Диана Дуэйн - THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

"Rhiow? Rhiow!"
Her head snapped around. Arhu was still sitting there with his claws full of strings, but now they were trembling because he was. "What's that noise?" he said.
"What you said was coming," she said.
"What I said—" He looked confused.
"This is what he did before, Rhi," Urruah said, looking grim. "Saash?"
"Not right now," Saash said, her voice desperately level. "If I don't finish this other patch, the whole job'll have to be done again. Let them come."
"Oh, sure," Urruah said. "Let them 'tree' us inside the circle, five bodies thick! Then what are we supposed to—"
"No," Arhu said, and the word started as a hiss of protest, scaled up to a yowl. "No—!" The Children of the Serpent burst in.
Rhiow knew that ehhif had somewhat rediscovered dinosaurs in recent years. Or rather, rediscovered them again, only more visually than usual this time. She had once heard Iaehh and Hhuha idly discussing this tendency for each new generation of their kind to become fascinated with the long names, the huge sizes and terrible shapes. But in Rhiow's opinion, the fascination had to do with the ehhif perception that such creatures were a long time ago and far away. And the most recent resurrection of the fascination, in that movie and its sequel, were rooted in a variant on the same perception: that long ago and far away was where and when such creatures belonged.
But this too had become one of the places where they belonged. They did not take kindly to intruders. And they certainly would not let any leave alive….
Arhu started to crouch down, trembling, at the sight of them, as if he had forgotten what he was holding. "Saash!" Rhiow hissed, and without missing a beat, Saash let go of the strings she had been working on— they snapped back into place in the catenary—and took hold of the ones Rhiow had held. Rhiow bent down before Arhu could finish collapsing, and snatched the strings out of his paws. He was wide-eyed, crouching right down into a ball of terror a pitiful and incongruous sight with him in this body, which would have been large and powerful enough to bring down the biggest wildebeest. But the hunt was in the heart, as the saying went: Rhiow couldn't entirely blame him for not having the heart for this one as the Children of the Serpent poured into the cavern and hit the circle, claws out, roaring hunger and rage.
Urruah lifted his head and roared too, but the sound was almost drowned in the wave of shrieks of hate that followed it. Single sickle-claws three feet long scrabbled against the circle, jaws half the size of one of their bodies tried to slash or bite their way in; and everywhere on your body, though nothing touched you physically, you felt the pressure of the little, cold, furious eyes. There was intelligence there, but it was drowned in hatred, and gladly drowned. The impression of outraged strength, pebbled and mottled greenish– and bluish-hided bodies throwing themselves again and again at the circle; the impression of raging speed, and the interminable screaming, a storm of sound in this closed-in place: that was what you had to deal with, rather than any single, rational impression of This is a deinonychus, that is a carnosaur— "That's what it was," Arhu was moaning, almost helplessly, like a starving kitten. "That's what it was—"
Rhiow swallowed. "The circle's holding?" she said to Urruah.
"Of course it is. Nothing they can do about it. But how are we going to get out?"
It was a fair question. He had said "five deep"; possibly he had been optimistic. The cavern was now packed so full of saurians that there was no seeing the far wall, except for the part near the roof, above the tallest heads. Rhiow had a sudden ridiculous vision of what Grand Central would look like at rush hour if it were full of saurians, not people: a whole lot like this. We need shopping bags, though, she thought, pacing around the circle, forcing herself to look into the terrible little eyes, the jaws snapping futilely but with increasing frustration and violence against the immaterial barrier of the circle: and Reeboks and briefcases. Or no, maybe the briefcases wouldn't be in the best of taste—
"Done," Saash said.
"The whole repair?"
"Yes. I'm going to bring up the rest of the Grand Central complex again," Saash said. "Tell our connection to get ready."
Heard that. Kit said. We're set. Rhiow, if you need help, there's backup waiting. Might need it, Rhiow said, but it's hard to say. Hang on—
Saash leaned into the catenary again, put out one single claw, inserted it into an insignificant-looking little loop in one string—it looked like a snag in a sweater—and pulled.
The loop straightened, vanished. The catenary came alive again, the full fire of its power bursting up through the strings that had been offline. Saash stood watching it, her head tilted to one side, listening.
"Feels right," she said. "Khi-t?"
We've got the gates back, said another voice: Nita's. Want us to test the bad one? "Please."
The screaming and scrabbling and clawing went on all around them, undiminished. Okay, it hyperextended all right—
"I saw that," Saash said. "The catenary's feeding the patched string properly. Shut it again?"

"Oh, no, Saash," Rhiow said. "Oh no."
"Why not? Have you got anything better?" Saash said. "You want to try the odds of dropping the circle and having time to hit them with the neural inhibitor? I don't think so, Rhi! There are so many of them leaning against that spell right now, they'd just squash us to death the second we dropped it, never mind what else they'd do to us. Which they will, as you remember from last time."
Rhiow swallowed. Arhu stared at Saash in dumb terror. Urruah said, "Just what are you thinking of?"
Saash started to smile again, a smile entirely in character with a giant prehistoric predator-cat. "I'm going to push the catenary back out there without its 'insulating" spell in place," Saash said.
"Your brain has turned to hairballs!" Rhiow shouted. "What if it degrades the circle on the way through?"
"It won't."
"How sure are you?"
"Very sure. I'll leave the 'insulation' in place until after I've shoved it outside."
"Oh, wonderful, just great! And what about when you take the insulation off, have you thought that it might just degrade the circle then, and blast us all to ashes?"
"It shouldn't."
"Shouldn't—!"
"You want to sit here and wait them out?"
Rhiow looked out at the room full of roaring, shrieking saurians. Those at the far side of the room were already settling down to wait.
"It won't work. No matter how long we sit here, they'll wait," Saash said. "And sooner or later we're going to need food and sleep, and as soon as the last one of us goes to sleep, and the circle weakens enough to let them in—"
Urruah looked from Rhiow to Saash, then back to Rhiow again. "She's got a point," he said. Rhiow's tail was lashing. "You think you have a life or so to spare?"
"You want to find out if it matters," Urruah said, more gently than necessary, "down here?" Rhiow licked her nose again, then looked at Saash. "All right," she said. "I concur." "Right," Saash said.
She looked at the catenary. It drifted toward the edge of the circle; its own protective circles drifted with it.
Some of the saurians nearest the place where it was about to make contact looked at the catenary with the first indications of concern. Its rainbow fire fell into their big dark eyes, turning them into a parody of People's eyes—bright slits, dark irises; they blinked, backed away slightly.
"They're not wild about the light," Urruah said.
Saash nodded. The small circle surrounding the catenary made contact with the larger one: they "budded" together again. As if becoming somewhat uneasy at this, more of the saurians began to back away, and the screaming and roaring started to take on an uncomfortable edge. Some of the saurians nearer the walls stood up again, began to mill around, catching their companions' unease. Saash closed her eyes then and held quite still.
In one swift motion the catenary popped back out through the circle. It was now bereft of the smaller, "child" circles that the main protective circles had generated around it, and saurians jostled away from it as it drifted quickly back to its original position in the center of the cavern.
The saurians parted around it, closing together again nearest the circle, and going back to their raging and scrabbling against its invisible barrier. Saash looked over their heads as best she could, past them, to where the catenary had now settled itself back in place.
"Ah1 right?" she said. "Mind your eyes, now."
Rhiow started to close hers but was caught too late. The catenary suddenly stopped being merely a fiercely bright bundle of rainbows and turned into a raging floor-to-ceiling column of pure white fire. Lightning forked out of it in all directions, at least what would have passed for lightning. The whole cavern whited out in a storm of blinding fire that hissed and gnawed at their circle like a live thing. All Rhiow's fur stood on end, and her eyes fizzed in their sockets. Behind her, Arhu cried out in fear. The desperate shrieks of the saurians were lost in the shrieking roar of the unleashed catenary.
Eventually things got quiet again, and Rhoiw scrubbed at her tearing eyes, trying to rub some vision back into them. When she could see again, the catenary was once more sizzling with its normal light. But there was little else left in the cavern that was not reduced to charcoal or ash, and nothing at all left that was alive in the strictest sense… though bits and pieces here and there continued to move with lizardly persistence.
Saash stood there, looking around her with grim satisfaction. "Definitely," she said, "not at all wild about the light."
Urruah got up and shook himself, making a face at the smell. "I take it I can drop the circle now."
"It's as safe as it's going to get, I think," Rhiow said, "and once it's down, we can use the other spell if we need it." She went over to the crouching Arhu. "Arhu, come on—we have to go."
He looked up and around him, blinking and blinded, but Rhiow somehow got the idea that this blindness had nothing to do with the light "Yes," he said, and got up. Urruah had hardly collapsed the circle before Arhu was making hurriedly for the cavern-entrance through which they had come. "We have to hurry," he said. "It's coming—"
Urruah looked from Arhu to Rhiow. "Now what?" "What's coming?" Saash said.
"The greater one," he said. "The father. The son. Quick, quick, it's coming!" His voice started to shade
upward into a panicky roar. "We've got to get out before it comes!"
Rhiow's tail was lashing with confusion and concern. "I'm willing to take him at his word," she said. "There's no reason to linger—we've done what we came for. Let's get back up to the light."
- =O= - *** - =O= -
It took less time than going down had taken. Despite the thought that they might shortly be attacked again, they were all lighter of spirit than they had been—all of them but Arhu. He wouldn't be quiet: the whole way up through the caverns with him was a litany of "It's coming" and "That's what it was …" and "the greater one," and an odd phrase that Rhiow heard only once: "the sixth claw …" Arhu didn't grow silent again until they came up into the last cavern, past the great teeth of stone, to see the red-gold light of that world's sunset, and the green shadows beneath the trees beyond the stony threshold. There he stood for a long time while Saash checked the main matrix for the repaired gate, and he gazed at the declining sun as if he thought he might never see it again.
The thought had certainly been on Rhiow's mind earlier; but now that they were up and out, there were other concerns. She glanced through the patent gate to the darkness beneath Grand Central, from which Kit and Nita were looking through, interested. "Many thanks," she said. "Having you here as backup lent us the confidence to go all out."
