The Big Meow - Diana Dueyn

Rhiow looked out at the afternoon lawn: all was peace, not even a bird singing. She turned and made her way back into the front room, letting her nose lead her to a windowsill spot where no other Person’s scent lingered. There Rhiow turned around a couple of times, lay down, and half-closed her eyes on the cool spare sleekness of the living space. It’s not a design feature, though, she thought. These rooms are so clean because no one’s here often enough to cause a clutter. Poor Silent Man. Iau, help us help him!

And keep the known universes from being destroyed, the Whisperer said.

Yes, Rhiow said, put her head down on her paws, and closed her eyes completely. Absolutely. That too…

Much, much later – or so it felt – Rhiow woke up, blinking, and turned her head to glance out the window. She was mildly disturbed to see by the light outside that the sun had just barely set. She felt around in the back of her mind for the part of the Whispering that kept a time-reckoning for her, comparing her personal time against the ehhif versions of it. Yes, it was still the same day: she hadn’t accidentally slept the Sun around.

Rhiow yawned. A known side effect of residence at the “wrong” end of a timeslide was a certain disorientation in the feel of your personal timeflow: your soul knew that it was in more places at once than it ought to be. It’ll pass…or we’ll finish work here and get back home, and it won’t be an issue any more. But I keep finding myself wondering how Iaehh’s doing Just the price you pay when you’re in a relationship with an ehhif…

Rhiow got up, stretched, and made her way through the living area to the doors onto the back patio. Except for her team, who were all asleep as she’d left them, no other People were in sight.

She walked through the door, which had been left open a crack. What a place, she thought, where the crime rate is so low that you can leave things open like this… The shadows were gone now, the colors of the backyard flowers and the lawn softening down into less-definite shades, drained of their vividity by the growing dusk.

Rhiow wandered off into the least-kempt part of the shrubbery at the corner of the yard furthest from the house, and once decently out of sight could tell immediately that she’d picked the right spot to take care of business: others had done so before. She went unfocused, and when the necessities were handled, slipped out of the shrubbery again to see a dark shape peering into the house through the open doors.

“Hwaith?”

The shadow turned, saw her, purred — though the purr had a rueful sound to it. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

Rhiow waved her tail “no”, a regretful gesture, as she made her way over to the house-wall and the cat food dishes. “My brain’s just too full of new information,” she said. “It only let me sleep long enough to recharge my muscles.” She sighed, stretched, and sat down, looking over the dishes. “Your day’s been even longer than ours, though. Did you get enough rest?”

“Enough for the time being. It was a good thing I was up, though: Aufwi wanted to talk to one of us.”

“What’s the matter? Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” Hwaith said. “There wasn’t any point in disturbing you; you’d just gotten to sleep. But he wanted to let everybody know that the gate was trying to put down yet another root.”

Rhoiw swore softly. “And did it?”

“No, he managed to stop it. But he also marked the location it was trying to sink that root into. I was about to go up and have a look at the spot.”

“We’ve got an hour or so before Helen will be here,” Rhiow said. “Let me have a bite and I’ll go with you.”

She went over, checked out the dishes, chose one that had some kind of chicken cat food in it, and ate. At first, Just a few bites, Rhiow thought – but her stomach started to make a liar of her as soon as the first bite was in her mouth. This is really unusually good, she thought, you have to wonder just what they’re putting in our food, or not putting in it, uptime –

Shortly she looked up to see that Hwaith had sat down to have a wash. “I’m sorry,” Rhiow said, and had to laugh at herself as she went over for a drink. “Maybe I’ve been working harder than I thought I was…”

Hwaith purred loud and raspy at her as she drank. “Don’t rush,” he said. “I’ve got a transit ready: it won’t take long for us to get there.”

She drank, sat down, scrubbed briefly at her face. “I guess it’s easy to forget how hard you’re working when you’re out on the trail,” Rhiow said. “And then when you’re somewhere new and interesting…”

“Or old and interesting,” Hwaith said. “Time travel has its attractions, I guess. Urruah’s certainly been enjoying wallowing in the past.”

Hwaith sounded a little wistful. Rhiow got up, stretched fore and aft once more. “While you wish you could have your mundane present back,” she said, trotting over to him. “Don’t think I don’t catch the occasional thought.” She put her whiskers forward. “And I can’t blame you. Which way are we headed?”

“For the moment, just into the bushes,” Hwaith said.

