The Big Meow

Rhiow’s tail lashed. “Turn to her how?” she said, horrified. It was completely counterintuitive, utterly impossible, almost certainly a lie. At least that’s the conclusion that reasonable thought would lead you to… “It’s some trap,” she said to the others, unable to believe anything else. “Some stratagem of Hers, to get us to fall in with Her plans and do exactly the opposite of whatever will stop Her.”

Urruah was sitting with eyes slitted, very still. “It’s always been a favorite tactic of the Lone One,” he said, “to get wizards to do Her dirty work for Her.”

“But She knows we’d know that,” Arhu said. “She might think we’re annoying, but when has She ever thought we were stupid?”

“You’re sure about the translation?” Siffha’h said, looking at Ith a little suspiciously.

“There was no mistaking it. Look for yourself.”

A moment later, replicas of the uptime tablets and annotations of their carvings had appeared in the middle of the living room floor. Everyone gathered around to study them. But Ith was right about the words, insofar as the Speech sufficed to read them, and right about the absolute flatness of the language in the inscriptions, and the inability to construe it in any other way. The carvings that ornamented the texts even looked a little hasty, as if the ancient artisan was unnerved by what he or she had been carving. With reason… Rhiow thought. If the artist was a wizard, this message can’t have made any more sense to him or her than to us…

Helen Walks Softly was sitting on the floor in jeans and an LAPD sweatshirt with her legs curled under her, and now she leaned over the glowing simulacra of the carvings on the tablets, gazing at them thoughtfully. “Isn’t this interesting,” she said, and tapped a finger on one of the reconstructed tablets. “See this?”

Rhiow paced over to look at the carven character Helen was indicating. There seemed to be two heads embedded in it, one a cat’s and one a serpent’s, each with some ornamental scrollwork surrounding it. But then she looked more closely, and saw that the Feathered Serpent was wearing a collar adorned with cat’s heads, and the Great Cat had a collar that looked like a snake…

“An ocelocoatl,” Helen said, “and a Chan-Bahlum. When they turn up at all, theyturn uptogether a lot.”

Rhiow glanced at Arhu and Ith. “Maybe now we know why,” Rhiow said. “It’s been becoming plain that the two of them go a long way back. Or about six months, depending on how you look at it…”

“But that’s not the whole point, Rhiow. Look at the two of them. They’re right next to this – “

Rhiow peered at the carved character Helen was indicating. At first glance it looked like the the Black Leopard’s head, with a constellation of little leopard heads around it. “Now what?” Rhiow muttered. “Is that the Devourer in the Darkness having kittens or something? Isn’t He a tom?”

“Look closer, Rhi. It’s not Tepeyollotl: He’s on the far side of this carving. This is sa’Rraah, with her little friends all around her – right next to the Ocelocoatl, our feline-saurian fusion. And they’re looking at Tepeyollotl together.”

“Not with the friendliest expressions I’ve ever seen, either,” Urruah said.

“Not arguing that point,” Rhiow said, “I still don’t know if I’m going to trust the fate of all known universes to some artist who was practicing carving snarls…”

Siffha’h now came over to look at the carving, especially the part that Helen had identified as sa’Rraah and the shadow-imps. “You know,” Siffha’h said, “Herself’s little jackals were sure down there in strength in that cavern.”

“True,” Rhiow said, bristling. “Something I was trying to avoid thinking about at the time.”

“But that’s the problem, Rhi. Why weren’t they doing anything?”

That gave Rhiow pause. In the cavern, Rhiow had dismissed it the shadow-imps’ nonintervention as a momentary condition, something to be grateful for as long as it lasted: and then everything had gone crazy and she hadn’t had time to spare them further consideration. But now she thought, They should’ve been attacking us. What was holding them back?

“I don’t have any answer for you on that count,” Rhiow said. “But after reviewing what happened, I don’t see that we have any cause to relax at the moment.” She licked her nose. “That wizardry, black as it was, executed before poor Laurel managed to remake her Oath and withdraw enacture from it. The calcified heart that Dagenham threw into it was the product of the last ceremonial murder they needed – the one that would enable the entry of Tepeyollotl into our spaces. That kicked the spell into execution, though we were able to disrupt its running somewhat, and the weaving of the incursion worldgate.” She looked over at Hwaith and Aufwi. “You two were instrumental in that. And then Ith arrived –“