To Visit the Queen (19 page)

Then she dismissed the thought. He might sometimes be impatient and reckless, by a queen's standards anyway, but Urruah was a professional. He would not tamper with time unless and until the Powers sanctioned it.
And then when he does,
she thought, as Urruah looked up from the spell with an extremely self-satisfied expression,
he'll have the time of his life.

"Nice work, huh?" Urruah said, getting up.

"Beautiful as always," Rhiow said. "Did you get your name right?"

He put one ear back, not
quite
having an excuse to comment. "Uh, yes, I checked."

"That being the case," she said, "hadn't we better get going? You wouldn't want to leave a spell like this just sitting around for long: it wants to work. Waste of energy, otherwise."

Urruah grinned at her, then turned to Auhlae and Fhrio, who had finished checking the catenary and had strolled over to them.

"I've structured this so that, once we pass through, it'll seal behind us," Urruah said. "If this is some kind of trap, I don't want whatever might be waiting on the other side jumping straight back down your throats. The spell will continue running on this side, though, as usual, while sealed. Afterwards, say as soon as ten minutes after opening, there are three ways it can be activated. From this side, by either of you waking up this linkage"—he patted one outside-twining branch of the "hedge" with one paw— "which will make the slide bilaterally patent. You'll be able to see through, or to pass through if you need to. You'll see I've left a couple of stems unoccupied on the 'personality' stratum for you to add names to. It can also be activated from our side by one of us pulling a 'tripwire' strand— that's in case we need an early return. Otherwise, it's programmed to reopen to bilateral patency again in two hours: that's as long as I prefer to stay, for a scouting visit."

Auhlae and Fhrio both examined the linkages that Urruah had indicated. "All right," Auhlae said, "that's straightforward enough. If you're not back in two hours?"

"Intervention at that point will have to be your decision," Urruah said. "Myself, I'd say wait an extra hour before letting anyone come after us. But you may decide against that... and if you do, I wouldn't blame you. The slide will remain workable for a full Sun's day, in any case. If we don't return by then..." He shrugged his tail. "Better check with the European supervisory wizard for advice, because my guess is you'll need to."

Auhlae and Fhrio nodded.

"Then let's do it," Urruah said to Rhiow. She flicked her tail in agreement and leaped into the circle, found the spot that Urruah had marked out for her to occupy in lines of wizardly fire: behind her, Arhu jumped too, a little more clumsily, and found his spot.
Nerves. Poor kitling,
she thought: but Rhiow's fur was not lying entirely smooth, either. She licked her nose, and tried to keep her composure in place.

Urruah jumped into the circle, dead onto his spot, as if he had been practicing for this for years. His whiskers were forward, his tail was straight up with confidence.
Disgusting,
Rhiow thought, and resisted the urge to lick her nose again.

Urruah reached out for one of the traceries of words and fire laced through the "hedge," hooked it in both his front paws, and pulled it down to the spell's activation point, standing on it.

The sensation came instantly: not of passage, as in a normal gating, but of being squeezed.
Claudication is right,
Rhiow thought, as a feeling of intolerable pressure settled in all around her, seeming to compress her from every direction at once. It was as if giant paws were trying to press her right out of existence. And perhaps they were.
This existence, anyway.

She could not swallow, or breathe, or lick her nose, or move any part of her in the slightest. The world reduced itself to that terrible pressure—— which suddenly was gone, and she fell down.

Into the mud.

Rhiow struggled to her feet, opened her eyes enough to register that they were in some kind of street: buildings stood up on either side. Off to one side, Arhu was pulling himself to his feet as well. Beside her, Urruah was standing up, and swearing.

"What?" Rhiow said, "what's the matter?"

"Is your nose broken?" he said. "Sweet Dam of Everything, this smells like sa'Rráhh's own litter-box. The
mud!"