Kit made a small, only fractionally mocking bow: Nita grinned. "Our pleasure," she said. "We're all in the same business, after all. Want us to leave this open for you?"
Rhiow looked over at Saash. "No," Saash said, turning away from the matrix she was checking. "I want to check its open-close cycle a couple more times. But nicely done, my wizards. Go well, and let's meet well again."
"Dai," the two said; and the gate snapped from its view of the Grand Central tracks to the usual shining warp/weft pattern.
Rhiow turned to Saash, who said, "The matrix is just fine now. That design flaw in the braiding of the catenary is going to have to be looked at, at some point. But not just now…"
"No," Rhiow said. "I'll talk to Har'lh about it; I'll have to report to him this evening anyway. But, Saash … what a job. And you did wonderfully, too," she said to Urruah. "Not many circles could have taken that punishment."
She went over to where Arhu was standing. He looked at Rhiow with an expression equally composed of embarrassment and fear.
"I screwed up," he said.
She breathed in, breathed out. "No," she said, and gave him a quick lick behind one ear. He stared at her, shocked. "You started your Ordeal. Now at least we have some kind of hint of what your problems are going to be."
He looked at her, and away again, toward the sunset: the sun was gone now, the darkness falling fast.
"Yes," he said, in a voice of complete despair. "So do I."
Chapter Eight
What with the report for Har'lh, and seeing Saash and Arhu safely back to the garage—for Arhu still seemed very disturbed, though his litany of fear had stopped—it was late before she got home. At the sound of the kitty door going, Hhuha looked up from where she was sitting, reading in the big chair. From inside, in the bedroom, a man's voice was saying, "And now tonight's list of Top Ten Reasons to call the Board of Health—"
"Mike," Hhuha said, "she's back."
Rhiow ran across to her and jumped in her lap, purring, before Hhuha could rise. "Oh, you rotten little thing," Hhuha said, picking her up and nuzzling the side of her face, "I've been worried stiff, where the heck have you been all evening?"
Once again Rhiow wondered, as she had before, which ehhif demigod Heck was. "Don't ask," she muttered. "But I'm glad to be back, oh, believe me I am. Mmm, you had pizza again. Any leftovers?"
Hhuha held her away a little, leaving Rhiow's hind legs dangling. "I wish you wouldn't do that," Rhiow added, with a rueful glance down at her legs. "It's hardly dignified."
"I wonder," Hhuha said, "are you getting out somehow?"
From the bedroom, a snort could be clearly heard over the laughter coming from the picturebox. "There's nowhere for her to get out but twenty stories down, Sue," the answer came. "And if she's doing that, how's she getting back?"
"I hate it when he's sensible," Hhuha muttered, holding Rhiow close again. "Well, you're okay. I'm so glad. I'll give you some of that nice tuna."
"I'll eat it," Rhiow said, "though I must be out of my mind."
But neither of them moved for a few minutes: Hhuha just held Rhiow more or less draped over her shoulder, and Rhiow just let her, and they purred at each other. Moments like this make it all worthwhile, Rhiow thought. Even the almost-getting-eaten-by-dinosaurspart. For the work she did was as much about keeping Manhattan safe for ehhif as for People, and about making it easier for wizards of all kinds to keep the planet going as it should. Wizards had kept various small and large disasters from befalling the city in the past and would do so often again; on the smallest scale, they did it every day. And the purpose, finally, was so that normal life could go on doing what it did—just trying to manage the best it could and finding what joy there was to be found along the way. Entropy was running: the heat was slowly bleeding out of the worlds, and nothing could be done to actually stop the process. But wizards could slow it down, however slightly, and make a little more time for everyone else to purr at each other in….
"You must be hungry," Hhuha said, and didn't move.
"Starving," Rhiow said, and didn't move, either.
She glanced around, her head resting on Hhuha's shoulder. Papers were all over the place again, on the living-room table and in a heap by the chair. "I'm going to shred some of those if I get a chance," Rhiow said lazily, her tail twitching a bit with the pleasant image. "I wish you'd find something else to do with your days; you so dislike what you have to do now."
'Talk talk talk," Hhuha said, having just caught the last few sounds of the sentence as a soft trill. "You are hungry, I bet. Come on."
She finally put Rhiow carefully down on the rug and went to open another can of cat food. Rhiow sat, watching it with some resignation, since her nose told her plainly that the leftover pizza was in the microwave, and there was pepperoni on it.
They always leave it there and sneak slices in the middle of the night. Would they ever notice if I just opened it one night, took a slice out, and closed it again? If I timed it right, each of them might think the other one did it….
"How much of that pizza is left?" Iaehh's voice came from the bedroom.
"About half."
"Bring me some?"
"How much?"
"About hah0."
"Pig."
"Controlling personality." "Pizza in bed. Disgusting." "Call it a lifestyle choice."
"You can damn well choose about half of about half. I get the rest."
"Forget it," Rhiow said then, with amusement and resignation, as Hhuha filled her bowl again. "It would never work… you two talk to each other too much. If this relationship were a little more dysfunctional, I'd eat a lot better, you know that?"
"There you go," Hhuha said, straightening up from the food bowl. "What a good kitty."
Rhiow set about eating the awful tuna at her best possible speed, so that she could get into the bedroom before the pizza was all gone.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
Much later, both of them were snoring, and Rhiow lay at the end of the bed, looking at the yellow Venetian-blind light and thinking. In particular, she was looking at a chance group of wrinkles in the blanket at the end of the bed: they looked a little like two curves and a slash across them.
The Eye.
We've got a visionary on our hands, Rhiow thought.
Seers turned up occasionally among wizards, just as among non-wizards—though there would always be those who would argue that any seer was probably actually some kind of wizard anyway. The talent was not widespread. Wizards as a class might be more liable, by the nature of their work, to the sudden flash of insight that could be mistaken for genuine future-seeing: and to a lesser extent, they were sensitive to dreams and visions—perhaps the Whisperer, in her most benevolent mode, trying to hint at where danger might lie, since she was not allowed to warn you directly. But some few wizards sidestepped even her boundaries and saw clearly what might happen if things kept going the way they were going at present. Some did so with dreadful clarity. They tended not to last long: they were usually claws in the One's paw and (as the myth had it) usually personified the Claw That Breaks, the razor-sharp but brittle weapon that inflicts a fatal wound on the enemy, but itself does not survive the battle. Having a seer in the vicinity meant that the Lone Power would start noticing you back with unusual persistence … not a happy scenario. I had a lot ofplans for this life yet, Rhiow thought. This is not good.
She thought once more of Arhu's voice crying, That's what it was. That's what it was— "'It' what?" she said softly. And she sighed. She was going to have to press him on that point, and it was going to be painful. Rhiow was sure it had something to do with the condition in which they had first found him: she had her suspicions, but she needed confirmation from him, to tie up that particular loose string.
And there were others. One was a very small thing, but it was still bothering her.
Why did my light go out?
Rhiow went back in thought, suddenly, to her first diagnostic on the malfunctioning gate, the other day. The gate had as much as told her that it had been interfered with, somehow, during its function.
But nothing should be able to produce such interference except more wizardry.
Another wizard…
She shied away from that thought. There were rogues, though they weren't much discussed. The common knowledge was that wizardry did not live in the unwilling heart: a wizard uncomfortable with his power, unable to bear the ethical and practical choices it implied, soon lost the power, and any sense of ever having had it. But a wizard who was quite comfortable with the Art, and then started to find ways to use it that weren't quite ethical…
Normally such wizards didn't last long. The universe, to which wizardry was integral, had a way of twisting itself into unexpected shapes that would interfere with a rogue's function. Equally, there was no particular safety in assuming that a rogue was willingly cooperating with the Lone One— or with what It stood for. Like many another ill-tempered craftsman, sa'Rrahh the Destroyer was careless with her tools, as likely to throw them away or break them in spite as to reward them for services done. So when rogues appeared, they tended to be a temporary phenomenon.
Yet a personally maintained wizardry, once done and set in motion, shouldn't be able to be interfered with. Except by the wizard who created it…
Rhiow bunked once or twice as that thought intruded.
Did something affect me down there?
She thought hard. The recurring difficulties she had been having with threatening imagery … Surely not.
But when had she ever had anything like that happen before? Certainly she had been scared to the ends of her guard-hairs the last couple of times she'd been Downside. But nothing had gone wrong inside her head.
There were ways, though, to get inside another being's mind against its will. Wizards knew about them… but did not use such "back doors" except in emergencies: they were highly unethical.
But if one of my team—
She put the thought aside. It was ridiculous. Saash would never do any such thing: her commitment to the Powers, and to Rhiow personally, was total. She was incorruptible, Rhiow would swear. Urruah was, too: he was just too stubborn and opinionated, once he had his mind made up about which side he was on, to change without signs as readable as an earthquake.
But Arhu…
Rhiow found herself thinking, once more, about the weak link, the new link, the new "member" of the team.
That was something she was going to have to deal with, of course, and the sooner the better… how much she disliked the idea of having a team member simply thrust on them, even if it was by the Powers That Be. Teams of wizards came together willingly, for reasons of work and affinity … otherwise they fell apart under the strain of frequent exposures to life-or-death situations. Feline teams, made up of members of the most independent-minded species on the planet, had to have close personal relationships and had to be absolutely convinced of each other's reliability.
One came by such certainty only slowly. She and Saash had started working together a while after they met, about a year after Rhiow had passed her Ordeal, maybe two years after Saash's. It had been a casual thing at first—pulling together to do an assigned job, then drifting apart again. But the "apart" periods had become fewer and fewer as they realized they had a specialization in common. This was a commonplace phenomenon among wizards. After the first blaze of power associated with your Ordeal, the power begins to fade somewhat with age: but you soon find something to specialize in, and make up by concentration and narrowing of focus what you lose in sheer brute force, becoming, in a phrase Rhiow had heard Har'lh use once, "a rifle instead of a fire hose." After a while she and Saash started to be "listed" together in the Whispering as "associated talents," the Manual's delicate way of suggesting that they were beginning to become a team. Some time after that, Urruah turned up in their professional Me as a "suggested adjunct" for a couple of missions, and simply became part of the team over time.
