The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

What? That monstrosity? Not a chance. Look at the size of it. That’s the hot new thing…or so they tell us. Television. The Silent Man shook his head.

Urruah stared. “Really? Surely it’s too – oww!“

He turned and looked over his shoulder at Rhiow, who had just reached up and stuck a claw in his butt. She narrowed her eyes at him. You were just about to tell him some of the future? Don’t get carried away here!

Too what? the Silent Man said.

“Uh, sorry. Too small for a TV antenna?” Urruah said.

The Silent Man laughed that hissing laugh again. “TV”, he said. Cute. Too small, though? This one screws up the local skyline more than somewhat as it is. Paramount had a heck of a time getting the city to give them permission for the thing – but finally they got their way. Though whether they’ll be glad about that in ten years, who knows? There’s maybe three hundred television receiver sets in LA. Most of them belong to people with a lot of money. What do you expect when one of the things costs a hundred bucks? The rest are homemade – one of the transmission companies that was trying to start up actually mailed out flyers to people with instructions on how to build their own receivers. Don’t know what kind of takeup they got.

The Silent Man shrugged as the signal changed and he pulled the sedan into the intersection for a right turn. I think W6XYZ there is just a loss leader: Paramount’s using it to get more attention for its movies. They’ve been trying to get a commercial license for the service for years now, but the government’s had a whole lot of other things to think about. Now that the war’s over, though — You ask me, the radio people have been greasing some palms in Washington to keep things just the way they are. Don’t see why they’re worried, though. He smiled one of those cynical smiles that Rhiow was already getting used to the sight of. Who’d sit home squinting at a blurry movie on one of those little dinky tubes when you can go for a night out with your doll and see it in a beautiful gilded picture palace? And the only other thing they’re talking about doing on television is some kind of program with a host interviewing people. They’re calling it a ‘talk show’. Who’s going to spend a hundred bucks on a box that just shows people sitting around talking?

“Who indeed,” Rhiow said. She glanced over at Urruah again. Are you settled down a little, now? Can you please remember what decade you’re in?

Uh, yeah. But, Rhi — Urruah climbed carefully onto the back of the front seat, balancing there next to the brim of the Silent Man’s hat and peering forward through the windshield. Then he leapt down into the front seat beside Sheba. Our guy here is really enjoying talking to someone without having to run it through paper first. Big pieces, or little ones…

Yes, Rhiow said, I gathered that. There was something else about his tone that was jogging her memory. The Silent Man’s voice reminded her of the way Iaehh sounded, some evenings, when some colleague from work called him: as if he wanted to keep them talking past the mere business at hand – the sound of someone afraid of the silence that would eventually fall, a silence that had once had another voice in it, now no longer to be heard except in memory. And even memory fades…

Here we go, said the Silent Man. We’ll park here and walk over. He pulled up to the curb, killed the engine, and stepped out of the car, opening the back door on the curb side for the rear-seat passengers.

Rhiow and Hwaith jumped down onto the sidewalk and stood there, glancing around them, as the Silent Man reached in to get Sheba out, and Urruah followed. “This is where it happened?” he said.

“This is it,” said the Silent Man, settling Sheba comfortably on his shoulder. He headed up to the corner, and stopped there.

Rhiow and the others followed him, pausing to gaze upward at the astonishing structure that took up what had to be at least the next half of this block of Hollywood Boulevard and reached well back along Highland. “This,” Rhiow said to Hwaith, “…is a hotel?”

“One of the better ones,” Hwaith said.

It occurred to Rhiow that taking it all in was going to require some time. But then I’m used to New York hotels. Relatively small buildings, in terms of the space they take up on a block…and relatively sedate. Whereas it seemed that the only thing this building’s architect had lacked was sedation. The place was a complex vista of white stucco and red tile, with a confusion of terraces and porticoes and awnings and cupolas and even what appeared to be a couple of dome-topped bell towers. The terraces and balconies on the Boulevard side were set back from the street by a couple of sidewalks’ width of plantings, and sheltered – if that was the word for a building so exhibitionistic – by a row of fine tall palm trees.

Quite something, huh? said the Silent Man.

“Unique,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward.

“Spanish Revival, they call it,” Hwaith said to Urruah as they stood there gazing up at the little tiled portico that sheltered the entry to the Hollywood Hotel’s bar.