Rhiow's face was trying to contort itself right out of shape at the smell: she could only agree. The street was at least four inches deep in a thick, black mud that, to judge by the smell, was mostly horse dung: but there was rotten straw in it too, and soot, and garbage of every kind, and a smell that suggested the
ehhif
's sewers had discovered a way to back up so thoroughly that they ran uphill. The air was not much better. It was brown, a brown such as Rhiow had not seen since she last visited Los Angeles during a smog alert: but this was far, far worse— the concentrated, inversion-confined smoke from ten thousand chimneys, most of them burning coal. You could see this air in the street with you: it billowed faintly, like smoke from a burning building in the next block. But nothing was burning— or, rather,
everything
was: wood, coal, coke, trash.

"Is the tripwire here?" Arhu asked.

"Of course it's here," Urruah said, a little crossly. "I can feel it even through this stuff. Everything's going according to plan... so far." He looked around at the mud. "Though I have to admit my plans did not include
this.
"

"It's going to take a while for our noses to get used to this," Rhiow said, looking around her with some concern. "Meanwhile, there's no point in standing around waiting for it to happen."

"You mentioned playing in traffic," Arhu said, looking across the street as horse carriages plunged by, big drays pulled by huge horses, smaller gigs with neat-looking ponies between the shafts, or tall, slender beasts apparently bred for the hackney trade. "I'd give a lot for a nice taxi to run underneath at the moment."

"I wish you had one too," Urruah growled, glancing up the road and unwilling to put a paw in the loathsome mud. "I will never complain about New York being dirty again.
Never!
"

"Yes you will," Arhu said, more in a tone of resignation than foresight, but he knew Urruah well enough by now to be able to make the statement without resource to prophecy.

Urruah was so disgusted that he didn't even bother taking a swipe at Arhu. "For someone who lives in a Dumpster," Rhiow said, unable to resist the chance to tease him, "you're awfully fastidious."

"My Dumpster is cleaner than this," Urruah said. "A
sewage-treatment
facility is cleaner than this! If— "

"I get the message," Rhiow said. "Come on, 'Ruah, we don't have a choice. Let's do it."

They ran across the street together—— and Arhu was completely unprepared for the motor roar that came from down the side street. In a cloud of smoke, a four-wheeled vehicle on thin-tired, spindly wheels came charging around the corner and straight at them.

There was no time to jump. Arhu's eyes rolled in terror, but it was informed terror. He threw himself flat under the vehicle's chassis: it passed over him and roared on down the street, the
ehhif
sitting in the contraption either completely unaware that they'd almost run over a cat, or completely unconcerned about it.

Urruah, who had been farther in the middle of the road, now ran over to Arhu as he picked himself up and shook himself to get the worst of the muck off. "You have to start being more careful about what you ask for," Urruah growled. "Clearly someone's listening.... Are you all right?"

"As long as I don't have to wash and find out what I taste like," Arhu muttered, "yes." He trotted hurriedly for the sidewalk, or what passed for it: in this neighborhood, this meant "where the mud was only an inch thick instead of three or four."

They crouched against the brick building there and looked up and down the road. It was plainly Tower Hill, running into Great Tower Street as usual, but the street names were different— George Street and Great Tower Hill— and the traffic was mostly pulled by horses. Not that that made it any slower than modern London traffic: if anything, it looked to be moving a little faster.

People walked past them, some well dressed, some seemingly poor but clean though somewhat threadbare, some practically in rags: and no one seemed to notice the mud. A few heads turned when one of the motor vehicles passed, though. Rhiow couldn't tell whether it was because they were unusual, or simply because of the noise they made. Apparently the muffler had not yet been invented.

"Now what are
those
doing here?" Urruah said. "Internal combustion engines aren't until the turn of the century."

"Neither is the word for smog," Rhiow said, looking up at the dingy, near-opaque sky, "but that doesn't seem to have stopped these people: they've got that, too."

"What time would you say this is?" Rhiow said. "The light is so peculiar."

Urruah shook his head. "Late afternoon? Not even smog could make it this dim."

"I wouldn't be too sure," Rhiow said.

"Everything here feels wrong," Arhu said. "All of it." His face had lost the disgusted expression it had worn a moment before: his eyes looked slightly unfocused.

