Диана Дуэйн - THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

A sudden coolness in Arhu's voice, in his eyes. "Nothing."
"Fwau," Rhiow said; a bit roughly, for her, but she thought it necessary. "Something else has to have been said first." She thought she knew what, but she didn't dare lead him….
Arhu stared at her. Rhiow thought she had never seen such a cold and suspicious look from a kit so young. Pity rose up in her; she wanted to cry, Who hurt you so badly that you've lost your kittenhood entire? What's been done to you? But Rhiow held her peace. She thought Arhu was going to give her no answer at all: he laid his head down sideways on the concrete again. But he did not close his eyes, staring out instead into the dimness of the garage.
Come on, Rhiow thought. Tell me.
"I was in the alley," Arhu said. "The food's good there: they throw stuff out of that grocery store on the other side of it, the Gristede's. But the pride there, Hrau and Eiff and Ihwin and them, they caught me and beat me again. They said they'd kill me, next time; and I couldn't move afterward, so I just lay where they left me. No one else came for a good while…. Then she must have come along while I was hurting. I couldn't see her: I didn't look, it hurt to move. She said, You could be powerful. The day could come when you could do all kinds of good things, when you could do anything, almost, with the strength I can give you… if you lived through the… test, the… hard time…" Arhu made an uncertain face, as if not sure how to render what had been said to him. "She said, If you take what I give you, and live through the trouble that follows—and it will follow—then you 'II be strong forever. Strong for all your lives." His voice was going matter-of-fact now, like someone repeating a milk-story heard long ago against his dam's belly."! wanted that. To be strong. I said, What could happen to me that would be worse than what's already happened? Do it. Give it to me. She said, Are you sure? Really sure? I said, Yes, hurry up, I want it now. She said, Then listen to what I'm going to say to you now, and if you believe in it, then say it yourself, out loud. And I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid. And it was quiet then."
"Hmm. Where was this alley, exactly?" said Urruah.
"Ru, shut up. You can check the Gristede's later. Arhu," Rhiow said, "say what she told you to."
A little silence, and then he began to speak, and a shiver went down Rhiow from nose to tail: for the voice was his, but the tone, the meaning and knowledge held in it, was another's. "In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art that is Its gift in Life's service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so—looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded…."
No hesitation, no uncertainty; as if it had been burned into his bones. Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all
looked at one another. "Then what happened?"
He stirred. "After a while, I felt better, and I saw I could get away—none of them were there. I walked out into the street. It was quiet. It was late, just the steam coming up out of the street, you know how it does. I walked a long time until I saw inside there, inside those doors. It was all bright and warm, but the doors were shut. I thought, It's no use, there's no way to get in. But then—" Now he sounded dreamily mystified, though at a remove. "Then someone— men I heard how to get in, if I wanted to. I knew more than I knew a minute before: a way to move, and words to say. And she said, Do that, and then go in and see what happens. I dare you. So I did. I said the words, and I walked in through the doors … through them!… and then on under the sky-roof, and on down through those littler doors, down into the dark…"
Arhu trailed off, and shivered. "I'm tired," he said, and closed his eyes.
Saash, lying beside him, looked at Rhiow thoughtfully, then started to wash the top of Arhu's head.
Rhiow sat down and let out a breath. Well, she said silently to the others, in the form of the Speech that goes privately from mind to mind, it would appear that the Powers That Be have sent us a brand-new wizard.
Not a wizard yet, Urruah said, his eyes narrowing. An overgrown kitten on Ordeal. And since when do the Powers dump a probationer on already-established wizards? The whole point of Ordeal is that you have to survive it alone.
None of us, Saash said, ever does it completely alone. There's always advice, at first: from Them, or other wizards. That's most likely why he's been sent to us. Who else has he got?
That's the problem, Rhiow said. You know there are no accidents in our line of work. This kit was sent to us. He's going to have to stay with us, at least until he's started to take this seriously.
No way! Urruah hissed.
Rhiow stared at him. You heard him, she said. "I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid." He's not clear yet about the meaning of the Oath he's taken. If he hadn't met us, that would be his problem, and the Powers': he'd live or die according to the conditions of his Ordeal and his use of the wizardry bestowed on him. But we found him—you found him!—and under the conditions of our own Oaths, we can't let him go until he understands what he's brought on himself. After he does, he's the Powers' business: he and They will decide whether he lives and becomes a wizard, or dies. But for the time being, we're a pride in the nurturing sense as well as the professional one… and that's how it will be. You have any problems with that?
She stared until Urruah dropped his eyes, though he growled in his throat as he did it. Rhiow cared not a dropped whisker for his noise. Urruah was still young in his wizardry but also profoundly committed to it, and though he could be lazy, tempery, and self-indulgent, he wouldn't attempt to deny responsibilities he knew were incumbent on him.
"So," Rhiow said aloud. "Saash, you seem to have become queen for the day…."
Saash made a small ironic smile, suggestive of someone enjoying a job more than she had expected. "It's all right, I can manage him. He'll sleep sound for a while…. I made one of the small healing wizardries to start the wounds cleaning themselves out."
"Make sure you sleep, too. I'll make rounds in the Terminal in a while; Har'lh wanted the gates double– checked. Urruah, it would help if you held yourself ready while Saash is awake, in case she needs anything."
"All right," he said, and he brightened. "It'll be ehhif lunchtime soon, and they'll be throwing lots of nice leftovers in that Dumpster around the corner. Then there's this alley, with the Gristede's. Thirty-eighth, you think, Saash?…"
Rhiow's whiskers went forward in amusement as she turned to jump down. For the moment, she wasn't sure which was motivating Urruah more: the desire for food or the prospect of a good scrap with a tough pride. "Eat hearty," she said, "and keep your ears unshredded. Call if you need anything: you'll know where to find me."
"Working," Urruah said, in a voice of good-natured pity.
Chapter Three
An hour later Rhiow strolled across the concourse again, under a "sky" glowing blue with reflection from brilliant sunshine glancing blindingly from the polished acreage of floor. She had checked the main tunnel gates first, and finished with the Lexington Avenue local gate, near the left-hand end of the platform. All their logs were reporting as they should have, including the malfunctioning gate's log, which now showed eight accesses since its repair. Things were back to normal.
For the time being, Rhiow thought, as she headed one last time toward the upper-level track gates. The problem with worldgates was that they were inherently unstable. Space didn't like to be broached, however briefly: it strove to re-seal itself by any means. Standing worldgates needed constant adjustment and maintenance to compensate for changes in local string structure caused by everything from seasonal changes in the Earth's orbit to anomalies in local conditions—solar wind, sunspots, shifts in the ionosphere or the planet's magnetic field. After a while you learned to anticipate the gates' quirks, and you routinely prepared for trouble before the full and new of the Moon, at the solstices, during close cometary passes. And every now and then, like today, the gates would find a new and totally unexpected way to make your life interesting.
Part of Rhiow's mind kept worrying at the problem of the malfunctioning gate's lost logs while she made her way over to the gate that was best for long-range accesses, the one near Track 32. Besides that, though, she was thinking about Arhu and about all those rats. There'd been no reason for so many of them to be down there. What had attracted them? Where had they gotten in from? … Probably some passageway to the outside needed to be blocked up. Somewhere under these streets, in the tangle of tunnels and conduits too complex for even one of the People to know, the rats must have found entirely too suitable a breeding– place. As she passed through the door to the platform, Rhiow's mouth quirked with distaste at the taint of dead rat that still lingered in the tunnel air. To her, rats were a symbol of the entropy that wizards spent their lives slowing: a persistent, hungry force, implacable, that might be fought to a standstill, but rarely more, and which would quickly grow past control if ignored….
Halfway down the platform, a slender blond-haired she-ehhif in dark skirt and jacket stood waiting, a briefcase under one arm. Rhiow smiled at the sight of her, knowing immediately that she was not waiting for the train—though she would claim to be, should anyone question her. The odds of her being noticed at all in so busy a place were minimal. If she were noticed, her manner of leaving wouldn't surprise anyone. She would simply be there one moment, and gone the next, and anyone watching would assume that they'd simply somehow missed seeing her walk away. Even if someone looked at that wizard right at the moment she passed the gate, the nature of wizardry itself would protect her. Almost no nonwizardly creature is willing to see the "impossible," even right under its nose, and shortly it finds all kinds of explanations for the strange thing it saw. This useful tendency meant that many short-duration wizardries didn't have to be concealed at all. Other kinds were simply invisible to most species, like the glowing, shimmering webwork of the gate where it hung face-on to the platform, the surface of the web slowly beginning to pucker inward in the beginning of patency.
Rhiow strolled on down to the she-ehhif. At the flicker of motion, seen out the corner of an eye, the woman turned and saw Rhiow coming, and raised her eyebrows. "Dai stiho," the woman said. "Was this one down this morning?"
"For a change, no," Rhiow said. 'This will come in phase in about thirty seconds. Got far to go?"
"Not too far, but Perm's a mess right now, and I'm on deadline," the woman said. "Vancouver, and then Kamchatka."
"Oh, the oil spill."
"If we can get authorization from the Powers That Be for the timeslide," the woman said, and smiled slyly, "it'll be, ' What oil spill?' But we won't know until we check with the A.A. in Vancouver."
"Well, dai," Rhiow said, as the woman turned toward the gate, "and good luck with the Advisory. And with Them… "
"Thanks. You go well, too," the woman said, stepping forward as the center of the gate's string structure puckered fully inward into metaextension. A human wizard couldn't see the strings without help, but she certainly could see the metaextension's sudden result. Hanging in the air before them was a round (or actually, spherical) window into deep gray shadow with the beginnings of dawn outside it, a sky paling above close-planted pine trees. A park, perhaps, or someone's backyard, there was no telling—a given wizard set the coordinates to suit his mission's needs. Had Rhiow been curious about the location, she could check the gate's log later. For the moment, she watched the young woman step into the predawn dimness, and heard her speak the word that completed the wizardry, releasing the hyperextended strings to pop back out of phase.
