Assistance to British Nationals Abroad

Palmerston was not a wizard: that's important to establish, first.

He was, rather, Chief Mouser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Head of the Corps of Diplocats, a high-ranking Civil Service position that did not include wizardry in its required qualifications.

Personally, he didn't see any fault in not being a wizard. Things he did consider faults included not being a cat (although most non-cats, poor things, couldn't help it, and he did his best to be patient); failing to serve the British people in the capacity to which one had been appointed; and compounding both of those by being a cat but claiming one was too tired from "important wizard business" to bother with doing one's actual job as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.

So if anyone wondered why Palmerston disliked Larry, his Number Ten counterpart, it was definitely not jealousy that Larry was a wizard and Palmerston wasn't; it was simply that the other tom was too lazy to do his job properly.

"Please don't bother me," Larry said without opening his eyes more than a crack from where he was napping under a table in a corridor in Number 10, Downing Street. "I am busy trying to keep horrors from beyond from breaking through into this dimension." Larry always claimed he was too busy trying to keep horrors from beyond from breaking through.

"And you don't even care that the Folly apprentice is visiting the Foreign Office as we speak?" Palmerston asked.

"What is it to me what some ehhif do?" Larry said, and rolled so he was looking at the wall and not at Palmerston.

It was true that the Folly humans, even though they called themselves wizards, weren't really wizards - most of what they did was barely sorcery, and they did have an Oath, but not the real one. Palmerston's friend Gladstone had been eavesdropping when the Commissioner gave the new one his oath and he said it was nothing at all like the Wizard's Oath that Larry had sworn. And they didn't know anything about the Whisperer, who silently told wizards the things they needed to know to do their work. No humans on the whole island of Britain were real proper wizards anymore - maybe the none in whole world; Palmerston hadn't met any, but then his network of international agents was still in its early stages. And nobody was even quite sure if the Nightingale still counted as human anyway.

But wizards or not, they could still cause all kinds of trouble. "What if it's something properly wizardy?" Palmerston said. "Shouldn't you do something? They've never come to the Foreign Office before."

"The Starling wouldn't know proper wizardry if it came up and shouted at him in the Speech. Now go away; this is important."

"Fine," Palmerston said, putting his back up. "I guess I'll just have to deal with it myself." He headed straight back across the block to his office on King Charles Street - he might not have been a wizard, but he was a cat, and a Whitehall cat at that, so he could still walk through walls and travel unseen as needed.

He caught up with the Folly people on their way out of the building. "What's going on? Why are you here?" he asked.

The Starling looked down at him and said, "Oh, you must be Palmerston. Hello."

Of course, the Starling, not being a real wizard, didn't know the Speech and hadn't bothered to learn Ailurin, so he had no idea what Palmerston was saying.

Toby was a wizard, though. And he wasn't bad, for a dog; always willing to stop for a chat and keep Palmerston up to date on the news.

"Hi, Palmerston," he said. "Just some bureaucratic stuff. There have been humans accidentally slipping through into London from other Earths. Two of them we've found so far. Maybe worldgates, or some kind of screwy transit spell. We can't figure out why or how or how to send them back, so since they've been stuck here awhile already, Peter is trying to arrange passports and human licenses and things so they can go outside if they want to, without worrying about any of that."

"Worldgating issues, hmm?" Palmerston tapped his tail measuredly against the floor. "Sounds like a job for a cat." Cats, it was well known, had a special affinity for worldgates (even the ones who weren't wizards.)

"If you want to come take a look at them, I guess it can't hurt," Toby said. Toby was also very polite about people who happened not to be wizards but wanted to know about things anyway - but then he'd have to be, living with the Folly humans. And knowing about things was part of a Whitehall cat's job, just as much as catching mice.

"Excellent!" Palmerston headed for the door. "Well, come on, what are you waiting for?"

"Oh no, no no no," the Starling said, edging him gently out of the doorway with one boot. "You're staying here. We're not repeating that business with Freya."

Freya had been Larry's wizarding partner for awhile, before Palmerston's appointment to the Foreign Office position. She'd been exiled to Kent after she was a little too careless about keeping her wizardry secret from the humans - too many transport spells and too much air-walking when humans might notice, turning up places they couldn't believe a cat could get on her own. That had become Larry's excuse for never bothering to go more than a few feet from his favorite nap spots in Number 10.

Freya would probably have been happy to help the Folly with a worldgating issue. But first he'd have to convince Larry to call her. And besides, last he'd heard she'd become very involved in a climate research project with some of the tigers and jaguars who were living in Kent.

Luckily, Palmerston wasn't a wizard, so he didn't have to worry about secrecy. He leaned in a friendly way on the Starling's leg, and then "sidled", using the innate ability of cats to slip slightly sideways to reality and go unnoticed among humans. Then he followed them to the car and curled up in the back seat, since Russell Square was a little far to walk on a cold day.

He'd been to the Folly a few times before, just checking up on them in his cabinet office capacity and all that, especially since they'd had a foreign national under house arrest there for awhile.

The Folly was always a fun day out. He went down to the kitchen with Toby first to say hello to Molly and get fed some leftovers.

"She still hasn't figured out a way around whatever's blocking her access to the Speech," Toby said between sausages. "But I'm helping her. She'll get through someday and once she's off probationary status nothing will stop us."

"I have faith in you," Palmerston told her. "You'll be a great wizard." She smiled and rubbed his ears in thanks.

The displaced humans were in a room upstairs with the Nightingale. Toby showed him where, and they sat under a table and watched the Folly humans working on the problem.

"The young male came through first," Toby told him. "They found him walking on the shoulder of the M25, babbling about how all the junctions were in the wrong places. That was almost two weeks ago. Then the female. They both seem to be from a universe that's very similar to this one, but different in a lot of little ways."

"I've told you before. I was just going for a walk," the woman said to the Nightingale. "Walls closing in - you know how it is," she laughed nervously. "And even though it was a sunny day - it was summer where I started - it suddenly wet and slippery, like it was raining. But not the pavement, the air itself. Or the world. And then I - it felt like I lost my balance in the universe, and slid through, and then I was here, and all the signs and trees were in different places." She had loose dark hair and wore a floaty yellow dress that was completely wrong for the season. Palmerston wasn't great at guessing humans' ages, but he was better than most cats, and he would have put her mid-to-late twenties.

The man was the same age, maybe a little older, in jeans and an unbuttoned button-up, curly hair and an overgrown goatee. He was telling the Nightingale's apprentice about how he hadn't meant to go through the portal, he'd somehow slipped through it accidentally, and he really needed to get back home to his girlfriend, as soon as possible. The Starling was tapping his pen against a notebook and staring at him in a slightly unfocused way, giving the impression he'd heard this many times already.

"Are they wizards?" Palmerston asked, curious.

"Dunno," said Toby. "Don't think so. None of them are sung as wizards in the Great Howl," that was Tony's version of the Whispering through which the Powers-That-Be advised wizards, "but if they're not from this universe they wouldn't be. It's always tough to get extradimensional info in the Howl. They kind of smell like wizards maybe, but none of them have tried to Speak to me or Molly. Maybe I'm just smelling whatever magic they slid through in. I haven't tried the Speech with them, because the Folly humans can't know I'm a wizard, and the last thing displaced persons need is to go telling nonwizard humans that the dog was talking to them. Everything's already out of balance enough." He scratched behind one ear with his hind leg. "It's a bother. But the Nightingale's asking most of the right questions anyway."

"So it's a worldgating problem?"

"It has to be something like that," Toby said. "London's old and strange and full of weak spots in reality and the M25 has its own special issues, but most of those, if you fall through, it's a little less concrete than this. From what I've heard in the Howl it sounds like some kind of rogue worldgates, but that's really not my specialty. London doesn't even have worldgates, does it? I was routed through the wordgate in Chur that time I had to go offplanet for errantry."

"If London had worldgates, believe me, the Chief Mouser to the Foreign Office would know about them."

"If London had worldgates, the Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would probably have to be a wizard, wouldn't he?" Toby asked. "There'd be lots of wizarding foreign office business to handle, with an active worldgate complex."

"Well, exactly," Palmerston said, lashing his tail decisively.

Of course, there was a London worldgate: it had always been cranky and unreliable and had been sealed up tight since the Blitz, back in the days when Nelson was the Chief Mouser, to try to keep it protected from the war, and to keep anyone on the other side of the war from interfering with it while Britain's wizards had other things to keep them busy. The human wizards had done it, disconnecting it from its old location in the Underground and shutting it down and hiding it away. One of the British Museum cats had told him she thought there had been more than one, even, but the human wizards and the worldgating team at the time had shut the others down, leaving just the one to re-grow the complex from after they came back from the war. Whatever the wizards on the other side of the war were doing - the ones who had started serving Ssa'Rah, the Power who brought Death into the world - London's wizards had really not wanted to give them access to its gates, or any of the other various things that London's main hyperstrings were powering.

And they'd won the war, but, of course, they hadn't come back from it: not as wizards, at least. And there hadn't been any human wizards called by the Powers since then, and the other wizards of London - cats and dogs and birds and so on - and the various other sorts of creatures who made the city their home - had decided it was safer to just leave the worldgates shut down.

But, Palmerston thought, it couldn't hurt to have a look, just in case Toby's errand was something Larry needed to check out after all. He hopped the tube to Westminster Station, sidled again. He curled up for a quick nap under the cleanest empty seats, and then headed south toward the Houses of Parliament instead of home to Whitehall. He sidled through the Palace and then down into the old crypt of St. Mary's Undercroft, and there it was, tucked into a wall among the gold leaf and vaulting - the last London worldgate. They'd parked it there during the Blitz, underground in one of the most protected places in London, one that had survived since the 13th century and would surely survive the war, surrounded by power both spiritual and temporal.

It would have been invisible to any humans, and even most wizards; it had gone dim and quiescent, drab compared to the vivid decorations of the chapel, caused, he was told, by all the decades of disuse.

But Palmerston was a cat, and he was still sidled, so he could see it - the intricate tangle of hyperstrings, glimmering just on this edge of reality, the webwork that wove it to the deep time of the city and the massed consciousness of the beings which lived there, and the more ponderous catenary cords that anchored and powered it. He didn't know anything about worldgate theory - that was a wizard thing - but he knew about string, and that was enough to see just the beginnings of what the structure of it meant.

He came down here sometimes to check on it. There wasn't an official Mouser to the Houses of Parliament - officially, there were nobody but humans resident in the Palace of Westminster - and Larry never stirred himself to leave Whitehall, so Palmerston considered it part of his responsibility as a Mouser to the Cabinet Office to include the whole complex in his patrol one evening a month or so, just to make sure the pest issues were being kept under control. If he happened to pass by the Undercroft, he'd look in on the old worldgate, just to make sure it was still there and nothing had changed.

This time he sat in front of it and stared, tail lashing. Anyone not a cat would have thought he was staring at a motionless bit of wall. But it has changed, he thought. It was still dull, but there was movement in the dullness, and maybe for the first time, he really believed in it as a door. A door that wanted to open. One loose end of a string dangled down in front of it, and stirred slightly in a breeze he couldn't feel. Grab me, it sang to him as it trembled.