There were still a lot of things they all didn't know about each other, but wizardry by no means required total disclosure, any more than relationships in the rest of life did. How many lives along you were, what you had gone through in this one … how much personal information came out, and when, was all a matter
of trust and inclination, and the need for privacy that was inextricably part of feline life and which balanced them both.
Rhiow would swear to the Queen's own face, though, that she knew Urruah and Saash well enough to say that neither of them would ever go rogue or sabotage a wizardry in process. If there had been sabotage today, its source was elsewhere.
And as for Arhu…
She sighed. She would have to deal with him tomorrow. But not before noontime, anyway. They would all need a good night's sleep tonight, odd as it was to be asleep now. Over the next few days, they could all get back to their normal schedules.
She stretched out on the bed, rolled over so that her feet were in the air in what Hhuha described as the somebody-shot-my-cat position, and let herself drift off to sleep, but not before burping once, gently, as the pepperoni settled itself.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
By noon the next day she was at the garage and was surprised to meet Saash by the door, lying sprawled well out of the way of the cars, but there was no sign of Arhu.
"Sleeping," Saash said, washing one paw calmly.
"He could probably use it."
"Don't know, Rhi," Saash said, standing up and arching her back to stretch, then lying down again. "I wonder if he might not be better awake."
"You saw the Eye, then."
"I did. Risky business this, Rhi. He's likely to attract high-profile attention." "Believe me," Rhiow said, "it's on my mind. How did you sleep?"
"After the jitters went away … well enough. But, Rhi, I'm not going down there again for a good long while, not if Iau Dam of Everything walks right in here and offers me Her job."
"Don't see why we should," Rhiow said. "Even Ffairh went only three or four times in his career, and only once down deep."
"May She agree with you," Saash said, and stood up— looked around carefully for any sign of Abad, and then scratched, and afterward sat down and began washing the fur into place again. "Meanwhile, are you going to let him sleep?"
"No," Rhiow said. "And I have an excuse. Where's Urruah this morning?" "Off again. Something about his o'hra." "Spare me," Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. "Look, you get some more sleep if you can. I'll take him off your hands for the day: he can go with me to check the track-level gates out again this afternoon—I want to see if they've replaced that switching track yet. Maybe help them a little if I can, now that the problem with Thirty's solved. If you want me, call."
"Thanks, Rhi," Saash said, and let out a cavernous yawn. "Don't wait for the call, though."
Rhiow sidled herself and made her way up to the ledge where Saash slept. There was Arhu, curled up small and tight, as if trying to pass for a rock. His breathing was so shallow, it could hardly be seen.
She hunkered down near him, and purred in his ear. There was no response.
Right, she thought, and extended a claw, and sank it carefully into the ear closest to the ground.
He whipped upright, eyes wide, and stared at her; then slumped back down again, the eyes relaxing again to a dozy look, with more than a touch of sullenness to it. "What?"
"It's time you were awake," Rhiow said.
"After yesterday? Come on." He put his head down again, closed his eyes.
Rhiow put her claw into the other ear this time, and somewhat more forcefully. Arhu sat up, and hissed.
"What?"
"Trying not to see," Rhiow said, "won't help." He stared at her.
"That's not what I'm here about," she said, "not mostly, anyway. I promised to teach you to walk on air. The sooner we get this lesson handled, the better… since you're going to be going on rounds with us for a while yet, I think, and we can't slow ourselves down all the time by using non-climbing routes. Get up, have a wash, you'll have your first lesson, and then we'll get you something to eat Some more of that pastrami, maybe?"
Arhu looked at Rhiow with a little more interest. But the look suddenly went cooler. "I'm not going back down there," he said.
"Good," Rhiow said, a little wearily, "then you and Saash are in complete agreement. It's not high on my list, either. Come on, Arhu, let's get a move on…."
- =O= - *** - =O= -
The lesson went quickly: faster than Rhiow would have thought possible. It reinforced a feeling she had been having, that Arhu could learn with blinding speed when he wanted to… and right now he wanted to, in order to get rid of Rhiow.
Purposely, therefore, Rhiow spun the lesson out. An hour and a half later, they were standing on the air directly above the roof of Grand Central, maybe thirty stories up, sidled, and fairly close to the windows of the Grand Hyatt. Rhiow had to smile, for many of those windows did not have their curtains pulled, and
inside them, one could see (as one almost always could) the occasional pair of ehhif doing what Hhuha sometimes facetiously called "the cat-scaring thing." Rhiow could not remember when she had last been scared by it, even by some of the noises Hhuha and Iaehh made in their throes. Arhu, however, had been betrayed by his prurient curiosity, and was watching one pair of ehhif with complete and disgusted fascination.
"Don't skywalk where you can easily be seen," Rhiow was saying, while wondering how much of what she told him was sinking in. "If you do it between buildings, make sure the walls are blind … or that you're sidled. Which has its dangers, too. Birds won't see you…."
"That could be nice," Arhu said, briefly distracted; he glanced around and licked his chops.
" 'Nice'? It could be fatal. There are more kinds of birds in this city than pigeons and sparrows and starlings. If one of the Princes of the Air hits you at eighty miles an hour, you'd better pray you're high enough up for a long-enough fall to reconstruct the wizardry."
"The Princes—"
"And a couple of 'princesses,'" Rhiow said. "There's a falcon-breeding program based on top of a building down near Central Park South. One of the hatchlings, about ten clutches ago, was a wizard: he's been promoted since, to Lord of the Birds of the East—a Senior for his kind. The rest of them are stuck-up as anything, think they're royalty, and kill more pigeons in a given day than they need to. They're a menace. Especially if they hit you with one of those little claw-fists of theirs, at high velocity, while you're invisible. The impact alone might kill you, for all I know. It sure kills the pigeons."
She sighed then as the two ehhif fell together, exhausted, at the end of their bout. "Come on," she said. "Enough looking for one day …"
Arhu's tail lashed. "If I stop looking at this," he said, almost absently, "I'll just see something else…."
Yes, Rhiow thought, that's the problem, isn't it…. "Come on," she said, "and we'll go down to the concourse and see about that pastrami. You can't see things while you're eating, I don't think. The chewing is supposed to interfere."
He looked at her with a glitter of hope in his eyes. "AD right," he said.
They walked down the air together, Arhu still doing it very slowly and carefully, as if it were a normal stairway; went right down to ground level, nearest the wall, and slipped inside the brass doors. Arhu looked around them as they walked together past the main waiting room toward the concourse.
Suddenly Arhu stopped and stared. "What are those?" he whispered.
Rhiow looked over into the waiting room. It had been one of the first areas to have its refurbishment completed, and was now routinely used for art exhibitions and receptions, and sometimes even parties. At the moment, though, the big airy space looked oddly empty, even though there were things in it… rather large things. In the center of the room, on a large black pedestal with velvet crowd-control ropes around it, caught in midstride—almost up on its toes, its tail stretched out horizontally and whipping out gracefully behind it—a dinosaur skeleton was mounted. Its huge head, empty-eyed, jaws open, seemed to glare down at the few casual observers who were strolling around it or pausing to read the informational plaque mounted nearby.
Rhiow gazed up at it and smiled sardonically. "Yes," she said, "I guess it doesn't look much like what we were dealing with last night. A lot bigger. These are part of the Museum of Natural History's new exhibition … and the ehhif are all excited about it because now they think they know, from these new models, how the saurians really held themselves and moved."
Arhu took a few steps toward the biggest of the mounted skeletons …. cocked his head to one side, and listened. After a moment, he said, "And those are real bones?"
"They dig them up and wire them together," Rhiow said. "It always struck me as a little perverse. But then, they have no way of seeing what we saw last night."
They walked on. "This place looked a lot different, the other night," Arhu said.
"If it's any help, it never looks the same way twice to me," Rhiow said. "I mean, the physical structures are always the same, obviously—well, not always, not with all this renovation and with exhibitions coming and going out in front But night and day pass, the light changes, the ehhif here are never the same ones at any given moment…. Though the city still isn't as big as you might think: you'll glimpse the occasional familiar face…"
"That's not what I meant," Arhu said, more slowly, with a puzzled expression. "It was bigger, somehow. It echoed."
"It does that more at night than in the daytime," Rhiow said. "Emptier."
"No," Arhu said. "It was full; I saw it full. Or I think I do now." He stopped and stared at the concourse before him: a late lunchtime crowd, the crush easing somewhat. "I heard something … a lot of noise. I walked in to find out what it was. Then—" He shook his ears as if they hurt him. "I don't want to think about that," he said.
"You're going to have to, sooner or later. But come on," Rhiow said. "Pastrami first."
Rhiow came unsidled long enough to do her "trick" again for the man in the Italian deli, and he gave her not only pastrami but cheese as well. She shared the pastrami happily enough with Arhu but never got a chance to do so with the cheese: as soon as he smelled it, he immediately snatched the whole thing and gobbled it, almost choking himself—a topologically interesting sight, like watching a shark eat a mattress. "Oh, this is wonderful," Arhu attempted to say around the mouthful, "what is this?"
"Solid milk," Rhiow said, just a little wistfully, watching it vanish. "They have a lot of kinds. This one's called 'mozzarella.'"
"What a terrific invention!"
"So ehhif are good for something after all?"
He glanced sidewise at her, and his face shut down again. "Not much besides this."
Rhiow held her peace until he finished the cheese. "Come on, get sidled," she said, "and we'll come back and see him again later: he's a soft-hearted type."
They strolled a little way out into the concourse, sat down by the east wall, out of the way of people's feet, and well to one side of the cash machines. Arhu craned his neck back in the bright noon light and looked up at the ceiling again. "It is backward."
"Yes … and you saw that before. Seeing is going to be a problem for you now … and a gift."
"If it's a gift, they can take it back," he said bitterly. "I can't stop seeing things now. Though you were right about the chewing."
"What kinds of things?"
"I don't know what most of them are," Arhu said. "It's like when the Whisperer… when she tells you stuff… but there's always more than just what she tells you. I see pictures of things behind things behind things, and it all keeps changing. I don't know where to put my feet."
"Images of alternate futures," Rhiow said, wondering if she now was beginning to understand Arhu's clumsiness. Arhu looked at her strangely.