The gate-weft persisted in metaextension just a second or so—a safety feature—and then the curvature snapped back flat as if woven of rubber bands, light rippling up and down the resonating strings as the structure collapsed into a configuration with lower energy levels. The spherical intersection with otherwhere vanished: the tapestry of light lay flat against the air again, waiting.
That's working all right, at least, Rhiow thought. Last week, as the wizard had mentioned, this had been the gate that had needed adjustment. Three mornings out of five, its web had refused to extend properly, making it impossible to use without constant monitoring.
Saash had had to stand here sidled all during rush hour, running the gate on manual and being jostled by insensible commuters. Her comments later had left Rhiow's ears burning: that soft breathy little voice sounded unusually shocking when it swore.
Rhiow smiled at the memory, and said silently, Saash?
A pause, and then, Here.
I'm over by your favorite gate. I'm going Downside to make sure none of the others is fouling it. A slight shudder at the other end. Better you than me, Saash said. How's our foundling?
Sleeping still. Go ahead, Rhi; Urruah's around if anything's needed. Dai, then.
You too. And be careful…
Rhiow let the link between them lapse, and watched the gate, letting its weft steady and the colors pale from their use-excited state. Then she reached into the weave with a paw and plucked at one specific string, a control structure. The whole weave of the gate resonated with light and power as it ran a brief diagnostic on its own fabric. Then it displayed a smaller glowing pattern, a "tree" structure—many– branched at the top, narrowing to a single "trunk" at the bottom.
With a single claw, Rhiow snagged the trunk line. The string blazed, querying her identity: the access for which Rhiow was asking was restricted.
Rhiow hung on to the string. The power blazing in it ran up through claw and paw and sizzled along her nerves, hunt-big for her access "authorization" from the Powers That Be. It found that, along with Rhiow's memory of her own acceptance of the Oath, woven together into the tapestry of life-fire and thought-fire that was how the wizardry perceived her brain. Satisfied, the wizardry rebounded, ran burning out of her body and down the weft of the gate. The tapestry rippled with light; the string structure puckered inward. The sphere in the air snapped open.
Warm green shadow shading down to a rich brown, slanting golden light leaning through the dimness in shafts… And that smell. Rhiow did not linger but leapt through, and waved the gate closed behind her with a flirt of her tail.
She landed in loam, silent, springy, deep. Rhiow came down soundlessly but hard, as always forgetting the change until it actually came upon her—and then, within a breath's time, she was wondering how she'd ever borne the way she'd been until a second ago, bound into the body of one of the People, not even a very big body as the People reckoned such things. Rhiow lifted the paw that had plucked the gate-string out, found it ten times bigger, the claw an inch-long talon; looked down at the print that paw had left in the
soft loam, and found it as wide across as an ehhifs hand was long. The usual unbelieving look over her shoulder reassured her about her color: she was still glossy black. She would have found it difficult to handle if that had changed as well.
Rhiow stood surrounded by many brown pillar-trunks of shaggy-barked trees, limbless this far down: their first branches began far above her head, holding out thin-needled bunches of fronds like an ehhifs hands with fingers spread. No sky could be seen through the overlapping ceiling of them, though here and there, ahead and to the sides, some gap of growth let the sun come slanting through to pool, tawny-golden, on the needle-carpeted floor. Rhiow padded along toward where more light came slipping among trunks more sparsely set, a bluer, cooler radiance.
A few minutes later she stepped out from among the trees onto a mossy stone ledge lifted up above the world; she looked downward and outward, breathing deep. The breeze stirring among those trees and rustling their tops behind her had nothing to do with New York air: it was a wind from the morning of the world, bearing nothing but the faint clean smell of salt. In a sky of cloudless, burning blue, the sun swung low to her right, passing toward evening from afternoon; westward, low over the endless green hills, its light burnished everything gold.
It was summer here. It was always summer here. The sun lay warm on her pelt, a lovely basking heat. The wind was warm and always bore that salt tang from the glimmering golden-bronze expanse of ocean just to the east. The whole view, excepting the occasional cliff-face or ledge like the one on which Rhiow stood, was covered with the lush green of subtropical forest. Here was the world as it had been before magnetic fields and poles and climates had shifted. Whether it was actually the same world, the direct ancestor-in-timeline of Rhiow's own, or an alternate universe more centrally placed in the scheme of things, Rhiow wasn't sure—and she didn't think anyone else was, either. It didn't seem to make much difference. What mattered was that her own world was grounded in this one, based on it. This was a world more single and simple, the lands not yet fragmented: everything one warm, green blanket of mingled forest and grassland, from sea to sea. The wind breathed softly in the trees, and there was no other sound until from a great distance came a low coughing roar: one of her Kindred, the great cats of the ancient world, speaking his name or the name of his prey, to the wind.
At the sound, Rhiow shivered briefly, and then smiled at herself. The People were descended from the dire– cats and sabertooths who roamed these forests—or had descended from them, willingly, giving up size and power for other gifts. Either way, when one of the People returned to this place, the size of the cat's body once again matched the size of its soul, reflecting the stature and power both had held in the ancient days. Reflex might make Rhiow worry at the thought of meeting one of those great ones, but for the moment, she was at least as great.
Rhiow gazed down from that high place. Perhaps half a mile below and a mile eastward, the River plunged down in a torrent that she thought must haunt the dreams of the lesser streams of her day, trickles like the Mississippi and the Yangtze. In her own time and world, this would become the Hudson, old, wide, and tame. But now it leapt in a roaring half-mile-wide wall of water from the deep-cut edge of what would someday be the Continental Shelf, falling a mile and a half sheer to smash deafening into its first shattered cauldron-pools, and then tumbled, a lakeful every second, on down the crags and shelves of its growing canyon, into the clouded sea. The spray of the water's impact at such velocity, spread so wide, made a permanent rainbow as wide as Manhattan Island would be someday.
And the island— Rhiow looked behind her, northward: looked up. Lands would change in times to come. Continents would drift apart or be torn asunder. Countries would be raised up, thrown down, drowned, or buried. But through the geological ages, one mountain of this coastland would persist. The indomitable foundation of it, a solid block of basalt some ten miles square, would be fragmented by earthquakes, half– sunk with the settling of what would become North America; the land around it would be raised hundreds of feet by glacier-dumped silt and stone, and the water of the massive, melted icecaps would nearly submerge what remained, coming right up to what endured of its ancient, battered, flattened peak. But that had not happened yet. And even when it did, New Yorkers would remember—not knowing the memory's source—and call the place the Rock.
Rhiow looked up. Far higher than she could see, standing so close to its base, the Mountain reared up to high heaven. There was no judging its height. Its slopes, towering above and to either side like a wall built against the northern sky, were clothed in forest. The trees were mighty pale-barked pillars, primeval seed– parents of the darker, younger trees among which the gate had left her, some of the parent-trees now hundreds of feet in circumference. In rank after rank they speared upward, diminishing, finally becoming hidden among their own branches, merely a green cloud against the farthest heights. Amid the cloud, though, where the great peak began (even from this aspect) to narrow, one slender arrowy shape, distinct even at this distance, speared higher than all the others: one tree, the Tree—the most ancient of them, and, legend said, the first.
Rhiow gazed at it, mute with awe. Maybe someday she would have leisure to climb the Mountain and look up into those branches, to sit in the shadow of the Tree and listen to the voices that spoke, so legend said, from that immense green silence. Not now: perhaps not in this life: perhaps not until after the ninth one, if luck and her fate led her that far. It was dangerous enough for her just to be here—as dangerous as it was for any being to remain, for a prolonged period, out of its own time or space.
Meantime, though, she might briefly enjoy the sight of me true and ancient Manhattan, the living reality of which the steel– and concrete-clad island was a shadowy and mechanistic restatement. Ehhif built "skyscrapers" half in ambition, half in longing—uncertain why the ambition never satisfied them no matter how they achieved it, and not remembering what they longed for. They had been latecomers, the ehhif: they had not been here very long before the world changed, and this warm, still wilderness went chill and cruel. It was the Lone One's fault, of course. That fact the ehhif dimly remembered in their own legends, just as they vaguely remembered the Tree, and an ancient choice ill-made, and the sorrow of something irrevocably lost.
Rhiow sighed, and turned her back on the lulling vista of the Old World, padding back among the trees. Better get on with what she had come here to do, before being here too long did her harm.
Rhiow made her way silently through the dimness beneath the trees toward the great cliff-outcroppings on this side of the Mountain's foot. Thinking of the Lone One brought Arhu to mind again. No question who he heard speaking to him, Rhiow thought, the first time, at least. She knew well enough the voice that had awakened her this morning, and which spoke to all feline wizards on behalf of the Powers That Be: the wisdom that first whispered in your ear to offer you the Art and the promise of your Ordeal, and then, assuming you survived, taught you the details of wizardry from day to day and passed on your assignments. Tradition said the one Who actually spoke was Iau's daughter, Hrau'f the Silent, Whose task was to order creation, making rules and setting them in place. The tradition seemed likely enough to Rhiow: the voice you "heard" had a she-ish sense about it and a tinge of humor that agreed with the old stories' accounts of Hrau'fs quiet delight in bringing order from chaos.
But the question remained: whose voice had spoken second? For Queen Iau had other daughters. There was another "she" involved with wizardry, one whose methods were subtle, whose intentions were ambivalent—and rarely good for the wizard….
Rhiow came to the bottom of the scree-slope that ran up to the base of the cliff-face. Here the trees bore the scars of old stonefalls: boulders lay among the pine needles, and the brown soft carpet grew thinner toward the sheer bare cliff. At the top of the scree-slope, jagged, silent, and dark, yawned the entrance to the caves.
She padded up the stones, paused on the flat rubble-strewn slab that served for a threshold, and gazed in. It was not totally dark inside, not this near to the opening—and not where the master anchor-structures for the New York gates all hung, a blazing complex of shifting, rippling webs and wefts, burning in the still, cool air of the outer cave.
