Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

Rhiow immediately felt guilty for treating Sif like a kitten. “I wasn’t –”

“You were,” Sif said. “You can’t see what your ears are doing.” Her tail was lashing, but it didn’t seem to be annoyance with Rhiow: rather with the whole situation they were stuck in. “Let it go.”

Rhiow put her tail over Sif’s back as the two of them stood for a last moment looking out at the strengthening glitter of the LA city lights, all a-tremble as the day’s heat rose into a sky gone dark umber with twilight. “I just want you to know,” she said, “that you’ve proven yourself a wizard to be reckoned with a hundred times over in the last year.”

Further down the hillside, the lights of the Silent Man’s car rounded another curve, briefly gold on the dark road, and vanished again. “Well, you’ve been a pretty good team leader, too,” Siffha’h said. “I’d say I can speak for us both on that, though getting my dimwit brother to say as much…”

“He has his ways of saying it,” Rhiow said. “Don’t worry on his part. Meanwhile, the others are waiting…”

The two of them slipped into the hillside brush after the others. There were no houses along here: the hillside was too steep even for the most ambitious ehhif builders to risk putting houses on it. Up at the top of the hill, though, where Dagenham’s house was perched, was another story.

Rhiow caught up with the rest of the team where they waited in the brush. Helen, now wearing dark sweats and sneakers and with her hair tied back tight, was crouching down under a gnarled Manzanita bush and digging her hands into the dry crumblyleaf-mould mulch. Under it the ground still had a touch of dampness left over from the soaked-in morning dewfall: Helen rubbed her hands in it an then rubbed her face to get rid of any shine and go darker and more patchy.

“You could just sidle,” Arhu said.

“Sooner not,” Helen said. “Right now I have this feeling that something up there is watching, watching… The less wizardry, the better.” She looked over at Rhiow.

“We’re thinking inside the same skin, cousin,” Rhiow said. “I’d sooner get in there without sidling if I could…”

“There might be a way,” said a voice from the shadows.

Hwaith came slipping out from under another of the manzanitas, half-invisible in the deepening twilight to even a Person’s eye until he moved. “Would you believe,” he said, “that this place has a wine cellar?”

“Not sure how it could avoid having one,” Urruah said, “having seen how the party crowds here soak the stuff up.”

“So right,” Hwaith said. “Natural cooling from the hillside. Locked on the inside, obviously. A nice iron gate to let the visitors see down the length of the tunnel. But you know…” He waved his tail. “There must be a lot of condensation when the temperatures on the hillside get really hot.”

“Which in this climate would be mostly…” Aufwi said.

“Because there’s a drain channel down the middle of the tunnel, and the condensation runs down it into a little pipe that lets out, oh…” He turned and wandered over to another bush a few yards away. “Right about here.”

And of course once you were looking for it, or right at it, it was impossible not to see the terra-cotta drainpipe all covered with detritus from the brush all around, and dully moss-colored from the parched moss that was growing in the only place it could manage to. The runoff hadn’t managed to dig too deep a gully on its way down the road: mostly it soaked into the ground and fed an unusually green and well-grown patch of brush.

Rhiow slipped over to the pipe and looked at it, then bent down to measure the width with her whiskers. “Kind of a tight fit…”

“Not for those of us who’ve been watching our intake,” Hwaith said, glancing in an idle manner toward Urruah.

Arhu and Siffha’h collapsed briefly into muffled adolescent snickering. Aufwi hunted more or less desperately for some other direction to look in. Urruah gave Hwaith a glance that might have been avuncular if fewer of his claws had been retracted at that moment. “Child,” he said, “watch and learn.”

Urruah bent down and gradually vanished into the pipe, though it was educational to watch what he had to do with his hindquarters to manage it. Rhiow slipped up beside Hwaith and said under her breath, “How can you joke at a time like this?”

“Now or never,” Hwaith said, giving her one of those sidewise looks. “I’d say this is the time for making use of last chances.” And in he went after Urruah.

Rhiow stood there feeling for a moment as if a claw had been very purposefully stuck into some previously unidentified tender spot on her hide. No one else had a look for her; Arhu slipped into the pipe after Urruah, and Sif and Aufwi after him.

Helen simply vanished… though not completely. Rhiow looked around her and saw nothing but a little shiny green beetle sitting on the ground where an ehhif surely no shorter than five foot eleven had been squatting. Where have you put your mass?? she said silently. And that wasn’t even a wizardry. How did you —

Elsewhere, Helen said. It’s a bit of a talent. She scurried up Rhiow’s tail onto her back. Quickly now, cousin, I’m compressed down pretty tight here –

Shortly, so was Rhiow. The kits had made light work of the pipe, and even Urruah had maneuvered himself in here somehow, but Rhiow found herself wondering whether Iaehh’s description of her as “plumptious” might actually have some foundation in fact. If anything’s left of the fabric of reality after I get back, she thought, I’ll have to look into it… She crawled along paw over paw, her back scraping the top of the pipe, though she was trying to keep it flat for Helen’s sake. Where the aueh are you?

Between your shoulderblades.

Rhiow hissed as she pulled herself along. It’s not even as if I drink that much cream.

How much is that much?

You’re not helping. Way down at the end of the pipe she could see a dim light. I’m a wizard, Rhiow said silently, and in considerable annoyance. In the course of my Art I will be thrust into embarrassing positions and situations that I may consider unbefitting to my dignity. I must remember that no dignity of mine matches that of Those who conferred my office upon me –

I’m betting you won’t catch Aaurh the Mighty stuffing Herself into something like this, Helen said.

The light was closer. Rhiow found it hard not to laugh, despite the weight and press of events. Cousin, she said, if we’re spared and come back to our own time and place, most seriously I desire your better acquaintance: because for an ehhif you’ve a very Personish sense of humor.

I take that as high praise, Helen said, and may the Queen take the mouse straight from your mouth and so claim it for her own that only the tail hangs out when She’s done. Here we are now –

Maybe a yard ahead the pipe widened out into a tiny tunnel with a grille at one end, perhaps a foot wide. The grille, though, was thin wire stuff susceptible of being bent to one side by a Person approaching with enough intent from the far side: and whatever intent Hwaith might have earlier imparted to it, Urruah had added a whole lot more. The grille was well bent askew from the bottom up, and Rhiow peered out under the bent-upwards part into a long dimly-lit space with an old tiled floor and brick walls.

Rhiow slipped through the opening and paused, looking around at the others, who were checking the space out. Helen scuttled down off Rhiow’s shoulder, down her leg and onto the floor, and beetled well off to one side near the closest of a series of dusty wood-and-wire wine racks stacked up high against the walls. A second later she was in ehhif shape again, down on one knee on the bricks and glancing around. “I’ll bet this isn’t the only space under this house that’s dug into the hillside like this…” Helen said.