So he did - he leapt and dug all twelve claws into it, feeling the sizzle of power through his paws, and let his body weight pull it down. As he did, all the strings in the gate pulled and twisted in new ways until it suddenly flipped to a whole new configuration, like one of the cat's-cradles that were named after cats' gate work. The whole thing had turned into a clear oval disk, about the height of a human, that showed - he squinted, still keeping hold of the string. Tower Bridge, it looked like in the background. And there was another cat - small, with white-and-black spots going silvery around the edges, and distinctive "eyebrow" markings above her eyes.

"Vhai'ing finally", she hissed as she stepped through and turned around, and then called back though the gate, to a very fluffy brown-and-white cat with bright blue eyes just visible on the other side, "Right, Hwa'heh, I'm going to recharge it and then stabilize it from this end before you come through." She reached up to pull a bundle of hyperstrings into one paw, twisting each one carefully around a polished claw.

This was clearly a wizard and a real gate technician, Palmerston thought, and stepped out of her way, unhooking the string that still had one of his claws stuck in it.

"No!" the stranger said, lunging toward him, but she was too late; the string slipped away and back up into the structure of the gate, and the whole thing changed configuration again, a tangled ball of hyperstrings and then another clear disk.

There was a different fluffy cat on the other side now, this one cream and seal-point, with what looked like a library behind him and a purple kerchief around his neck. He stepped through and said, "Hunt's luck, cousins. Professor Tam Tam, first record-keeper of the Is'hami Temple. I am on errantry, and I greet you."

He turned to the black-and-white cat to share breath in greeting and she hissed at him. "And how were you planning to go home, dare I ask?" she said.

"Through the gate?" he said, quizzically. All three of them looked at it. It gave an all-over shudder and then flipped back to its normal quiescent state, except, Palmerston thought, possibly even duller-looking than usual.

"We've spent a week trying to get enough power through just to pry it open for two People to transit and return! From a nearby universe! And I was still going to have to shove through all the power I can channel just to get Hwa'heh through! You've drained all of that and more, in one transit."

"Oh," Tam Tam said. "I just had an alert set to tell me if these coordinates ever became accessible again. Well, if we're stuck here, the Powers must have work for us. Let's get to it." He started washing his tail - one of his tails, Palmerston corrected. He seemed to have a few extra.

"So I'm depending on the competence of the local 'gating team to get me home, then, not yours," the black-and-white cat muttered to Tam Tam, and sat down ungracefully with a dour look at the gate expressing her opinion of the local team. "Siffha'h," she introduced herself to Palmerston. "Head of the Tower Bridge worldgating team, a couple of universes over from yours. On errantry. You are? - You're not a wizard." She narrowed her eyes.

"I'm Palmerston, Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth office. What exactly have you been doing to my gate?" He lashed his tail a few times, establishing authority.

"Trying to get the vhai'd thing to work!" Siffha'h said. She crawled under it and then rolled over, looking up and batting at it a few times. "Have you cut it off from the catenary entirely? Where is the gate team, and why in Iau's name were they letting you mess with a malfunctioning gate? And how did you get it open anyway?"

"There was a string," Palmerston explained.

Siffha'h stared at him, and then let out a long sigh. "So you pulled on it. We spent weeks and weeks trying to signal the gate team at the other side to let us through, and an auuh mouser wandered by and grabbed it by a loose hyperstring. And it would've worked anyway, if not for you," she added, rounding on Tam Tam again.

He spat out his tail and wiped at his mouth a few times to clear the hair out. "We've had a notation in the Whispering for decades that there was an urgent intervention needed here, and this is the first time the gate's been unblocked in my lifetime. We're far enough away, dimensionally speaking, that there was no way I was powering a transit myself, even without the blockages. Pardon me for taking my chance when I saw it."

"An intervention?" Siffha'h put her whiskers forward. "You're a gate tech?"

"I'm a historian," Tam Tam said. "It's somehow connected to one of the ancient--"

"Fine," said Siffha'h, cutting him off. "So where are the local gate techs, Auh'm - and what's your real name, not your ehhif one?"

"Palmerston," Palmerston said stiffly. "I'm employed by Her Majesty's government, so I'd thank you to use the name I'm employed under. And don't start with any of that stuff about slave names," he added, "the Empire has far too much real history around that to take it lightly."

"Auuhlm's'hah," she muttered, clearly unpracticed with human language. Having the Speech to use instead probably made her lazy, Palmerston though uncharitably.

"And the gate tech is part-time, because this gate hasn't been active since the humans had their last World War," Palmerston added, "but he lives upstairs in the House of Commons. I suppose we do need to let him know what's happened."

Palmerston was not really looking forward to telling Cronus that a cat had messed up his gate and let two wizards through, but it probably was something he needed to know.

"Hello, Cronus," he shouted up to the desk when they got to the Whip's office, and Cronus came out of his house, popped the lid of his tank, and scuttled over to peer down at them.

"Hello, Palmerston," he said in the Speech, and pointed a leg at him. "What have you done this time?"

"This is Siffha'h, your gate tech counterpart from a few universes over, and Professor Tam Tam, first record-keeper of the Is'hami Temple. He's a historian. They're on errantry."

"Dai stihó," Cronus said.

"Dai," said Siffha'h, and then looked at Palmerston and licked one of her paws. "Your gate tech is a spider?"

"There have been arthropod wizards on Earth since notochords where still a glimmer in the One's eye, little ts'k'tkt," Cronus said. "We're still not quite sure why they thought it was a good idea to ever let you fuzzy worms get your claws into the Universe's webwork."

"You can see hyperstrings?" Tam Tam asked, curious. "I'd been told that was unique to cats, at least on my world."

"No, but we can feel them, which is better," Cronus said. "And now that you've woken me up -" he jumped off the desk and landed on Palmerston's back. "What did you do to my worldgate? I can still feel it ringing from here."

"That was me," Siffha'h said. "One of the worldgates on our end has been unpredictably 'sliding, and we finally traced it to perturbations coming from the 'paired' gate in your universe. We've spent the past week pouring power and spellwork into it, hoping someone would notice and unlock it from your end."

"And Palmerston was the first person to notice?" Cronus said. Palmerston felt him climbing up to perch on his head, and nearly crossed his eyes trying to look up at him without tipping him off. "I suppose he could have been. He has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, for a ts'k'tkt. And I've only been checking it in person every sixteen days, as it's supposed to be so thoroughly locked down."

"I noticed," Siffha'h said. "Did you cut it off entirely from the catenary?"

"There's a secondary power umbilical that gives it a trickle charge, and that's all it needs to stay in hibernation status," Cronus said. "Which leaves me even more curious how it could be perturbing a gate several universes over. What has it been doing?"

"Opening crossdimensional portals at random locations in my London," Siffha'h said. "From what my team can tell from our logs, there have been at least four undirected portals, maybe more, and at least three of them had ehhif stumble through. I was going to bring some more of my team through to work on finding our ehhif, but someone," she glared at Tam Tam with both ears back, "drained all the power we'd sent through."

"Oh," Palmerston put a paw forward, interrupting her. "You're looking for lost humans? We need to bring in Toby, then. I think he has your humans. At least two of them."

Cronus hopped down started grooming his front two paws - which usually meant he was consulting the Webwork, his version of the Whispering - and then said, "Toby's busy tracking down your third human, but he says to all meet at the Folly in the morning to consult. And why didn't you tell Toby to talk to me if he had a worldgating problem?" he asked Palmerston.

"He thought it probably wasn't the worldgate!" Palmerston protested. "I figured I'd come look at it, and if anything seemed strange, I'd tell you. Which I did!"

"I suppose that isn't technically unture," Cronus said, and turned to Tam Tam. "And you? Are you also tracking down someone who slipped through my gate?"

"In a way," Tam Tam said. "But I don't think it's connected. Or, at least, not directly connected, though I supposed if the Powers think it's all the same errand, it likely is somehow. But mine came through, oh - from what Ubastis is telling me about our time differential, about 1500 hundred of your years ago. They're the sort of creatures you don't want at large in your world, if you can help it. They couldn't be returned, because their home is substantially harder to reach with worldgates than either of ours, and they had enough power of their own to block any attempts. But they were contained - or else you would be even more out of balance than you are - with help from specialists from my world, who'd done that sort of thing before. But someone's been coming through every decade or so to advise and help maintain the bindings. Except we haven't been able to get through for seventy-five years now, with your gate being shut down. And we worked with your ehhif wizards when we did, so if they're gone, then so is anyone who knows the specifics of the bindings, and how to access them. Unless they passed the knowledge onto you?" He looked at Cronus.

"You need to talk to Larry, at Downing Street," Cronus said. "Palmerston -"

"Larry never does anything," Palmerston said. "How is he supposed to help?"

"Larry is the Advisory wizard for all of London," Cronus said. "He is a lot busier than you know. And if anyone can show Tam Tam where to start, it's him."

"And Palmerston and Larry are Whitehall cats," said Siffha'h. "So if the Whispering comes up short, they should still be able to get you some information. Right? Whitehall cats are Whitehall cats in every universe."

"Of course," Palmerston said. "In that case, we'll meet you at the Folly for breakfast."

"Meanwhile," Cronus pointed at Siffhah, "you and I need to pull the logs on that 'gate, if it really has been opening."

"We need to pull the logs just for a start," she told him, "and then you need to show me what the vhai you've done to it. Want a ride?"

"Sure," he said, hopping up. "And I haven't done anything to it," he added as they faded through the wall of the whip's office. "I just maintain it..."

"I'll show you the shortcut to Downing Street," Palmerston told Tam Tam. "And you can stay the night with me in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, if you want. It's much nicer than Downing Street and the whole building's my territory."

Larry was curled up on the PM's desk, eyes closed as usual, although Palmerston was pretty sure he wasn't asleep.

"Larry!" he said.

"How many times--" Larry started, as he opened his eyes, and then, seeing Tam Tam, uncurled and sat up. "Hello, what's this?"

"Professor Tam Tam, chief archivist of the Ish'ami Temple," Tam Tam said. "I am on errantry, and I greet you."

"Iowrl, London Advisory, dai stihó and hunt's luck," Larry replied. "What errand? There's been nothing in the Whispering."

"I'm not from here: I came through your worldgate, when it momentarily opened," he said. "And there's something that seems to be blocking your access to wizardry from other universes, so you likely wouldn't have known. I couldn't get much about your world from my Whispering either. I'm a specialist in, among other things, historic bindings and containment. I'm here about whatever it is that I'm told you're keeping bound under your City."

"Thank Iau," Larry breathed, and flopped over. "I've been working full-time to try to keep things under control, but it hasn't been sustainable."

Tam Tam put an ear forward. "I know we say the Powers ask of you what's needed, not what you can give, but even they tend to understand the need for rest. Surely you aren't expected to balance those bindings all by yourself."

Larry shook himself all over. "No. I'm supposed to be supervising an entire corps of wizards that keeps a heavy claw on the bindings. But somebody's been murdering them, all around the M25."

Palmerston put both ears back and turned to him. "The M25 killer is killing wizards?" he hissed.

"You know about the cat killer?" Larry asked.

"Of course I know about him!" Palmerston lashed his tail. "I'm a Whitehall cat! Knowing about things like that is part of my job! Why didn't you tell me they were all wizards?"

"Huh," Larry said, and blinked at him.

"What's the M25?" Tam Tam asked.

"It's a ring road," Palmerston said.