"Anything can change a future," Rhiow said. "Say one thing, do one thing, and it goes one way. Do something else, and it goes another. What would have happened if the Whisperer had offered you the Oath, and you'd said no? What if you'd slipped off the brickwork, the other night? What if the police-ehhif had come and caught you trying to steal the pastrami, and they had taken you away to an animal shelter? Each of your futures would have been different. And there are thousands more."
"But which of them is real?" Arhu muttered.
Rhiow swished her tail slowly from side to side. "All of them… until you make the choice, perform the act. You're only seeing possibilities."
"But it's not just things behind things," Arhu said. "There are other images, things that stay."
"The past," Rhiow said softly. "That at least holds still. . . some ways, anyway. Are you seeing your past lives?"
"No," Arhu said, and then added, very surprised, "I think this is my first one." "We all have to start somewhere," Rhiow said. "How many have you had?"
She gave him a look. "That's a question you don't usually ask. If the Person you're talking to volunteers the information—"
He scowled, turned away. "That's what Saash said when I asked her what her Ordeal was like."
"And she was right to say so," Rhiow said. "That's personal business, too, as personal among wizards as the issue of lives is among People. Go around asking People questions like that and you're going to get your ears boxed."
Arhu looked scornful. "You guys are sure sensitive. Won't talk about this. Can't do that, somebody's
feelings might get hurt. How do you ever get anything done?"
"If there were more People in the world concerned about being sensitive," Rhiow said, rather shortly, "we'd have a lot less work to do…. Look, Arhu, you've had a bad time of it so far, I'd say. But we're trying to teach you the rules so that you'll have a better tune later. All I can do is warn you how People are going to take the things you say. If you still say them…" She shrugged her tail.
They were quiet for a moment. "As to lives," Rhiow said then, "I don't think all that much about my last ones. Most of us don't, I suspect, after the first few, when the novelty of the change wears off. The really persistent memories—big mistakes, great sorrows or joys—they intrude sometimes. I don't go digging. What you stumble across, from day to day, you're usually meant to find for some reason. But caching memories is as sick as caching food, for one of our People. Better to live now, and use the memories, when they come to mind, as a way to keep from making the same mistakes all over again. Use the past as a guide, not a fence."
"The past…" He looked out into the golden light of the concourse, toward the sunlight spilling through the south windows. "I don't remember much of mine."
"You don't have to tell me."
"I do," Arhu said, somewhat painfully. "You don't trust me."
There was no answer to that, not right now: and no question but that he was seeing at least some things with surprising clarity. "Arhu," Rhiow said, "it's just that if your gift is seeing … and it looks that way … you have to try to manage it, use it… and especially, you have to try to accept what there is to see about yourself, when it comes up for viewing. You are the eye through which you see. If the eye is clouded, all the other visions will be, too … and at this dangerous time in your life, if you don't do your best to see clearly, you won't survive."
He would not look at her.
He sees something, Rhiow thought. Something in his own future, I bet. And he thinks that if he doesn't talk about it, it won't happen…..
"For the time being, you just do the best you can," Rhiow said at last. "Though I admit I'd be happier if I knew you were coming to some kind of terms with your Oath."
"I said the words," Arhu said after a little while.
"Yes. But will you hold by them?"
"Why wouldn't I?" The voice was completely flat.
Rhiow swung her tail gently from side to side. "Arhu, do you know what entropy is?"
He paused a moment, listening. 'Things run down," he said finally. "Stuff dies. Everything dies."
"Yes."
"But it wasn't meant to … not at first."
"No," Rhiow said. "Things got complicated. That's the story of the worlds in one bowl. All the rest of the history of all the worlds there are, has been about the issue of resolving that complication. It will take until the end of the worlds to do it. Our People have their part to play in that resolution. There will be a lot of fighting … so if you like that kind of thing, you're in the right place."
"I wasn't yesterday," he said bitterly. "I couldn't have fought anything. I was fooling myself."
So that much self-vision is in play, whether he thinks so or not, Rhiow thought. "In the strictly physical sense, maybe," Rhiow said. "But nonetheless, you said what you saw. You tried to warn us. You may have given Saash that little impetus she needed to hurry and finish what she had to do before the saurians came in. That's worthwhile, even that little help. You struck your first blow."
"I don't know if I even did it on purpose," Arhu said.
"It doesn't matter," Rhiow said. "The result matters. We got out alive… and for a while, there was no way to tell whether we would or not. So, by and large, your presence yesterday made a difference."
She stood up, stretched, let out a big yawn. "Let's get a little more concrete," Rhiow said. "Anyway, I want to have a look at that track."
Together they walked through the concourse, slipping to one side or another to avoid the ehhif, and made their way down to the platform for Track 30. A repetitive clanking noise was coming from a little ways down in the darkness, and Rhiow and Arhu paused at the platform's end to watch the workmen, in their fluorescent reflective vests and hard hats, working on something on the ground, which at the moment was completely obscured by all of them standing around it, watching.
Rhiow threw a glance over at the gate, which was visible enough to her and Arhu if not to the workmen; the patterns of color sheening down it said that it was back to normal again. "Good," she said. "And it looks like that track's almost ready to go back into service. Come on," she said, and hopped down off the platform, onto the track bed.
Arhu was slightly uneasy about following her, but after a moment he came along. She led him carefully around the workmen, past the end of Tower A, and then back down in the direction from which they had first come, but this time at an angle, down toward the East Yard, where trains were pulled in for short-term storage during the morning and evening rush hours. She was not headed for the yard itself, but for a fire exit near the north side of Tower C. Its heavy steel door was shut; she glanced over at Arhu. "Down here," she said, and put a paw into the metal.
Arhu hesitated for a moment. "Come on, you did it just fine the other night," Rhiow said. "Yeah, but I wasn't thinking about it."
"Just remember, it's mostly empty space. You're mostly empty space. Just work the solid parts around each other… "
Rhiow walked through the door. After a moment Arhu followed, with surprising smoothness. "Nice," Rhiow said, as they went down the stairs together. The light here was dun even by cat standards, and Rhiow didn't hurry —there was always the chance you might run into someone or something you hadn't heard on the way down.
At the bottom of the fire exit, they walked through the door there and came out on the lower track level, on another platform, the longest one to be seen on this level. More fluorescent lights ran right down its length toward a low dark mass of machinery at the platform's end; electric carts and manually powered ones stood waiting here and there. "The tracks on this side are primarily for moving packages and light freight to and from the trains," Rhiow said; "bringing in supplies and equipment for the station, that kind of thing. But mostly that kind of traffic takes place during the evening or late at night. In the daytime, this area doesn't get quite so much official use … and so others move in."
Arhu looked alarmed. "What kind of 'others'?"
"You'll see."
They walked northward along the platform to the point where it stopped, across from a sort of concrete– lined bay in the eastern wall. Rhiow jumped down from the platform and crossed the track to the right of it. "This track runs in a big loop," she said, "around the terminal ends of the main tracks and out the other side. Not a place to linger: it's busy night and day. But things are a little quieter up this way."
She ducked into the bay and to the left, pausing to let her eyes adjust—it was much darker down here than out in the cavernous underground of the main lower track area, with all its lines of fluorescents and the occasional light shining out the windows of workshops and locker rooms. Behind her, Arhu stared into the long dark passage. Huge wheels wrapped full of fire hose, and mated to more low, blocky-looking machines, were bolted into the walls, from which also protruded big brass nozzles of the kind to which fire equipment would be fastened. A faint smell of steam came drifting from the end of the corridor, where it could be seen to meet another passage, darker still.
"What is this? And what's that?" Arhu whispered, staring down the dark hallway. For, hunched far down the length of it, against one of the low dark machines, something moved … shifted, and looked at them out of eyes that eerily caught the light coming from behind them.
"It's a storage area," Rhiow said. "We're under Forty-eighth Street here; this is where they keep the fire pumps. As for what it is—"
She walked down into the darkness. Very slowly, she could hear Arhu coming up behind, his pads making little noise on the damp concrete. The steam smell got stronger. Finally she paused by the spot from which those strange eyes had looked down the hallway at them. It seemed at first to be a heap of crazily folded cardboard, and under that a pile of old, stained clothing. But then you saw, under another piece of folded cardboard from a liquor store box, the grimy, hairy face, and the eyes, bizarrely blue. From under the cardboard, a hand reached out and stroked Rhiow's head.
"Hunt's luck, Rosie," Rhiow said, and sat down beside him.
"Luck Reeoow you, got no luck today," Rosie said. Except that he didn't say it in ehhif. He said, "Aihhah ueeur Rieeeow hanh ur-t hah hah'iih eeiaie…"
Arhu, who had slowly come up beside her, stared in complete astonishment. "He speaks our language!"
"Yes," Rhiow said, taking a moment to scrub a bit of fallen soot out of her eye: solid particulates from the train exhausts tended to cling to the ceiling over here because of the steam. "And his accent's pretty fair, if
you give him a little credit for the mangled vowels, the way he shortens the aspirants, and the 'shouting.' The syntax needs work, though. Rosie, excuse me for talking about you to your face. This is Arhu."
"Hunt's luck, Arhu," Rosie said, and reached out a grubby hand.
Arhu sat down just out of range, looking even more shocked than he had when the Children of the Serpent burst through into the catenary cavern the night before.
"I don't know if Arhu is much for being petted, Rosie," Rhiow said, and tucked herself down into a comfortable meatloaf shape. "He's new around here. Say hello, Arhu."
"Uh, hunt's luck, Rosie," Arhu said, still staring.
"Luck food not great stomach noise scary," Rosie said sadly, settling back into his nest of cardboard and old clothes. All around him, under the cardboard, were piled plastic shopping bags stuffed full of more clothes, and rags, and empty fast food containers; he nestled among them, arms wrapped around his knees, sitting content, if a little mournful-looking, against the purring warmth of the compressor-pump that would service the fire hose coiled above him.
Arhu couldn't take his eyes off the ehhif. "Why is he down here?" he whispered.
"Alalal neihuri mejhruieha lahei fenahawaha," Rosie said, in a resigned tone of voice. Arhu looked at Rhiow, stuck about halfway between fear and complete confusion.
"Rosie speaks a lot of languages, sometimes mixed together," Rhiow said, "and I have to confess that some of them don't make any sense even when I listen to them with a wizard's ear, in the Speech; so some of what he says may be nonsense. But not all. Rosie," she said, "I missed that one, would you try it again?"
