To Visit the Queen

by Diane Duane

  Rhiow blinked at that. "I can't see how. The power source isn't supposed to have any coordinate information in it, or anything like that...."

  "I'm not sure how either," Urruah said, "but what else am I supposed to think at this point? The gate itself wasn't connected to the power source, but we still had a failure in my timeslide, although it was a small one. Big enough, though, in terms of what we were trying to do." He sighed. "I think the next time we try this, we should keep the timeslide off the gate's power source and power it ourselves."

  "That's going to be hard on you," Rhiow said.

  "Yeah, well, I don't see that we have the option," Urruah said.

  "Excuse me," someone said pointedly from behind them.

  They both looked over their shoulders. Siffha'h was sitting there behind them.

  "I couldn't help overhearing," she said. "But you do have a power source. What about me?"

  Urruah blinked. "Uh. I hadn't— "

  "—thought about it? Or maybe you just don't trust me because I'm young yet." Her tone was very annoyed.

  "Siffha'h," Rhiow said, "give us the benefit of the doubt, please. We're very aware that our being here at all imposes on your team somewhat. We're unwilling to impose further when there's any way that— "

  "Look," Siffha'h said, "our whole reality is going to be rubbed out if we can't stop what's happening, and you're telling me you don't want to impose? Come on."

  Rhiow glanced at Urruah, rueful but still somewhat amused. "Well," she said, "you've got a point there. 'Ruah?"

  He looked at her with his tail twitching slowly. "You are unquestionably hot stuff," he said, "and anytime you want to power a timeslide of mine, you're welcome."

  "You build it," Siffha'h said, "and I'll see that it takes you where you want to go. When'll you be ready?"

  "Tomorrow afternoon, I think."

  "Good. I'll be here."

  She strolled off, tail in the air. Rhiow glanced over at Urruah. She really does remind me of Arhu sometimes.

  Yeah, Urruah said. In the tact department as well.

  Rhiow put her whiskers forward. You know how it is when you're young, she said. Life seems short, and all the other lives a long way away. You want to be doing things.

  So do I, Urruah said. Preferably things that'll solve this problem. He looked rather glumly at the spell diagram for the timeslide.

  "All right," Rhiow said. "Anything else that needs to be handled?"

  "He said he wanted you to see what he saw," Urruah said, glancing over at Arhu, who was still crouched down in meditative mode. "I'm going to look at it later; right now this is more of a priority."

  "Right."

  Rhiow went softly over to Arhu: then, as he didn't react, she sat down by him and began to wash— not only because she didn't want to interrupt him in whatever he was doing, but because she felt she badly needed it. She was tired, and needed to do something to keep herself from falling asleep. Rhiow had just finished her face and was starting on one ear when she felt something thumping against her tail. It was Arhu's tail; he had come out of his study and had rolled over to his side to look up at her.

  "You wash more than anybody I know," he said. "Are you nervous or something?"

  She looked at him, then laughed. "Nervous? I'm terrified. If you had a flea's brain's worth of sense, you would be too."

  "I'm scared enough for all of us," he said. "Especially after what I saw today."

  "You went to see the Ravens," Rhiow said. "How was it?"

  "Weird." He put his ears back. "I'm not sure I understood most of it, but I put it all in the Whispering, the way you showed me."

  "Good," Rhiow said. "I'll have a listen, then." She crouched down, tucking her paws under her in the position Arhu had been using: comfortable enough to let go of the world around and concentrate on the inner one, not so comfortable that she would fall asleep. Well, she said silently to the Whisperer, what has he got for me?

  This.

  Normally the voice you heard whispering was Hers, the familiar, steady, quiet persona, ageless, deathless, and serene. But material the source of which was a mortal being would come to you strongly flavored with the taste of its originator's mind. Knowing Arhu as well as Rhiow did, this was a taste with which she was also familiar. But now, as the point of view changed to early afternoon on the riverbank, suddenly Rhiow found herself immersed in the full-strength version of it— a quick, excitable, excited turn of mind, by turns cheerful and annoyed at a moment's notice, interested in everything and with a taste for mischief... though also with a very serious side that would come out without warning. Rhiow actually had to gasp for a moment to catch her breath as she bounded, with Arhu, down the walkway that led to the main gateway to the Tower: past the ehhif who were lined up at the gate, letting the security guards there check their bags and parcels: through the gateway, looking up at the old, old stones of the arch, and through, into a cobbled street that Arhu's memory identified as Water Lane.