"It's part of the binding spells," Larry corrected. "After all the ehhif wizards left, the spells were misbehaving and the Ailurin wizards who took over wanted some extra reinforcement. So they worked another layer of binding into the new ring road they built a few decades back. Even without ehhif wizards, London's old enough and full enough of odd powers and allegiances that we had enough influence in the planning to shape the road to the spell diagram. It's the newest and least stable of the layers of binding, though, and these murders aren't just taking out my wizards - they're being very deliberately placed as part of a blood-sacrifice ritual to take it down entirely. And we're too busy shoveling sand to keep the ritual from working to have time to track down whoever's doing it."

"Have you asked Toby for help?" Palmerston asked very quietly.

"What?" Larry said.

"Toby. The wizard at the Folly," Palmerston said. "He works with the police. I've been giving him all the eyewitness reports I could collect. If he knew there was a wizarding connection with the M25 killer, he could get their resources linked up with yours and maybe actually make some progress!"

"I've been busy, as I just mentioned," Larry said, eyes narrow.

"Well, we're meeting in the Folly kitchen tomorrow morning to discuss all this," Palmerston said. "Cronus should have told you through the Whispering by now. You can tell them then."

Larry blinked, listening to the Whisperer. "Ehhif have been falling through the worldgate from other universes?"

"Yes," Tam Tam said. "And I sincerely doubt it's accidental. Especially now that I've learned there's someone actively trying to bring down your bindings, the two are almost certainly connected. Here, give me everything you know about what's bound under your city and I'll give you the background I've got."

Then they both spent ten minutes staring into space while they loaded information into the Whispering for each other, which was incredibly boring to watch. Palmerston used the time to finally track down a family of mice who'd been living in the PM's office for weeks, completely untroubled by Larry. He left them on the PM's chair so the humans would know that at least somebody was doing the job they'd been hired for.

He dropped the last one off just as Tam Tam shook himself and blinked. "If someone's coming at it from both sides - the newest binding and the oldest - we're going to have to go all the way back to where the original binding was set."

"Yes," Larry said. "And if they mean it about wanting to restart the worldgate, Cronus will be going there too. That's where they tied off the catenary back during the war. They decided to let the binding and protections that were already there serve a double duty."

Tam Tam followed Palmerston back to the Charles Street building and told him that he needed a few hours to process the information Larry had given him. Palmerston showed him the best of the beds that his staffers had left around in convenient places, and then asked, "What is bound under the City?"

"You don't know? I thought you were a historian."

"I'm a Whitehall cat," Palmerston said, frustrated, "We're supposed to be the people who carry that kind of knowledge. But there was a long gap before Larry with no official cats in Whitehall at all, and he's never bothered with that part of the job, so I've had to spend the past year patching the Old Cats' Network back together the best I can. I'm not bad on history in general, but the people who know about the magic underlaying this city don't like to share the information. And no, I don't know what's bound under the city. Just that it's important, and Larry thinks it's wizards' business."

"Iowrl, yes," said Tam Tam, "He seems to be very good at spell maintenance, but severely underestimates the value of a good archivist. Or," he added, "Of a good mouser. Well. Talking it through might help me out, anyway." He sat up on his hind legs and waved one paw in the air, and a glowing square appeared in the air in front of them. "I teach better with visual aids. These are what the people in my world call the Old Gods."

An image appeared of what looked like - well, like piles of tangled string. They were dark, and hard to look at, and moved restlessly, but. "Piles of string?"

"Each of those piles of string is the size of this building," Tam Tam said, "And has been alive since your arthropod friend's ancestors were just a dream of the Powers. They aren't truly Gods - they aren't avatars of the true Powers that Be, like my Ubasti and your Iau - but they are incredibly strong and incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly dangerous. And they are horrors. A very, very long time ago, they somehow ended up exiled to one of the blank dimensions - not even a practice space, just an empty one, where nothing had been created yet. And every so often, a few of them manage to slip through the dimensional barriers into other worlds. A very, very long time ago - when cats were the only sentient race on my world, and the only wizards - some of them slipped though to ours, and we fought the Dawn War." The image changed to jerky images of a shadowy battle, the giant string-piles against cats with extra tails, tiny in comparison but shining with light. "And some of them were killed, and some of them were exiled, and some of them were bound into shadow, and even now, it falls on Ubasti's children to watch the bindings, and see that they are maintained, and to guard the edges of the world, and to be present if ever they try to break through again."

"Meanwhile," he said, and switched the images again, showing a small walled city on a river just recognizable as the Thames, its walls crumbling and empty of light, "At least one of them slid through into your world, as well. Maybe more than one, but the last records we have speak of only one. The temporal correspondences aren't exact, so I can't tell you if it corresponded with the incursion into my world, but the ones that came to your City came in the time after it was Londinium, but before it was Lundenburh." Great monsters rose up above the ruined city walls in the image - and then fell down again. "Your wizards managed to bind whatever had come through, but couldn't send them all the way back to where they came, so instead they bound them to one of the many 'downside' universes linked to the place's past, the more 'senior' realities that form its foundations - even then this place had a long and powerful past, long enough that its worldgates had survived the abandonment of the city, long enough to make a place of strength with foundations beyond its own world. And since the city was centuries ago abandoned and crumbling, it seemed a safe enough place to dispose of a problem."

And then, in the image, fires were lit in the city, and the wall started reassembling itself. "Little did they expect that less than five hundred years later, the city would begin to rebuild itself. But since the bindings were so strongly linked to place - and old enough, by then, that their age was part of their power - the wizards of that time decided to strengthen the bindings rather than move them, and when the city walls were rebuilt, and extra layer of spells were built into them. That's when they first brought in consultants from my universe, who had more experience with the Old Gods. And ever since then, it's been one of the tasks of the wizards of this city to maintain those bindings and keep strengthening them even as the city grew around them."

"And then - according to what I just got from Iowrl - you had a great War. Or perhaps a few, that bled into each other, as wars tend to do. And at the tail end of the last one, all of the human wizards of this island - and not a few of the canine and feline and avian ones - went across to the continent to face down a great many wizards who had come under the influence of the Lone One, sa'Rrahh. And they won, but most of them never came back, and the ones who did were no longer wizards. And before they left, they shut down your island's worldgate, and hid its connections - and a lot of the other magical underpinnings of this city - under the same bindings that hold the Old God, back in that Downside London. And since then, the bindings have been unraveling, the worldgate has been shut down, and there have been no new human wizards here, and many fewer nonhuman ones than you should have, for a population this size."

"Fewer?" Palmerston said, surprised. He would have said there were already plenty of wizards in London. There were certainly plenty of them around Whitehall.

"Iowrl didn't realize it either," Tam Tam said. "We don't have human wizards in my world either, but we have a lot of others. And if you look at worlds closer to this one, you're far under the numbers you should have. Even your gate tech had his Ordeal on a different continent! But you seem to be isolated here on your island in a lot of ways. I suppose encircling your capital with layers of magical bindings doesn't help with that, on a epistemological level."

Palmerston though about that while Tam Tam muttered over spell diagrams he'd pulled out of the Whispering, and Palmerston did his mousing rounds. Were they isolated here? Certain foolishness of the human politicians aside - he left a particularly interesting collection of legless cockroaches on the Foreign Secretary's desk - it didn't feel like they were. But how would they know? He made a note to himself to pay more attention to the foreign dignitaries that came through his office. And to keep working on building his network of diplocat envoys in his overseas embassies - the Old Cats' Network was all well and good, but everything was global now.

That settled, he took a nap.

He woke Tam Tam up in time for breakfast the next morning.

"I thought we were meeting Iowrl to have breakfast at the Folly?" Tam Tam asked with polite confusion.

"Yes, but the humans who work here will get worried if I don't turn up for at least one meal a day," Palmerston told him. "So I'll just have to have two breakfasts. If you sidle, you can share," he added generously.

It was fish in gravy. His favorite.

They met Larry by the steps to Number Ten a few minutes later, all three of them sidled. Larry had a short-distance transport spell already set up - Palmerston could have guessed he was too lazy to take the Tube - and they all stepped through right into Molly's kitchen.

Molly and Toby were already there. Toby looked up from his breakfast and said, "You know, there are supposed to be really good magical wards on this building."

"Are there?" Larry asked, "I didn't notice." He started taking a bath. Molly put a hand over her mouth and laughed silently.

"Looks like Siffha'h and Cronus aren't here yet," Palmerston told Tam Tam. "So we might as well get some breakfast while we're waiting." He perked his ears and looked expectantly at Molly.

She looked back at him like she knew exactly was he was trying to pull and wasn't falling for it for a second, and gave them each a dish anyway. Homemade spiced beef liver pate, still warm. Yum.

He was just finishing up when Siffha'h and Cronus arrived via their own transport spell. Molly put down another dish for Siffha'h, and tossed Cronus a handful of deep-fried crickets. He caught one and munched on it thoughtfully as he said, "So, what's the news?"

"I guess I'll start," Toby said. "What I was up to last night while you were perturbing our gate is tracking down another displaced person, with the help of the Folly humans."

"Good work," Larry murmured.

Toby wrinkled his nose. "Finding him was the easy part, that was just a bit of spellwork. The hard part was convincing the Nightingale that finding him was their idea. Anyway. He's upstairs with the others, the Starling got him settled in last night. He'd already been here a few days, sleeping on the street. After that, Molly and I got into the Met's records of the Cat Killer case. Thanks for the tip, Iowrl. We hadn't realized there was a wizardry connection, so we hadn't looked at it very closely, but once we did, there was one suspect in the police files who smelled very wrong just from the surveillance photos, so we're going to look into him a lot more closely when we have a chance. Then early this morning I sent the Nightingale and the Starling out on a wild goose chase, so we should have the place to ourselves at least until dinner."

Palmerston had a lot of respect for Toby and his ability to manage the Folly humans without ever letting them know he was a wizard. Of course Palmerston had to put in a lot of work with the humans in his Cabinet office, too, but they mostly understood the necessary work of a Chief Mouser and let him get on with it. And the ones who didn't weren't clever enough to be much of a problem. Toby had a much harder job.

"I'll want to look in on the humans as soon as we're done here," said Siffha'h. "I should be able to confirm they're the same ones I've been tracking."

"Right," Toby said.

"Then, since since I doubt the rest of you can follow the Gate diagnostics we put in the Whispering anyway, I'll go next. Simplified version: we pulled the logs on the London gate, and we found the transits. Someone - and it's definitely deliberate, not a random malfunction - has been sliding power through between your universe and mine, and spinning off short-term transit gates scattered around greater London." She shook her head. "Regardless. We found records of four recent transits between the universes related to our gate where something passed through, not counting what me and my gating team were doing."

Toby perked up his ears. "Four? Are you sure?"

"Four," Cronus said grimly. "Three of them match up with the three humans Siffha'h was tracing. They originated on this side, and seem to have been fairly random in timing and location. The fourth one - or rather the first one - started on her side. It looks like whoever is creating them was the first person through, and then opened the others from here."

"How are they getting through?" Tam Tam asked. "The blocks on your gate are impressive - I could never have made it without both Siffha'h and Palmerston. It sounds like starting from this end is slightly easier, at least if you have access to the gate, but that first one should have been nearly impossible."

"Sheer power, as far as I can tell," Siffha'h said, digging all her front claws into the flooring. "Our portal maker has access to levels of power that none of us can touch - that even I couldn't have touched right off Ordeal. They're also all near the sites of cat killings, which they could have pulled a little power from. But all four of the portals were targeted very tightly, for all that the timing and location seem to be semi-random. They're tuned not to let through anyone who is a wizard or anyone who isn't a wizard."