Rhiow sat down and just looked at them, as she always did when she made this trip. Learning the way these patterns looked had been one of her first tasks as a young wizard. Her Ordeal had revealed that she had an aptitude for this kind of work, and afterward the Powers had assigned Rhiow to old Ffairh to develop her talent. She remembered sitting here with him for the first time, her haunches shifting with impatience, both with delight at her splendidly big new body, and with the desire to get up and do something about the patterns that hung before her, singing and streaming with power. Or rather, to do something with them.
Ffairh had stared at her, eyes gleaming, and Rhiow had stopped her fidgeting and sat very still under his regard. Ffairh had been nothing much to look at in their homeworld—a scruffy black-and-white tom without even the rough distinction of scars, crooked in the hind leg and tail from where the cab hit him. Here, though, where the soul ruled the body, Ffairh stood nearly five feet high at the shaggy, brindled shoulder, and the sabers of bis fangs were nearly as long as Rhiow's whole body back home. The weight and majesty of his presence was immense, and the amused annoyance in those amber eyes, which down by Track 116 had seemed merely funny, now took on a more dangerous quality.
"Don't be so quick to want to tamper," Ffairh had said. "No one exploring this world has been able to find a time when these wizardries weren't here… and exocausal spell-workings like that always mean the Powers are involved. No one knows for sure which One wove them. Aaurh herself, maybe: they're strong enough for it. They're old and strong enough to be a little alive. They have to be, to take care of themselves and protect themselves from misuse: for wizards can't watch them all the time. Most of the time, though .. . and you'll find that's what you'll spend these next few lives doing, unless They retire you, or you slip up…."
He had been right about that, as about most things. Ffairh was two years gone now: where, Rhiow had no idea. He had let his sixth life go peacefully, in extreme old age, and if he'd since come back, Rhiow had yet to meet him. But he had refused to go before completely training his replacement. Now, as she sat and examined the gate-wefts for abnormalities, Rhiow smiled at the memory of her head ringing from yet another of the old curmudgeon's ferocious cuffs and Ffairh's often-repeated shout, "Will you hurry up and learn this stuff so I can die?!"
She had learned. She came here more often than need strictly required, though not so often for repeated exposure to endanger her: about that issue, Rhiow was most scrupulous. She was just as scrupulous, though, about knowing the gates well, and knowing this part of them—the root of the installation—best of all. The wizardries that manifested as the string structures of the four Grand Central gates were only extensions: branches, as it were, of the Tree. The "trunk" of the spells, the master control structure for each of them, was here, in the Old World—the upper levels of the true Downside, of which Grand Central's and Penn's "downsides" were mere sketchy restatements. The "roots" of the spell structure, of course, went farther down … much farther, into the endless, tangled caverns, down to the roots of the Mountain, the heart of this world. But that wasn't somewhere Rhiow would go unless the Powers That Be specifically ordered it They never had, during her management of these gates, and Rhiow hoped they never would. Ffairh had gone once and had described that intervention to her, in a quiet, dry fifteen– minute monologue that had given her nightmares for weeks.
But there was no need to consider any action so radical at the moment. Rhiow spent a good while looking over the interrelationships of the Grand Central gates with the Penn complex, making sure there were no accidental overlaps or frayings of the master patterns, which needed to remain discrete. It happened sometimes that some shift in natural forces—a meteor strike, a solar microflare—would so disrupt "normal" space that the spell patterns in it would be disrupted, too, jumping loose from the structures that held them. Then the abnormally released forces would "backlash" down the connection to the master structures here in the Old World, causing a string to pop loose and foul some other pattern. There was no sign of mat, though. The four Grand Central patterns and the smaller, more tightly arrayed Penn wefts were showing good separation.
Rhiow got up and padded to the shifting, shimmering weft of the third of the Grand Central gates, the north-sider at Track 26. A long while she scrutinized it, watching the interplay of forces, the colors shimmering in and out Everything looked fine.
Truth was more than looks, though. Rhiow took a few moments to prepare herself, men reached out a paw, as she had done in Grand Central, extended a claw, and hooked it into the wizardry's interrogation weave.
The question, as always, was who was interrogating whom. How you put Me into a wizardry, a bodiless thing made of words and intent, Rhiow wasn't sure, but if Aaurh had indeed set the gates here, that was explanation enough. She had not invented life, but she was the Power that had implemented it, and the stories said that, one way or another, life got into most of what she did. The gate certainly thought it was alive. While Rhiow quested down its structure, assessing it from inside as she might have assessed her own body for hurt or trouble, the gate felt it had the right to do the same with her. It was unnerving, to feel something un-feline, and older than your world, come sliding down your nerves and through your brain, rummaging through your memories and testing your reflexes. Quite cool, it was, quite matter-of-fact, but disturbed.
Disturbed. So was Rhiow when the gate was finished with her, and she unhooked her claw from the blazing, softly humming weft. Panting and blinking, she stood there a moment with streaked and blurring afterimages burning in her eyes: the all-pervasive tangle of strings and energies that was the way the gate perceived the world all the time. To the gate, proper visual images of concrete physical structures were alien. Therefore there was no image or picture of whoever had come and—interfered with it—
Rhiow started to get normal vision back again. Still troubled by both her contact with the gate and by what it had perceived, she sat down and began to wash her face, trying to sort out the gate's perceptions and make sense of them.
Something had interfered. Someone. The gate did not deal in names and had no pictures: there was merely a sense of some presence, a personality, interposing itself between one group of words of control and another, breaking a pattern. Associated with that impression was a sense that the interposition was no accident: it was meant. But for what purpose, by whom, there was no indication.
And when that break in the pattern was made, something else had thrust through. The gate held no record of what that thing or force might have been: the energy-strands holding the gate's logs had been unraveled and restrung. They now lay bright and straight in the weave, completely devoid of data. The initial break was sealed over by the intervention Rhiow and the team had done this morning. But the gate, in its way, was as distraught as anyone might be to wake up and find himself missing a day of his life.
Rhiow was upset, too. What came through… ? she thought, gazing at the gate-weft. She thought of the dry chill flowing from the jagged, empty tear in the air they'd found waiting for them that morning. A void place… There were enough of those, away in the outer fringes of being, worlds where life had never "taken." Other forces moving among the worlds liked such places. They used them to hide while preparing attacks against what they hated: the worlds full of light and life, closer to the Heart of things …
Rhiow shuddered. She needed advice. Specifically, she needed to talk to Carl, and to her local Senior, Ehef, when she had rested and sorted her thoughts out. But rest would have to come first.
Rhiow stood up and once more slipped a paw into the gate-weft, watching the light ripple away from where she felt around for its control structures. You're all right now, she said to the gate. Don't worry; we'll find out what happened.
From the gate came a sense of uncertainty, but also of willingness to be convinced. Rhiow smiled, then looked wistfully at the huge, glossy, taloned paw thrust into the webwork. It would be delightful to stay here longer—to slip down into those ancient forests and hunt real game, something nobler and more satisfying to the soul than mice: to run free in the glades and endless grasslands of a place where the word "concrete" had no meaning, to hold your head up and snuff air that tasted new-made because it was…
Her claw found the string that managed the gate's custom access routines. The gate's identification query sizzled down her nerves. Rhiow held still and let it complete the identification, and when it was done, paused. Just for a while… if wouldn't hurt…
Rhiow sighed, plucked the string toward her, softly recited in the Speech the spatial and temporal coordinates she wanted, and let the string loose.
The whole weft-structure sang and blazed. Before her, the sphere of intersection with her own world snapped into being. A circular-seeming window into gray stone, gray concrete, a long view over jagged pallid towers to a sky smoggy gray below and smoggy blue above, and the sun struggling to shine through it: steam smells, chemical smells, houf-droppings, car exhaust…
Rhiow looked over her shoulder, out of the cave, into the green light with its promise of gold beyond … then leapt into the circle and through, down onto the gravel of the rooftop next to her building. Behind her, with a clap of sound that any ehhif would mistake for a car backfiring, the gate snapped shut. Rhiow came down lightly, so lightly she almost felt herself not to be there at all. She glanced at her forepaw again. It seemed unreal for it to be so small. But this was reality.
Such as it was …
When she got back up to the apartment's terrace again, the glass terrace doors were open, and Hhuha and Iaehh were having breakfast at the little table near it. The whole place smelled deliciously of bacon. "Well, look who's here!" Iaehh said. "Just in time for brunch."
"She's been out enjoying this pretty day," Hhuha said, stroking Rhiow as she came past her chair. "It's so nice and sunny out. Mike, you should feel her, she's so warm…."
Rhiow smiled wryly. Iaehh chuckled. "No accidents: this cat's timing is perfect. I know what she wants."
"Sleep, mostly," Rhiow said, sitting down wearily and watching him fish around on his plate for something to give her. "And if you'd had the morning I had, you'd want some, too. These four-hour shifts, they're deadly."
"All right, all right, be patient," Iaehh said, and reached Rhiow down a piece of bacon. "Here."
Rhiow took it gladly enough; she just wished she wasn't falling asleep on her feet "You spoil that cat," Hhuha said, getting up and going over to theffrihh. "I know what she wants. She wants more of that tuna. You should have seen her dive into it this morning! We've got to get some more of that."
"Oh Queen Iau," Rhiow muttered around the mouthful, "give me strength." She cocked an eye up at Iaehh. "And some more of that before I go have a nap …"
Chapter Four
The hour's main news stories, from National Public Radio: I'm Bob Edwards…. The South Kamchatka oil spill has begun to disperse after Tropical Storm Bertram shifted course northeastward in the early morning hours, Pacific time, causing near-record swells between the Bay of Kronockji and Shumshu Island at the southern end of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The spill from the crippled Japanese tanker Amaterasu Maru threatened the economically important fishing grounds off the disputed Kurile Islands, and had significantly increased tensions between Russia and Japan at a time when the disposition of the Kuriles, claimed by Japan but occupied by the Soviet Union since the end of World War Two, had been thought by diplomatic sources to be nearing resolution. —President Yeltsin's special envoy Anatoly Krischov has returned to Moscow from Teheran after talks aimed at resolving the escalating border crisis in the Atrek valley between Iran and Turkmenistan, where rebel tribesmen have clashed with both Iranian and Russian government forces for the fourth day in…"
Rhiow rolled over on her back, stretched all her legs in the air, and yawned, blinking in the late afternoon light. The sound of the ra'hio being turned on had awakened her. A long day, she thought. I don't usually oversleep like this…
She twisted her head around so that she was looking at the living room upside down. A soft rustling of papers had told Rhiow even before her eyes were open that Hhuha had just sat back down at the other end of the couch. Iaehh was nowhere to be seen; Rhiow's ears told her that he was not in the sleeping room, or the room where he and Hhuha bathed and did their hiouh. So he was out running, and could be gone for as little as a few minutes or as long as several hours.