  This little street ran parallel to the river inside the main outer wall. To the left, as Arhu went, was another wall studded down its length with several broad, circular towers: this ran on for about an eighth of a mile, to where the outer wall came to a corner and bent leftward. The stones in the left-paw wall were mostly rounded, as if they had come out of a river, but some had been cut down roughly into squarish shape, and they looked and smelled ancient. From them, as Rhiow had from the bricks and stones of the Underground, Arhu caught a faint sense of much contact with ehhif, but the flavor was strange, a compendium of old, faded triumph and equally old, abject fear. Arhu paused for a moment, feeling it on his fur, feeling it especially strongly from the right side when he passed a latticework gateway of metal that let out to an archway leading down to the river. Traitor's Gate, the Whispering said in his mind: and just briefly, as he did then, Rhiow saw, in a flicker, the way Arhu Saw with the Eye.

  A flicker, there and gone. Ehhif standing up, ehhif lying down and being brought up to the gate in boats, ehhif dying and in fear of dying coming in, ehhif dead going out: queen-ehhif and tom-ehhif, proud, dejected, defiant, afraid, bitter, reluctant, confident, desperate: plots and schemes, offended innocence, furious determination, all rolled together in a moment of vision, all spread out over long years of history, circumstance, and confusion; the conflicting needs and desires, the long-planned machinations of the powerful and the requirements of the moment, terror-horror-resignation-life-death-brightness-sickness-cold-blood-release-darkness—— gone. The Eye closed, and Arhu stood and shook his head, trying to clear it: and an ehhif, not seeing him since he was sidled, tripped over Arhu, caught himself, and went on, looking behind him to try to see the cobblestone he thought he had stumbled on.

  "Ow ow ow ow," Arhu spat, and took himself over to the left-paw wall to recover himself a little. From inside the left-paw wall came a harsh cawing, a little like ehhif laughter, as if someone thought it was funny.

  While he stood there and panted, Rhiow shivered all over at the thought of the burden Arhu was bearing. Better him than me, she said, somewhat ungraciously, to the Whisperer. The vision Arhu had been trying to describe to her turned out to be more like half-vision, and all the more maddening for it. For Arhu was looking, just briefly, through the eyes of Someone Who saw everything in the world as whole and seamless: thoughts, actions, past causes and present effects, the concrete and the abstract all welded into a single staggering completion. Rhiow understood a little of Arhu's confusion and anger now, for trying to extract one piece of information from the all-surrounding vastness of the Whisperer's perception seemed impossible, like trying to fish one drop of water out of your water bowl with your claw. You would always get a little bit of something else along with it— or a lot of something else. Rhiow thought with embarrassment of the facile way she had been telling him to concentrate, and grab hold of one part of it.

  More, she now understood much better his confusion about tenses: for in the Whisperer's mind, the world was finished, a
made thing, a completed thing, though one that was constantly changing. It was a harrowing point of view for a Person to try to assimilate, or for any mortal being who lived in linear time and generally thought that one thing happened after another, and that the future was still indeterminate. It was not, to Her. The Whisperer, in Her mastery, saw it all laid out. The only place where Her uncertainties lay was in what you would do to change the future, in which case everything you did also became part of the ongoing completion, a law of the universe, as if it had been laid down so from the very beginning. The two visions of the future did not exclude one another, from Her point of view; they actually complemented one another, and made sense. To Rhiow, that was the most frightening concept of all.

  She breathed out, wondering how she would apologize to Arhu for so completely misunderstanding what he had been dealing with, as Arhu got back his breath and his composure, and headed on down Water Lane again. Just across from Traitor's Gate was an opening into the central part of the Tower complex, through a building called the Bloody Tower. He went under this archway as well, and turned immediately left.