"Clever," Tam Tam breathed. "That's enough of a paradox that would let it slip through a lot of barrier spells instead of having to break through them."

Palmerston blinked. "Huh? But if nobody can get through, where did the displaced persons come from?"

"Toby, your notes said the ehhif you'd tracked down didn't seem to be wizards but you couldn't be quite sure?" Siffha'h said.

"I'm still not sure," Toby said. "The new one's giving me the same feeling."

"The three ehhif I was tracking were all former wizards," Siffha'h said. "Wizards who'd lost their wizardry, and forgotten they'd ever had it. That's how we found the pattern so quickly. I don't think the portals were aimed at anyone in particular, just set near former wizards who might stumble through them and help increase the imbalance between the two universes."

"If that's the case," Larry said, "How did the portal-maker come through? A former wizard couldn't have set this up, I don't care where they're getting their power."

"There's another category of people who aren't wizards but also aren't not wizards. Probationary wizards."

"Our troublemaker's on Ordeal?" Tam Tam asked, his whiskers forward.

"It would explain the power levels," Cronus said. "But looking at whose spinnerets were all over the spellwork - or rather, Whose - I think it's more likely we're looking at someone who failed their ordeal."

"sa'Rrahh," Larry hissed, and Palmerston shivered. sa'Rrahh, the old Enemy, the One who had rebelled against Queen Iau, who was still, and always, the implacable foe of Life.

"But we knew She would be behind this somewhere," Siffha'h said. "She always is. The question is, what does She want?"

"She wants to break the bindings on the Old God under your City," Tam Tam said. They all turned to look at him. "Whether She wants to free them, or bind them to Her servant's wishes instead, I can't tell. Either one, I suspect, would serve Her purposes. But the bindings have been weakening ever since your ehhif wizards left, and you don't have enough wizardry left to maintain them. And She's been killing the ones you do have, in exactly the right patterns to weaken the bindings. And pulling humans through from another universe without the proper safeguards is weakening them farther, pulling everything out of alignment. Probably the worldslide spell was designed just to get Her servant here, where they could do the most damage, but once it was set up, why not keep using it? And the more they use it, the more influence they have over your Gate."

They were all silent for a moment, until Palmerston said, "So how to we stop Her?"

"To fix the bindings?" Tam Tam said. "They're damaged enough that I don't see any way to do it without going Back to where they're rooted, where the Old God was originally bound."

"We're going to have to go there to fix the Gate, too," Cronus said. "When they cut it off from the catenary and put it in inactive mode to protect it, as far as I can tell, they decided that the safest place to hide the rest of the backend was behind the bindings that already existed."

Tam Tam shook his head. "With the Old God. That... seems unwise."

"Until very recently, nobody worried much about the Old God," Larry told him. "They'd been quiescent for centuries. Nobody thought they were a threat."

Molly tapped on the table beside her, and Toby said, "Oh, right. Molly found some old things in the Folly library that mention that before the War, they'd even thought about releasing the bindings altogether and seeing if they could just send them somewhere else. They thought it was a lot of useless, obsolete bother. So I guess they didn't think there would be any problem with reusing them as long as they were there."

"Ehhif," Siffha'h said scornfully. "And, as far as I can tell, one of the other things they decided to hide down there was your kernel. London's, and probably England's as well. And as bad as things are already, I suspect we're going to need to do some kernel work to fix it. And sticking your kernel, the heart and soul of everything that makes a place a place, on the other side of some heavy binding spells, would explain a lot about how it's so difficult for wizardry to get through to here."

"And just to make things even better," Cronus said, "It's going to have to be a one-way trip. We can get the gate working well enough, and powered well enough, to open a worldslide downside - we think - but we won't be able to hold it more than a few minutes, not with the state of the gate and the power sources we have to work with. Especially if there's someone actively working against us, which there likely will be. So we're going to have to send a team through knowing the only way they can come back is if they manage to reconnect the gate to its original power source and fix all the imbalances. Without breaking the bindings on the Old One. And there was a blank spot in the gate log that makes us suspect the Lone Power's servant is already down there waiting for us."

They all sat in silence for a moment.

"Also," Cronus added, once they'd had a chance to think it over, "We're going to have to take the displaced humans with us."

"What?" Toby said and Larry said together. Palmerston shared the sentiment.

"That far back in place, our two Londons are a lot closer together," Siffha'h said. "Sending them back where they belong will be possible from there where we can't do it from here. And they're having a strong enough effect on the gate's balance that I don't think we can fix it completely until they're back, not well enough to get us back. So they're going to have to tag along."

"Well," said Toby, and stood up. "In that case. Let me show you where they are."

The humans were back in the same upstairs sitting room where they'd been the first time Palmerston saw them. There was a little bit of milling around in the hallway outside as they argued over how - and when - to start talking to the poor things.

"When ehhif wizards lose their wizardry, they forget everything related to wizardry," Siffha'h was insisting. "Not just what they used to be able to do, but that it ever existed, and they even break contact with any friends and family who were wizards. If we just march in there and start talking to them--"

"--and anyway they're already traumatized enough," Toby talked over her, "Any unplanned world transit can do that, their minds know something is out of balance--"

"If we're taking them downside with us, they're going to have to find out about wizardry somehow," Larry said, "There's no point in catfooting around it--"

"Let Tam Tam decide," Palmerston broke in. They all stared at him. "He's a professor, didn't you listen to his introduction? He knows how to teach people things. And he's from a universe that's not fully sevarfrith, so he has more experience than you do dealing with humans and magic."

Cronus looked at Larry. "He has a point."

Larry started washing his face. "Fine. We don't have time for this kind of bickering anyway."

"In that case," Tam Tam said, "I suggest we just walk in there and don't worry about it. They're already off balance, they know something very strange is going on, they don't need the shock and awe treatment. That's likely to react badly with the memory blocks on their wizardry anyway. Just act like everything's normal and give them a chance to decide that it is. Siffha'h, Cronus, we're going to need to turn the Worldgate into a worldslide, right?."

"I have a start. But I've never gone back in place before. Just back in time. Normally I'd want to consult with a specialist."

"We have one," Toby said. "Molly."

"Molly?" Larry said incredulously.

"She's done it before. She may still be probationary but she knows what she's doing with that kind of 'slide."

"Fine, good," Tam Tam said. "So we walk in, we say hello, Siffha'h, you pull out your spell diagram for the worldslide and we start working on it, and let them get curious. Like luring a scared kitten out from her hiding place. If they really are too damaged to even talk to, they won't be able to see it. And if they do, that will let them come to terms with it in their own time."

It worked, too. Molly opened the door and four wizards walked through and said "Hello" or "How d'you do," in the Speech to the three humans who were sitting around a table, still looking kind of shocky. They had tea, and some books to read, and an old-fashioned radio, but none of them really looked like they'd been using them.

Siffha'h jumped up on the table. "I'm a wizard on errantry, and I greet you," she said to them, and turned to the younger male. He was a fairly ordinary human from London, pale-looking and his hair and beard still scruffy, in a slightly different blue jeans and button-up than the night before.

"Hello?" he said. "You're a... talking kitty."

"You're Dha'ffi Ssi'ahh," she said, completely butchering the human name. "Former wizard, specialities, among other things, kernel work and energy flows. Relinquished your wizardry three years ago for personal reasons, undisclosed. Currently work as a bartender at a pub and live with a long-term girlfriend."

"I don't know what you're talking about with the wizardry," he said. "But I'm David Simon. And I don't know what you're implying about my girlfriend, but I don't have to take it. Not even from a talking cat."

"Mmm, yes," Siffha'h said, and moved on to the female. She had dark brown hair, worn loose and straightened and just below shoulder length, careful makeup, and today's trim dress was patterned in green and white. "Ireehe Harrheh. Also former wizard, specialized in multispecies communications and aeromancy, although also have some experience with city, national, and planetary-scale kernels. Relinquished your wizardry two years ago, also undisclosed personal reasons, possibly related to the fact that two weeks later you married your fiancee of three years and gave up your marketing career to become a full-time housewife."

"Hi," she said softly, and politely held out a hand for Siffha'h to sniff. "You're very cute. Can I pet you?"

Siffha'h glanced at her superciliously and then turned to the third human. He was definitely older, even Palmerston could tell, by the gray in his fur, and the silver glasses over his eyes. He had a worn-looking cloth jacket and brown trousers. "Arhurr Auhli," she said. "Former specialty combat wizardry, of all things. That's a rare one." She looked at him sideways. "Gave up your wizardry in return for an emergency power boost in an offplanet intervention in a last-ditch effort to get your team home. You succeeded in that, at least. Was it worth it?"

"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" he asked the other two humans. "Or is this just an even more elaborate hallucination?"

"No, you're really seeing a bunch of talking animals who are telling you that you used to be able to do magic," Tam Tam said, joining Siffha'h. "So these are your strays?"

"They match what the Whisperer told me," she said. "A few minor variations in personality readings, but not more than you'd expect from ehhif who were experiencing ongoing trauma."

"Sure," the younger man said. "You're magic cats. Do a spell to prove it. The 'wizards'," he put his fingers in air quotes, "who brought us all to this building here gave me a pretty light show. Can you do that?"

"Sorry," Tam Tam said, not sounding sorry at all, "we don't have time to show off, we're trying to figure out how to get you home. You probably all have at least a little experience with gating, so feel free to join us if you decide you want to be useful." He hopped down from the table with a flick of both his tails, and Siffha'h followed him.

Cronus already had a spell diagram laid out in an empty corner of the room in slightly-glowing gold filigree, and Molly and Larry were crouched over it, muttering. Siffha'h and Tam Tam joined them. Palmerston couldn't see any way he could be useful to them, but he couldn't be much help with the humans, either, since he wasn't a wizard and couldn't talk to them in a language they'd understand.

He sat next to Toby and watched the others tweaking the spell, and then he noticed that Molly had brought up a folder of printouts. "What's the papers?" he asked Toby.

"Oh, it's some printouts from HOLMES - the police computer system - about the cat killer," he said. He glanced over at the other wizards, looking slightly guilty, and then said, "Do you want to look at them?"

Palmerston had the paperwork spread out over the floor in half a second. Most of it was information he already knew from talking to witnesses and friends of the victims - who had been killed, where, and how, and about the humans that had been working to stop the killings. He paused when he got to several pages of printouts of what must have been surveillance footage, showing the same young man, in a hoodie and a cap. "What's this?" he asked Toby.

"That's our prime suspect," Toby said. "Both for the killings, and for whoever's playing silly buggers with the gates. Ring any bells?"

"Not in the least," Palmerston said, and then he startled as the older human man loomed over them.

"Who is that?" he asked sharply, picking up the clearest of the printouts.

"It's our top suspect for whoever brought you here," Toby told him. "Do you recognize him?"

"No," the man said, and the frowned. "Maybe. I think I've seen him around." He showed the picture to the woman, who'd followed him over, but she shook her head.

"He looks like you," the younger man offered. "Not exactly, but - could he be a relative?"

"I don't have any relatives."

"Are you sure?" Siffha'h asked, and Palmerston nearly jumped out of his skin again; he hadn't heard her coming. "You never had any kids?"

"No!"

"Were you married?"

"No!"

"Are you sure you haven't just forgotten?"

"I would think I'd remember a thing like that!" he said.