Rosie spent a moment's concentration, his eyes narrowing with the effort, and then said, "Short den full hai'hauissh police clean up."
"Ah," Rhiow said. "There was a big meeting of important people in town, a 'convention,'" she said to Arhu, "and the cops have stuffed all the shelters, the temporary dens, full of homeless people, so they won't make the streets look bad. Rosie must have got to the shelter too late to get a place, huh Rosie?"
"Uh huh."
'"Homeless—"' Arhu said.
"We'd say 'denless.' It's not like 'nonaligned,' though; most ehhif don't like to wander, though there are exceptions. Rosie, what have you had to eat since you came down here? Have you had water?"
"Hot cloud lailihe ruhaith memeze pan airindagha."
"He's sshai-sau," Arhu said.
"Maybe, but he can speak cat, too," Rhiow said, "which makes him saner than most ehhif from the first pounce. You've got a pan down there in the steam tunnel, is that it, Rosie? You're catching the condensation from the pipes?"
"Yeah."
"What about food? Have you eaten today?"
Rosie looked at Rhiow sadly, then shook his head. "Shihh," he said.
"Rats," said Rhiow, and hissed very softly under her breath. "He knows the smell of food would bring them. Rosie, I'm going to bring you some food later. I can't bring much: they'll have to see me, upstairs, when I take it."
There was a brief pause, and then Rosie said, with profound affection: "Nice kitty."
Arhu turned away. "So this is one of the the People-eating ehhif I heard so much about," he said. There was no deciphering his tone. Embarrassment? Loathing?
"He's one of many who come and go through these tunnels," Rhiow said. "Some of them are sick, or can't get food, or don't have anywhere to live, or else they're running away, hiding from someone who hurt them. They come and stay awhile, until the transit police or the Terminal people make them go somewhere else. There are People too, who drift in and out of here … many fewer of them than there used to be. This place isn't very safe for our kind anymore … partly because of the Terminal people being a lot tougher about who stays down here. But partly because of the rats. They're bigger than they used to be, and meaner, and a lot smarter. Rosie," Rhiow said, "how much have the rats been bothering you?"
Rosie shook his head, and cardboard rustled all around him. "Nicht nacht night I go up gotta friend rat dog, dog, dog, bit me good, no more, not at night…"
"Rats bad at night," Arhu said suddenly.
Rhiow gave him an approving look, but also bent near him and said, too softly for an ehhif to hear, "Speak normally to him. You're doing him no kindness by speaking kitten."
"Yes bad, heard them bad, loud, not two nights ago, three," Rosie said, his voice flat, but his face betrayed the alarm he had felt. "Smelled them, smelled the cold things—" There was a sudden, rather alarming sniffing noise from under the cardboard, and Rosie's eyes abruptly vanished under the awning of cardboard, huddled against a sleeve that appeared to have about twenty more sleeves layered underneath it, alternately with layers of ancient newspaper. Rhiow caught a glimpse of a familiar movement under the bottom-most layer that made her itch as if she had suddenly inherited Saash's skin.
The sniffing continued, and Arhu stared at Rosie and actually stepped a little closer, wide-eyed. The cardboard spasmed up and down, and a little sound, huh, huh, huh, came from inside it "Is he sick?" Arhu said.
"Of course he's sick," Rhiow muttered. "Ehhif aren't supposed to live this way. He's hungry, he's got bugs, he keeps getting diseases. But mat's not the problem. He's sod. Or maybe afraid. That's 'crying,' that's what they do instead of yowl. Water comes out of their eyes. It makes them ashamed when they do that. Don't ask me why."
She turned away and started to wash, waiting for Rosie to master himself. When the sobbing stopped, Rhiow turned back to him and said, "Did you see them come through here? Did they hurt you? I can't tell
by smell, Rosie: it's your clothes."
The cardboard moved from side to side: underneath it, eyes gleamed. "They went by," he said, very softly, after a little while.
"Did you see where they came from?" Rhiow said. The head shook again. "Which 'cold things,' Rosie?" Rhiow said. "They roar … in the dark…"
Rhiow sighed. This was a familiar theme with Rosie: though he would keep coming down here to hide, trains frightened him badly, and he seemed to have a delusion that if they could, they would get off the tracks and come after him. When life occasionally seemed to ratify this belief—as when a train derailed near enough for him to see, on Track 110—Rosie vanished for weeks at a time, and Rhiow worried about him even more than she did usually.
"All right, Rosie," she said. "You stay here a little while. I'll come back with something for you, and I'll have a word with the rats … they won't come while you eat. Will you go back to the shelter after the convention's done?"
Rosie muttered a little under his breath, and then said, "Airaha nuzusesei lazeira." "Once more, please?"
'Try to. No purr not long tired lie down not get up."
Rhiow licked her nose; she caught all too clearly the ehhifs sense of weariness and fear. "We have got to get you some more verbs," she said, "or adjectives, or something. Never mind. I'll be back soon, Rosie."
She turned and hurried away, thinking hard about Rosie's clothes, and putting together a familiar short description of them in her head, in the Speech, and of what she wanted to happen to them, and what was inside them. "Come on, Arhu. You don't want to be too close to him in the next few seconds."
"Why? What's the matter? What's he going to—"
Well down the hallway, Rhiow paused and looked back. In this lighting, it would have taken a cat's eyes to see what she and Arhu could: the revolting little multiple-branched river of body lice making their way in haste out of Rosie's clothes, and pouring themselves very hurriedly out every available opening, out from under the cardboard and out across the floor, where they pitched themselves down a drain and went looking for other prey.
"I wonder if they like rat?" Rhiow said, and smiled, showing her teeth.
She loped back out of the corridor, with Arhu coming close behind her, and together they made their way back to the fire exit.
"But that," she said softly to Arhu, turning to look at him just before she slipped ahead of him through the metal of the door, "was entropy."
- =O= - *** - =O= -
Out in the concourse again, the air seemed much fresher than it had a right to in an enclosed space where diesel fumes so often came drifting out of the track areas; and the sunlight pouring through the windows was doubly welcome. Rhiow paced along up the staircase to the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance; sidled again, she and Arhu jumped up on the cream marble colonnade railing and walked along it to where they could perch directly over the big escalators going up into the MetLife building. There Rhiow started a brief wash, a real one this time.
"That was completely disgusting," Arhu said, staring out and down at the shining brass of the information kiosk in the middle of the concourse floor.
"What? The lice? I guess so. But I always do that when I see him. It's a little thing. Can't you imagine how he must have felt?"
"I can imagine it right now," Arhu said with revulsion, sat down, and started scratching as if he too had had Saash's pelt wished on him.
"He's a sad case," Rhiow said. "One of many. The ehhif would say that he fell through the safety net." She stopped washing, sighed again: Rosie's sadness was sometimes contagious. "When we're not minding the gates … we try to spread our own net to cushion the fall for a few of those who fall through. People … ehhif… whoever. We take care of this place, and since they're part of it for a while … we take care of them too."
"Why bother?" Arhu burst out. "It won't make a difference! It won't stop the way things are!"
"It will," Rhiow said. "Someday … though no one knows when. This is the Fight, the battle under the Tree: don't you see that? The Old Tom fought it once, and died fighting, and came back with the Queen's help and won it after he'd already lost. All these fights are the Fight. Stand back, do nothing, and you are the Old Serpent. And it's easy to do that here." She looked around at the place full of hurrying people, most of them studiously ignoring one another. "Here especially. Ehhif kill each other in the street every day for money, or food, or just for fun, and others of them don't lift a paw to help, just keep walking when it happens. People do it, too. Hauissh goes deadly, toms murder kittens for fun rather than just because their bodies tell them to…. The habit of doing nothing or of cruelty, believing the worst about ourselves, gets hard to break. You meet People like that every day. It's in the Meditation: ask the Whisperer. But you don't have to be the way they are. Wizards are for the purpose of breaking the habit… or not having it in the first place. It's disgusting, sometimes, yes. You should have tasted yourself when we found you."
Arhu turned away from Rhiow. "It's sick to be so worried about everybody else," he said, refusing to look at her. "Peopie should care about themselves first. That's the way we're built."
"You've bought into the myth too, have you," Rhiow said, rather dryly. "Sometimes I wonder if the houiff started that one, but I'm not sure they're that subtle. I suspect the concept's older, and goes back further, to our own people's version of the Choice." She looked at him, though, saw the set, angry look of his face, and fluted her tail sideways, a why-am-I-bothering? gesture. "I think your stomach is making you cranky," she said. "Let's go down and see about a bite more of that cheese— Oh. Wait a moment—"
An ehhif in a suit, and carrying a briefcase, was coming along the colonnade. Arhu stared at him with alarm, for the ehhif plainly saw them and was making directly for them. He got ready to jump—
"Not that way!" Rhiow said three hurried words in the Speech, and hardened the air behind Arhu just before he launched himself straight out into the main concourse. "It's all right, sit still!"
Arhu sat back down, shocked, digging his claws into the marble. The approaching ehhif paused, glanced around him casually, put the briefcase down, then turned around and leaned on his elbows on the railing, and stared out across the concourse himself.
"Nice to see you, Har'lh," Rhiow said. "Thanks for the backup yesterday."
"Don't mention it. I would have come myself, but I was otherwise occupied." He glanced sideways, only very briefly. "Good to meet you, Arhu," he said. "Go well. An excellent job you folks did. Nice going with that, Rhiow."
"Thanks, Har'lh. I could have done without the last part of it, but at least we brought our skins home whole. Going down to inspect the catenary?"
"I doubt I'll need to go down that far… I just want a look at the main matrices up top." "All right. But Saash thinks the whole thing needs to be rewoven."
"So she said. When she makes her full report, I'll look into it in more detail and have a word with the Supervisory Wizard for the North American region," Har'lh said. "It's not a job I'd care for, though. Logistically it would be something of a nightmare. Not to mention unsafe for Saash if the job started to get more complicated than she thought."
"Don't things usually?" Rhiow said. Then, a little mischievously, she added, "I'm curious, though, Har'lh. You don't seem much bothered by these inspection runs. What happens to your physicality, Downside?"
