Diane Duane - On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service

Arhu sat staring at Urruah wide-eyed, and didn’t say anything. This by itself was so bizarre an event that Rhiow nearly broke up laughing. “Boy’s got taste, if nothing else,” Urruah said to her, and sat down himself for a moment. “He was up on Broadway and raided some ehhifs shopping bags after they’d been to Zabar’s. Caviar, it was, and smoked salmon and sour cream: supposed to be someone’s brunch the next day, I guess. He did a particulate bypass spell on a section of the trunk lid and pulled the stuff out piece by piece … then gave every bit of it to this little marmalade creature with big green eyes.”

Arhu was now half-turned away from them while hurriedly washing his back. It was he’ihh, composure-washing: and it wasn’t working—the fur bristled again as fast as he washed it down. “Never even set the car alarm off,” Urruah said, wrapping his tail demurely around his toes. “Did it in full sight. None of the ehhif passing by believed what they were seeing, as usual.”

“I had to do it in full sight,” Arhu said, starting to wash further down his back. “You can’t sidle when you’re—”

“—stealing things, no,” Rhiow said, as she sat down too. She sighed. The child had come to them with a lot of bad habits. Yet much of his value as a Person and a wizard had to do with his unquenchable, sometimes unbearable spirit and verve, which even a truly awful kittenhood had not been able to crush. Had his tendencies as a visionary not already revealed themselves, Rhiow would have thought that Arhu was destined to be like Urruah, a “power source”, the battery or engine of a spell which others might construct and work, but which he would fuel and drive. Either way, the visionary talent too used that verve to fuel it. It was Arhu’s inescapable curiosity, notable even for a cat, which kept his wizardry fretting and fraying at the fabric of linear time until it “wore through” and some image from future or past leaked out.

“If nothing else,” Rhiow said finally, “you’ve got a quick grasp of the fundamentals … as they apply to implementation, anyway. I can see the ethics end of things is going to take longer.” Arhu turned, opened his mouth to say something. “Don’t start with me,” Rhiow said. “Talk to the Whisperer about it, if you don’t believe us: but stealing is only going to be trouble for you eventually. Meanwhile, where shall we meet in the morning?”

Urruah looked around him as Arhu got up again, looking a little recovered. “I guess here is as good a place as any. Five thirty?”

That was opening time for the station, and would be fairly calm, if any time of the day in a place as big and busy as Grand Central could accurately be described as calm. “Good enough,” Rhiow said.

They started to walk out down the Graybar Passage again, to the Lexington Avenue doors. “Arhu?” Rhiow said to him as they came out and slide sideways to hug the wall, heading for the corner of Forty-Third. “An hour before first twilight, two hours before the Old Tom’s Eye sets.”

“I know when five thirty is,” Arhu said, sounding slightly affronted. They do shift change at the garage a moonwidth after that.”

“All right,” Urruah said. “Anything else you need to take care of, like telling the little marmalade number—”

“Her name’s Hffeu,” Arhu said.

“Hffeu it is,” Rhiow said. “She excited to be going out with a wizard?”

Arhu gave Rhiow a look of pure pleasure: if his whiskers had gone any further forward, they would have fallen off in the street.

She had to smile back: there were moods in which this kit was, unfortunately, irresistible. “Go on, then—tell her goodbye for a few days: you’re going to be busy. And Arhu—”

“I know, ‘be careful’.” He was laughing at her. “Luck, Rhiow.”

“Luck,” she said, as he bounded off across the traffic running down Forty-Third, narrowly being missed by a taxi taking the corner. She breathed out. Next to her, Urruah laughed softly as they slipped into the door of the post office to sidle, then waited for the light to change. “You worry too much about that kit. He’ll be all right.”

“Oh, his survival is between him and the Powers now,” she said, “I know. But still …”

“ … you still feel responsible for him,” Urruah said as the light turned and they trotted out to cross the street, “because for a while he was our responsibility. Well, he’s passed his Ordeal, and we’re off that hook. But now we have to teach him teamwork.”

“It’s going to make the last month look like ten dead birds and no one to share them with,” Rhiow said. She peered up Lexington, trying to see past the hurrying ehhif. Humans could not see into that neighboring universe where cats went when sidled and in which string structure was obvious, but she could just make out Arhu’s little black-and-white shape, trailing radiance from passing resonated hyperstrings as he ran.

“At least he’s willing,” Urruah said. “More than he was before.”

“Well, we owe a lot of that to you … your good example.”

Urruah put his whiskers forward, pleased, as they came to the next corner and went across the side street at a trot. “Feels a little odd sometimes,” he said.

“What,” Rhiow said, putting hers forward too, “that the original breaker of every available rule should now be the big, stern, tough—”

“I didn’t break that many rules.”

“Oh? What about that dog, last month?”

“Come on, that was just a little fun.”

“Not for the dog. And the sausage guy on Thirty-Third—”

“That was an intervention. Those sausages were terrible.”

“As you found after tricking him into dropping one. And last year, the lady with the—”

“All right, all right!’ Urruah was laughing as they came to Fifty-Fifth. “So I like the occasional practical joke. Rhi, I don’t break any of the real rules. I do my job.”

She sighed, and then bumped her head against his as they stood by the corner of the building at Forty-Fifth and Lex, waiting for the light to change. “You do,” she said. “You are a wizard’s wizard, for all your jokes. Now get out of here and do whatever you have to do with your dumpster.”

“I thought you weren’t going to mention that,” Urruah said, and grinned. “Luck, Rhi—”

He galloped off across the street and down Forty-Fifth as the light changed, leaving her looking after him in mild bemusement.

He heard me thinking.

Well, wizards did occasionally overhear one another’s private thought when they had worked closely together for long enough. She and Saash had sometimes “underheard” each other this way: usually without warning, but not always at times of stress. It had been happening a little more frequently since Arhu came. Something to do with the change in the make-up of the team? … she thought. There was no way to tell.

And no time to spend worrying about it now. But even as Rhiow set off for her own lair, trotting on up Lex toward the upper East Side, she had to smile ironically at that. It was precisely because she was so good at worrying that she was the leader of this particular team. Losing the habit could mean losing the team … or worse.

For the time being, she would stick to worrying.

The way home was straightforward, this time of day: up Lex to Seventieth, then eastward to the block between First and Second. The street was fairly quiet for a change. Mostly it was old converted brownstones, though the corner apartment buildings were newer ones, and a few small cafes and stores were scattered along the block. She paused at the corner of Seventieth and Second to greet the big stocky duffel-coated doorman there, who always stooped to pet her. He was opening the door for one of the tenants: now he turned, bent down to her. “Hey there, Midnight, how ya doing?”