  Built into the wall here was a house with many long peaked roofs, the Queen's House: and in front of it were arches with iron bars set in them. Behind those arches were some low, wizened trees and shrubs... and in the trees, and under at least one of the shrubs, sat the Ravens.

  Arhu had known they would be large, but he hadn't thought they would be as large as a Person. Most of them were, though, and at least one of them, which perched on that stone wall, above the bars, was as big as Huff: as big as a small houff. They were all resplendently glossy black, and they looked down at him and, to Arhu's astonishment, saw him perfectly well, even though he was sidled.

  "Look," one of them said. "A kitty."

  "Oh, shut up, Cedric," said another of them. "You had breakfast."

  Arhu licked his nose and sat down, trying to preserve some dignity in the face of so many small, black, intelligent, completely unafraid eyes staring at him. "I, uh, I'm on errantry. Hi," Arhu said.

  "And we greet you, too, young wizard," said one of the Ravens. There was a muffled noise of cawing from the far side of Tower Green: Arhu looked over his shoulder.

  "How many of you are there here?" he said. "Should I go over and say hi to them, too?"

  "No, they're minding their territories at the moment," said the Raven. "After all, the place is full of tourists. Later in the day, when the warders chuck them all out and lock the place up, we can all get together in the quiet and the dark and have a chat. Meanwhile, anything you say to me, they'll know. They can See it, after all."

  "I'm sorry," Arhu said, "but I don't know what to call you. There are ehhif names on the sign over there, but— "

  "No, it's all right: we use their names," said the biggest of the Ravens. "It's a courtesy to them, and from them: they've made us officers in their army, after all." She chuckled. "Even if we're only noncoms. So I'm 'Hugin,' and that's 'Hardy.' " She pointed with her beak at the Raven sitting below her. "We have other names that we tell to no one, that come down from the Old Ones, but we can't give you those. Sorry."

  "Uh, it's okay. But look, is it right what the sign says over there? That the ehhif think this place would 'fall' without you? Fall down?"

  "Cease to exist," said Hugin.

  "Of course the place would fall without us," said another of the Ravens. "We've always been here. It doesn't know how to be here without us."

  "How long is always?" Arhu said.

  "How long does it have to be?" Hardy said. He was a little thinner than the others, a little smaller, which might have been deceptive, but the eye, that black, wise eye, seemed to say that this was the eldest of them. "Since there were buildings. And before that: since there were humans, what you call ehhif. We Saw your People come, too: We Saw them go, when the city first was burned. We stayed, and the dead... no others."

  Arhu controlled his desire to shudder. With their great ax-like beaks, there was no mistaking these birds for anything but what they were— meat-eaters— and there was no mistaking what they would have eaten, from time to time, in this city where there had so often been large numbers of dead ehhif. Or People, for that matter, Arhu thought.

  "It's all right," another of the Ravens said. "By the time we eat somebody, they don't mind anymore. And these days we mostly don't, anyway. The Wingless Raven gives us chicken breast." The Raven clattered its beak with pleasure. "Very nice."

  "If you've been here that long," Arhu said, "you must have seen a lot."

  "Even if we hadn't been," Hugin said, "we would still be Seeing it now. William the Conqueror: I See him walk by a puddle, right over there, and a cart goes through it and gets his hose wet, and he swears at the man driving the cart and pulls him out of his seat, throws him down into the water, too. The Romans: I See them walking their city wall, looking at the cloud of dust as Boudicca and her chariots come riding. Over there." She gestured with her beak at the remains of the wall, like a bumpy sidewalk, that stretched from past the Wardrobe Tower remains to the Lanthorn Tower, along the green that had once been the site of the Great Hall. "And poor Anne Boleyn. There she goes, over to the block. Over there." She turned and pointed with her beak in the other direction, over toward Tower Green. "Very dignified, she was. That used to be a great concern for them. And there he goes running by, one of them who didn't care about dignity so much." She pointed over to the little corner building that was presently the Tower gift shop, but once was the home of the Keeper of the Jewels. "Colonel Blood, with the Crown stomped flat and hidden under his wig, and the Rod with the Dove down one boot. He almost gets away with that, too."