"Well now, I would think some people might consider that a personal question," Har'lh said, giving her an amused look. "But let's just say I won't be able to stop going to the gym any time soon. My looks don't change down there the way People's do. Pity."
Rhiow put her whiskers forward at him. "Is Tom back from Geneva yet?"
"Later tonight. I'm glad he'll be getting back…. Between work and Work, I've been getting short of sleep."
Rhiow had figured that out already: Har'lh's rugged good looks had acquired a rather brittle edge over the past few days. "The way you keep pouring cappuccino down yourself, are you surprised?" she said, and whisked her tail back and forth in a tsk, tsk gesture. "Your body isn't going to thank you, Har'lh."
"All right, now, you wait just a minute, Miss Cream Junkie," Har'lh said, smiling slightly. "You're lecturing me about my body?"
Rhiow put one ear back in the mildest annoyance. Hhuha had discovered that Rhiow was very partial to whipping cream… and Rhiow had not exactly talked her out of it It was a couple of weeks after that time that Rhiow had first heard the bizarre adjective "plumptious." Shortly thereafter Hhuha had stopped bringing cream home and had subjected Rhiow to a very annoying withdrawal ("Is it smart to just do this 'cold turkey'?" Iaehh had asked, and Rhiow had practically shouted, "Cold turkey would be very nice in these circumstances, yes, give me some!"—to no avail). There had followed a course of what purported to be diet cat food, but which Rhiow firmly believed to be textured, compressed sawdust in a shiny gravy consisting mostly of lacquer. Next to it, the foul disgusting tuna of recent days could actually have been considered an improvement, though that was not something that Rhiow was ever going to let Hhuha know. "Life around ehhif can be a little too fat-free sometimes," she said. "I'm just grateful she didn't try to turn me vegetarian." She shuddered, knowing cats whose well-meaning but very confused ehhif had tried this tack. Mostly the People involved had found themselves short a life very quickly, unless they managed to get away and start over elsewhere.
"Completely the wrong lifestyle for you guys," Har'lh said, and glanced down. "I wish my kind wouldn't keep trying that crap. —Hey, Urruah, how they shakin'?"
"In all directions, as usual," Urruah said, and jumped up on the railing next to Rhiow. '"Luck, you two." He leaned over toward Arhu, breathed breaths with him. "Is that mozzarella I taste? Rhi, you spoil this kit."
Arhu looked at Urruah, and said, "Half a quarter pounder with cheese and bacon. You ate the lettuce?" He grimaced. "What a big bunny!"
"Oh yeah? So how do you know what lettuce tastes like?"
"I'm going Downside," Har'lh said, "before something gets out of hand here. Give Saash my best, Rhiow. I'll talk to her as soon as I get topside again."
'"Luck," Rhiow said, and Har'lh strode away toward the stairway, swinging his briefcase idly. Urruah was looking at Arhu a little oddly. "Haifa quarter pounder?" he said. "How do you know?" "I see you eating it," Arhu said. "Saw," Urruah said pointedly.
"No. I see you eating it now," Arhu said. He was looking at the blank marble wall as if there was far more there to see. "The MhHonalh's down in the subway, at Madison and Fifty-first. A tom-ehhif and a queen– ehhif are eating outside it, and talking. Then talking louder. Real loud. All of a sudden they start fighting —" Arhu's look was blank but bewildered. "He hits her, and tries to hit her again but she ducks back, and then he comes at her again, now he's feeling around in his jacket for something, but all of a sudden he trips over something he can't see and falls down, and he's getting up and feels in his jacket again—and then the transit cops come around the corner: he gets up and runs away, and the queen is standing there —'crying'—"
Urruah's eyes were very round as he looked over at Rhiow. "It really is the Eye, isn't it?" Urruah said softly.
"The ehhifs dropped his quarter pounder on the floor there," Arhu said, as if he hadn't heard. "I see you pick it up and take it away behind the garbage can. No one else sees, they're all looking at the ehhif-queen and the cops—"
Rhiow looked at Urruah, her tail twitching thoughtfully. "That was a nice move," she said.
"I might have done it only for the burger," Urruah said, looking elsewhere.
Rhiow put her whiskers right forward at the phrasing, for the one thing wizards dare not do with words is lie. "Of course it's the Eye," she said. "The symbol for it was in the spell. We worked the spell… and spells always work. I think he may have had this talent in latent form, before … but the presence of the symbol in the spell reaffirmed it, and now it's really starting to focus."
Arhu was looking at Rhiow again. "I see you now," he ( said, a little desperately. "But I see that, too. And other things. A lot of them at once…"
"It's the 'eternal present,'" Rhiow said. "I heard about it once from Ffairh: if you ever get stuck in a gate, in an artificially prolonged transit, you can start seeing things that way. Not a good sign, normally …"
"But I'm not normal," Arhu said, suddenly sounding very weary.
"No," Rhiow said wearily. "And neither are we. We are all weirdoes together… but the 'together' is the important part."
She sighed then. "'Look, I could use a small dose of normalcy myself. Let's all go back to my neighborhood; they're starting the day's bout of hauissh, and we can sit and just kibitz for a while. You two skywalk over: Arhu can use the practice. No birds," she said to Arhu, at the sight of that gleam starting to creep back into his eye. "I have a little something to take care of here; I'll meet you there in half an hour or so. Yarn's stoop, maybe?"
"Sounds like a plan. Come on, youngster, let's you and the Big Bunny show them how we do it uptown."
And Urruah turned and strolled straight out onto the air over the main concourse, forty feet up, heading for the front doors.
Eyes wide, suddenly delighted, Arhu scampered out across the air after him. Rhiow stood there, absolutely transfixed with horror lest they be seen. But no one looked up. No one in the city ever looks up.
She watched them go, unnoticed; then let out a long breath at the lunacy of toms and headed back toward the Italian deli.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
When Rhiow got home, she found that her ehhif had been out as well, to dinner and a movie, and apparently had been back only a little while: Iaehh was going through the freezer, apparently hunting a frozen pizza. Rhiow walked over into the little kitchen and found her food bowl empty. She looked meaningfully at Iaehh, and said loudly, "I wouldn't keep you waiting for your dinner."
Iaehh shut theffrihh and started going through the cupboards. "Sue?"
No answer. "Sue?"
"Oh, sorry, honey …" came the voice from the bedroom. "My mind was elsewhere." "I was looking for that tuna stuff."
"Oh, there isn't any … the store was out of it"
"Thank you, Queen of us all," Rhiow said, heartfelt, and put her face down in the bowl. It was a nice hearty mixture, beef and something else: rabbit? Turkey? Who cares? Delightful.
"I'll pick up some of it tomorrow."
"I'll enjoy this while it lasts," Rhiow muttered.
"She seems to like this all right, though."
"Good…" Hhuha said, as she came back into the living room.
"You sound tired."
"I am tired. Another day of fighting with the damn system, and the damn network, and the damn air conditioner …"
He came over to her and held her. "I wish you could find a way to get out of there."
Hhuha sighed. "Yeah, well, I've been thinking about that, too. It's making you as unhappy as it's making me."
"I wouldn't put it that strongly."
"I would. So, listen… I've got an appointment in a couple of days."
"Oh? Who with?"
"A headhunter."
"You didn't tell me about this!"
"I'm telling you now. The guy's been on the phone to me a couple of times over the last year. At first I didn't want to do anything; you know, I thought things at the office might improve."
"Yeah, sure."
"Well, I did. But the other day I thought, 'Okay.'" She snickered. "You should have seen me sneaking out to a pay phone at lunchtime, like some kind of crook."
"Well, it wouldn't be great for you if they heard you talking about it in the early stages of the negotiations, I admit."
"In any stages. Someone else in the company was that dumb, last year. They were pink-slipped within minutes of the word getting out. I don't plan to have that happen, believe me."
"So who's he headhunting for?"
"A couple of different companies, apparently. He's willing to arrange interviews with both if my resume holds up. We'll be talking about that day after next. Lunchtime appointment."
"Hey, wow. Good luck!"
A brief silence while they nuzzled each other. "It's a little scary," Hhuha said after a little while. "Jumping before I'm pushed…"
"You were always the brave one."
"No. I just hate being taken advantage of… and I've been starting to get that feeling…" Another small silence. "Want to be taken advantage of now?" "I thought you'd never ask."
They went into the bedroom, chuckling. Rhiow lifted her head to watch them go, then put her whiskers forward and went out her little door, softly, so that they would not think they had scared the cat.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
On the rooftop, she lay comfortably sprawled in the still warmth. Air conditioners thundered around her, a basso rumble and rattle through the night, the fans of the cooling towers showing as gleaming disks in the light of the nearly full Moon that was sliding, golden, up the eastern sky.
Rhiow looked up at it thoughtfully. Rhoua's Eye, its glory hidden behind the world, glanced past it (as legend had it) into the Great Tom's eye, which reflected its light; growing from slit to eye half-open to eye round and staring, and then shrinking down to slitted eye and full-dark invisibility again, as the month went round. There were People who believed, in the face of ubiquitous evidence to the contrary, that the feline eye mirrored the Moon's phase. Rhiow had been amazed, and very amused, to find that some ehhif had the same story.
There were wizardry connections as well. Apparently the ehhif version of The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye, the defining document that contained descriptions of all beings and all wizardry in this particular part of the universe, originally took the form of an actual book that could be read only by moonlight: hence its ehhif name, The Book of Night with Moon. Supposedly the Book had to be read from, at intervals, to keep all existence in place, and everything correctly defined. I wouldn't care to be the one who does the reading, Rhiow thought, looking out over the city as the Moon went quietly up the sky. Too much exposure to such power, such knowledge, and you could lose yourself as surely as you might lose yourself Downside if you stayed too long…
But mat was the danger all over wizardry: there were so many different kinds of existence, alien and fascinating, to lose your nature in…. Though was this perhaps some kind of obscure bint from the Powers, Rhiow wondered, that you might be expected to lose your nature eventually? … A hint of the way things would be, someday, when the world was finally set right, and all the kinds of existence were united in timelessness, perfected and made whole, as the Oath intimated they would be?
… Maybe. But she wasn't ready.