Revival? Rhiow thought. …Possibly because it fainted after they woke it up the first time, and it saw what had happened to it…? She waved her tail in a gesture of irony that she hoped would be lost on a watching ehhif, and regarded the portico. HOLLYWOOD HOTEL CORNER, a sign above it proclaimed, as if seriously thinking it could redefine the nearby intersection in its own terms. “So this is where you came out,” Rhiow said, “and saw the Lady in Black…”

This is the spot.

“Good,” Rhiow said, as she caught sight of two small mostly-white shapes coming along toward them under the palm trees. They were looking at Rhiow with interest, and slight confusion. Sightseeing, Rhi? one of them said silently. And out in the open? We done here already?

Arhu’s tone was surprisingly edgy, in marked contrast to the sound of it just a couple of hours ago. Siffha’h was walking quite close to him, a kind of body language that Rhiow had started to recognize as suggesting that she was troubled by her brother’s rattled state.

Not just yet, Rhiow said. Granted, the situation looks unusual, but bear with me for the moment. We’ve turned up something interesting with this ehhif’s help. Some kind of apparition was out here before dawn… possibly even a revenant. But the only ones who saw it were ehhif. We need a better look.

Arhu glanced curiously up at the Silent Man as he and Siffha’h came strolling up to the group and paused at the corner. For his own part, the Silent Man looked at them almost without surprise. More of your people, Blackie? he said to Rhiow.

“The younger members of our team,” Rhiow said. “This one, Arhu, is gifted in a particular way that will be helpful to us. He sees what’s going to be…”

“Which is useful,” Arhu said, “but sometimes not as useful as seeing what’s been.” He looked over at Rhiow. “How long before dawn did this apparition turn up?”

“Maybe two hours before the Eye came up?” Rhiow said to Hwaith. He waved his tail “yes.” “Four AM, as ehhif reckon it. See what you can See.”

“Got to do something about this traffic first,” Siffha’h said, and sat down at the corner, looking out at the intersection.

All the traffic lights promptly turned yellow, and then red.

Now that’s a gift, said the Silent Man, as the traffic in all four directions came to a halt.

Arhu sidled himself and wandered out into the intersection. “Give me five minutes,” he said.

The Silent Man watched with interest, backing up to lean against one side of the tiled portico, like one ehhif casually waiting to meet another. On his shoulder, Sheba settled herself down with her paws pressed together, and closed her eyes. Don’t think you’ll have that long, said the Silent Man, shaking his head as he looked for any sign of where Arhu had gone. They’ll start jumping the lights…

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Siffha’h said, and closed her eyes.

A sudden odd silence fell over the intersection as all the cars’ electrical systems failed in unison, for perhaps a mile in every direction.

The silence didn’t last more than a few moments: all around the traffic lights, drivers started getting out of their cars, pulling the vehicles’ hoods open, staring into the complex innards in complete bemusement, and (in some cases) exercising their vocabularies most creatively. But Arhu paid them no mind. In mid-intersection, he sat himself down, curled his tail around his toes, and stared in an unfocused-looking way at the cracked concrete there.

Rhiow didn’t have anything of the Eye herself, but to a watching wizard, the influences involved in its use could obscurely be glimpsed. For a few seconds, the imagery of previous hours whirled around Arhu as he felt about with his mind for the specific moments of past time that were needed. He overshot a bit at first. Filmy cars seemed to run over or through him at high speed, gauzy pedestrians jittered back and forth in the background; the memories of recent days and nights alternately spotlighted or shadowed Arhu. He didn’t move, not even his tail twitching, as the imagery faded, went unchangingly dark around him. And then he looked up, gazing down Hollywood Boulevard.

“There,” Arhu said.

They watched her come, moving through and past the brief here-and-now traffic jam as if it wasn’t there: but then again, last night, it hadn’t been. Down the white line she came, exactly as described. The revenant was a thin, pale apparition in the broad sunlight of day, and hard to see; but there was no mistaking her. She was tall and elegantly dressed and empty-eyed, walking with a stately and icy precision, her eyes seeming fixed on some goal that the people around her had given up their right to see. The expression of cold-set scorn on the queen-ehhif’s face, and the feeling of revulsion and rejection that flowed from her, gave Rhiow a chill down her back.

She glanced up and saw with some surprise that the Silent Man’s eyes were fixed, not on Arhu or the traffic jam, but the remembered vision of the night before. But then he was here, Rhiow thought. That alone could make it possible for him to see an induced recurrence.

Possibly feeling Rhiow’s regard on him, the Silent Man glanced down at her. That’s a good trick, he said.

