Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

Rhiow put her nose up into the air, sniffed. The scents of old growth, damp bark, shed conifer needles and peppertree leaves, mingled in the still air with scents of stale water and baked stone. But there was something else as well. “Am I crazy,” Rhiow said, “or is that – oil?”

“Not crazy at all,” Hwaith said. “Not actually on the grounds, here. But it’s close by: there’s a well down the other side of the hill. Ironic, really, since you could say this whole place was built on oil.”

Rhiow stood still and listened. Muted by the way the ground fell away, she could hear a faint, repetitive creaking noise. “Is that the well I’m hearing?” she said.

“That’s it.” Hwaith started off in the opposite direction, and Rhiow padded after him. “Anyway, down over here is where that root was trying to sink itself – “

Along the ridge of the hill, a terrace reached away from one side of the main house, stretching perhaps a hundred yards. At the terrace’s end a formal box garden began, or what remained of one. Once it had been an interlocking maze of carefully trimmed lines of shrubbery. Now it was looking ragged around the edges, even dusty. “If these ehhif are so wealthy,” Rhiow said as they paced through the maze, “it’s surprising they don’t take better care of the place.”

“It is a little strange,” Hwaith said, “but they don’t seem to be here much. Watch out for these steps – a couple of the slabs are loose.”

They made their way down a shallow stairway at the far edge of the maze, heading for a small, flat area further down the hillside, hemmed in by an incomplete circle of trees. “This is where my gate was trying to root,” Hwaith said, “at least briefly.” He stopped, his nose wrinkling. “Wait a minute. Do you smell – “

To a Person’s senses, ehhif blood had a metallic reek, instantly identifiable. Even if there had been rain to wash it away, which there had not, the scent would still have lingered in the soil for weeks, unmistakable. Now Rhiow walked slowly into the center of the ring of trees, sniffing carefully.

The scent was very old. Rhiow spent a while working her way over toward one spot in particular, near the encircling ring of trees, where once upon a time, the blood had soaked deep. But that had been a long time ago. Hwaith came up by her, put his nose down, inhaled. His tail lashed.

“Years old,” he said. “But I’d have trouble saying how many. Forensics hasn’t been my field.”

“Could this be a murder the police here missed?” Rhiow said. “Is this anything you’ve heard about before?”

“No,” Hwaith said, sounding upset.

Rhiow’s tail was lashing too, now. “We’re going to have to get Arhu up here,” she said. “I can’t believe this. Another – maybe not a murder, but something. And no way to tell if it’s germane to what we’re doing.” She put her nose down to the ground again, took another long breath –

— froze. A sour stink, faint, damp, acrid, teased her nose. Her mind went back to the stink she’d scented when she had had her teeth sunk into the diagnostic webbing of Hwaith’s gate, just after they’d arrived. “Do you smell that?” she said.

He put his nose down by the ground, breathed, then opened his mouth to rebreathe the scent. “Yes.”

Rhiow shook her head, sneezed. Then she sat down, licked a paw and scrubbed at her nose briefly, it itched so with the warring scents. “I wonder,” she said. “Hwaith, do earthquakes have a scent?”

He gave her an odd look. “That’s a thought that never would have occurred to me.”

“These earthquakes, anyway,” Rhiow said. “Your gate’s hyperstrings — at least, the diagnostic strings tied to the other places where the gate was trying to put down roots — they were full of this smell.”

“You’re right,” Hwaith said. “But, Rhiow, we haven’t had a quake here.” He paused. “At least, not recently. Certainly not in the last six weeks. Maybe not for much longer.”

“I wonder if we’re about to have one here.”

He looked thoughtful. “That could be. Are you suggesting we should try to prevent it?”

Rhiow sneezed again – once without trying, and then once on purpose to try to clear her nose of the warring scents. “I don’t know if we could. Even if we could, I don’t know if it would be wise. But I think we should make sure one of us is keeping an eye on this site, because if we can investigate the quake while it’s active, we might be able to run a trace back to the cause.”

Hwaith’s tail waved slowly from side to side as he thought. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “I’ll take a moment to jump back over to where Aufwi’s watching the gate…see how he’s doing, and ask him to add a tracer to the diagnostic that’s looking at this attempted root.”

“If you would,” Rhiow said.

With barely a breath of displaced air and only the softest pop, Hwaith vanished. Rhiow blinked – the departure had been unusually slick – and got up to walk out of the circle of trees, over to where the plantings parted to allow the southward vista to open up. Below, past the nearer, barren hills, the city view was beginning to glitter through the dusk — that softer, yellower, fainter light that had so struck Helen the first time she saw it. “Quite a view…” she said.

“It is,” Hwaith said from right behind her.

Rhiow jumped – not exactly off the ground, but she started violently enough that all her fur stood up in response. She came around to face Hwaith, still bristling. “How do you do that?”

His eyes were wide with shock. “What?”

“You transited in and I didn’t even hear you come back!”

