Diane Duane - On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service

Everything living understands the Speech in which wizards work, as well as many things that are not living now, or once were, or which someday might be. Air was malleable stuff, and could be reminded that it had once been trapped in oxides and nitrates in the archeaean stone. It had been in and out of so many lungs since its release that there was controversy among wizards whether air should any longer simply be considered as an element, but also as something once alive. Either way, it was easy to work with. A few words more, and the hyperstrings in the empty air of the alley knotted themselves together into the outline of an invisible stairway: the air, obliging, went solid within the outlines.

Invisible herself, Rhiow trotted up eight stories to the roof of the building on the left, and leapt up over the parapet to the gray gravel on top. Wincing a little as always at the way it hurt her feet, she glanced over her shoulder and said the word of release: the strings unknotted and the air went back to being no more solid than the smog made it. Rhiow made her way along to the back left-paw corner where the next building along, her ehhif’s building, abutted this one’s roof.

When the ehhif who built her building had done its brickwork, they had left a repeating diamond pattern down its side of bricks that jutted out an inch or so. The bottom of one of these diamonds made a neat stairway straight up to where her ehhif’s apartment’s terrace jutted out.

Rhiow jumped up onto the parapet of the building she had just ascended, and then stepped carefully onto the first of the bricks. Slowly she made her way up, sure of the way, but in no rush: a fall would be embarrassing. Just before coming up to the last few bricks, she unsidled herself and then jumped to the terrace: slipped under the table and chairs there, nosed through the clear plastic cat door and went in.

“Hey, there you are …”

He was sitting halfway across the room, in the leather chair under the reading lamp. The apartment was a nice enough one, as far as Rhiow understood the denning requirements of ehhif, a “one-bedroom” apartment with a living room full of leather furniture and bookshelves, a big soft comfortable rug on the polished wood floor of the main room. It was clean and airy, but still had places where a Person could curl up and sleep undisturbed by too much sun or noise: a place not too crowded, not too empty.

Well, Rhiow thought … until recently, not too empty … She went over to Iaehh and jumped up in his lap before he had time to get up. It was always hard to get him to sit still, more so now than it had been even a month ago.

“Well, hello,” Iaehh said, scratching her behind the ears: “aren’t we friendly today?” He sighed: he sounded tired. Rhiow looked up into his face, wondering whether the crinkles around the eyes were a sign of age or of strain. He was good-looking, she supposed, as ehhif went: regular features, short dark hair, slim for his height and in good shape—Iaehh ran every morning. His eyes sometimes had the kind of glint of humor she caught in Urruah’s, a suppression of what would have been uproarious laughter at some wildly inappropriate thing he was about to do. All such looks, though, had been muted in Iaehh’s eyes for the last month.

“I’m always friendly with you,” Rhiow said, stepping up onto the arm of the chair to bump her head against his upper arm. “You know that. Except when you hold me upside down and play ‘swing the cat.’ ”

“Oooh,” Iaehh said, “big purr …” He scratched her under the chin.

“Yes, well, you look like you can use it—you’ve got that busy-day look. I hope yours wasn’t anything like mine …” It was folly to talk to ehhif in normal Ailurin: Iaehh couldn’t hear the near-subsonics which People used for most of the verbal part of their speech. But like many People who denned with ehhif, Rhiow refused to treat him like some kind of dumb animal. At least her work meant she could clearly understand what he said to her, an advantage over most People, who had to guess from tone of voice and body language what was going on with their ehhif.

“You hungry? You didn’t eat much of what I left you this morning.”

“You forgot to wash the bowl again,” Rhiow said, starting to step down into his lap, then pausing while Iaehh resettled himself. “With all the dried stuff from yesterday and the day before yesterday stuck to it, it wasn’t exactly conducive to gourmet dining. I’ll get some of the dry food in a while.”

She settled down in his lap and made herself comfortable while he stroked her. “You’re a nice kitty,” Iaehh said. “Aren’t you?”

“Under the throat,” Rhiow said, “yes, right there, that’s the spot …” She stretched her neck out and purred, and for a while they just sat there together while bright squares of the late afternoon sun worked their way slowly across the apartment.

“Now, why can’t the people at work be as laid back as you,” Iaehh said. “You just take everything as it comes … you never get stressed out …”

She stretched her forepaws out and closed her eyes. “If you only knew,” Rhiow said.

“ … you don’t have any worries. You have a nice bed to sleep on, nice food whenever you want it …”

“As regards the food, ‘nice’ is relative,” Rhiow said with some amusement, kneading with her paws on Iaehh’s knee. “That ‘choice parts’ thing you gave me the day before yesterday was parts, all right, but as for ‘choice’? Please. I’d be tempted to go out and kill my own cows, except that getting them in the cat door would be a nuisance.”

“Ow, ow, don’t do that … ! You go in and out whenever you like, you don’t have a job, you don’t have to worry about anyone depending on you …”

Rhiow’s tail twitched ironically. “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were so,” she said softly, and sighed. Any wizard had daily concerns over whether or not she was doing her job well: you pushed past those doubts and fears as best you could, secure in the knowledge that the Powers that Be would not long allow you to go on uncorrected if you were messing up. Yet that routine, negative sort of approval sometimes fell short of one’s emotional needs … it left you wondering, am I giving enough? The Powers which made the Universe have poured Their virtue into me for the purpose of saving that Universe, piece by piece, day by day. Am I giving enough of it back? And—more to the point—is it working?

“What a life,” Iaehh said.

“You’re not kidding,” Rhiow said.

“But I still wonder … is it good enough …”

She opened an eye and looked up at him.

“I don’t know sometimes,” Iaehh said, stroking her steadily, “if it’s fair for me to keep you. Just because … you’re all that’s left of her … I don’t know, is that a fair reason to keep a pet?”

Rhiow sighed again. His tone was reflective, his face was still: but the intensity of Iaehh’s grief for Hhuha was no less obvious for lacking tears. For one thing, Rhiow could hear the echoes of his emotions: even non-wizardly People could manage that much with the ehhif with whom they spent most of their time. For another thing, Rhiow was an experienced wizard, fluent in the Speech. Understanding it, you could thereby understand anything that spoke. You could also speak to anything that spoke, and make yourself understood: but this was strictly forbidden to wizards except when engaged in errantry, on wizardly business that required it. Rhiow had sometimes been tempted to break her silence, but she had never done it—not even when Iaehh had clutched her and wept into her fur, moaning the name that Rhiow herself also would have moaned aloud in shared grief, if only it had been allowed: Susan, Susan…