Rhiow knew in a general way that Iaehh was doing this to stay healthy, but sometimes she thought he overdid it, and Hhuha thought so, too; depending on her mood, she either teased or scolded him about it. "You're really increasing your chances of getting hit by a truck one of these days," she would say, either laughing or frowning, and Iaehh would retort, "Better that than increasing my chances of getting hit by a massive cardiac, like Dad, and Uncle Robbie, and …" Then they would box each other's ears verbally for a while, and end up stroking each other for a while after that. Really, they were very much like People sometimes.
Rhiow yawned again, looking upside down at Hhuha. Hhuha glanced over at her and said, "You slept a long time, puss." She reached over and stroked her.
Rhiow grabbed Hhuha's hand, gave it a quick lick, then let it go and started washing before going for her breakfast. So, Rhiow thought while the news headlines finished, there's still an oil spill. This by itself didn't surprise her. Timeslides, like any wizardry meant to alter the natural flow and unfolding of time, were rarely sanctioned when other options were available. Probably the Area Advisory for the Pacific Region had noticed the availability of a handy alternative instrumentality: natural, "transparent" in terms of being unlikely to arouse ehhif suspicions, and fairly easily influenced—of all the languages that humans use, only the wizardly Speech has no equivalent idiom for "everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it."
Oh well, Rhiow thought. One less thing to worry about. She spent a couple more minutes putting her back fur and tail in order, then got down off the couch, stretched fore and aft, and strolled over to the food dish. Halfway across the room, her nose told her it was that tuna stuff again, but she was too hungry to argue the point.
Wouldn't I just love to walk over to you, she thought about halfway down the bowl, looking over her shoulder at Hhuha, and say to you, loud and clear, "I'd think that last raise would let you spend at least sixty cents a can." But rules are rules…
Rhiow had a long drink, then strolled back to jump up on the couch and have a proper wash this time. She had finished with her head and ears when Hhuha got up, went to the dining room, and came back with still more papers. Rhiow looked at them with distaste.
As Hhuha sighed and put the new load down on the couch, Rhiow got up, stretched again, and carefully sat herself down on the papers; then she put her left rear leg up past her left ear and began to wash her back end. It was body language that even humans seemed sometimes to understand.
Rhiow was pretty sure that Hhuha understood it, but right now she just breathed out wearily. She picked Rhiow up off the pile and put her on the couch next to it, saying, "Oh, come on, you, why do you always
have to sit on my paperwork?"
"I'm sitting on it because you hate it," Rhiow said. She sat down on it again, then hunkered down and began kneading her claws into the paperwork, punching holes in the top sheet and wrinkling it and all the others under it.
"Hey, don't do that, I need those!"
"No, you don't. They make you crazy. You shouldn't do this stuff on the weekend: it's bad enough that they make you do it all day during the week." Rhiow rolled over off the paper-pile, grabbing some of the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.
"Oh, kitty, don't!" Hhuha began picking the papers up. "Not that I wouldn't like to myself," she added under her breath.
"See? And why you should pay attention to that stuff when I'm here, I can't understand," Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha picked her up and put her in her lap. "See, isn't that better? You don't need this junk. You need a cat."
"Talk talk, chatter chatter," Hhuha said under her breath, straightening the paperwork out. "Probably you're trying to tell me I shouldn't bring my work home. Or more likely it's something about cat food."
"Yes, now that you mention—" Rhiow made a last swipe at one piece of the paperwork as it went past her nose in Hhuha's hand. "Hey, watch those claws," Hhuha said.
"I would never scratch you, you know that," Rhiow said, settling. "Unless you got slow. Put that stuff down…………. "
Hhuha started rubbing behind Rhiow's ears, and Rhiow went unfocused for a little while, purring. There were People, she knew, who saw the whole business of "having" an ehhif as being, at best, old-fashioned— at worst, very politically incorrect. The two species really had no common ground, some People said. They claimed that there could be no real relationships between carnivores and omnivores, predators and hunter-gatherers: only cohabitation of a crude and finally unsatisfactory kind. Cats who held this opinion usually would go on at great length about the imprisonment of People against their will, and the necessity to free them from their captivity if at all possible—or, at the very least, to raise their consciousness about it so that, no matter how pleasant the environment, no matter how tasty the food and how "kind" the treatment, they would never forget that they were prisoners, and never forget their own identity as a People presently oppressed, but who someday would be free.
When all ehhif civilization falls, maybe, Rhiow thought, with a dry look. Make every ehhif in the city vanish, right this second, and turn every cat in Manhattan loose: how many of them will be alive in three weeks? Cry "freedom!"—and then try to find something to eat when all you know about is Friskies Buffet.
She made a small face, then, at her own irony. Maybe it would be better if all cats lived free in the wild, out of buildings, out of ehhif influence; maybe it would be better if that influence had never come about in the first place. But the world was the way that it was, and such things weren't going to be happening any time soon. The truth remained that ehhif kept People and that a lot of People liked it… and she was one.
That's the problem, of course, she thought. We're embarrassed to admit enjoying interdependence. Too
many of us have bought into the idea that we're somehow "independent" in our environment to start with. As if we can stop eating or breathing any time we want…
She sighed and stretched again while Hhuha paused in her scratching and started going through her papers once more. Anyway, what's the point, Rhiow thought, in making sure People are so very aware that they're oppressed, when for most of them there's nothing they can do about it? And in many cases, when they truly don't want to do anything, the awareness does nothing but make them feel guilty… thus making them more like ehhif than anything else that could have been done to them. That outwardly imposed awareness satisfies no one but the "activist" People who impose it. "I suffer, therefore you should too…"
Granted, Rhiow's own position was a privileged one and made holding such a viewpoint easy. All languages are subsets of the Speech, and a wizard, by definition at least conversant with the Speech if not fluent in it, is able to understand anything that can speak (and many things that can't). Rhiow's life with her ehhif was certainly made simpler by the fact that she could clearly understand what they were saying. Unfortunately, most cats couldn't do the same, which tended to create a fair amount of friction.
Not that matters were perfect for her either. Rhiow found, to her annoyance, that she had slowly started becoming bilingual in Human and Ailurin. She kept finding herself thinking in slang-ehhif terms like ra'hio and o'hra: poor usage at best. Her dam, who had always been so carefully spoken, would have been shocked.
Rhi? said Saash inside her. I'm awake, Rhiow said silently.
Took you long enough, Saash said. Believe me, when this is over, I've got a lot of sleep to make up. Oh? Rhiow said.
Our youngster, Saash said dryly, has been awake and lively for a good while now. It's been exciting trying to keep him in here, and I don't think I'll be able to do it much longer. I had to teach him to sidle to distract him even this long—
You mean you had to try to teach him to sidle, Rhiow said. I mean he's been sidling for the last two hours, said Saash.
Rhiow bunked at that. Nearly all wizardry cats had an aptitude for sidling, but most took at least a week to learn it; many took months. Sweet Queen about us, Rhiow thought, what have the Powers sent us? Besides trouble …
All right, Rhiow said to Saash. I'll be along in half an hour or so. Where's Urruah?
He's having a break, Saash said. I sent him off early…. I thought maybe there was going to be a murder.
Oh joy, Rhiow thought. To Saash, she said, Did he go off to the park? He mentioned the other day that some big tom thing would be going on over there.
He mentioned it to me too, Saash said. Not that I understood one word in five of what he was saying: it got technical. He left in a hurry, anyway, and I didn't want to try to keep him.
I just bet, Rhiow thought. When Urruah was in one of those moods, it was more than your ears were worth to try to slow him down. All right. Hold the den; I'll be along.
Somewhat regretfully—for quiet times like this seemed to be getting rarer and rarer these days—Rhiow got down out of Hhuha's lap, sat down on the floor and finished her wash, then went out to the terrace to use the hiouh-box.
Afterward, she made her way down from the terrace to the top of the nearby building and did her meditation—not facing east for once, but westward. The smog had been bad today; Rhiow was glad she had been inside with the air-conditioning. But now that the day was cooling, a slight offshore breeze had sprung up, and the ozone level was dropping, so that you could at least breathe without your chest feeling tight. And—probably the only positive aspect to such a day—the Sun was going down in a blaze of unaccustomed splendor, its disk bloated to half again its proper size and blunted to a beaten-copper radiance by the thick warm air. Down the westward-reaching street, windows flashed the orange-gold light back in fragments; to either side of Rhiow, and behind her, skyscraper-glass glowed and in the heat-haze almost seemed to run, glazed red or gold or molten smoky amber by the westering light.
Rhiow tucked herself down and considered the disk of fire as it sank toward the Palisades, gilding the waters of the Hudson. As a wizard, she knew quite well that what she saw was Earth's nearest star, a glimpse of the fusion that was stepchild to the power that started this universe running. Rhoua was what People called it. The word was a metonymy: Rhoua was a name of Queen Iau, of the One, in Her aspect as beginner and ender of physical life. Once cats had understood the Sun only in the abstract, as life's kindler. It had taken a while for them to grasp the concept of the Sun as just one more star among many, but when they did, they still kept the old nickname.
The older name for the Sun had been Rhoua'i'th, Rhoua's Eye: the only one of Her eyes that the world saw, or would see, at least for a good while yet. That one open Eye saw thoughts, saw hearts, knew the realities beneath external seemings. The other Eye saw those and everything else as well; but no one saw it. It would not open until matter was needed no more, and in its opening, all solid things would fade like sleep from an opening eye. A blink or two, and everything that still existed would be revealed in true form, perhaps final form—though that was uncertain, for the gathered knowledge of matters wizardly, which cat-wizards called The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye, said little about time after the Last Time or about how existence would go after Existence, in terms of matter, past its sell-by date. But there was little need to worry about it just yet while Rhoua still winked. The day the wink turned to a two-eyed gaze … then would be the time to be concerned.