The question of the danger was always there, though, for a practicing wizard. When you were on the universe's business all the time, with a wizard's multifarious worries on your mind, were you likely to start losing your felinity? I wonder, she thought, if the ehhif wizards have this problem … if they fear losing their "humanity" as a result of having to cope with the larger worldview, the bigger maid-set, in which no language or way of life is superior to any other, and each must be valued on its own terms? I can understand why it must look crazy to Arhu that I spend so much time worrying about houiff and ehhif and whatnot. …
But then, she thought, I have ehhif of my own to think about, after all. The habit's hard to break….
All the same… the worry niggled at her, occasionally, and was doing so again. It was something she had occasionally felt she should talk to Ehef about. But then she would get busy with some assignment….
Maybe that's not good, Rhiow thought after a while. How many years have I been at this, now? And when did I last have a vacation from the Art? A real one, when I wouldn't be on call, and could stay home, and eat that terrible cat food, and lie in the sun, and purr at Hhuha… and just be People…
The problem was, of course, that she knew perfectly well how much tune and energy the Powers That Be had invested in her. Go on vacation… and that invested energy would be lost, even for that little while: as in hauissh, any move which is not an attack means lost ground. The heat death of the universe doesn't speed up… but it doesn't slow down as much as it might have. Lie basking in the sun… and know that the power that runs the sun is running out at its usual speed, trickling away like blood from a wound… and you're not doing anything to make sure the world keeps going that little bit longer to enjoy that warmth and light
She sighed. I will know doubt, she thought, slipping into the Meditation, and fear: I will suspect myself of folly and impracticality in this seemingly hard-edged world, where things clouded or obscure are so often discounted as unimportant, and mystery is derided, and uncertainty is seen as a sign of an inability to cope. But my commission comes from Those Who move in the shadows, indistinct and unseen for Their own purpose: Those Whom we never see face to face except in the faces of those we meet from day to day. In Them is my trust, until I am relieved of Their trust in me. I will learn to live with uncertainty, for it is the earnest of Their promise that all things may yet be well; and when, in the shadows, the doubts arise, I will close my eyes and say, This is no shade to Them; for my part, I will bide here and wait for the dawn….
She closed her eyes and dozed.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
Rhi, Saash's voice came suddenly.
Rhiow opened her eyes, surprised. The Moon was much farther across the sky, westering now. "What is it?" she said. "Are you all right?"
I'm fine. But Rhiow, have you heard anything from Har'lh?
"He said he was going to talk to you after he came back from Downside," Rhiow said.
Well, he hasn't.
"Maybe something else came up," Rhiow said. "He's a Senior, for Iau's sake. It's not like he hasn't got ten million people to keep an eye on."
Rhi, you're not listening. He hasn't come back from Downside. The gate logs show his access… but not his egress.
Rhiow sat up, shaking her head. "He could have come back by another gate. And he did say he might take a look at the catenary if he had to—"
He's not there. I called him. There's no answer and no trace of any other gating. Rhi, he's gone!
Chapter Nine
She headed for Grand Central at her best speed, which (this time of night) meant skywalking; but her concerns over this were fewer than usual. There were not that many people likely to spot a black cat in the dim predawn air, fifty stories up, and all the birds of prey were asleep.
Rhiow came down to ground level again at Forty-second and Lexington, and got herself sidled. She trotted past the Grand Hyatt, past a few drunks sitting against the walls, waiting for the station (or the nearby liquor store) to open; passed through the locked front doors, and hurried up past the waiting room …
… and stopped, looking around her suspiciously. There was something different…
The lights in the display area were mostly out, of course, with the station in closed-down mode.
No… that's not it.
Rhiow walked past the biggest of the mounted skeletons, strolling toward the back of the room. No one hiding here… That had been the first impression: something concealing itself, hugging the shadows, waiting … Nothing. You're nervous. Let's get on with business.
Rhiow started to walk out again … and then paused, looked up at the biggest skeleton.
Its position was different.
Impossible. The thing weighs tons; it's wired together much too securely to sag out of shape.
An illusion, then … born of the darkness, her nerves. The way the head hung down, the empty eyes looking at her, was creepy in this subdued lighting, seeming somehow more concentrated and immediate than they had yesterday. The nasty little front claws were held out in what might almost have been a gesture of surprise—in an ehhif, at least. Iau only knew what such a gesture might once have meant in a saurian. If there was threat in these poor dead bones, it was in the huge jaws, the serried ranks of fangs …
Rhiow thought suddenly of the back of the cavern that led into the deep Downside: the spikes of stone, the jaws ready to close …
She flirted her tail in annoyance at herself—there were much more important things to think about at the moment. She turned and galloped up into the brighter lighting of the main concourse, down to the platform for Track 30 and the gate….
- =O= - *** - =O= -
Saash was there. So was another figure, an ehhif, sidled as well: Tom Swale, Har'lh's partner-Advisory. He was a little shorter than Har'lh, a little broader in the shoulder, higher-cheekboned, and with silver-shot hair: if anything he looked more like an Area Advisory than his partner did, though he wore the same kind of informal clothes this time of day, shirt and jeans and sneakers. His easygoing face, though, was wearing an unusual expression of strain and concern.
"It's nice to see you, Rhiow," Tom said, hunkering down to talk to her, "but I wish to die Powers that it was under other circumstances. Saash has filled you in?"
"Yes." Rhiow looked over at Saash, who said, "I've checked all the logs of all the gates here, and the Penn team has fed me all their gates' logs as well. No sign of any access by Har'lh except to this gate: no sign of his egress from any other gate in New York, and no sign of any private gating, either."
Almost behind her, Urruah came trotting down the platform, and greeted Tom. "You still here? There's no sign of him yet?—"
"None. Wizards all over are looking for him. But no one's found him… which is pretty unusual. Wizards almost always find what they're looking for, especially when this many of them are concentrated on the task."
"They're looking offplanet as well?" Rhiow said.
Tom nodded. "An Area Advisory going missing is usually a fairly serious sign," Tom said. "There's concern at fairly high levels."
"He wouldn't be—dead—would he?" Saash said, with the greatest reluctance. "I don't think so," Tom said. "I'm pretty sure I would know."
"Oh, come on, Saash," Urruah said, "you're nuts. Have you ever heard of a Advisory dying in the line of duty?"
Tom looked at Urruah fairly gently. "Urruah," he said, "all Advisories die in the line of duty. Any exceptions are accidents or misperceptions on the part of the living. It's within the job description: we accept it."
"That said," Rhiow said, "Advisories are also tough and smart. Maybe not as powerful as they would be if they were younger; but who is? Could it be that Har'lh's still Downside, but held somehow in a pocket of influence of some other Power"—she was not going to name names at this point—"that is making it seem that he's not there?"
"It's a possibility. But I'm surprised you're eager to suggest it, since you know what it would mean."
"I'm not eager, believe me," Rhiow said; and a glance at the others confirmed to her that they were in agreement.
"Well." Tom breathed out, a harassed sound. "The only good thing about all this is that it's been a slow night; there haven't been any other accesses down here. We don't know for sure that this particular occurrence was aimed specifically at Carl… but we also can't take the chance that other wizards on
errantry might fall foul of it. Were these other gates, I might be concerned; but this is the master system— all the world's gates are sourced out of me 'tree' structure that arises in the roots of the Mountain. That being the case, I think I'm going to have to get a little drastic, and insist that the gating system worldwide be shut down until we find Carl and get all this sorted out. It may be nothing serious at all…"
"But you doubt it," Rhiow said.
"I doubt it. The shutdown obviously isn't going to apply to accredited repair teams: naturally that's going to mean you. I'm sorry to put you through this again, Rhi… but you did the most recent intervention, and the way the Powers work, that suggests you're going to be the ones who can produce the result. How soon can you go down again?"
Rhiow looked at Saash and Urruah. Urruah was carefully studying a crack in the concrete: Saash was scratching.
Come on, you two.
This does not work for me, Urruah growled silently. I hate this, Saash hissed. You heard what I told you before. Yes, I did. Well? They both looked up at her.
She turned to look up at Tom. "Dawn would be the soonest," Rhiow said. "I would prefer noon, though, since that way we can bring our newest member along. He's likely to be extremely useful, but not unless he's rested."
Tom too examined the concrete for a few breaths. "I hate to let the trail get cold."
"If there is a trail," Urruah said. "I'd sooner take a little extra time in preparation, and get the job right, if we have to go down there again."
"You're right, of course," Tom said. He stood up. "Let's say noon, then. I'll mind your upper gate for you this time: Carl and I have been working together long enough now that I may be able to help you somehow. Otherwise I'll be in a position to get you backup in a hurry should you need it."
Rhiow flirted her tail "yes," though privately she was unsure how fast any backup was going to be able to reach them, if they were going to have to go as far down the "tree" structure as she feared they would. "I want an override," she said, "on the number and power of wizardries we can bring down with us. I feel we're going to need to be unusually well armed this time, and while I know the Powers are chary of letting people throw spells around like water, I think our workload the last few days, and the resistance we met last time, are going to justify it."
Tom looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded. "All right," he said, "I'll take it up with the North American Supervisor."
"Don't just take it up, T'hom. I want it done. Otherwise—"
She didn't finish the sentence, but she was somewhat fluffed up, and didn't try to disguise it. "You're willing to pay the price?" Tom said.
Rhiow licked her nose. Such exceptions did not come cheap. Of course, not even the smallest wizardry was without its price: usually you paid in your own stamina, in the work and pains you took over the construction of the spell, the personal energy required to perform it, and the energy you spent in dealing with the consequences. But for extra services, you paid extra… and the coin was usually time off your lifespan. Days, months: a dangerous equation, when you didn't know for sure how much time you might have left… but sometimes necessary.
She licked her nose again. "Yes," she said.
Tom looked at her, and sighed. "I'll talk to you at noontime," he said. "Saash, the catenaries will go down in half an hour—that'll give everyone worldwide who might be transiting plenty of time to finish their transits or change their plans."
"Fine," Saash said. "We'll use the Thirty gate again for the access: having just worked on it, I'm happiest with its function. If you'll see to it that power is running to that one gate for noon—"
"Consider it done." Tom stood up again. "Listen, you three… I'm sorry this is going to be so rough on you. I appreciate what you're doing."