He led her over to a thick patch of rhododendron on the opposite side of the yard, and slipped under the canopy of broad glossy leaves. Rhiow followed. Back against the stuccoed wall separating the yard from that of the house next door, in the dimness Rhiow saw a patch of a different darkness, paler, twilit. “Right through here – “ Hwaith said, and slipped through.

Rhiow paused for just a moment, assessing the personal gating: a securely anchored and flexible construction, a nice piece of work. She stepped through after Hwaith, glanced around.

They were standing at the foot of a moderately steep hillside; its lower slope and the ground where they stood was covered with the pale oat grass that seemed to favor unwatered spots in this part of the world. Several other small hills came down to meet the ground around them, and rather to Rhiow’s surprise, none of them had houses built on them, or even roads.

“We’re about three miles northwest of the Silent Man’s place,” Hwaith said, heading up the hill. “Greystone, the ehhif call it. Up here — ”

As they climbed, the oat grass gave way to low shrubbery and ground cover, both somewhat overgrown. “This is only three miles away from where we were?” Rhiow said. “You’d think it was much further, out in the country somewhere – “

“Well,” Hwaith said, “when these ehhif marked out their home territory, they did it with an eye to their privacy. You’ll see in a moment.”

“I keep meaning to ask,” Rhiow said as they worked their way up through the underbrush. “Where’s home territory for you, Hwaith? Are you in-pride? Or have you got ehhif of your own?”

“Oh, no,” Hwaith said. “I’ve got a den-place down in Union Station, and I’m friendly enough with the ehhif there, but I haven’t been closely affiliated for a long time now. Managing the gate even under normal circumstances is enough of a strain that I wouldn’t want to have to do that and have ehhif too. It wouldn’t be fair to them, really. And as for a pride…” Suddenly Hwaith sounded as if he was coming up against something he didn’t want to deal with too closely. “Work tends to get in the way of pride-life, doesn’t it? I mean, the gate-management end of things. If I start thinking about changing specialties, training a replacement, it might be another story.”

She gave him a wry look as they came out between one band of shrubbery and another near the top of the hill. “Hwaith, if you’re telling me that wizardry’s impairing your tom-life, you’re doing something wrong! Better have a word with Urruah.”

He put his whiskers forward, catching her amusement. “Oh, no, it’s not like that. I’ve hardly forsaken the queens for my Art! There were one or two when I was young, sure, but work got busy, nothing really came of it…” He shrugged his tail as they made their way through the second line of shrubbery. “And later on you learn not to expect it to be a Sehau-and-Aifheh thing every time. Might as well expect to have the sky rain fresh songbirds on you with their breasts ready plucked.”

Rhiow chuckled. “Songbirds? I’d settle for chicken.” But the sudden romantic turn of phrase amused her. Sehau was a tom: Aifheh was his queen… At least that was the way the most famous of the many versions of their story went — a sung-verse variant composed by one of the greatest of the cat-bards, the one who anciently kept company with the ehhif-bard Hharo’lahn in the Isles of the West. The tale had already been old when the People first told it to the ehhif-wizards of Egypt, and thousands of subsequent generations of People retold it to any species that would listen, and to each other. Toms especially loved it, doting on its over-the-top romance and unavoidable tragedy – but then toms always tended a little toward the histrionic, as something that would increase the drama in any given song. This, though, was an opinion Rhiow knew perfectly well it was wiser to keep to herself.

They came out of the shrubbery and stood at the hilltop, and Rhiow waved her tail in astonishment as she looked across the wide broad space to a huge frontage of house, built all in shadowy gray granite. The main building was two stories high, and at least a New York short block in length – a stately procession of arcades and porticoes, terraces and peaked roofs, railed stone terraces, archways, and doors of wood and glass. “This was an ehhif den?” Rhiow said. “The pride must have been huge!”

“Not at all,” Hwaith said as they headed toward it. “Only two ehhif lived here.”

“But not any more, I take it,” Rhiow said. The whole atmosphere of the place spoke strangely of abandonment: lightless windows, overgrown grass, ragged plantings hanging over leaf-scattered garden paths.

“No, it’s still lived in,” Hwaith said, leading the way down along the frontage. “A wealthy ehhif built the place some decades ago. I mean, a really wealthy one: the founder of one of the great old industrial ehhif families that have lived here for more than a century. This was the biggest private home ever built in the city: still is.” Hwaith glanced at the building’s l long frontage of the building as they paced by it. “After the old tom-ehhif built it, he gave it to his only tom-kit. It was to be the place where the young tom and his queen would live their lives out together.”