… For my own part, Rhiow told the fading day, 7 know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. Some I will meet today who think that day is blind and that night lies with its eyes closed; that the Gaze doesn't see them, or doesn't care. Their certainty of blindness, though, need not mean anything to me. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always…
Rhiow finished her meditation and stood, stretching herself thoroughly and giving one last look to that great burning disk as the apartment buildings of the western Hudson shore began to rear black against it. Having, like many other wizards, done her share of off-planet work, Rhiow found it difficult to think of Rhoua's Eye as anything less than the fiery heart of the solar system. It still amused her, sometimes, that when the People had found out about this, they had had a lot of trouble explaining the concept to the ehhif.
Some of the earlier paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were potentially rather embarrassing, or at best amusing, in this regard—images of big eyes and sun-disks teetering precariously on top of cat– headed people, all hilariously eloquent of ehhif confusion, even in those days when ehhif language was much closer to Hauhai, and understanding should have been at least possible if not easy.
Rhiow made her way down to the street, sidled before she passed the iron door between her and the sidewalk, and then slipped under, heading west for Central Park.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
She was surprised to meet Urruah halfway, making his way along East Sixty-eighth Street through the softly falling twilight, with a slightly dejected air. He slipped into the doorway of a brownstone and sat down, looking absently across the street at the open kitchen door of a Chinese restaurant. Clouds of fluorescent-lit steam and good smells were coming out of it, along with the sounds of a lot of shouting and the frantic stirring of woks.
"I would have thought you'd still be in the park," Rhiow said, sitting down beside him.
"The rehearsal's been put off until tomorrow," Urruah said. "One of the toms is off his song."
Rhiow made an oh-really expression. Urruah, like most toms, had a more or less constant fascination with song. She had originally been completely unable to understand why a tom should be interested in the mating noises that another species made: still less when the other species was not making these noises as part of mating, but because it was thinking about mating, in the abstract. But Urruah had gone on to explain that this particular kind of ehhif singing, called o'hra, was not simply about sex but was also some kind of storytelling. That had made Rhiow feel somewhat better about it all, for storytelling was another matter. Dams sang stories to their kits, grown People purred them to one another—gossip and myth, history and legend: no one simply spoke the past. It was rude. The thought that ehhif did the same in song made Rhiow feel oddly closer to them, and made her feel less like Urruah was doing something culturally, if not morally, perverse.
"So," Rhiow said, "what will they do now?"
"They'll keep building that big structure down at the end of the Great Lawn; that wasn't going to be finished until tonight anyway. Tomorrow they'll do the sound tests and the rest of the rehearsal. The other two toms are fine, so there shouldn't be any more delays."
Rhiow washed an ear briefly. "All right," she said. "We're going to have to take Arhu out and show him our beat… not that I particularly care to be doing that so soon, but he already knows how to sidle—"
"Whose good idea was that?" Urruah said, narrowing his eyes in annoyance.
"Mine," Rhiow said, "since you ask. Come on, Urruah! He would have had to learn eventually anyway … and it turns out he's a quick study. That may save his life, or, if he dies on Ordeal, who knows, it may make the difference between him getting his job done and not getting it done. Which is what counts, isn't it?"
"Humf," Urruah said, and looked across the street again at the restaurant. "Chicken …"
"Never mind the chicken. I want you on-site with him for this first evening at least, and as many of the next few evenings as possible. He needs a good male role model so that we can start getting him in shape for whatever's going to happen to him." She gave him an approving look. "I just want you to know that I think you're handling all this very well."
"I am a professional," Urruah said, "even if he does make my teeth itch…. But something else is on my mind, not just o'hra, as you doubtless believe. That oil spill intervention you mentioned? I heard that they got the authorization for the timeslide they wanted."
Rhiow bunked at that. "Really? Then why is the spill still on the news? That whole timeline should have 'healed over'… excised itself. We're well past the 'uncertainty period' for such small change."
"Something went wrong with it."
Rhiow put her whiskers back in concern. Timeslides were expensive wizardries, but also fairly simple and straightforward ones: hearing that something had "gone wrong" with a timeslide was like hearing that something had gone wrong with gravity. "Where did you hear about that?"
"Rahiw told me; he heard it from Ehef—he saw him this morning."
The source was certainly reliable. "Well, the situation's not a total loss anyway," Rhiow said. "That tropical storm sure 'changed course.' You could tell that was an intervention with your whiskers cut off."
"Well, of course. But not the intended one. And a failed timeslide …" Urruah's tail lashed. "Pretty weird, if you ask me."
"Probably some local problem," Rhiow said. "Sunspots, for all I know: we're near the eleven-year maximum. If I talk to Har'lh again this week, I'll ask him about it."
"Sunspots," Urruah said, as if not at all convinced. But he got up, stretched, and the two of them headed back down East Sixty-eighth together.
They wove their way along the sidewalk, taking care to avoid the hurrying pedestrians. As they paused at the corner of Sixty-eighth and Lex, Urruah said, "There he is."
"Where?"
"The billboard."
Rhiow tucked herself well in from the corner, right against the wall of the dry cleaner's there, to look at the billboard on the building across the street. There was a picture on it—one of those flat representations that ehhif used—and some words. Rhiow looked at those first, deciphering them; though the Speech gave her understanding of the words, sometimes the letterings that ehhif used could slow you down. '"The—three —' What's a 'tenor'?"
"It's a kind of voice. Fvais, we would say; a little on the high side, but not the highest."
Rhiow turned her attention to the picture and squinted at it for a good while; there was a trick to seeing these flat representations that ehhif used—you had to look at them just right. When she finally thought she had grasped the meaning of what she saw, she said to Urruah, "So after they sing, are they going to fight?"
The word she used was sth'hruiss, suggesting the kind of physical altercation that often broke out when territory or multiple females were at issue.
"No, it's just hrui't: voices only, no claws. They do it everywhere they go."
That made Rhiow stare, and then shake her head till her ears rattled. "Are they a pride? A pride of males? What a weird idea."
Urruah shook his head. "I don't know if I understand it myself," he said. "I think ehhif manage that kind of thing differently … but don't ask me for details."
Rhiow was determined not to. "Which one's your fellow, then? The one who went off voice."
"The one in the middle."
"He's awfully big for an ehhif, isn't he?"
"Very," Urruah had said with satisfaction and (Rhiow thought) a touch of envy. "He must have won hundreds of fights. Probably a tremendous success with the shes."
Rhiow thought that it didn't look like the kind of "big" that won fights. She had seen pictures of the ehhif– toms who fought for audiences over at Madison Square Garden, and they seemed to carry a lot less weight than this ehhif. However, she supposed you couldn't always judge by sight. This one might be better with the claws and teeth than he looked.
"So all these ehhif are coming to listen to him in, what is it, three nights from now? Is he that good?"
"He is magnificently loud," said Urruah, his voice nearly reverent. "You can hear him for miles on a still night, even without artificial aids."
Rhiow put her whiskers forward, impressed almost against her will. "If I'm free tomorrow," she said, "maybe I'll go with you to have a look at this rehearsal."
"Oh, Rhiow, you'll love it!" They crossed the street and walked back toward the garage where Saash stayed, and Urruah started telling Rhiow all about ah'rias and ssoh'phraohs and endless other specialized terms and details, and Dam knew what all else, until Rhiow simply began saying "Yes," and "Isn't that interesting," and anything else she could think of, so as not to let on how wildly boring all this was. For me, anyway, she thought. Occasionally, thinking he'd been invited to, or that someone nearby was in the slightest bit interested, Urruah went off on one of these tangents. If you didn't want to hurt his feelings— and mostly his partners didn't, knowing how it felt to have a personal passion used as a scratching-post by the uncaring—there was nothing much you could do but nod and listen as politely as you could for as long as you could, then escape: the suddenly discovered need to do houih was usually a good excuse. Rhiow couldn't do that just now, but once more she found herself thinking that Urruah was a wonderful example of one of a wizard's most useful traits: the ability to carry around large amounts of potentially useless information for prolonged periods. That, she thought, he's got in abundance.
"Oh, I forgot," she said at last, almost grateful to have something else to talk about. "Did you talk to the canine Senior about that houff?"
"Yes," Urruah said. "Rraah's going to arrange some kind of accident for him—have him 'accidentally' cut loose from the building site, late one night. Apparently he's got a home waiting for him already."
"Good," Rhiow said. They turned the corner into Fifty-sixth, and down the street Rhiow saw Saash sitting outside the garage, a little to one side of the door, through which light poured out into the evening. She wasn't even sidled, and her fur looked somewhat ruffled, as if she was too annoyed to put it in order. Cars were going in and out at the usual rate, and Saash was ignoring them, which was unusual; she was normally very traffic-shy, but right now she just sat there and glared.
Saash looked at Rhiow and Urruah as they came up to her, and as the saying goes, if looks were claws, their ears would have been in rags. "What kept you?" she said.
"Where's the wonder child?" Urraah said.
"He's inside," Saash said, "playing hide-and-seek with the staff. Abha'h's going out of his mind; he can't understand why one minute he can see the new kitten and the next minute he can't. Fortunately he thinks it's funny, and he just assumes that Arhu is hiding under one car or another. However, he's also decided that the new kitten should have flea powder put on him, and needless to say, that's the moment Arhu chooses to disappear and not come visible again, which means I got the flea powder instead of him—"
Urruah began to laugh. Saash gave him a sour look and said, "Oh yes, it's just hilarious. You should have heard the little sswiass laughing. I hope I get to hear him laugh at you like that."
Rhiow suppressed her smile. "Who knows, you may get your chance. Did you get some sleep, finally?"
"Some. How about you?'
"I've slept better," Rhiow said. "I had odd dreams…."
