Helen nodded. “Your first time? I understand you. But maybe you’ve had enough time here to feel the ground a little–” She put her hand down on the grassy ground beside her. “This whole area’s coming down with faults, and microquakes are an everyday occurrence. Just in these ten square miles or so, we’ve got the Chatsworth fault to the north, and the Bailey Fault west of us, and the Malibu Fault running south of us along the coastline, and two big ones running right under Boney Mountain–” she waved at the bare peak looming above them westward–”so it’s not so much ‘have you had an earthquake today?’ as ‘how did you miss having one’.” She shook her head. “Mostly they’re so tiny you don’t feel them. But it’s still really strange for us to go so long here without even a minor tremor. It was giving me the jitters…and the ikhareya wasn’t happy either. At least now I can relax a little. At least until we find out what’s causing this problem, anyway.”
“You didn’t feel anything from the quakes down in L.A., then?” Rhiow said.
Helen shook her head. “I had to hear about them on the news, in the car, on my way home from work.” Then she chuckled at Urrauh’s expression. “Urruah, I’m all for connectedness to the land, and taking care of the environment, but if I did my grocery shopping via gating circle, that people would notice.”
Urruah’s tail wreathed gently. “Aha,” he said. “Is that where you were? I thought I smelled chicken–”
I am going to give you such a whack when we’re in private, Rhiow said silently. “Well,” Rhiow said, “maybe we should get our slide set up. Our backtime contact, Hwaith, gave us the coordinates we need, and we’ve got all the necessary authorizations.”
“I see that,” Helen said, standing up and dusting her hands off on her pants: she was looking upslope, into the wind. “From fairly deep in, too. Whatever’s going on, this is fairly serious…” She looked down at Rhiow. “And it doesn’t seem to be our usual enemy involved with this, does it? The Kemish, the Old Bad One… Or at least that’s not the feeling I’m getting.”
“I’d say you’d be right,” Rhiow said, “and I wish I knew what to make of that. Meanwhile, do you want to nominate a spot where we can anchor the slide?”
“If we go upslope a quarter mile or so,” Helen said, “past the cave, that’ll take us well away from the beaten path. There’s a place where the hillside shelves out flat for a little bit.”
“Arhu?” Rhiow said. “You two go on and get it set up. And ask Aufwi to come up here as soon as he’s finished making the L.A. gate safe and shutting it down.”
Siffha’h and Arhu headed up the hill, but not before Arhu had thrown an odd look over his shoulder at Helen. “Sorry,” Rhiow said. “You’ve got to excuse him: he has trouble with ehhif sometimes. He was abused by them, almost killed, when he was very young.”
“It’s no problem,” Helen said. “We all have our burdens. Believe me, I have problems with some of my fellow ehhif, occasionally.” She smiled a little ruefully as they started up the hill. “All just part of the Game, my ikhareya says…”
“I was going to ask you about that,” Urruah said as they headed upwards through the long grass. “I heard the word you used, and Herself gave me the closest cognate in the Speech at the same time. You have one of the Powers that Be for your own?”
Helen blinked, then laughed. “Uh, no! No one could own one of Them. I’ve just got a close personal connection to one of Them: lots of wizards who’re native Americans do. It’s like yours to– I think you call Her ‘the Whisperer?’”
“That’s right,” Rhiow said. “You hear wizardry through your connection, then–”
Helen’s look was a touch sheepish. “Oh, no, I still use a written Manual a lot of the time. I was born and raised in the Valley, in Encino: I didn’t really start getting to know my tribal life until a few years ago, after I finished college and went into the Force. But I’ve been really busy up here since then, since it turns out the old shaman needed to train a new one before he went West. As usual, there aren’t any coincidences…”
From above and ahead of them came a soft pop!, the sound of someone trying to minimize the air displacement from his appearance “out of nothing”. There stood Aufwi on the flattened space that Helen had described, his head and shoulders silhouetted against the blue. “Do you know Aufwi?” Rhiow said, as they came up on the level. “He handles the L.A. gate.”
“Sure, I see him downtown every now and then. Haku, Aufwi, how’s it going?”
“A lot better than it was earlier, believe me,” he said as they came up and out onto the shelf that lay under the lee of the hill. The shelf was mostly hard dirt strewn with rockfall, and shadowed from the sun by a slope now more nearly a cliff, all studded with outcroppings of brown and golden stone. In a relatively bare spot off to one side, nearly into the sun again, the glow of a complex spell-circle lay spread across the ground, and Arhu and Siffha’h were was pacing around it, looking it over.