“But it didn’t turn out that way,” Rhiow said.

At the far edge of the huge graveled space to one side of the great house, they paused, and Hwaith flirted his tail “no”. “In this town,” Hwaith said, “so many things don’t necessarily go as planned…”

Rhiow put her nose up into the air, sniffed. The scents of old growth, damp bark, shed conifer needles and peppertree leaves, mingled in the still air with scents of stale water and baked stone. But there was something else as well. “Am I crazy,” Rhiow said, “or is that – oil?”

“Not crazy at all,” Hwaith said. “Not actually on the grounds, here. But it’s close by: there’s a well down the other side of the hill. Ironic, really, since you could say this whole place was built on oil.”

Rhiow stood still and listened. Muted by the way the ground fell away, she could hear a faint, repetitive creaking noise. “Is that the well I’m hearing?” she said.

“That’s it.” Hwaith started off in the opposite direction, and Rhiow padded after him. “Anyway, down over here is where that root was trying to sink itself – “

Along the ridge of the hill, a terrace reached away from one side of the main house, stretching perhaps a hundred yards. At the terrace’s end a formal box garden began, or what remained of one. Once it had been an interlocking maze of carefully trimmed lines of shrubbery. Now it was looking ragged around the edges, even dusty. “If these ehhif are so wealthy,” Rhiow said as they paced through the maze, “it’s surprising they don’t take better care of the place.”

“It is a little strange,” Hwaith said, “but they don’t seem to be here much. Watch out for these steps – a couple of the slabs are loose.”

They made their way down a shallow stairway at the far edge of the maze, heading for a small, flat area further down the hillside, hemmed in by an incomplete circle of trees. “This is where my gate was trying to root,” Hwaith said, “at least briefly.” He stopped, his nose wrinkling. “Wait a minute. Do you smell – “

To a Person’s senses, ehhif blood had a metallic reek, instantly identifiable. Even if there had been rain to wash it away, which there had not, the scent would still have lingered in the soil for weeks, unmistakable. Now Rhiow walked slowly into the center of the ring of trees, sniffing carefully.

The scent was very old. Rhiow spent a while working her way over toward one spot in particular, near the encircling ring of trees, where once upon a time, the blood had soaked deep. But that had been a long time ago. Hwaith came up by her, put his nose down, inhaled. His tail lashed.

“Years old,” he said. “But I’d have trouble saying how many. Forensics hasn’t been my field.”

“Could this be a murder the police here missed?” Rhiow said. “Is this anything you’ve heard about before?”

“No,” Hwaith said, sounding upset.

Rhiow’s tail was lashing too, now. “We’re going to have to get Arhu up here,” she said. “I can’t believe this. Another – maybe not a murder, but something. And no way to tell if it’s germane to what we’re doing.” She put her nose down to the ground again, took another long breath –

— froze. A sour stink, faint, damp, acrid, teased her nose. Her mind went back to the stink she’d scented when she had had her teeth sunk into the diagnostic webbing of Hwaith’s gate, just after they’d arrived. “Do you smell that?” she said.

He put his nose down by the ground, breathed, then opened his mouth to rebreathe the scent. “Yes.”

Rhiow shook her head, sneezed. Then she sat down, licked a paw and scrubbed at her nose briefly, it itched so with the warring scents. “I wonder,” she said. “Hwaith, do earthquakes have a scent?”

He gave her an odd look. “That’s a thought that never would have occurred to me.”

“These earthquakes, anyway,” Rhiow said. “Your gate’s hyperstrings — at least, the diagnostic strings tied to the other places where the gate was trying to put down roots — they were full of this smell.”

“You’re right,” Hwaith said. “But, Rhiow, we haven’t had a quake here.” He paused. “At least, not recently. Certainly not in the last six weeks. Maybe not for much longer.”

“I wonder if we’re about to have one here.”

He looked thoughtful. “That could be. Are you suggesting we should try to prevent it?”

Rhiow sneezed again – once without trying, and then once on purpose to try to clear her nose of the warring scents. “I don’t know if we could. Even if we could, I don’t know if it would be wise. But I think we should make sure one of us is keeping an eye on this site, because if we can investigate the quake while it’s active, we might be able to run a trace back to the cause.”

Hwaith’s tail waved slowly from side to side as he thought. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “I’ll take a moment to jump back over to where Aufwi’s watching the gate…see how he’s doing, and ask him to add a tracer to the diagnostic that’s looking at this attempted root.”