  "And it was you Saw that then?" Arhu said. "You must be pretty old." He let the skepticism show in his voice a little.

  "Oh, not us," said Hardy. "Our ancestors. Though we See what they See: that's our job. And eventually the humans noticed that we were always here, and for once they came to the right conclusion, that the place needed us. They started trying to protect us— very self-enlightened, that. Though there have been times when the population has dropped very low." He glanced up at the sky. "During the war— the last big one here— almost all of us died except old Grip. The humans got very worried. And well they might have, with the V2s and the buzz-bombs coming down all around them. But we knew it would be all right. We Saw it then, as we See it now."

  "That's why I've come," Arhu said. "It may not be all right, soon, in a very large-scale sort of way. We need help to find out how to stop what we think is happening from happening." He looked around him. "All this could be gone...."

  "No," said Hardy, "of course it won't. This will still be here." He squinted up at the pale stones of the Tower. "It will be dead, of course. No people... and eventually, even no Ravens. No nothing, just the dark and the cold, and the thin black cloud high up that the Sun can't come through. The wind crying out for loneliness... and nothing else."

  "You mean it's going to happen," Arhu whispered, shocked.

  "I mean it already has happened," said Hardy. "Now it's just a matter of Seeing how it happens otherwise. You know that: for you have the Eye too, don't you?"

  "Yes. I'm not very good at it yet," Arhu said, suddenly feeling a little humble in the face of what was plainly another kind of mastery than his own.

  "Oh, you will be, if you live," said another of the Ravens. "Give it time."

  "I'm not so sure I'm going to have a lot of time to give it," Arhu said.

  "Of course you will," Hardy said. "We're here in strength now, after all. Nothing will fall that we don't See fall first. And the more of us there are, the more certain the vision. When there was only one to See, that was a dangerous time."

  "But there are a lot of you now."

  "Oh, after this century's second war, all fortunes turned, if slowly," said Hardy. "Certainties returned. Also, we felt like breeding again. It's not like it is with your People— we don't do it unless we feel like it. And also, some of us came from other
places to live here. The humans thought they brought us, of course, but we knew where we were going. We chose to come; we chose to stay."

  Arhu wondered if this wasn't possibly slightly self-deluding. "But your wings are clipped," he said, rather diffidently, not knowing whether they might be insulted. "You couldn't fly away if you wanted to."

  The Ravens looked at each other in silence for a fraction of a second, then burst out in loud, cawing laughter, so that some of the tourists on the other side of the Tower grounds turned to stare. "Oh, come on now," said Hugin, "surely you don't believe that, do you?"

  "Uh," Arhu said. "I'm not sure I know what to believe."

  "Then you're a wise young wizard," said another of the Ravens. "Why, youngster, we can go anywhere we please. We're the 'messengers of the gods,' of the Powers That Be, don't you know that? Even the humans know it. They're confused about which god, of course: they're confused about most things. But they still managed to give us use-names that are the same as the ravens they think served one of their gods, and went between heaven and Earth carrying messages. Hugin"—that Raven pointed at Hugin with its beak. "Actually she's Hugin the Second, after another one who went before her. And there's Munin the Second over there." The Raven speaking pointed at a third one.

  "We go where we please," said Hugin. "You've been working with the People who manage the gate under the Tower, so you must know how we do it."

  "You worldgate?" Arhu said.

  "We transit. And we don't need spells for it, if that's what you mean," said another of the Ravens. "We don't need to use a gate that's been woven ahead of time and put in place, either. We see where to go... and we go. We find out what's happened, and we bring the news back. That's all."

  Arhu sat down and licked his nose. "A long time now we have served Them," said Hardy. "We come and go at Their behest. That would be why you are here, for you're Their messenger, as we are."

  "Uh," Arhu said.

  Cawing came from farther up the wall: a noise of laughter. "Oh, come on, Hardy," said another raven-voice, "less of the oracular crap. Cut him some slack."