"After having been in the real Downside," Saash said, relaxing enough to scratch, "that's hardly a surprise. Just think of the last time …"
"I know." Rhiow preferred not to. "But I'm not sure I noticed everything I should have there: I want to go talk to Ehef this evening."
"About the gate?"
"Not entirely." Rhiow twitched an ear back toward the depths of the garage. "The circumstances, our involvement with him… the situation isn't strictly unusual, but it's always good to get a second opinion."
Saash flicked her tail in somewhat sardonic agreement. "Should be interesting. Come on," she said, "let's go see if Abha'h's caught him yet."
They waited for a break in the traffic, then slipped in through the door and made their way down into the garage and among the racks of parked cars. They passed Abad, who was looking under some of the cars racked up front in a resigned sort of way; he was holding a can of flea powder. Saash gave it a dirty look as they passed.
They found Arhu crouching under a car near the back of the garage, snickering to himself as he watched Abad's feet going back and forth under the racks. He looked up as they came, with an expression that was
much less alarmed than any Rhiow had seen on him yet, but the edge of hostility on his amusement was one that she didn't care for much. "Well, hunt's luck to you, Arhu," she said, politely enough, "though it looks like you're doing all right in that department … if you consider this a hunt and not mere mouse-play." She and the others hunkered down by him.
"Might as well be," Arhu said after a moment. He watched Abad go off. "They're real easy to fool, ehhif." "If you couldn't sidle, you'd be singing another song," said Urruah. "But I can. I'm a wizard!"
Rhiow smiled a slight, tart smile. "We are wizards," she said. "You are still only a probationer-wizard, on Ordeal."
"But I can do stuff already!" Arhu said. "I went through the doors last night! And I'm sidling!" He got up and did it while they watched, strolling to and fro under the metal ramp-framework, and weaving in and out among the strings: there one moment and gone the next, and then briefly occluded in stripes of visibility and nonvisibility, as if strutting behind a set of invisible, vertical Venetian blinds. He looked ineffably smug, as only a new wizard can when he first feels the power sizzling under his skin.
"Not a bad start," Saash said.
Urruah snorted. "You kidding? That's one of the most basic wizardries there is. Even some cats who aren't wizards can do it. Don't flatter him, Saash. He'll think he really might amount to something." His slow smile began. "Then again, go ahead, let him think that. He'll just try some dumb stunt and get killed sooner. One less thing to worry about."
Rhiow turned and clouted Urruah on the top of his head, with her claws out, though not hard enough to really addle him. He crouched down a very little, eyeing her, his ears a bit flat. When I want your assessment of his talents, she said silently, I'll ask you for it, Mister Couldn't-keep-a-dog-from-eating-his– mouse-earlier. Aloud she said, "You know as well as I do that the Oath requires the protection of all life, including life that annoys you. So just stuff your tail in it"
Urruah glared at her, turned his head away. Rhiow looked back at Arhu. 'Tell me something to start with. What do you know about wizards? I don't mean what Saash has been telling you, though it's plain she hasn't been able to get much through your thick little skull. I want to hear what you know from before we met you."
He squirmed a little, scowling. "Wizards can do stuff." "What stuff? How?"
"Good stuff, I guess. I never saw any. But People talk about them." "And what do they say?" Urruah said.
Arhu glared back at him. "That they're stuck up, that they think they're important because they can do things."
Urruah started slowly to stand up. Rhiow glanced at him; he settled back again. "And probably," Rhiow
said just a touch wearily to Arhu, "you've heard People say that wizards are using their power somehow to help ehhif control People. Or that they're just trying to make all the other People around be their servants somehow. And somebody has to have told you that it's not real wizardry at all, just some kind of trick used to get power or advantage, some kind of hauissh or power game."
Arhu looked at her. "Yeah," he said. "All that."
"Well." Rhiow sat down. "'Just tricks'; do you think that? After you went through the doors?"
She watched him struggle a little, inwardly, before speaking. He desperately did not want to admit that he didn't understand something, or (on the other side) admit to feeling more than cool and blase about anything … especially not in front of Urruah. Yet at the same time, he liked the feel of what he'd done the night before: Rhiow recognized the reaction immediately … knowing it very well herself. And she knew that the thought that there might be more of that was tantalizing him. It was the Queen's greatest recruitment tool, the one that was the most effective, and the most unfair, for any living being—but especially for cats: curiosity. You are unscrupulous, she said privately to the Powers That Be. But then You can't afford to be otherwise….
"That happened," Arhu said finally. He looked, not at Rhiow, but at Urruah, as if for confirmation: Urruah simply closed his eyes … assent, though low-key. "I felt it. It was real."
"Urruah's right, you know," Rhiow said. "Even nonwizardly cats can sometimes walk through things … though usually only in moments of crisis: if you're not a wizard, the act can't be performed at will. You'll be able to, though … if you live through what follows."
"Whatever it is, I can take it," Arhu said fiercely. "I'm a survivor."
Saash shook herself all over, then sat down and scratched. "That's nice," she said, very soft-voiced. "We get a lot of 'survivors' in wizardry. Mostly they die."
Rhiow tucked herself down in the compact position that Hhuha sometimes called "half-meatloaf," the better to look eye-to-eye with the kit. "You said you heard a voice that said 'I dare you,'" she said. "We've all heard that voice. She speaks to every potential wizard, sooner or later, and offers each one the Ordeal. It's a test to see if you have what it takes. If you don't, you'll die. If you do, you'll be a wizard when the test is over."
"How long does it take?"
"Might be hours," Urruah said. "Might be months. You'll know when it's over. You'll either have a lot of power that you didn't have a moment before … or you'll find yourself with just enough time for a quick wash between lives."
"What's the power for, though?" Arhu said, eager. "Can you use it for anything you want?"
"Within limits," Saash said. "Walk in other elements and other worlds, talk to other creatures, even not– live things sometimes—go places no other People not wizards have ever been or seen—"
"Other creatures?" Arhu said. "Wow! Any other creatures?"
"Well, mostly"
"Even ehhif? Cool! Let's go talk to that cop and freak him out!" He started toward the garage door.
Rhiow grabbed him by the scruff and pushed him down with one paw. "No. You may not use the Speech to communicate with members of other species unless they're wizards, or unless you're on errantry and the job specifically requires it."
"But that's dumb!"
"Listen, killing," Urruah said, leaning over Arhu with a thoughtful expression. "If you start routinely talking to ehhif so they can understand, there's a chance that eventually one of them's going to believe that you're talking. And before you know it they've thrown you in a scientific institute somewhere and started drilling holes in your skull, or else they're taking you apart in some other interesting way. More to the point, if you do that, they'll start doing it to other People too. A lot of them. I wouldn't want to cause something like that, not ever, because sooner or later you're going to find yourself between lives, and the explanations that would be demanded of you by the Powers That Be—" He shook his head slowly. "If I started seriously thinking that you might actually pull a stunt like that, I'd just grab you and kick your guts out right now, Ordeal or no Ordeal. So take notice."
"Then this wizardry isn't any use," Arhu muttered, scowling. "You say you can do all this stuff, and then you say you're not allowed to do it! What's the point?"
Rhiow felt herself starting to fluff up. Urruah, though, said mildly, "It's not quite like that. Are you allowed to fight with me, killing?"
Arhu glared at Urruah, then he too began to bristle. Finally he burst out: "Yes, I am! But if I did, you'd shred me!"
"Then you understand the principle," Urruah said. "We're allowed to do all kinds of things. But we don't do them, because the result in the long term would be unfortunate." He smiled at Arhu. "For us or someone else. Till you come to know better, just assume that the results would be unfortunate for you. And in either the long term or the short… they would be."
Rhiow noticed that his claws were showing more than usual. Wonderful, she thought, remembering the saying: Old tom, young tom, trouble coming! "You'll find in the next few days," Rhiow said, "that there are a fair number of things you can do… and they'll be useful enough. You'll like them, too. Keep your ears open: when you hear the whisper… listen. She doesn't repeat herself much, the One Who Whispers."
Arhu looked up at that. "We're not working for anyone, are we?" he said, suspicious. "The People ate free,"
Rhiow wanted to roll her eyes but didn't quite dare: Arhu was a little too sensitive to such things. "She'll suggest something you might do," Rhiow said, "but whether you do it or not is your choice."
"That's not exactly an answer."
Urruah stood up. "He makes my head hurt," Urruah said. "Give him the power to change the world and he complains about it. But then, if he's not willing to cooperate with the Powers Who're the source of the power, why should he learn anything more about it? Not that he will" He looked amused.
"All right, all right," Arhu said hastily, "so I want to learn. So when do I start?"
They looked at one another. "Right away," Rhiow said. "We have to go inspect the place we take care of, make sure things are going right there. You should come with us and see what we do."
Arhu looked at them a little suspiciously. "You mean your den? You're a pride?"
"Not the way you mean it. But yes, we are. The place we take care of—you remember it: the place where we found you. Ehhif living here use it as a beginning and ending to their journeys. So do ehhif wizards, and other wizards too, though the journeys are to stranger places than the trains go. – –."
"There are ehhif'wizards?" Arhu laughed out loud at the idea. "No way! They're too dumb!"
"Now who's being 'stuck up'?" Urruah said. 'There are plenty of ehhif-wizards. Very nice people. And from other species too, just on this planet. Wizards who're other primates, who're whales … even wizards who're houiff."
Arhu snickered even harder. "I wouldn't pay any attention to them. Houiff don't impress me."
"You may yet meet Rraah-yarh," said Urruah, looking slightly amused, "who's Senior among the houiff here: and if you're wise, you'll pay attention to her. 7 wouldn't cross her … and not because she's a houff, either. She may look like half an ad for some brand of ehhif Scotch, but she's got more power in one dewclaw than you've got in your whole body, and she could skin you with a glance and wear you for a doggie-jacket on cold days."