“I didn’t want to disturb you!” “Well, would you please do it louder after this, because I am disturbed!”

Then Rhiow took a long breath. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. I’m on edge, it’s wrong of me to take it out on you. But sweet Iau up a tree, Hwaith, I’ve never heard anyone self-gate that quietly!”

He ducked himself down and twisted his head to her, and Rhiow’s annoyance dissolved instantly into amused embarrassment, for it was the kind of gesture a young Person, half-apologetic, half-playful, would have used with a playmate. “Sorry,” Hwaith said, giving her so upside-down a look from those brassy eyes that for a second or so he was practically standing on his head. Then he righted himself. “I don’t think about it often. I told you, I have the Ear sometimes – the ulterior-hearing gift. A lot of the time I can hear the air about to move, or what direction it’s going to move in, and nudge it out of moving explosively.”

“Selective matter displacement,” Rhiow said, less upset now and much more impressed.

“More like diffusion,” Hwaith said. “I spread the kinetic energy of the air’s motion around, that’s all. It’s a gimmick.”

“A useful one, I bet,” Rhiow said, and sat down to recover herself a little.

Hwaith sat beside her, looking down the hill at the glitter of the city. “Not usually,” he said. “Mostly my gate doesn’t care whether I sneak up on it or not: it misbehaves anyway.”

They sat quietly for a few moments while Rhiow finished calming herself down. “As I was saying before you sneaked up on me…it really is a fine view. You can see all the way to the ocean from here.”

“True enough,” Hwaith said, and glanced over his shoulder at the huge dark old house behind them, its windows blank and empty. “Not often anyone here to see it, though, since the murder.”

She stared at him. “Wait. Since the murder? What murder?”

“Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know.” He got up, shook himself. “Come on. It’s back here it happened.”

They walked back through the garden maze to the house. “The young tom-ehhif who lived here with his queen,” Hwaith said, “had a personal assistant who worked closely with him. Something went wrong with this other young tom-ehhif – no one’s sure what. One story was that he was jealous of the relationship between the tom and queen – though which of them he might have desired, no one’s sure. Another was that he’d become ill in his mind, and couldn’t tell friend from enemy any longer.”

They came to a halt in front of a set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors set in behind a little terrace. “Right there,” Hwaith said, “something more than twenty years ago now, the tom-ehhif who lived here was shot by his assistant: and soon after, when someone came to the house, the assistant shot himself as well. At first there were few questions about it. Afterwards the questions just wouldn’t stop. Why didn’t the queen-ehhif hear the first shot? Did she perhaps fire it herself? What was the assistant doing there that night, when he’d been told not to come? And there were a hundred other issues about it that couldn’t be settled to anyone’s satisfaction…” Hwaith waved his tail. “Finally the young tom’s father sold the house to someone else: another pair of wealthy ehhif. They own it still. But they’re not here much. I think the place troubles them.”

He let out a breath: they both sat for a few seconds in the quiet. Off in the trees down the hill, a California jay produced its rusty call from a throat that sounded like it really needed to be greased. “You must be thinking that ehhif here don’t do anything but kill each other,” Hwaith said.

“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. She looked down the length of the house. “But you say the ehhif who den here won’t stay… You think they feel the place is th’haimenh?” It was the Speech-cognate of the Ailurin word sseih’huuh, “haunted,” though the word in the Speech was more precise about the cause of the associated apparitions – more a kind of lingering, self-repeating spectral recording than any real local persistence of soul, for which there was another set of words.

“I don’t know,” Hwaith said. “I’m not clear about how ehhif think of such things. You live with them full time: maybe you know better than I would.”

Rhiow thought briefly about Iaehh, sitting some nights in the silence of the apartment that was only his now, his eyes still and sad, his head held in a way that suggested he was listening in mind to a voice he would never hear in life again.

“I’m not always sure, either,” she said, and got up. “Hwaith, let’s get back to the Silent Man’s. They’ll be thinking about getting ready to go. …And maybe,” she said, glancing over her shoulder and flirting her tail, “you’ll show me just how you diffuse that air.”

In utter silence, Hwaith vanished. Rhiow followed.

When the Silent Man’s car rolled up the broad, curving cypress-lined drive to the front door of Elwin Dagenham’s house in the hills, the pre-intervention conference in the back seat was still in full swing.

“My back fur looks terrible.”

“Sheba, it’s just fine.”

“No it’s not, it won’t lie down.”

“I could help you with that.”

Whack! “Ow!”

“I told you, I’m not interested! Come back in three months.”

“Will there be food? I’m starving.”

“I told you to eat before you left.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“There’s always plenty of food. Just make sure you get it before the houiff do.”

“Houiff? Nobody said anything about houiff!”

“I must have mentioned them at least once or twice. Oh, it won’t stay down!”

“All you need is for someone to lick it a little – “

Whack! “Oww!!”

“I told you, three months!”

“There must be something in the food here. Hwaith, do they put hormones in the cat food here? Normally he’d have heard her the first ten times she told him.”