“We’ll see if it’s going to be good enough,” Rhiow said. Closer and closer the vision came, straight down the white line, walking right through one of the live ehhif who was standing with his hands on his hips and staring at his stalled car in disgust. He got an odd look, that ehhif, and he shivered all over: in the mid-morning warmth, he took off his hat and mopped his brow as if suddenly sweating cold.

On the Lady in Black came, and stepped out into the intersection. Another second or three and she would walk right through Arhu. But he looked up, catching her eyes with his: and in mid-step she froze where she was.

In that instant the vision went sharp, clear and dark. Around her the pavement went black and wet; beyond her, night and streetlights could be seen. Rhiow didn’t move, for fear of distracting Arhu. But she looked closely at the Lady in Black. As ehhif went, Rhiow suspected that this particular queen would be considered extremely beautiful. Yet there was also something strange about her, a sense that the physical form she wore was as relatively unimportant as some item of clothing.

Rhiow looked harder, as Arhu was doing. He had gotten up now and stretched himself, and was walking around the queen-ehhif. Perhaps Rhiow caught a touch of his examination more directly, now, for as she looked at the ehhif’s shape, inside it, only half-seen, some odd force seemed to twist and writhe. What’s going on there? Rhiow wondered, her ears starting to go back. It’s as if –

She’s not really there? Arhu said silently, pausing to look up at the woman-shape from behind. He was bristling, the hair on his back all spiked up, and his tail was starting to fluff. Good guess. No scent, Rhi. She’s a shell. She’s been soulsplit.

Rhiow growled softly in her throat, angry and unnerved to have her and Hwaith’s suspicions independently confirmed. A few ways did exist to denature a body’s connection to its soul while the body was still living – not exactly a severance, but the next best thing, exempting the soul from passing along the consequences of its actions to the body in which it belonged. All these methods were dangerous, and except under very specific circumstances, all of them were illegal for wizards to use, either on other beings or on themselves. There were, of course, some ways besides wizardry to produce the same effects. Either way, the hapless practitioners tended not to stay alive long enough to spread information about the techniques very widely. But where soulsplitting was being employed, there were also usually other closely affiliated abuses of power to be found: and all of them were favorite tools of Sa’rráhh’s, when the Lone One thought she could trick some poor mortal creature into using them.

Is her body still alive, do you think? Hwaith said.

Don’t know, Arhu said. She sure doesn’t care. This soul’s completely taken up with thoughts of what she’s warning us poor bystanders about. His tail was lashing. And she’s enjoying the thoughts, let me tell you. She really hates everyone and everything here, and she just can’t wait to see this whole state fall right off into the Pacific.

Rhiow hardly found that surprising. Many beings who underwent soulsplitting did so because they thought that liberating the soul from the body while still scheduled to be alive would allow them access to some “higher”, purer, less emotion-dominated state of being. But all too often matters went the other way entirely, usually because the creature initiating the split didn’t fully understand the deeper reaches of the relationship between soul and body — the way the physical side of existence acted as a check on the less safe or sane urges of a spirit still connected, however tenuously, to physical timeflow and its consequences. Arhu, Rhiow said, is it safe to query her? For us, and for her connection to her body? Whatever state that might be in…

Arhu walked back around in front of the Lady in Black, watching her closely, and sat down again. I’m holding this revenance out of the timeflow for the moment, he said. It’s probably safe enough to ask her a few questions. But I can’t keep Seeing her this way for long: and even if I could, it might not be smart. Something else is watching her too, Rhi. Whatever it is, it’s inside time, and shouldn’t have any perception of this frozen moment. But I’d rather not press my luck.

All right. Ask her: who is the Great Old One?

Arhu said nothing aloud, merely looked at the queen-ehhif’s apparition. She spoke no word in response, moved not at all. But at a long chilly remove, as if it were being bounced back through several stages of some immaterial relay, the answer came: He is the one from outside, older than all Gods: their inverse, dwelling in the Void. He is the darkness before any word, and the silence into which all words spoken must die. He is the End.

Rhiow licked her nose. Urruah, now sitting by her, looked out at Arhu. Ask her, Urruah said, who is the Black Leopard?

Another long silence: longer this time, Rhiow thought. He is Tepeyollotl Night-Eater, Lord of the Beasts of the Dark, the answer came back, who is called into time to devour all things: and to the darkness beyond time and timelessness he will return when all is devoured. He is the Herald of the End.