Rhiow kept quiet and tried to keep her face straight over the thought that everything toms discussed seemed to come down to physical violence sooner or later. Saash, though, leaned close to Arhu and said, "You are now on the brink of joining a great community of people from many sentient species … a fellowship reaching from here to the stars, and farther. Some of your fellow-wizards are so strange or awful to look at that your first sight of them could nearly turn your wits right around in your head. But they've all taken the same Oath you have. They've sworn to slow down the heat-death of the Universe, to keep the worlds going as best they can, for as long as they can … so that the rest of Life can get on with its job. You want great adventure? It's here. Scary things, amazing things? You'll never run out of them… there are any nine lives' worth, and more. But if you don't pass your Ordeal, this life, none of it's ever going to happen."
"You willing to find out how hot you really are?" Urruah said. "That's why the Whisperer has spoken to you. Take her up on her offer… and the Universe gets very busy trying to kill you. Live through it, though… and there'll be good reason for the queens to listen to you when you sing."
Once more Rhiow kept her smile under control, for this kind of precisely applied power play was exactly what she had needed Urruah for. Tom-wizards tended to equate management of their power with management of their maleness: no surprise, since for toms in general all of life was about power and procreation. But it was language Arhu wouldn't understand until he grew old enough to understand wizardry, and life in general, in terms of hauissh, the power-and-placement game that ran through all feline culture. Rhiow almost smiled at the memory of Har'lh once equating hauissh with an old human strategy-game and referring to it as "cat chess," but the metaphor was close enough. All cat life was intrinsically ha'hauissheh, or "political" as Har'lh had translated it; and as the saying went, those who did not play hauissh had hauissh played on them, usually to their detriment. As a team manager, Rhiow had long since made her peace with this aspect of the job, and always made sure her own placement in the game was very secure, then directed her attention to placing her team members where they would do the most good, and felt guilty about the manipulation only later, if ever.
"So," Rhiow said. "Let's get on with it, young wizard. We usually walk, and you'll need to learn the various routes before we teach you the faster ways to go." She stood up. "First route, then: the hardest one, but the one that exposes us least to notice. Can you climb?"
Arhu positively hissed with indignation. Rhiow turned away, for fear the smile would slip right out, and as she passed, Saash lowered her head so that (without seeming to do so on purpose) it bumped against Rhiow's in passing, their whiskers brushing through one another's and trembling with shared and secretive hilarity. Oh, Rhi, Saash said silently, were we ever this unbearable?
I was, Rhiow said, and you would have been if you'd had the nerve. Let's dull his claws a little, shall we?…
- =O= - *** - =O= -
The run to Grand Central along the High Road, which normally would have taken the three of them perhaps twenty minutes, took nearly an hour and a half; and the dulling of Arhu's claws, which Rhiow had intended in strictly the metaphorical sense, happened for real—so that when they finally sat down on the copper-flashed upper cornice of the great peaked roof, looking down at Forty-second, Arhu was bedraggled, shaking, and furious, and Rhiow was heartily sorry she had ever asked him whether he could climb.
He couldn't. He was one of those cats who seem to have been asleep in the sun somewhere when Queen Iau was giving out the skill, grace, and dexterity: he couldn't seem to put a paw right. He fell off walls, missed jumps that he should have been able to make with bis eyes closed, and clutched and clung to angled walks that he should have been confident to run straight up and down without trouble. It was a good thing he was so talented at sidling, since (if this performance was anything to judge by) he was the cat Rhiow would choose as most likely to spend the rest of his life using surface streets to get around: a horrible fate. It may change, she thought. This could be something he 'II grow out of. Dear gods, I hope so… Finally she'd said to the others, out loud, "I could use a few minutes to get my breath back," and she'd sat down on the crest of the terminal roof. It was not her breath Rhiow was concerned about, while Arhu sat there gasping and glaring at the traffic below.
Why is he so clumsy? Urruah said silently as they sat there, letting Arhu calm himself down again. There's nothing wrong with him physically, nothing wrong with his nerves… they're the right "age"for the way his body is developing. He was the one of them best talented at feeling the insides of others' bodies, so Rhiow was inclined to trust his judgment in this regard.
It's like he can't see the jump ahead of him, Saash said. There's nothing wrong with his eyes, is there?
No. Urruah washed one paw idly. Might just be shock left over from last night, and the healing, and everything else that's happening.
He didn't look shocky to me in the garage, Rhiow said.
Believe me, Saash said, especially before you got there, shock was the last thing he was exhibiting. This is something of a revelation.
After a few moments, Rhiow got up and walked along the rounded copper plaques of the roofs peak to where Arhu sat staring down at the traffic. "That last part of the climb," she said as conversationally as she could, "can be a little on the rough side. Thanks for letting me rest"
He gave her a sidelong look, then stared down again at the traffic and the ehhif going about their business on the far side of Forty-second Street, walking through the glare of orange sodium-vapor light. "How far down is it?" he said softly.
It was the first thing Rhiow had heard him say that hadn't sounded either angry or overly bold. "About fifty lengths, I'd say. Not a fall you'd want…" She looked across the street, watching the cabs on Vanderbilt being released by the change of lights to flow through the intersection into Forty-second. A thought struck her. "Arhu," she said, "you don't have trouble with heights, do you?"
He flicked his tail sideways in negation, not taking his eyes off the traffic below. "Only with getting to them," he said, again so quietly as to be almost inaudible.
"I think the sooner we teach you to walk on air, the better," Rhiow said. "We'll start you on that tomorrow."
He stared at her. "Can you do that? I mean, can I—"
"Yes."
She sat still a moment, looking down. After a few breaths Saash came up behind, stepping as delicately and effortlessly as usual, and looked over Rhiow's shoulder at the traffic and at the dark, graceful, sculpted silhouettes that came between them and the orange glow from beneath. "A closer view than you get from the street," she said to Arhu. "Though you do miss some of the fine detail from this angle."
"What are they?"
"'Who,' actually," Saash said. "Ehhif gods." "What's a god?"
Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another. My, Urruah said silently, we are going to have to start from scratch with this one, aren't we? … Hope he doesn't survive to breed. I wouldn't hold out much hope for the next generation.
"Very powerful beings," said Saash, giving Urruah a look. "Cousins to the Whisperer: they're all littermates under the One, or so we think. Each species has its own, even ehhif."
Arhu sniffed at the idea and squinted at the carved figures. "One of them looks like he's falling asleep."
"She," Rhiow said.
"How do you tell?"
Urruah opened his mouth, but Rhiow said, "Some other time. That one's a queen, Arhu: the other two're toms."
"What's that one got on his head?"
"It's something ehhif wear," Saash said; "it's called a hha't. But don't ask me why it's got wings on it."
"Symbolic of something," Rhiow said. "All these carvings are. That middle one is a messenger-god, I believe. The 'sleepy' one, she's got a book; that's a way ehhif communicate. The other one, he's probably something to do with the trains. See the wheel?"
"There has to be more to it than just that, though," Urruah said. "Someone involved in the construction has to have known what this was going to be, besides just a place where the trains come and go. It can't just be coincidence that the Lord of Birds is shown there at the center of it all; they've always been the symbols of speed in getting around, especially of nonphysical travel. And then that one there, the queen, has the Manual, and the one in the middle has the stick with the Wise Ones wound around it: the emblem of what's below, in the Downside, under the roots of the worldgates. There have to have been wizards on the building's design team."
"I'll leave it to you to conduct some research on the subject," Rhiow said "But there was wizardry enough about the place's building, even at the merely physical level: it never shut down, even when the construction was heaviest. Eight hundred trains came and went each day, and some of them may have been late, but they never stopped… and neither did other kinds of transit. Speaking of which, let's get on with our own business. We're running late."
She walked on down the roof-cornice, taking her time. "All very scenic," she said casually to Urruah, "but tomorrow we'll take the Low Road, all right?"
"The Queen's voice purrs from your throat, oh most senior of us all," Urruah said, following her at a respectable distance. She didn't look at him, but she twitched one ear back and thought, I'm going to take this out of your hide eventually, O smart-mouthed one. Don't give him ideas. And don't make fun of his ignorance. It's not his fault he has no education, and it's our job to see that he gets one.
I would say, Urruah said with a silent wrinkling of his whiskers, that we have our job cut out for us.
Rhiow kept walking toward the end of the roof. "There's an opening down here," she said to Arhu as they went. "It's a little tricky to get through, but once in, everything else is easy. How much other experience have you had with buildings?"
He shrugged. 'Today."
She nodded. He was young and inexperienced enough not even to have the usual cat-reference, which likened buildings to dens, or in the case of the taller ones, to trees hollowed out inside. Rhiow had always been a little amused by this, knowing what trees the city buildings were echoes of. She'd occasionally heard humans refer to the city as a jungle: that made her laugh, too, for she knew the real "jungle," ancient and perilous, of which the shadowy streets were only a reflection.
"Well, you're going to start picking up more experience fast," she said. "This is one of the biggest buildings in this city, though not the tallest. If you laid the almost-tallest building on the island—see that one, the great spike with the colored lights around the top?—yes, that one—laid it down on its side and half-buried it as the Terminal's buried, then this would still be larger than that. There are a hundred thousand dens in it, from the roof to the deepest-dug den under the streets, at the track levels. But we'll start at the top, tonight. The path we'll take leads under this roof-crest where we're walking, to the substructure over the building's inner roof. You said you came through the main concourse … did you look up and see blue, a blue like the sky, high up?"
Arhu stopped well clear of the edge of the roof, which they were nearing, and thought a moment. "Yes. There were lights in it. They were backwards…."
His eyes looked oddly unfocused. The height bothers him, Rhiow thought, no matter what he says… And then she changed her mind, for his eyes snapped back to what seemed normalcy. Well, never mind. A trick of the light…
"Backwards," though. "Saw that, did you?" she said, which was another slight cause for surprise. "Very perceptive of you. Well, we'll be walking above that: it's all a built thing, and you'll see the bones of it. Come here to the edge now and look down. See the hole?"
He saw it: she saw his tongue go in and out, touching his nose in fright, and heard him swallow.
"Right. That's what I thought the first time. It's easier than it looks. There's just a tiny step under it, where the brick juts out. Stretch down, put your right forepaw down on that, turn around hard, and put yourself straight in through the hole. Urruah?"
