To Visit the Queen (10 page)

"That's right," Huff said as he plodded along. He led Rhiow and her team through an iron gate in a nearby hedge, and down onto a sunken, paved walk, which made its way behind that hedge around the busy-street side of the Tower and into an underpass leading away under that street. "See this grassy area over to the right, the other side of the railings? That was the moat... but much earlier, before the Imperial people were here, it was a swamp with a cave nearby that led into the old hillside. That was where the first gate formed, when this was just a village of a few mud-and-wattle huts."

"How come a gate spawned here, then," Arhu said, "if there were so few
ehhif
around?"

"Because they were around for two thousand years before the Imperials turned up," Huff said, "or maybe three. There's some argument about the dates. It's not certain what kept them here at first; some people think the fishing was good." Huff put his whiskers forward, and Rhiow got, with some amusement, the immediate sense that Huff approved of fish. "Whatever the reason, they stayed, and a gate came, as they tended to do near permanent settlements when the Earth was younger." He flicked his ears thoughtfully as they all stepped to one side to avoid a crowd of
ehhif
making their way up to the admission counters near the gateway they'd come in.

"It's had a rocky history, though," Rhiow said, "this gating complex. So Urruah tells me."

"That's right," Huff said as they turned the corner and now walked parallel to the main street with all the traffic. "This has always been the heart of London, this hill... not that there's that much left of the hill anymore. And the heart has had its share of seizures and arrests, I fear, and nearly stopped once or twice. Nonetheless, everything is still functioning."

"What exactly is the problem with the gates at the moment?" Rhiow said.

Huff got a pained look. "One of them is intermittently converting itself into an unstable timeslide," he said. "The other end seems to be anchoring somewhere nearby in the past— it has to, after all; you can't have a slide without an anchor— but the times at which it's anchoring seem to be changing without any cause that we can understand."

"How long has it been doing this?" Urruah said. His eyes had gone rather wide at the mention of the timeslide.

"We're not absolutely sure," Huff said. "Possibly for a long time, though only for microperiods too small to allow anyone to pass through. In any case, none of the normal monitoring spells caught the gate at it. We only found out last week when Auhlae— that's my mate— was working on one of the neighboring gates... and something came out."

"Something?"
Arhu said, looking scared.

"Some
one,
actually," Huff said, glancing over at the Tower as a shriek of children's laughter came from somewhere inside it. "It was an
ehhif
— and not a wizardly one. Very frightened... very confused. He ran through the gate and up and out into the tube station— that's where our number-four gate is anchored, in the Tower Hill Underground station— and out into the night. Right over the turnstiles he went," Huff added, "and the Queen only knows what the poor
ehhif
who work there made of it all."

"Have you made any more headway in understanding why this is happening?" Rhiow said. She very much hoped so: this all sounded completely bizarre.

But Huff flirted his tail no, a slightly annoyed gesture. "Nothing would please me better than to tell you that was the case," he said.

Rhiow licked her nose. "Huff," she said, "believe me when I tell you that we're sorry for your trouble, and we wish we didn't need to be here in the first place."

"That's very kindly said," Huff said, turning those green eyes on her: they were somber. "My team are— well, they're annoyed, as you might imagine. I appreciate your concern a great deal, indeed I do."

Huff and Rhiow's team turned leftward into the underpass, which was full of
ehhif
heading in various directions, and one
ehhif
who was tending a small mobile installation festooned with colored scarves and T-shirts. Numerous prints of the Tower and other pictures of what Rhiow assumed were tourist attractions were taped to the walls, and some of what Rhiow assumed were tourists were studying them. "Huff," Urruah said, "what did the gate's logs look like after this ingress?"

"Muddled," Huff said as they walked through the underpass, up the ramp on its far side, and turned toward a set of stairs leading downward into what Rhiow saw was the ticketing area of the Underground station: above the stairway was the circle-and-bar Underground logo, emblazoned with the words TOWER HILL. "We found evidence of multiple ingresses of this kind, from different times into ours... and egresses from ours back to those times. The worst part of it is that only one of those egresses was a 'return': all the others were 'singles.' The
ehhif
went through, in one direction or another, but they never made it back to their home times."