Do you, I wonder, Rhiow thought, but then she felt guilty, for the thought was unworthy. Of course he does. It's his job. AH we can do is do ours.
"Let's go, you two," she said. "We've got a lot of preparation to do. T'hom—go well."
"So may we all," he said, and vanished.
- =O= - *** - =O= -
The three of them repaired to Rhiow's rooftop and spent the next few hours discussing what spells they might possibly bring with them that would do any good against a force much bigger and more dangerous than the saurians they had met the other day. It was certain that they would meet such force, since they had defeated the saurians so bloodily last time, and (worse) because Har'lh's disappearance was almost certainly a provocation to draw them, or others like them, down again.
"My guess is that they're going to try something more spectacular than the last time," Urruah said. "If you're right, and they managed to sabotage the catenary … then worse is coming. We've got to get down there and have enough power to stop whatever we find."
"If T'hom gets us that override," Saash said, looking out over the rooftops as the sun came up, "it's going to make our jobs a lot easier."
"Plan for it," Rhiow said, "but also plan without it I for one am going to be prepared to survive this intervention: I'm not going to plan to get stuck in circle again, either. I know the Oath says we have to let these creatures survive if at all possible—but not at the cost of our own lives or our mission. I'm going to use that neural degenerator as liberally as I need." "So will I," Urruah said, "but Rhi… even an override may not be enough to save us, if the kind of numbers turn up that you're expecting."
"What are you suggesting we do about it?"
"Conjunct coupling," Urruah said, and licked his nose.
So did Rhiow. Saash just stared at him, round-eyed, then turned around and started to wash her back.
"I've been thinking about what Arhu was saying," Urruah said. " 'He's coming. The father … the son.' Something bigger than the rest of the lizards. Something much more dangerous … that was the impression I got, anyway."
Rhiow switched her tail in reluctant agreement. "You're saying you think conjunct is the only way we're going to be able to maintain power levels high enough to handle something like … that." Whatever that was: she was becoming afraid to follow that line of reasoning to its rational conclusion, even here in the burgeoning light of day.
"It means," Urruah said, "that no matter whether one or another of us has a lapse, the others' combined power will be able to feed the wizardry they're doing, and keep it going."
Saash sat up and glared at him. "It also means that if we go down there hooked up in conjunct, we all have to come back that way … or none of us can come back up again at all! If any of us die down there, the others will be stranded—!"
There was a pause. "Yes," Urruah said, "it would mean that. But think about the alternative, even with the override that T'hom may or may not be able to get us. You're doing a wizardry. Your concentration, or your power flow, fails. You blow the wizardry … and you die … and then the others are put at risk trying to keep you from dying, and their wizardries fail." He would not look away from Saash. She stared back at him; the tension stretched itself across the air between them. "Everyone dies. The whole job goes straight to sa'Rrahh. And not just our lives … whatever happens to them when you die down there. A whole lot of other lives. All those that depend on the gates working. Har'lh's, too, for all we know. —At least this way we would have a better chance of supporting one another's wizardries. I'm no hero … but it's all about getting the job done, isn't it? Rhi?" He turned to her.
Rhiow looked down at the gravel where she sat, her tail twitching. Finally she glanced up again. "If it were just me," she said at last, "I would sanction it. But it's not just me. There are two other team members who must agree to be bound in this manner… and this isn't something I can decide for the others involved."
Saash would not look at her. "I'm not going to ask for a decision now," Rhiow said. "Noon will be soon enough. Between now and then I'm going to have to go explain it all to Arhu anyway, which should be interesting." She looked east, at Rhoua's Eye, rising nonchalantly in the sky as if this were just another day; and from the streets came the early hoots and tire-screeches of the beginning of rush-hour traffic, reinforcing the feeling of normalcy, spurious though it was.
"It's all in the Queen's womb anyway," she said. "All we can do is wait and see how the litter comes out… and meantime, make sure our claws are sharp. Saash, wait awhile before you head back to the garage."
She walked off to her usual stairway in the air, leaving Saash and Urruah pointedly not looking at each
other. Please, Iau, let them sort it out, she thought.
But she couldn't help but wonder how effective prayer was likely to be today, of all days…. - =O= - *** - =O= -
The garage was deep in its morning business, cars going in and out at a great rate, and Rhiow questioned whether the ehhif-working there would have seen her whether she had been sidled or not As it was, she was, and she walked up the air again to the high ledge in the back, where Arhu was sleeping.
She sat down on the concrete and simply looked at him for a moment. He was sleeping a little more easily, if nothing else: stretched out long and leggy, rather than hunched up in the little ball of previous days. He's beginning to fill out a little, Rhiow thought, even after just a few days. A few months of this and he's going to start looking like a proper young tom.
If we survive that long…
She was aware, suddenly, of eyes half-open and looking at her.
"I heard you," Arhu said, not moving, just watching her with a sleepy look, but one that was nonetheless unusually knowing.
Rhiow stuck out a leg and began to wash it in a casual manner.
"Something bad's happening, isn't it?" Arhu said.
"Much worse than usual," Rhiow said. "Har'lh is missing."
"I know," Arhu said, rolling over to lie upright. "I see that. Or, at least, I know it's happened… but I don't know how or why."
He paused, as if looking at something else; then said, "You can't go after him now. Something's coming ,.. trying to break through."
"What?" Rhiow said.
"The one who chooses," Arhu said, gazing out into the fumy air of the garage. "And the one who didn't choose. There's a darkness pushing against the gate; I see it bending outward, and there are eyes, they're staring, they want—" Suddenly Arhu scrabbled to bis feet and pushed himself right back against the concrete wall, as if he had forgotten how to melt through it, and he started to pant as if he had been running. "It's coming," he gasped, "they're coming, all the choices, all the eyes … coming upward …"
"Sit down, Arhu," Rhiow said, and went over to him, leaning to wash behind his ear briefly. He sat, but he was still staring out into the dimness, his eyes flickering wildly from side to side as he watched what Rhiow couldn't see.
'This one's scary," Arhu said softly, his breathing beginning to slow a little; but his eyes were still wide, fixed on some spot out of Rhiow's vision, or anyone else's. 'This one really wants to be real, this choice. It's going to do it soon." He quieted a little more, but a few seconds later, he said, "They can't use the gates."
"I know," Rhiow said. "Tom has had them shut down."
"That's not the problem," Arhu said. He looked at her, with some confusion, Rhiow thought, and said, "All these choices … .How did we choose?"
Her first temptation was to tell him to look himself at the ancient memories the Whisperer would show him; but then it occurred to Rhiow that he was already seeing enough at the moment—he seemed to be caught in some kind of visionary fugue—and adding more imagery on top of it might make him even more confused or cloud some perception that might be of more importance.
Rhiow nudged Arhu down into the "sphinx" position he had been lying in earlier, and hunched next to him, tucking her forepaws in. "I suppose all the Choices are odd," she said, "but ours, well, it had its own quirks. We were made before the ehhif, supposedly, but well after the cetaceans and the saurians, of course. The saurians had passed by then; their failed Choice had killed all of them. There were a very few saurians, you know," she said, settling her front paws more comfortably, "who had rejected that image of world-ruling power than the Lone Power offered them. They took the vegetarian option to use less life, more sparingly—but there were not enough of them in the Choice to turn it aside, and they died under the fangs of the others. The Lone One's long black winter killed the rest
"Then, much later, after the winter was gone and the world was warm and green again, our foremothers came. There wasn't any differentiation among the various kinds of feline families yet: just one kind, who didn't look so much different from us, although they were bigger, more houff-sized. They all ran in prides, and so when they grew into mind, the First Queens made the Choice for them, as queens decide what their prides will do today."
"What did It—what did she say?"
"Well, sa'Rrahh came and said to them that the way of life that Iau had held out to them—to kill responsibly, to take only what they needed—was just Her plot to keep them small and weak, living on subsistence, on sufferance, and eventually to make slaves of them. The Destroyer held out to them the promise of rule over the world, the land the saurians had wielded: power and terror, domination, all other life fleeing before them. And the Queen-mothers of the First Prides, wizards and nonwizards both— because there are always wizards in a Choice, at least a few—considered the Choice; but, being People after all, they disagreed on what to do, just as the saurians had."
"So some took sa'Rrahh's offer—"
Arhu had that faraway look again: Rhiow had no idea what he might be seeing, and continued as she had been doing. "Most did, and their Choice ruled the others. The Hungry, those who made that Choice, grew great and terrible in body, killing for power and success, but like the carnivorous saurians, they hadn't paid enough attention to the wording and intention of the Lone One's offer. They had their time to rule, but it was short—soon enough the ice crept down from the poles and buried the forests where they hunted, killing their game, and then most of them as well. There was a second group of the Eldest Kindred who rejected power and rule over the Earth, and elected to kill what they needed, only. They were the Mindful. They stayed small, for the most part, but grew wise, enough so to survive the ice when it came."
She fell silent for a moment, wondering what to make of the look on Arhu's face. "But there were more—"
he said.
Rhiow switched her tail "yes." "They weren't very many, that last group: the Failed. They recognized as potentially deadly the Choice the Lone Power was offering, and they attacked her and died. But they're reborn, again and again, in one or another of our sundered Kindreds."
"They're wizards," Arhu said suddenly, and looked up at Rhiow.
"Yes," she said. "Still we die: there's no escaping the fate of the rest of our kind. But we're set apart; and we alone of all felinity may come again to that time and place where cats' bodies are once again the size of their souls…. Other confusions between size and Kindred have come about over time. The Hungry are born among the smaller kindreds, and the Mindful among the great; the savage and the kindly mingle. You never know which sort you'll find yourself dealing with. Yet every feline, great or small, carries all of them within herself; we all have to make the Choice again and again, a hundred times in a life, or a thousand. Sum up all the choices, over nine lives, and your fate's decided, they say. If you fail, then there's nothing at the end of it all but silence, and the night. Pass through that last summing-up, though, under Iau's eye, and there's the last life, which doesn't end—"
"—the Tenth Life and the truest," Arhu said slowly, "of those whose spirits outwear and overmaster their bodies, untiring of the chase, the Choice, the battle, and go on in the world and beyond it; immortal, dangerous and fair, cats-become-Powers, who move in and out of phЧитать дальше