"Like this," Urruah said, slipping between them, and poured himself straight over the edge into the dark. Arhu watched him find the foothold, twist, and vanish into the little square hole among the bricks.
"Do that," Rhiow said. "I'll spot for you. You won't fall: I promise."
Arhu stared at her. "How can you be sure?"
Rhiow didn't answer him, just gazed back. Sooner or later there was always a test of trust among team– working wizards—the sooner, the better. Demonstrations that the trust was well-founded never helped at this stage: start giving such proofs and you would soon find yourself handicapped by the need to provide them all the time. She kept her silence and spoke inwardly to the air under the little "step" of outward– jutting brick, naming the square footage of air that she needed to be solid for this little while—just in case. Arhu looked away, after a moment, and gingerly, foot by foot, started draping himself over the edge of the cornice, stretching and feeling with his forefeet for the step.
He found it, fumbled, staggered— Rhiow caught her breath and got ready to say the word that would harden the air below. But somehow Arhu managed to recover himself, and turned and writhed or fell through the hole. A scrabbling noise followed, and a thump.
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other, waiting, but mercifully there was no sound of laughter from Urruah. They went down after Arhu.
Inside the hole, they found Arhu sitting on the rough plank flooring that ran to the roofs edge underneath the peak, and washing his face in a very sincere bout of composure-grooming. A line of narrow horizontal windows, faintly orange-yellow with upward-reflected light from the street, ran down both sides of the roof, about six feet below its peak, and northward toward Lexington. From below those windows, thick metal supporting beams ran up to the peak and across the width of the room, and a long plank-floored
gallery ran along one side, made for ehhif to walk on.
Cats needed no such conveniences. Urruah was already strolling away down the long supporting beam at just below window-level, the golden light turning his silver-gray markings to an unaccustomed marmalade shade.
Arhu finished his he'ihh and looked down the length of the huge attic. "See the planks under the beams and joists there?" Rhiow said. "On the other side of them is the sky-painting that the ehhif artist did all those years ago, to look like the summer sky above a sea a long way from here. The painting's trapped, though: when they renovated the station some years back, they glued another surface all over the original painting, bored new holes for the stars, and did the whole thing over again."
Arhu looked at Rhiow oddly. "But they had one there already!"
"It faded," Saash said, shrugging her tail. "Seems like that bothered them, even though the real sky fades every day. Ehhif… go figure them."
"Come on," Rhiow said. They walked along the planks, ducking under the metal joists and beams every now and then, and Arhu looked with interest at the corded wires and cables reaching across the inside of the roof. "For the light bulbs," Saash said. "The walking-gallery is so that, when one of the brighter stars burns out, the ehhif can come up here and replace it."
Arhu flirted his tail in amusement and went on. "Here's our way down," Rhiow said as they came to the far side of the floor. "It's all easy from here."
A small doorway stood before them, let into the bare bricks of the wall: the door was shut. Urruah had leaped down beside it and was leaning against it, head to one side as if listening.
"Locked?" Rhiow said.
"Not this time, for a change. I think the new office staff are finally learning." He looked thoughtfully at the doorknob.
The doorknob turned: the door clicked and swung open, inward. Beyond it was a curtain: Urruah peered through it "Clear," he said a moment later, and slipped through.
Rhiow and Saash went after him, Arhu followed them. The little office had several desks in it, very standard-issue, banged-up gray metal desks, all littered with paperwork and manuals and computer terminals and piles of computer-printed documentation. More golden light came in from larger windows set at the same height as those out in the roof space.
"Some ehhif who help run the station work here during the 'weekdays,'" Rhiow said to Arhu as they headed for the office's outer door, "but this is a 'weekend,' so there's no fear we'll run into them now. We're seven 'stories,' or ehhif-levels, over the main concourse; there's a stepping-tree, a 'stairway' they call it, down to that level. That's where we're headed."
Urruah reared up to touch the outer door with one paw, spoke in a low yowl to the workings in its lock: the door obligingly clicked open with a soft squeal of hinges, letting them out into the top of a narrow cylindrical stairwell lit from above by a single bare bulb set in the white-painted ceiling. The staircase before them was a spiral one, of openwork cast iron, and the spiral was tight. While Saash pushed the door shut again and spoke it locked, Urruah ran on down the stairs two or three at a time, as he usually did, and Rhiow found herself half-hoping (for Arhu's benefit) that he would take at least one spill down the stairs, as he also usually did. But the Tom was apparently watching over Urruah this evening. Urruah vanished into the dimness below them without incident, leaving Rhiow and Saash pacing behind at a more sedate speed, while behind them came Arhu, cautiously picking his way.
Faint street sounds came to them through the walls as they went, but slowly another complex of sounds became more assertive: rushing, echoing sounds, and soft rumbles more felt than genuinely heard. At one point near the bottom of the stairs, Rhiow paused to look over her shoulder and saw Arhu standing still about hah7 a turn of the stairs above her, his ears twitching; bis tail lashed once, hard, an unsettled gesture.
"It's like roaring," he said quietly. "A long way down …"
He's nervous about getting so close to where he almost came to grief, Rhiow thought. Well, if he's going to be working with us, he's just going to have to get used to it…. "It does sound that way at first," she said, "but you'd be surprised how fast you get used to it. And at how many things there are to distract you. Come on……………….. "
He looked down at her, then experimentally jumped a couple of steps down, Urruah-style, caught up with her, and passed her by, bouncing downward from step to step with what looked like a little more confidence.
She followed him. In the dimness below them, she could see a wedge of light spilling across the floor: Urruah had already cracked open the bottom door. Through it, the echoes of the footfalls and voices of ehhif came more strongly.
"Now get sidled," Saash was saying, "and keep your wits about you: this isn't like running around under the cars in the garage. Ehhif can move pretty fast, especially when they're late for a train, and you haven't lived until you've tripped someone and had them drop a few loaded Bloomie's bags on you."
Arhu merely looked amused. He had sidled himself between one breath and the next. "I don't see why we should hide," he said. "If you take care of this place, like you say, then we have as much right to be here as all of them do."
'The right, yes," Rhiow said. "In our law. But not in theirs. And in wizardry, where one species is more vulnerable than the other to having its effectiveness damaged by the conflict of their two cultures, the more powerful or advanced culture gives way graciously. That's us."
"That's not the way People should do it," Arhu growled as they stepped cautiously out into the Graybar passage, one of the two hallways leading from Lexington Avenue to the concourse. "I don't know a lot about hauissh yet, but I do know you have to fight to get a good position, or take it, and keep it."
"Sometimes," Urruah said. "In the cruder forms of the game … yes. But when you start playing hauissh for real someday, you'll learn that some of the greatest players win by doing least. I know one master who dominates a whole square block in the West Eighties and never even so much as shows himself through a window: the other People there know his strength so well, they resign every day at the start of play." "What land of hauissh is that?" Arhu said, disgusted. "No blood, no glory—" "No scars," Urruah said, with a broad smile, looking hard at Arhu. Arhu looked away, his ears down.
"Last time they counted his descendants," Urruah added, "there were two hundred prides of them scattered all over the Upper West Side. Don't take subdued or elegant play as a sign that someone can't attract the queens."
They came out into the concourse and paused by the east gallery, looking across the great echoing space glinting with polished beige marble and limestone, and golden with the brass of rails and light fixtures and the great round information desk and clock in the middle. The sound of ehhif footsteps was muted at the moment; there were perhaps only a hundred of them in the Terminal at any given moment now, coming and going from the Sunday evening trains at a leisurely rate. Then even the footstep-clatter was briefly lost in the massive bass note of the Accurist clock.
Arhu looked up and around nervously. "Just a time-message," Saash said. "Nine hours past high-Eye."
"Oh. All right. What are all those metal tubes stuck all over everything? And why are all the walls covered with that cloth stuff?"
"They're renovating," said Saash. "Putting back old parts of the building that were built over, years ago … getting rid of things that weren't in the original plans. It should look lovely when they're done. Right now it just means that the place is going to be noisier than usual for the next couple of years…."
"The worldgates have occasionally gotten misaligned due to the construction work," Rhiow said. "It means we've had to keep an extra close eye on them. Sometimes we have to move a gate's 'opening' end, its portal locus, closer to one platform or away from another. It was the gate by Track Thirty-two, last time: they were installing some kind of air-conditioning equipment on Thirty-two, and we had to move the locus far enough away to keep the ehhif workmen from seeing wizards passing through it, but not so close to any of the other gates' loci to interfere with them…."
"What would happen if they did interfere?" Arhu said, with just a little too much interest for Rhiow's liking.
Urruah sped up his pace just enough for Arhu to suddenly look right next to him and see a tom two and a half times his size, and maybe three times his weight. "What would happen if I pushed those big ears of yours down their earholes, and then put my claws far enough down your throat to pull them out that way?" Urruah said in a conversational tone. "I mean, what would be your opinion of that?"
They all kept walking, and when Arhu finally spoke again, it was in a very small voice. "That would be bad," he said.
"Yes. That would be very bad. Just like coincident portal loci would be bad. If you were anywhere nearby when such a thing happened, it would feel similar. But it would be your whole body … and it would be forever. So wouldn't you agree that these are both events that, as responsible wizards, we should do all we can to forestall?"
"Yeah. Uh, yes."
'Track Thirty, team," said Rhiow. "Right this way, and we'll check that the Thirty-two gate is where it belongs. Saash, you want to go down first and check the gate's logs?"
"My pleasure, Rhi."
They strolled down the platform, empty now under its long line of fluorescent lights. No trains were expected on 30 until the 10:30 from Dover Plains and Brewster North; off to one side, on 25, a Metro– North "push-pull" locomotive sat up against the end-of-track barrier, thundering idly to itself while waiting for the cars for the 11:10 to Stamford and Rye to be pushed down to it and coupled on. Arhu stopped and gave it a long look.
"Loud," Urruah said, shouting a little.
Arhu flicked his tail "no." "It's not that—"
"What is it, exactly?" Rhiow said.
"It roars."
"Yes. As I said, you get used to the roaring."
"That's not what I mean." He sat down, right where he was, Читать дальше