"Mmm," she said, in a way that Palmerston thought he might find annoying very quickly if it were aimed at him. "Where were you living - oh, two years ago?"

"I don't know! Probably more or less where I am now! I manage a block of flats and I don't have any friends, it all blurs together after awhile!"

"Ah," Siffha'h said, and walked off.

"What was that about?" Palmerston asked, following her.

"He did have a wife and a kid," Siffha'h said. "They must have been involved in his wizardry; they would have just... slipped out of his life after he lost his wizardry; that's how it works for ehhif. The son is in the Whispering as probationary, but all details are blacked out."

"His kit is our enemy?"

"Maybe the portals weren't as randomly targeted as we thought," she said. "Anyway, come over here, I need you to fill in your Name in the spellwork."

"My Name?" he said. "Wait. I'm coming with you?"

"Of course you're coming with us," she said. "You've been in this up to your ears since before I got here; the Powers seem to want you along, for reasons that are beyond me, but who am I to argue with the Powers? Unless you don't want to come."

"No! I want to come! I just expected to have to talk you into it."

"You can talk Larry into it if you want," she said, "he doesn't seem excited about the idea of you being even more involved. But he's not the one setting the parameters of the 'slide. Over here." She pointed him to a section of the spell diagram.

"I'm not sure what I'm looking at," he admitted.

Cronus climbed over to him, moving around the lines of the diagram , as at home as if he was playing with silk in his tank. "Right here," he said. "There's what we have of your name, only we need to fill in the rest. That's Palmerston," a line of spiky letters, "And this fills in some of your other basic characteristics, physical and personality and history stuff, mostly via Larry, but I need the rest of your name to authenticate it."

"Do you have 'Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office' in there?"

"No," Cronus said, and stared at him with all eight eyes. "I suppose I should, shouldn't I." He reached out and spun a few more lines of gold into the diagram, filling in one of the empty spaces. "But I meant your Ailurin name. Surely your mother didn't call you Palmerston."

"I don't know what my mother called me," he said, and took a couple deep breaths. "I don't really like to think about that much."

"You don't have an Ailurin name?" he said. "I thought you just always went by Palmerston as a political statement, or something."

"No, I. They called me Auuh'wt. In the Home. Some of them."

"Auuh'wt," Siffha'h said, and blinked slowly at him. "It fits you. The stray, and the hearth."

"I. What?" he said, unexpectedly flustered.

"And speaking of strays," Tam Tam said, "We're being watched."

The three humans had herded over and were staring at the wizards as they worked.

"What is that?" asked the female breathlessly, reaching down toward the spell diagram and then stopping herself at the last minute.

"It's our plan for getting you home, cousin," Tam Tam said. "This spell should be the first step. There might just be a few complications on the way. Can I add your Name, to make sure we can get you safely through?"

"Um. Sure?" she said.

Palmerston got out of the way after that, but, he noticed, the humans didn't. They kept watching as the wizards put the last few touches on the spell, and Tam Tam softly explained to them what they were doing, in language that was almost easy enough even Palmerston could follow it.

Finally Siffha'h stepped back and stretched until she must have cracked every bone in her spine. "All right. That's as good as we're getting, I think. Molly?"

Molly didn't look exactly happy about it, but she nodded.

"Right. We'll pack it up, then. Everybody get a nap and a meal and make final preparations, and we'll meet at the worldgate at five. Me, Tam Tam, Cronus, and Toby are going through as the repair team, with Auuh'wt as our official Whitehall cat, and three ehhif tagging along just because it wasn't going to be complicated enough already. Larry and Molly will hold things on the other end."

"Not Molly," Toby said.

"What?"

"Molly can't leave the Folly. It's a thing."

"We shouldn't need her," Larry said. "Once you're through, the 'slide's going to close fast enough there's hardly any point in even one of us watching, and probably the worldgate with it. All the trouble will be on your side after that. And if you don't come back, Molly won't be what makes the difference."

"Right," Siffha'h said grimly. "Great plan, everyone. See you in five hours."

Palmerston went home the long way, just in case it was the last time. He had his lunch, thanked the staffers who served him, did another pest-control survey of the office, sat in on a video call with his Jordanian envoy (he really needed to do something about the microphones that were tuned to Human voice frequencies rather than Ailurin), spent some time supervising and improving morale in the office, took a nap, ate dinner, and then headed back toward Westminster.

Larry met him on the steps outside Number 10, and fell into step beside him.

"You're walking?" Palmerston asked.

"It's a nice night," he answered, and twitched his tail in a way that said, stop talking to me.

The others were already there. Most of them had spent the day at Russell Square, so they'd probably come by spell instead of walking. Cronus had the place-slide spell hooked to the gate, and almost ready to activate.

The humans were huddled together to one side, staring at the partly-visible gate and looking even more shocky than before, but at least they looked like they'd all been well-fed recently. Molly making up for not being able to come, probably.

"Are you ready?" Siffha'h said when she saw them. Palmerston nodded.

"Where do you need me?" Larry asked.

"Since you're staying behind, I want you to do the final activation. Here," she said, and hooked his claws into one of the hyperstrings. The gate looked even more sickly and somehow wrong than it had the evening before. "Toby, Tam Tam, we're going to need all the power any of us can spare." They took their places, putting their paws into designated spots in the diagram. "All right," she said, and then looked around. "How many of you have gone back in place before? None of us? I haven't either, but I've done a fair amount of timeslide work, and work in some of my London's Downsides, and Molly talked me through some of it yesterday. You're going to keep wanting to think that this is like going back in time, that the London we're visiting is the London that existed 1500 years ago. But it's not. It's London, now, but a now that belongs to that past the way our past belongs to us now."

The other wizards were nodding along: it probably made more sense if you actually understood the words in the Wizard's Speech instead of hearing them in Ailurin, which didn't really have concepts for five-dimensional travel. Siffha'h could tell the humans weren't really getting it, either. She sighed.

"The important thing to keep in mind," she said, "Is that things on the other side of that 'gate may not work the way you expect them to. Distances and times will shift, or be deceptive. Things might change around you unexpectedly. In some ways it's a more senior reality than ours, but it other ways it doesn't have a reality separate from what ours gives it. Cause and effect still work, but maybe not the same way. Wizardry still works, but you have to keep a closer eye on the 'consequences' element of the equation. This world is built half out of the real foundations of the place, and half out of the stories that are remembered about the place. Metaphors will be a little less metaphorical than usual. Follow my lead, and don't do anything stupid. Got it?"

They all nodded.

"Good. Go," she said, and all the wizards pushed power into the diagram. It flared up bright gold and then flowed silvery into the hyperstrings of the Gate, and Larry pulled the trigger, and it untangled itself, retied itself a new way, and then stretched in a direction that shouldn't have existed, and then bounced and was still, like a puddle with no stones in it.

When it cleared, there was an oval, just about the height of the older human, and through it, a view very similar to one of the older Londons that Tam Tam had shown him. It was dark and full of wispy fog, but blurry starlight glimmered on the meanders of a river, and in the distance he could see a cluster of huts spilling cheerful firelight through their doors.

Past them, though, looming dark and indistinct against the slightly lighter black of the sky, was a hunched and broken walled shape: the ruined City.

"Go," Larry said, sounding strained. "I can't hold it much above a minute."

Toby jumped through, and Cronus followed, and then Tam Tam and Siffha'h herded the humans though, and Palmerston last: he thought he felt the Gate take a few hairs off his tail as it closed behind him.

He took a second to look around him. They were on what must have been an old Roman road, trying to be broad and level even as it was half-decayed and some of the cobblestones had been robbed out. The Roman city still loomed ahead of them, around a curve but on the same side of the river, two miles or so upstream. They must have been in the place where Westminster would one day be built, but around them was nothing but foggy marsh.

Everything felt old, he though. Old and heavy. He remembered a story he'd been told by one of the oldest cats he'd known, at the Cats & Dogs Home, who'd been in and out of shelters all her life, collecting stories from every cat she met: about Londinium when it was empty of ehhif, "home to nowt but cats and corpses and ravens and rats: and even the rats weren't nothing on the rats we have now, but the ghosts were stronger."

"What," said the older human, in a choked-sounding voice, and then coughed a few times, coughed again, and managed to say, "What have you done to us?" He had his hands up by his throat, and Palmerston saw that he was tugging on - a chain? What was it? Whatever it was looked spiky, like - like the words of the Speech in the spell diagram. It was wrapped around his throat, almost like a tie or a scarf, but tight; it was digging into the skin of his neck, and already leaving angry-looking red marks.

"I told you," Siffha'h said. "This place is partly made of memories and stories, and metaphors are less metaphorical here. The three of you have lost most of your stories, but you've kept your metaphors." She jumped up onto his shoulder and pawed at the cloth-of-Speech. "I'd say you probably have something you need to say and haven't said." She looked over at the woman, who now had a tiny raincloud hovering over her head and drenching her in cold water. "You might want to look into those antidepressant pills when you get back. I have a friend who says they work really well. As for you," she stared at the other man. He had something spiky, too, only it was wrapped around the top of his head like a crown, and it was not so much thorny-looking words as just thorns. Blood was dripping down across his face from some scratches. "You might want to just try therapy to start. Mind you, if we're really unlucky, this place might try some ad-hoc therapy of its own on you: that's always fun in the haunted spaces, and the space itself is likely to try to slow us down before we even find our real opposition."

"If it's a property of the space, why didn't something like this happen to you when you came through?" the man with the words on his throat asked.

"Because we're cats," Palmerston said. "And cats are always just cats, not metaphors." He shook himself just in case, though, and heard the reassuring jingle of nothing around his neck but his Foreign Office tags on his favorite red flea collar.

Cronus had changed, though: he was larger, almost Siffha'h's size, and made of light; it spilled between the joints of his legs, and his fur had gone crystalline and sparkling, so that he looked like a restless firework. It didn't look exactly comfortable, but it didn't look like it was bothering him. "It's fine," he said, "this is more or less what I was expecting."

"And I'm a metaphor for a dog," Toby said.

"What?" Tam Tam asked.

"It's a long and boring story from when I was on Ordeal that you don't need to worry about," Toby said. "But basically, London thinks I'm a metaphor for a small friendly dog named Toby who's slightly more dangerous than he looks. And since that's what I am, there's not much that can be done with it. So I should be all right. Shall we head out?"

They walked a long way.

If their starting point was the place that would one day be Westminster, it was just about two miles to the old city walls; it seemed longer than that, and also less long, because he didn't get tired or hungry and his paws didn't get sore, no matter how rough the old road became. The stars didn't move in the sky and the firelight in the village, probably some version of Saxon Aldwych, never flickered. Every so often, there would be a noise in the marshes that lined the road, like an animal passing through or a wind that they couldn't feel, but they never saw anything. Without discussing it, they formed a perimeter around the humans, with Cronus in the front casting a light and Toby in the back, Tam Tam on the Thames side and Palmerston landward, and Siffha'h roaming around between them, watching everywhere. The only noise was the padding footsteps of Toby and the humans, and the steady drip, drip, drip of rain off the woman's coat and the hem of her dress. The fog rose off the river in sheets and furls but never thickened enough to hide their view of the dark City around the river's curve. Nothing happened.

The woman in the rain shivered. "Can we sing, or something?"

"No," Siffha'h said. "That would be a... bad idea. Not unless you knew exactly how this place would feel about what you were singing."