Urruah's eyes went wide. "This way," Huff said, and led them under one of the turnstiles and off to the right.

Rhiow followed him closely, but Urruah's shocked look was on her mind. "What?" she said to him as Huff leaped up onto the stainless-steel divider between two banks of stairways.

"Single trips," Urruah said, following her up. "You know what that means...."

Rhiow flirted her tail in acquiescence. It was an uncomfortable image, the poor
ehhif
trapped in a time not their own, confused, possibly driven mad by the awful turn of events, and certainly thought mad by anyone who ran into them. But then she started having other things to think about as she followed Huff steeply down. The steel was slippery; the only way you could control your descent was by jumping from one to another of the upthrust steel wedges fastened at intervals to the middle of the divider, almost certainly to keep
ehhif
in a hurry from using the thing as a slide. Rhiow started to get into the rhythm of this, then almost lost it again as Arhu came down past her, yelling in delight. Various
ehhif
walking up on one side and down on the other looked curiously for the source of the happy yowling in the middle of the air.

"Arhu, look out," Rhiow said, "oh, look out, for the Queen's sake
look
— " It was too late: Arhu had jumped right over the surprised Huff, but had built up so much speed that he couldn't stop himself at the next wedge: he hit it, shot into the air, fell, and rolled for several yards, then shot off the end of the divider to fall to the floor at the bottom of the escalator. Rhiow sighed.
He was so good there,
she thought,
for about ten minutes.

She caught up with Huff as he jumped down. "Huff, I'm sorry," Rhiow said, watching Arhu do an impromptu dance as he tried to avoid crowds of
ehhif
stepping on him. It was something of a challenge: they were coming at him and making for the stairs from three directions at once. "He's a little new to all this, and as for being part of a team..."

"Oh, it's all right," Huff said, unconcerned. "Our team has one his age: younger, even. She's left us all wondering whether we aren't too old for this kind of work. With any luck, they'll run each other down and give us some peace. Come on, over this way."

Huff led them from one hallway into another, where several stainless-steel doors were let into the tiled wall. "In here," said Huff, and vanished through the door: "through it" in the literal sense, passing straight into the metal with a casual whisk of his tail.

It was a spell that any feline wizard knew, and even some nonwizardly People could do the trick under extreme stress. Rhiow drew the spell-circle in her mind, knotted it closed. Then inside it she sketched out the graphic form of her name, and the temporary set of parameters that reminded her body that it was mostly empty space, and so was the door, and requested them to avoid one another. Then she walked through after Huff. It was an odd sensation, like feeling the wind ruffling your fur the wrong way: except the fur seemed to be on the
inside
—

—and she was through, into what looked like a much older area, a brick-lined hallway on the far side of the door, lit by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, all very much different from the clean, shining fluorescent-lit station platform outside. Rhiow looked over her shoulder, and Urruah came through after her. From the far side of the door there were a couple of soft bumping noises.

Urruah put his whiskers forward and looked ahead of them at Huff, who had paused to see where they were. "He has a little trouble with this one sometimes," Urruah said.
Bump,
and Arhu abruptly came blooming through the metal, spitting and growling softly to himself. "
Vhai
'd stuff, why doesn't it get out of the way when I tell it— "

"Language," Rhiow said, rather hopelessly, but for the moment, Urruah just laughed. "
Telling
it won't help," he said. "You've got to ask nicely. Most things in the Universe react positively to that. Sass them, and they get stubborn."

Arhu threw Urruah an unconvinced look as he padded by him in Huff's wake. Old wooden doors opened into side rooms off this hallway: storerooms, Rhiow thought— a smell of electrical equipment and tools hung about the place. "There are workshops down here," Huff said, "and there's an access to the tunnel junction where the Tower Hill station's tracks run near the access stairs to the Fenchurch Street railway station. That's where the number-four gate is."