"You're not kidding," Urruah said. "Something's happened to history... and I don't like the look of it. Or the smell of it."

Rhiow curled her lip at the smell from the street. "This would have been here anyway," she said, picking up one forefoot out of the mud. "The kind of sanitation we take for granted in our own time was something these
ehhif
were only beginning to see the need for. And their technology's not up to it, even if they
did
see the need. There are more people in this city than in almost any other in the world, and all they've got are brooms and dustpans... and four million
ehhif
and a quarter million horses inside the city limits." She smiled grimly. "Work it out for yourself. How many cubic miles of— "

"Please,"
Urruah said, and sneezed.

They started to walk, looking for someplace clean. They found no such place, at least in the public roads. Only the moat surrounding the Tower led up to patches of green grass beneath the old stone walls. Their structure was unchanged from what Rhiow had seen in modern London, but they were stained black by who knew how many years of air pollution. Slowly the three of them made their way around toward the river, looking down it from a spot that would have been close to where Rhiow and Arhu had stood only a few hours before.

"This is all wrong," Arhu whispered. Across the river was a great palisade of buildings, all of which were taller than architecture of the
ehhif
-queen Victoria's time could possibly have been.

"This stuff shouldn't be here," Arhu said. "And look at that."

They looked at the great bridge, crowned with its pyramidal towers and boasting its high cross-walkway, which appeared on so many of the postcards and T-shirts the
ehhif
sold near Tower Hill Underground station. "That's wrong too," Arhu said.

Rhiow looked at him. "Are you sure? Even in our world, it's pretty old— "

Urruah stared off into the distance for a moment as he cocked an ear to listen to the Whisperer. "He's right, though," he said presently. "She says that in our world, this wasn't built until eighteen eighty-six. No matter what year this is in the spread we're heading for, that's still too soon."

"Interesting," Rhiow said, and shook herself to abort a beginning shiver. "Something to do with the technology, maybe?"

"They've got a whole lot too much of it, if you ask me," Urruah said.

"Of technology?" Rhiow said, and looked around her. Overhead, something very like a helicopter went by in a loud chatter of rotors. What she couldn't understand was why a helicopter needed flapping wings as well.

"Of the wrong
kind
of technology," Urruah said. "Rhi, this timeline has been contaminated...
seriously
contaminated."

"And you don't think it's an accident."

"Do you? Really?"

She looked around her at the vista down the river, of cranes standing up and erecting new buildings of steel and plate glass, but still somehow in a style that was essentially Victorian, complicated and, to her eye, overdecorated. She looked down the face of the river, which was full of shipping— not sail, as at least some of that shipping still should have been, but metal ships, running on internal combustion or (in just a very few cases, as in a technology that was rapidly being left behind) steam. She saw the design of many of those ships that were making their way to and from the Pool of London: lean, low, forward-thrust, angular shapes such as she had seen often enough in New York Harbor— battleships and cruisers in the modern mold, all fanged with guns and other weapons she couldn't recognize. There were a lot of those warships: they came and went as regularly, it seemed, as the tour ships that ran up and down the Thames in Rhiow's native time. For all its bustle of business and its aura of
ehhif
success and power, this London also had a grim air about it.

"No," Rhiow said. "This contamination is purposeful. The Lone One has been busy here."

"Very busy, I'd say," said Urruah. "And the contamination has to have happened a good while ago: not even
ehhif
can make changes like this overnight. We've got to find out when this alternate timeline was seeded."

Rhiow looked around her and lashed her tail in frustration. "We're going to have a good time finding that out," she said. "We can't just ask the
ehhif.
"

"We can ask People," Arhu said.

"Yes," said Rhiow, "but which ones? We could waste a lot of time talking to the wrong sources... and I have a feeling time isn't something we dare waste here."

They walked down to the edge of the river, looking up and down its length. The water was olive-colored and filthy, and it stank. A few desultory seabirds floated on it, or fished optimistically among the weeds and garbage for something to eat. Above it all, the dirty air billowed, unpleasantly visible.