"Oh," she said, and was silent a little longer.

Palmerston couldn't have said how long it took before they were at the walls of the City; maybe the question wasn't even worth asking, there. There wasn't a gate where the road met the wall, just blank stone still twenty feet high, so they turned as the road did and followed clockwise around the wall, probably, Palmerston assumed, until they saw a gate.

And they kept following.

They made it all the way around to where the walls met the river again without seeing anything like a gate. That was near Tower Hill, or what would be Tower Hill in a few more centuries. There were ravens wheeling in the sky overhead. Palmerston thought he recognized Munin, one of the Tower ravens he'd spoken to a few times; that he would be in both that London and this one seemed both unlikely and very likely.

Maybe they should have consulted the ravens before they came here. But asking the ravens for information was never straightforward and always hard to interpret. The ravens kept wheeling overhead, and didn't seem to notice the small group walking by the wall.

When they hit a dead end at the river Cronus silently turned and led them back around again to where they started, and when that showed them just the same blank crumbling wall they'd seen the first time, he turned and did it again.

When they came to the river at the end of the wall a third time, the man with the crown of thorns sat down and refused to go any farther. "I'm sorry, I've followed this madness this far, but are we just going to keep going back and forth around the walls forever? Don't you have some magic or something? I've seen you walk through walls before."

"What do you mean?" Siffha'h asked. "I told you, distances might be deceptive here. I know it may seem like we've been walking longer than we should have, but we have a ways to go before we even get to the City."

"No we don't," Palmerston said. All the wizards turned to stare at him. "He's right, we've walked the entire length of the wall three times now. I thought it was part of a spell or something, to get us in. It's not?"

"There's no wall there," Tam Tam said.

The man with the words in his throat kicked it very hard, and then jumped back, holding his toes and shouting, "Ow bloody ow. It sure feels like there's a wall there."

Palmerston walked up to it and pressed a paw to it, and then through it. "It feels like a normal wall to me," he said. "I could walk through it if I had to. And we're all the way around to Tower Hill: can't you see the ravens?"

The one that might have been Munin banked lower and cawed loudly down at them for a moment. Everybody startled at the sudden noise, the first sudden thing that had happened since they'd arrived.

"See, ravens," Palmerston said.

The wizards looked at each other again, and then Cronus walked up beside Palmerston and softly wafted a glowing strand of silk forward. It stuck to the wall. He sent a few more after it, and then turned to the others. "Cousins, I think there's a wall there."

Siffha'h hissed, and then spat a few words in the speech at it. "I think we've found our first warding spell," she said. "Palmerston, keep those three out of trouble while we see what we can do."

The four wizards huddled by the wall for awhile as it slowly accumulated more glowing strands of spider-silk. He saw Siffha'h, and then Tam Tam, try to walk through it, but both of them simply slid off, and ended up on the other side of the road, shaking their heads in confusion. Cronus's marker silk would stick, but when he tried to stick anything stronger to it, or climb it himself, it slipped away too. Finally they had a low-voiced but intense discussion, and Tam Tam gestured the rest of them back over.

"There's a spell on the wall that keeps wizards out, and only wizards," he said. "It dates from the war - they must have been very worried about those foreign wizards they were going to fight, and what would happen if they lost. This is why wizards need to stay out of factional politics," he added with frustration.

"Larry's a civil servant, he's not allowed to be partisan. Neither am I."

Tam Tam blinked a smile a him. "That's reassuring. Anyway, it's gone parasitic on the original binding. We can't get through it, and we can't bring it down without bringing everything down, and we probably can't even do that from outside, and we can't go back."

"So what can we do?" asked the woman with the rain.

"You four can go through without us," Siffha'h said.

"No we can't!" the man with the thorny crown said.

"I wonder if that's why the Powers brought you to us," she continued. "If our enemy was just opening random transits, the Powers took the chance to bring us exactly the people we needed. Because the three of you, between you, have exactly the specialties we need to reattach the catenary and fix whatever's wrong with the kernel. You just need to go through the Wall, and find your wizardries on the other side."

"Very rarely can someone who has renounced their wizardry win it back," Tam Tam said from beside her. "But nothing is never, for the Powers, and they make do with the tools they have."

"Except when they make the tools they need, instead," said Siffha'h.

"I don't even remember being a wizard!" the woman with the rain protested. "Why would I have given up something like that anyway?"

"Maybe you can't," Tam Tam said. "But I think you know, somewhere, what you need to know to get it back," and he looked with significance at the rainstorm, and the thorny crown, and the words in the throat. "This sort of metaphor space is as likely to help with something like that as to hinder it."

"Nobody's going to make you go through," Toby said. "But we don't have any better ideas. And you'll have Palmerston as a guide. I can't think of a better guide to any London; he's spent the whole time since he became Chief Mouser learning everything he can about the city."

That was a little exaggerated, but it was good to be appreciated for once, Palmerston thought.

The humans looked at each other.

"I'm going," the woman said suddenly. "I hate the rain anyway. I'm going. It can't be worse than-- I'm going."

"Well," the man with the words said, "I might as well go; I don't have anything better to do tonight anyway."

They all looked at the man with the crown. He reached up and pushed it down tighter on his head and said, "Okay. Okay, I'll go."

It was simple to get through, after that. Toby handed each of the humans a portable charm that would let them walk through the wall, and Palmerston led the way.

It was eerie, on the other side. Eerie in a different way than the marshes outside had been. The crumbling stone buildings cut off the sky all around them, and there was no sign of life, not even cats or rats or ravens, not even the unmoving fires they'd passed in Aldwych.

The woman shivered under her rain. "So where do we go from here?"

Palmerston looked around, and got his bearings. What had Tam Tam said about how the bindings were done? "The amphitheatre," he said. "We'll start at the amphitheatre." That was where Dick Whittington put his library, and Dick Whittington and his feline partners were some of the greatest wizards in the city's history. It was near the oldest city square, and even now, it was where the city of London kept its archives. Hadn't they said the creatures were bound to the memories of the city's past? Anyway, if anyone was going to bind horrible monsters in a Roman city, where else would they put them but under the amphitheatre? He hadn't thought about it when he thought they'd be following a wizardry, but now that he did, it was obvious. "Come on. The streets are different but the layout of the City is still the same in its bones. I'll take us there."

"Dunno," the mad with the thorny crown said. "The center, I guess? Or do we just go where it feels creepiest?" He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked around him warily.

Oh, fiddlesticks, Palmerston realized. They couldn't understand him. He'd taken the time to learn their language, but he couldn't speak it - his mouth was the wrong shape - and they didn't know his at all. And there weren't any wizards around anymore to translate.

Well, he managed well enough with the humans in the Foreign Office. If usually in less forbidding circumstances. "FOLLOW ME," he shouted, loud enough that the humans would at least be able to hear him if not understand him, and then turned and started up the road. When he didn't hear them following he stopped and turned around. "COME ON!" he shouted. "THIS IS BASIC 'TIMMY'S' DOWN THE WELL', YOU CAN DO IT." He took another half dozen steps and then stared back at them balefully.

"I think the cat has an idea," the man with the words in his throat said. "We've followed the animals this far. Might as well keep going."

Palmerston flicked his tail in satisfaction and started down the street again.

The older man followed him, and after a short hesitation the other two caught up.

"This is a very stupid idea," the man with the thorny crown said. "Also, why is he suddenly meowing at us? They were talking before! They suddenly stop talking right when it gets really bad?"

"You think this is when it's really bad?" Palmerston asked. "Oh dear."

"Weren't you listening?" the woman in the rain said. "The others are all wizards. He's just an ordinary cat."

"I'm not an ordinary cat! I'm Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office! I'd like to see you leave a dead mouse on the Prime Minister's desk!" Palmerston protested. "Besides, any cat in London would be better equipped than you three for this, no Cabinet appointment required."

"Oh, wonderful!" the man with the thorny crown said, and threw up his hands. "We're following an ordinary cat. He's probably just taking us to wherever smells like stinky fish."

"Which wouldn't even be that bad an idea, seeing as we're basically hunting calamari," Palmerston said, and then realized they'd stopped following him. They'd all paused by a building, two-story, that was in better shape than most of the ones they'd been passing. It even still had a wooden door, and there was a clear yellow light shining out the windows.

"Should we see what's in there?" the woman in the rain asked.

"NO!" Palmerston yelled, running back to him. "NO! Bad idea!"

He was fairly sure that was one word in Ailurin which most humans could understand if they tried, but but of course even if they understood they didn't listen. By the time he was back, the man with the thorny crown had opened the door.

A woman was waiting on the other side of it, dark-haired, sitting in a chair. "Delores?" the man said, in a tone of vast relief.

"Who were you expecting?" she asked with a smile. "C'mon, kiss me."

He stepped in and leaned down to kiss her, and then the door shut behind him and blocked their view.

"Should we--" the woman started again.

"NO! NO!" Palmerston said.

"I think he's saying no," the man with the words answered drily.

"You two will stay out here and wait," Palmerston said, trying to convey this by the way he was herding them back from the door. "If he doesn't come out soon, I'll go get him." He was just an ordinary cat, he wasn't the one who'd been specially chosen for this task by the Powers, so if this was a trap, it was less likely to be aimed for him.

Besides, unlike them, he could take care of himself.

Proving this, they waited and waited and the man didn't come back out. Palmerston sighed, and turned to the humans. "STAY," he said firmly, and then jumped up and through the house's open window.

The man and the woman were sitting side-by-side on a sofa in a small, warm, cluttered-looking room, which, Palmerston couldn't help but notice, had the wrong dimensions for the outside of the building.

"Oh, God, I missed you so much," the man was saying, stroking the woman's hair, as relaxed as if he'd completely forgotten they were in the middle of a mission to save England, or at least fix its worldgate. "Every moment I'm not with you seems like some kind of half-real dream."

"Speaking of missing," the woman said. "Where have you been?"

He stiffened at that. Palmerston jump to the back of the couch and walked back and forth, trying to figure out how to remind him of what they were supposed to be doing, but he didn't seem to see him. And the couch felt real under his paws, but the woman smelled like fog and dust. This must be some sort of illusion, he thought, but he remembered how Siffha'h had warned them that the line between real and illusion might be wavery, here.

"About," the man said in reply to the question.

"About where?" the woman said. She'd raised her head from his shoulder and was looking at him now, her mouth pressed thin.

"It's not enough everything I've given up for you, I can't go out for a night without you needing every detail?"

"After everything you've given up!" she said. "Did I ever ask you to give anything up for me?"

"Well you sure didn't complain when I said I would turn down the new job in the City and move in to help you out!"

"Fucking right I didn't! But what the hell good does it do me when you're fucking unreliable? I had two doctor's appointments to get to in the last week and where the hell were you?"

He deflated at this and collapsed back onto her. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm awful, I just want to be a good partner to you, and I keep letting you down, I just - I needed to - "

Palmerston paced back and forth on the back of the couch and watched them. He supposed the man couldn't just up and say he'd fallen through a portal to a another world and couldn't get back, but surely he could come up with some version of it that make sense? But it didn't even really sound like they were arguing about that; it had the feel of something often-repeated and well rehearsed.

"You should break up with me," the man said, "I'm completely worthless, I'm useless, the only good thing in my life is that I can take care of you and I can't even do that without fucking it up--"

"Oh, sweetheart," the woman said, and now it was her turn to pet him. "It wasn't even the doctor's appointments, I could have asked someone else to drive me, it was just that you didn't let me know you weren't coming. That's not a lot to ask, you just tell me you won't be there. We said when you moved in that you'd be more reliable!"