He led them down one more stairway, a spiral one this time. It let out onto a small, dimly lit platform that ran for maybe ten yards along a double line of track, the track stretching away into darkness on both sides. Above the platform hung the faintly glimmering oval of an active gate matrix. In front of it sat three People, one of them up on his haunches and working with the gate's control strings: a youngish tabby tom who, except that his tabbying was marmalade rather than silver and gray, reminded Rhiow somewhat of Urruah.

One of the other two turned her head to look at the new arrivals. She was a slender gray shorthair queen, about Rhiow's own size but slimmer, with the most beautiful eyes Rhiow thought she had ever seen: they were a blue as deep as the skies on one of those perfect autumn days you sometimes got in the city, and the set of them was both indolent and kind. As she looked at Huff, the expression got kinder, and Rhiow knew immediately that the two of them were mates. The fourth Person, apparently concentrating on what the young tabby was doing, didn't move.

"Has it failed again?" Huff said as they walked toward the others.

"It
vhai
ing well has
not,"
said the tabby, sounding very annoyed. "But that's what you'd expect, isn't it, since People are coming to look at it?"

Well, so much for any concerns about
Arhu's
language,
Rhiow thought with resignation.

The handsome queen chuckled. "Huff, you weren't really expecting this gate to oblige you, were you? The cranky thing."

"No, I suppose not. Rhiow," Huff said over his shoulder. "Come meet Auhlae, my mate."

"You're very welcome," Auhlae said, touching noses delicately with Rhiow, "and well met on the errand. And this is..."

"My older partner Urruah," Rhiow said, "and my younger partner Arhu."

Noses were bumped all around: Rhiow was privately amused to note how shyly Arhu did it. He was apparently not immune to physical beauty in a queen. "And this is Fhrio," Auhlae said.

"Rrrrh,"
Fhrio said, a sound of general disgust, and dropped back down to all fours again, turning to the others. "Yeah, hunt's luck to you, hello there, well met." He bumped noses peremptorily, then sat down and started in on a serious bout of composure-washing, the action of a Person so annoyed that he didn't trust his reactions with others for the moment.

"And Siffha'h," said Auhlae.

The smallest of the London team got up, turned away from her single-minded concentration on the gate, and looked at Rhiow and the others. This little queen was maybe a couple of months younger than Arhu, Rhiow thought, and, like him, was a
hu-rhiw,
though a paler one; her coat had much more white than black, and two black "eyebrow" marks over her eyes gave her a humorous look. Her eyes were large, golden, and thoughtful, and the look she gave Rhiow was surprisingly mature and measuring for someone who still had most of her milk teeth.

"I greet you," Rhiow said, "and hunt's luck to you."

"You too," said Siffha'h, and stepped over to touch noses, first with Rhiow, then with Urruah. Arhu, coming back from nosing Fhrio, met her last: they bumped noses cordially enough, and then, slightly to Rhiow's surprise, Siffha'h repeated the touch. She looked up at Arhu and said, "What's
that?"

"Uh, chili pickle," Arhu said.

"Hhehhh,"
Siffha'h said scornfully, nose wrinkled and lips pulled back— the feline equivalent of an
ehhif
of tender years saying "Ewwww." She turned away, leaving Arhu looking rather stricken.

"I had wondered," Huff said genially to Arhu. "Remind me to take you along some night when I do Indian."

"Huff has been telling us about your problem," Rhiow said to Auhlae. "I take it there's been no improvement."

Fhrio looked up from his
he'ihh.
"I've been trying to get it to fail all morning," he said, "and I might as well have saved my time. The logs don't give us enough data about what the strictly physical conditions were doing when the last failures occurred. I'm going to have to sit down with the Whisperer and get Her to make me a list."

"That won't stop the problem, though," Siffha'h said. "You're going to have to shut the gate."

"I would rather not do that," Fhrio said, and began washing furiously again.

Auhlae looked over at Rhiow and Urruah with a sympathetic expression. "Fhrio is our gating specialist," she said softly. "He tends to take these things rather personally."