Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

Rhiow was trying to sound casual about it, but she was no more successful at this than Urruah had been. Now he looked up from the bowl again, and Rhiow knew she was in trouble: anything that could make Urruah stop eating was going to be problematic. “What happened?”

Arhu and Siffha’h still had their heads down in the bowls, but now Aufwi had stopped eating and was looking at her too. Hwaith began washing one ear. “Maybe this can wait until everyone finishes –”

“Rhiow,” Urruah said.

It wasn’t a tone she heard from him often. So she had no choice but to tell him what she had been up to, and how and where Hwaith had found her.

Various shocked looks were exchanged among her team while she was getting through the tale. Rhiow did her best to ignore them. Finally Urruah, who had sat quiet by the food bowl during the whole recital, gave her an annoyed look and said, “Did you think to ask any of us along on this little jaunt??”

Rhiow sighed. “Ruah, everyone was out, and the moment presented itself, and I took that moment. Like you’ve never misjudged a wizardry in your life. Do I have to remind you again about the Oyster Bar incident?”

Urruah’s tail twitched. “All right,” he said. “Point taken.”

“And that didn’t even involve anyone else’s quality-of-life issues – so keep your sense of proportion about you.”

“Yes, O Queen.”

Sarcasm, Rhiow thought: that’s better. “All right. Does anyone else care to take me to task for my night’s work? Last chance.”

Arhu and Siffha’h looked away from each other and began examining the ceiling. Aufwi washed his face. Helen started braiding her hair.

“Fine,” Rhiow said. “So, you two. About Dolores and Ray – “

“A boring night,” Arhu said.

“All this ehhif moaning and boning and rolling around,” Siffha’h said, rolling her eyes. “Urruah, you’d have loved it.”

Urruah put his ears back.

“But finally they finished up with that and our tom started working again on convincing his weak-minded little queen that he knew what was best for her,” Arhu said. “I’m sorry, Rhi, don’t look at me like that, but this one was not bred for brains, whatever else she might be good for. Otherwise she’d see that all this tom wants her for is her sshi’fth.”

It was slang again, and Rhiow once more started feeling grateful that she didn’t understand some of what the kits were saying. “Or maybe something else,” said Siffha’h.

“Such as?” Aufwi said.

Sif was bristling a little. “I don’t know,” she said. “But when they were talking after they finished, she kept trying to get him to discuss what life would be like for the two of them after she got her career running again…”

“And he didn’t want to talk about that very much,” Arhu said. “It wasn’t like he was avoiding the subject on purpose. It was more like he didn’t believe it was ever going to happen. Like something impossible. I Looked at him — ” Arhu’s tail lashed. “And whatever I could get from his images of his future life – which were pretty murky except for pictures of having lots of things – one thing’s for sure: she wasn’t there.”

Siffha’h gave him a look. “So when they started doing it again — ”

“I got bored and I left,” Arhu said, in the tone of voice of someone telling on himself so another party wouldn’t have the pleasure of doing it first. “And what I found!”

“What?” Urruah said. “Where’d you go?”

“Back to the house where all the ehhif were partying.”

“Why in the Queen’s name?”

“Because that’s where their meeting is tonight,” Siffha’h said. “They’re going somewhere more important after that, but he wouldn’t say where. Wouldn’t even think about it.”

“Really,” Hwaith said.

“And because Ray was thinking about that house all the time, even in the middle of the most physical stuff,” Arhu said. “And about the little guy.”

“Who,” Helen said, “Elwin Dagenham?”

“Him,” Arhu said. “As if he’s really important somehow.”

“Indeed,” Rhiow thought. Suddenly her thoughts about the party’s host were falling into many new shapes, some of them most unusual.

“But not important in the public relations sense,” said Aufwi.

“Absolutely not. In Ray’s mind, he’s this big dark shape. Dangerous.”

Rhiow’s tail twitched slowly. It was hard to imagine the inoffensive, almost shy figure she’d seen last night as any kind of dangerous. “And you couldn’t See why.”

Arhu sighed. “Not then,” he said. “He was way too full of ehhif sex-think for me to See anything else right then. Which is why I left.”

Rhiow caught the set of growing annoyance in Siffha’h’s ears. “It was wise of you to stay behind,” she said. “Thanks for that.”

Sif’s ears went forward. “So you went back to the house–” Rhiow said.

“They were plenty of them still partying,” Arhu said. “So I just got sidled and walked around poking my nose into things. I wanted to see if I could figure out where the group was going after they met.”

“Are you absolutely sure you weren’t noticed?”

“Of course I wasn’t,” Arhu said. “The ones that weren’t trying to get into each other’s clothes were mostly busy wrapping themselves around as much alcohol as they could find. And not just alcohol, either.”

Helen looked alert. “Drugs?”

“Just hhash,” Arhu said. “There was a little room back in the wing of the building that runs along the hillside. The inside was furnished sort of the same way as the library we saw: and it had a fireplace. Everyone was gathered around that and blowing their smoke into it.”

“Smart enough, I guess,” Urruah said. “That way any smell would vent out up the chimney rather than out into the hallway.”

“Not that one of us couldn’t smell it,” Arhu said. “That’s what brought me down there first. But then I thought, ‘Who knows, maybe the ehhif who owns this place has some other little secrets stashed down here as well.” And sure enough, down that hall a little way is a doorway that looks just like more wall paneling until you Look at it really hard.”

“Show us,” Rhiow said.

A blink later they were no longer in the Silent Man’s living room, but looking at the wall paneling in the hallway of Elwin Dagenham’s house. To the normal visual sense, there was no break in the expensive hardwood paneling at all. But Rhiow and the others now saw what Arhu had seen when he bent the Eye on the paneling. A faint fizz of power described a door-shape in the wood, hiding the actual razor-thin space between door and jamb.

“Wizardry,” Aufwi said, looking shocked.

“Too underpowered,” said Helen, peering at it through Arhu’s eyes. “It’s a charm.”

Auwfi looked confused. “You haven’t run into this kind of thing before?” Helen said. “Granted, you don’t see these a whole lot in urbanized societies. There are some Speech-words for simple things, like the states of visibility or cohesion, that are so powerful they don’t need to be built into a spell by a wizard to work: you can attach them to some physical object and get a fairly good result, though it’s usually pretty low-powered. Even nonwizardly humans can use charms – if they can find the word they need, and learn how to tether it to the right kind of object. People in rural cultures, or lifestyles with strong verbal transmission traditions – and a lot of superstition – tend to hang onto them longest.”

Rhiow’s fur stood up a little. That someone in that house would have the knowledge to use such a thing, combined with what they already knew about the place, disturbed her. “Anyway, as soon as I saw that,” Arhu said, “I went in – “