"I just felt like if I stayed in this house one more bloody minute there I'd disappear.."

"Well, you accomplished that all right! I never asked you to turn your whole life into me!"

"No, but you damned well asked for everything along the way!"

"You could have said no!"

"I love you!"

"No you don't!" she shouted at him, and he cringed back.

She crumpled down on herself and sighed. "I can barely take care of myself, David. I can't be responsible for enforcing your limits for you. I just want you to be my partner! And watching you make yourself miserable is not the way to prove you love me!" She pushed herself off the couch and back into the chair. "I'm going to bed. If you decide to be less of a sad sack, you can join me. But take that stupid fucking hat off first. You always did look daft in hats."

He looked after her until she was gone in the shadows that were no longer the house, and then slowly reached up and pulled the crown of thorns off his head and threw it on the ground. He started at it, and then started weeping.

That, at least, Palmerston knew how to deal with. There was more weeping than one might expect in the corridors of Whitehall. He jumped down and then nudged at the man's hand until there was space for him to crawl onto his lap and purr as hard as possible.

After a second, he started petting Palmerston, mechanically, and then folded over him and gasped, "What have I done?"

"Made a good start at working out some of where you've gone wrong, it sounded like," Palmerston said.

He sat up fast at that. "You talk!"

"Of course I talk. You understand me?"

"I... maybe?"

Palmerston looked over the edge of the couch. The faded shag carpet was still there, but the crown had disappeared. He glanced back up at the man. "Does the phrase 'For Life's sake' suddenly mean anything to you?"

He started to say something, stopped, and then stared into the distance for a long time. "What the bloody hell did I do with my Manual?" he said.

"You have your wizardry back."

"I think. This is... how did I forget all of that? And that was all it took, having a screaming fight with Delores? I've been having screaming fights with Delores twice a week."

"Then I suspect what it took was having screaming fights with Delores twice a week, and then having another one with a dream-shade of Delores when you were in Old Londinium, 1500 years back in place, and the Powers had a job for you to do."

"Oh. Fuck. I forgot that, too."

"The others are waiting outside," Palmerston said. "We should probably keep moving, or who knows where we'll end up."

He'd been half afraid the door would open again on somewhere else entirely, but it was still the dark, clammy, crumbling Roman road. The two other humans had sat down on half-fallen walls and were watching the ravens still wheeling above what would be Tower Hill.

"You came back!" the woman in the rain said, standing up.

"Yes," he said, and rubbed a hand against his goatee. "Sorry about that. This place is strange. Palmerston says we need to get going."

The older man stood up then. "You can talk to the cat now?" he asked, slowly.

"Yes," he said again, and then nothing else.

"And the cat still says we need to get going," Palmerston finished finally, and started walking again. Eventually they fell in line behind him.

The Amphitheatre, of course, was nearly all the way across the City from the Tower Hill side: they really should have started at the other gate, but maybe not, maybe they'd needed to come in where the ravens were watching the way. At any rate, he'd looked at enough of the old maps, and talked to the cats who begged fish and chips from every archaeological dig in the City, so he should have no trouble getting them there.

They crossed a small River that he didn't know the name of and had never met; maybe even most of its memory was gone in his London. Soon they were on a road that, in a few blocks and a few centuries, would be Cannon Street. More and more buildings appeared around them, with less and less evidence they'd been touched for the last several centuries. He stopped at one of the perfectly square Roman intersections. To the right was what would be, maybe, Gracechurch Street, leading up to the Forum. To the left was an ancient London Bridge. It looked liable to fall into the river any minute, and it also felt wrong. All four of them stared at it for a moment.

"There's something bound there," the man with the words in his throat said.

Palmerston shook himself and started cleaning his tail. Whatever it was, he didn't want to tangle with it.

The man who'd thrown off his crown shook his head. "Whatever it is, it's not what we're looking for," he said. "I think it's a few Londons further back in place. And not our errand."

"Thank Iau," Palmerston said. "Whatever that is, I hope I never have to get closer to it than this. Come on, we're turning north."

He led them up past the Forum and then across Wallbrook - a river he'd met once, and who was reasonably fond of cats - and then even further north, toward the oldest part of the Roman city. There was still no sign of life, unless they turned around to look at the ravens; just damp and fog and the remains of stone buildings. And then, more clear yellow light staining the fog from from a mostly-intact building at the end of the block.

Palmerston stopped them, because the last thing they needed was to blunder in unprepared again. But the woman with the rain shook her head. "I think that one's mine," she said. "I think I have to. We came here for a reason, right?"

"Yes," the man who'd thrown off his crown said. "But, Irene, the Powers have their reasons, but they aren't always reasons we can understand. And they give us the work because they want us to make our choices, not just mindlessly follow."

"Besides," the man with the words in his throat said, "Didn't the other black-and-white cat say there might be someone here working against us? It could be a trap."

"All the same," she said, "I think I have to go in. Did avoiding things work well for you two so far?"

Neither of them answered her. She nodded, and started walking toward the lit up house.

"Fine," Palmerston said, "But I'm coming with you."

That didn't even need to be translated: she waited for him to catch up, and then stopped again before she opened the door to the house. She took a deep breath, and said, "If I go in there, I can be a wizard again," pushed it open, and stepped through.

It was a kitchen; scrupulously clean, and all done in cheerful yellows and shining stainless steel. There was a man sitting at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper. But where Delores had been very distinctly a person - even if not quite a real one - the man was blurry, like a person in a dream that the dream hadn't quite identified yet.

He looked up when they came in and said, "Oh, Reeny! I was starting to worry," with no hint of worry in his tone. "Did you have some last minute shopping? What's the plan for dinner?"

"There is no plan for dinner," she said, with a bit of a tremble in her voice, and then repeated, more strongly, "There is no dinner. I hate this. I hate being a wife. I want to be a person again. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm NOT!" she finished, shrill, and the raincloud over her head had been expanding as she spoke until it filled the whole kitchen, and burst into torrents of water that raked over the walls and furniture until the yellow and steel went runny and showed the ancient stone underneath, and the man got vaguer and vaguer until he said, "I would have been happy with just a sandwich," in small voice and washed away entirely, and with him the rain and the cloud, too.

Palmerston shook himself as hard as he could but there was no getting around the fact that he was wet and it was horrible.

"That felt really good," the woman said, finally wringing the water out of her hair. "I should have done that years ago. Why did I ever let him convince me I wanted to be a housewife?" She swung her hair down and then reached up into empty air in from of her face and pulled out a small three-ring binder with a gingham-print cover embossed with the word MANUAL. "That wasn't nearly as harrowing as I thought it would be."

"The last one didn't go quite like that," Palmerston said, still trying to shake the wet off his front paws.

"Oh! Poor thing, I got you all wet," she said, and spoke two words in the Speech that left him feeling like he'd spent the past hour sitting under the hand dryer in a public restroom.

"Better," he said. "I take it you have your wizardry back?"

"I do," said the woman who'd come out of the rain. "So let's go take care of this Old One and fix the kernel, and then I can go home and have that talk with my real husband." She made a face. "I doubt it will be that simple with him."

"Probably not," Palmerston agreed.

After that, they were all keeping an eye out for another lit-up house for their last human to go in, but all the rest of the way across Londinium everything stayed dark and empty around them. It wasn't until they were right by the front gate of the Amphitheatre that they saw that yellow light again.

They could all feel that there was more to the Amphitheatre than had been at the houses, though. That same sense of something bound as at the Bridge, but far more immediate, and with a strong sense of age and power and decay and alienness that was completely different. None of them were eager to go in, but the woman who'd come out of the rain was absolutely certain the kernel was there, and the cut end of the catenary for the gate was near it.

"I'm rusty, but I remember enough that I'm pretty sure I can fix the kernel, if we get there," she said.

"And when that's done, we should be able to take down whatever barrier is keeping the other wizards out," said the man who'd taken off his crown. "It shouldn't be difficult to do from this side. Once that's done, the others can come in and fix the bindings quickly enough."

"Our best plan, then, is probably to go in fast and quiet, and take the barrier down, and get out of the way," Palmerston said.

"I like that plan," the man with the words in his throat said when the others had translated for him. He stared up at the tall curving walls, enclosing the ground used for thousands of battles watched by thousands of spectators, all empty now. Except that it wasn't. "Not as much as I like the plan where we turn around. But we can't. So we might as well go in."

They did.

It was a big empty oval, with tiers of benches all around, with a flat floor of clean sand.

The kernel sat in the middle of the oval, pulsing faintly, not hidden at all.

And in front of it, a little curly-haired boy was crying.

"That's my son," the man with the words in his throat said.

"I thought you didn't have a son," said the man who'd thrown off his crown.

"So did I," said the man with the words in his throat. "Oh, God, what have I done?" He ran across the theater to the boy, but then just stood there, awkwardly, while the boy kept crying.

Palmerston was trying to decide if a cat being there would make the whole thing more or less awkward, but finally the man leaned over, placed a hand tentatively on the boy's shoulder, and said something too softly for the rest of them to hear.

The boy shook it off angrily, and said something back, and they exchanged a few more words before the boy said, loudly enough this time, "No. You know what? Not good enough." He stood up and as he stood up he got larger, until he wasn't a boy anymore, but a young man, maybe a teenager of fourteen or fifteen - a prime age, Palmerston thought, for both magic and for listening too closely to sa'Rrahh.

"Get them," the young man said, flinging his arms toward them, and suddenly there were fibrous tentacles writhing up through the sandy floor of the amphitheatre. They wrapped around all three humans too quickly for them to react, pulling them off balance with tendrils tight around their ankles and binding their arms as well, and then they were passed from tentacle to tentacle up to the boy.

Palmerston had started running before the tentacles even appeared and made it safely up into the stands. The boy didn't seem to notice. "Oh good," he said to his father. "You brought your friends, just like I hoped you would. And now, the three of you are going to remove the rest of the bindings on my pets here, and I can really have some fun."

"I love you," the man said. "That was all I ever wanted to say. I love you, and I came all the way back from Rigel to tell you, that what I was going to do was worth it, even if I didn't come back, because it would keep you and your mother safe. And then I didn't tell you," he said, "Because if I didn't come back, I didn't want you to blame wizardry. So I just left again."

"Well, joke's on you then," the boy said, getting right up into his face. "I don't blame wizardry. I blame you. You left us! You walked right by me in the street and told my teacher you'd never had a son."

"I didn't remember," he said wretchedly.

"Oh, fuck that," the boy said. "You remembered well enough just now, didn't you? Anyway, I don't care. That's not important any more. You don't have a son, fine, I don't have a father. But you used to work on kernels a lot, I remember that, you took me into the practice spaces a couple of times. They've worked the binding on these things into the kernel somehow. If you get them off, I won't kill your friends, how's that?"

"I can do it," the woman said. He turned to her. "I'm more of a specialist than he is, and I've had more time to get used to my wizardry again. If you let me free, I can release the bindings."

"Do you think I'm a re-" he stalked toward her, but before he could finish the sentence, the man who'd thrown off his crown burst free from the tentacle that was holding him and sent a purple fireball toward the one that was holding the other man. It cringed away, which was enough for him to get loose, without the Speech necktie at last, Palmerston noted.

