of knowing which string to pull, and when, and how hard. Gates were tremendously complex constructions incorporating the hyperstrings that were the Universe’s building-blocks with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of words in the Speech which had made the Universe out of those building-blocks. Where such complexities had been sustained for prolonged periods, there was always a question of whether or not the construction incorporating them hadacquired some level of sentience…and many gates acted as if they had. Where there was sentience, or the appearance of it, there was relationship: and sometimes relationships went bad.