The young man spun back around, which was enough of a distraction for the woman to slip free of her own bonds, sliding out of the coils like she'd suddenly gone liquid herself, and run toward the kernel.

After that it was a melee: three wizards against an angry young man with the Lone Power in his eyes and a whole lot of lashing black tentacles at his command. He'd never seen a combat specialist wizard in action before - there weren't very many of them around, even outside London - but if they were all as good as that, not many of them would be needed. He was keeping the tentacles mostly occupied all by himself, sending spells as fast as he could call them out in every direction, and leaving the tentacles burnt or frozen or lashing uncontrolled where they hit, and the man who'd thrown down the crown was holding his own almost as well.

Palmerston was not really in the same pay grade as they were, and they seemed to be ignoring him, but he couldn't just sit there and watch; maybe he didn't have magic, but he knew how to sink his claws into a waving string. He gathered himself up and jumped.

The tentacle tasted awful, and didn't seem to even notice the weight of a single housecat dangling from it. He barely managed to hang on as it wove over the field of battle, and then he saw the woman who'd come out of the rain crouched by the kernel and beckoning to him.

"I don't want to kill you!" the father said, and the young man answered, "Too bad, I do! If you're not going to help, you're useless," and nearly managed to take him off his feet again with a swipe of a tentacle.

Palmerston let go just as his tentacle swept overhead, and landed on all four feet right next to the woman.

"I'm not much for combat," she said, "so maybe you can help me figure this out. There's so many layers of bindings and other mess on here, and it's been so poorly maintained it's all falling apart. But he's put his own bindings over the others," she turned the ball in her hands and showed him a livid green strand wrapped into the outer layers. "That's how he's controlling the Old One." They both ducked. "But if he's controlling an Old One, we should all be dead already. That's why he wants the other bindings gone: the old bindings mean he can't touch more than a fraction of the Old One's power, and the warding against wizardry means he can't take them out of here without losing his own control over them. In fact, I think if he leaves here, he loses his power over them whether he brings them or not; the wizardry warding would break his spell as soon as he passed through the ward. That might even have been its original purpose, or one of them. I can take that one down easily enough, it's similar to others I've worked with; that would let the other four come in, but then he'd be free to send the Old One up into a London that has people living in it."

They ducked again. Palmerston looked around: the two men were still holding their own, but it looked like they might be getting tired. The tentacles weren't.

"Why couldn't he just take it down, then?" Palmerston asked.

"I don't think he knows how," she said, watching the fight for a moment. "I'm not sure he knows any spells other than what he's using to control the tentacles, and what he did to the gate. The Lone One isn't generous with knowledge or power, he's just good at appearing so."

"Maybe you're supposed to take it down anyway?" he suggested. "If we brought the fight out of here, there would be other wizards to help, at least."

"There would also be a lot of non-wizards getting killed." She shook her head. "There's got to be some other way. But I can't fix the kernel or the worldgate without bringing down the anti-wizardry ward, because it's what's causing the problems in the first place. Someone might be able to fix the bindings on the Old One while leaving it up, but those spells are beyond me; I'm afraid to touch them. I think we'll need Tam Tam for that. But there's got to be something I'm missing, some way to solve this. The Powers won't have sent us here for nothing, not after all the trouble They took getting us here. What did Siffha'h tell us before we came in? That cause and effect may not work the same way here as other places. That stories are more than just stories."

"That metaphors are a little bit less metaphorical," Palmerston said. "You had your raincloud, but you rained it out; and he took off his crown; and I don't know where the words in his throat went, but he seems to have wizardry again, anyway."

She looked at him. "And what was your metaphor again?" she said.

"I'm a cat," Palmerston said. "I'm not a metaphor." But then he thought, and I'm the Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a civil servant in Her Majesty's government. And what was Her Majesty's government but a metaphor that was more than a metaphor, really? "Stay here," he told the woman. "I'm going to try a metaphor."

He walked carefully across the battlefield, only having to swerve a few time, until he was standing right in front of the young man. And then sneezed a few times and said, "Excuse me."

The young man finally looked at him. "What the hell are you? A housecat?"

"I'm Palmerston, Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office," Palmerston said. "And it's a key part of my duty as an employee of said office to render assistance to British nationals abroad. You're a British citizen, aren't you? But you don't seem to be where you belong. And I don't think you have a passport or a visa to be here. So I'm doing my job, and I'm assisting. you. HOME." On the last word he closed his eyes and shook his head, rattling the tags on his collar, reminding himself that he DID have the authority of Her Majesty's Government behind him, and it WAS more than a metaphor.

Even then, he didn't quite expect it to work. But when he opened his eyes again, the young man was gone, and the battlefield was quiet.

"What did you do?" the man who'd used his words asked.

"I sent him home," Palmerston said. "He's probably back with his mother, in your London." He thought about that for a second. "Or possibly passport control at Heathrow. I'm not certain."

"Passport control at Heathrow seems a bit cruel even for a servant of the Lone One," the man who'd thrown off his crown said, and took a deep breath."You're a wizard now too?" he asked Palmerston.

"No," Palmerston said, annoyed. "I'm Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That's plenty. I just used the power vested in me by Her Majesty's government as a duly appointed civil servant."

"A space where metaphors are more than metaphors," the older man muttered.

"Wherever you sent him," the woman said, standing up by the kernel, "it broke his binding--" and then they all stepped back, as something started rising up from the center of the amphitheatre.

And they kept rising. And kept rising. They looked larger in person that they had in Tam Tam's pictures, Palmerston thought with slight hysteria. They pulled the tentacles the wizards had been fighting with back into themself and they were a barely noticeable fraction of their bulk.

Finally they stopped rising and gazed down at them with something that might have been eyes.

"HOME," they said.

"Pardon?" Palmerston managed to squeak out.

"YOU SENT HIM HOME. SEND ME HOME."

"Well, they probably don't have a passport either," the man who'd said the words mused.

"Not helpful!" Palmerston said. "Besides, this one isn't a British national by any stretch, that would be more a Home Office thing and I've never liked deportations anyway, I wouldn't want to step on any--"

"SO LONELY," they said, in a voice that overrode anything else one could possibly be thinking.

The woman had been staring at them since they rose. "I don't think they mean any harm," she said. "I think they're lonely. They've been bound here for almost 1500 years, with nobody visiting but wizards come to put more bindings on. Maybe you should send them home."

"Fifteen hundred years is a long time for anyone to be in prison," the older man said. "And they can hardly do any harm if they're... wherever their kind already were."

"They aren't evil," the woman said. "They just hurt."

"I could try to... extend the metaphor. Maybe," Palmerston said. "The Home Office doesn't have a mouser right now anyway, I do most of their pest control." He took a deep breath and tried to recapture the feeling he'd had when he'd sent the young man away, gathering all the authority of the British Empire, the line of kings that could trace its blood back to the days when the creature was first bound, and the consent of millions of governed in a commonwealth of democracies that still spanned the globe. Go home, and it felt like it should have worked, something wanted to give, but it couldn't, it couldn't, they were still trapped, and they both cried out at the same time.

Palmerston opened his eyes. "I don't think I can send them back while they're bound here," he said.

"I could take the bindings down," the woman said. "That's a lot easier than fixing them. I could take them all down at once."

"Then there'd be nothing keeping them here," said the man who'd put thrown off his crown.

"There'd be nothing keeping them bound to this amphitheatre," she said. "But I don't think they could get home, though, not by theirself. I get the impression their home is very, very far away, and they're very old and tired. It's farther away than any of our wizardly power can reach."

They were all looking at Palmerston now. Including the creature, and that made for a LOT of looking. "I'm not in charge here!" he said.

"Yes," the older man said. "I think you are. You led us all the way here. And you are, after all, our representative of the British Government. If you want the metaphor to keep working, you have to be the one to decide."

"I--" Palmerston licked his lips nervously, and gulped. The creature loomed over them, and loomed, and loomed. He thought about how they had cried out when he had almost sent them free, and failed. He thought about how much smaller they had seemed, bound to the young man's will. "Fine. Then do it."

She hadn't been wrong about how easy it was to take down all the creature's bindings at once; they could all feel the space suddenly open around them as she took the spells down, and the creature suddenly became, not bigger - they could hardly have been bigger - but more.

Palmerston licked his lips again, and asked them, "Are you ready?"

They gave him back a worldless impression of time, of fifteen hundred years bound.

"I'll take that as a yes," Palmerston said, and sent them home. And they were gone, like the blink of an eye, the lash of a tail.

The amphitheatre was suddenly empty; there was so much space. He hadn't noticed all the space before. Palmerston started taking a bath. He hated deportations.

"I don't suppose you can send us home that way?" the man who'd thrown off his crown asked eventually.

"No," Palmerston said. "You three have proper passports, remember? The Starling went to a lot of trouble to get them for you. You're not the Foreign Office's business anymore. I think we'll have to wait for Siffha'h and Cronus to fix the gate, and send you back the hard way."

And just as he said that, Siffha'h and Cronus stepped through a transport spell into the middle of the amphitheatre, Toby and Tam Tam following behind. Siffha'h turned in a slow circle.

"What in Iau's name," she said, "did you just do?"

After that it was a lot of fiddly spellwork, and goodbyes ("We have a lot more work to do in our London, to fix the other end of it," the woman said, ruffling his ears, "but I think we can. And if not, I'll know to ask the Whitehall cats for help,") and admin work for the Whispering (as always,) and telling the story as many times as he could to as many people as he could (as always,) and catching back up with his work for the Foreign Office, and also catching up on his naps.

But still, it was only a few days later he found himself halfway up a staircase at Number 10 Downing Street, dropping a dead mouse on Larry's back.

Larry didn't stir.

"I caught this in the Prime Minister's Office," Palmerston hissed at him.

"Thank you," Larry said. "You've done a great service for your country. You deserve a medal. Now please take it away, I'm busy."

"What are you busy with? I fixed the bindings for you! You don't have to worry about that all the time now. And you never said thanks for that, by the way."

"Do you think that was my only duty as Advisory for London?" Larry asked.

"No, of course not! But Toby said now that the kernel's not blocked off anymore, we'll start seeing more new wizards. So you'll have help!"

"Yes," Larry said. "More new wizards. Lots of new wizards. New ehhif wizards, with no old ehhif wizards to mentor them, which means it's my job to do it."

"Oh," Palmerston said. He hadn't thought of it that way.

"And someone in Timeheart thought it would be good idea, first chance they got, to offer the Oath to the Starling's cousin Abigail," he added.

Palmerston had met Cousin Abigail a few times at the Folly. "So... I guess I can handle pest control duties in Number Ten for a little while?" he said.

"I certainly won't have time for it," Larry said, and rolled over to face the wall. "Now go away."

Palmerston would like to tell you about the Battersea Cats & Dogs Home, which was supposed to play a much larger role in this story.

Larry is busy. Please go away.

Cronus would like you to know that any political or cultural commentary in this story was entirely accidental, and we apologize for it.

Toby and Molly wish to reassure you that no, you really don't want to know what's currently bound under London Bridge.

Professor Tam Tam says not to worry too much about how all the timelines and universes line up; they're all slightly off-kilter from the ones you know anyway.

Siffha'h absolutely doesn't care that nobody has ever bothered to take her picture, she has enough to do keeping her Worldgates in line.

And your token ehhif guest stars slipped out the back before the curtain call.