Диана Дуэйн - To Visit the Queen

"It will if you don't act up," Rhiow said, and almost immediately regretted it.
"Whaddaya mean, 'act up'? I'm very well behaved."
Rhiow gave Urruah a sidewise look as he came up from behind them. "Compared to the Old Tom on a rampage," she said, "or the Devastatrix in heat, doubtless you are. As People go, though, we have some work to do on you yet."
"Listen to me, Arhu," Urruah said, as they jumped up onto Track
Twenty-Four and started weaving their way down it toward the entrance to the Main Concourse. "We're going into other People's territory. That's always ticklish business. Not only that: we're going there because there's something going on that they couldn't handle by themselves. They have to have feelings about that … and that we're now going to come strolling in there with our tails up to fix things, supposedly, can't make them overjoyed either. It makes them look bad to themselves. You get it?"
"Well, if they are bad – "
Arhu broke off and ducked out of the way of the swipe Rhiow aimed at his head. "Arhu," Rhiow said, "that's not your judgment to make. Certainly not of another wizard: not of regular People, either. Queen Iau has built us all with different abilities, and just because they don't always work perfectly right now doesn't mean they won't later. As for their effectiveness: sometimes a wizard comes up against a job he can't handle. When that happens, and we're called to assist, we do just that … knowing that someday we may be in the same position."
They came out of the gateway to Twenty-Four, squeezing hard to the left to avoid being trampled by the ehhif who were streaming in toward the waiting train, and came out into the Concourse. "We're a kinship, not a group of competitors," Urruah said, as they began making their way toward the Graybar Building entrance, hugging the wall. "We don't go out of our way to make our brothers and sisters feel that they're failing at their jobs. We fail at enough of our own."
"So," Rhiow said. "We've got a day or so to sort out our own business. Urruah, fortunately, doesn't have an abode shared with ehhif, so his arrangements will be simplest – "
"Hey, listen," Urruah said, "if I go away and they take my dumpster somewhere, you think that isn't going to be a problem? I'll have to drop back here every couple of days to make sure things stay the way I left them."
Rhiow restrained herself mightily from asking what Urruah could possibly keep in a dumpster that was of such importance. "Arhu, at the garage, have any of them been paying particular attention to you?"
"Yeah, the tall one," he said, "Ah'hah, they call him. He was Saash's ehhif, he seems to think he's mine now." Arhu looked a little abashed. "He's nice to me."
"OK. You're going to have to come back from London every couple of days to make sure that he sees you and knows you're all right."
"By myself?" Arhu said, very suddenly.
"Yes," Rhiow said. "And Arhu – if I find, that in the process you've gated off-planet, your ears and my claws are going to meet! Remember what Urruah told you."
"I never get to have any fun with wizardry!' Arhu said, the complaining acquiring a little yowl around the edges, and he fluffed up slightly at Rhiow. "It's all work and dull stuff!"
"Oh really?" Urruah said. "What about that cute little marmalade tabby I saw you with the other night?"
"Uh … Oh," Arhu said, and abruptly sat down right by the wall and became very quiet.
"Yes indeed," Urruah said. "Naughty business, that, stealing groceries out of an ehhif's trunk. That's why you fell down the manhole afterwards. The Universe notices when wizards misbehave. And sometimes … other wizards do too."
Arhu sat staring at Urruah wide-eyed, and didn't say anything. This by itself was so bizarre an event that Rhiow nearly broke up laughing. "Boy's got taste, if nothing else," Urruah said to her, and sat down himself for a moment. "He was up on Broadway and raided some ehhifs shopping bags after they'd been to Zabar's. Caviar, it was, and smoked salmon and sour cream: supposed to be someone's brunch the next day, I guess. He did a particulate bypass spell on a section of the trunk lid and pulled the stuff out piece by piece … then gave every bit of it to this little marmalade creature with big green eyes."
Arhu was now half-turned away from them while hurriedly washing his back. It was he'ihh, composure-washing: and it wasn't working – the fur bristled again as fast as he washed it down. "Never even set the car alarm off," Urruah said, wrapping his tail demurely around his toes. "Did it in full sight. None of the ehhif passing by believed what they were seeing, as usual."
"I had to do it in full sight," Arhu said, starting to wash further down his back. "You can't sidle when you're – "
" – stealing things, no," Rhiow said, as she sat down too. She sighed. The child had come to them with a lot of bad habits. Yet much of his value as a Person and a wizard had to do with his unquenchable, sometimes unbearable spirit and verve, which even a truly awful kittenhood had not been able to crush. Had his tendencies as a visionary not already revealed themselves, Rhiow would have thought that Arhu was destined to be like Urruah, a "power source", the battery or engine of a spell which others might construct and work, but which he would fuel and drive. Either way, the visionary talent too used that verve to fuel it. It was Arhu's inescapable curiosity, notable even for a cat, which kept his wizardry fretting and fraying at the fabric of linear time until it "wore through" and some image from future or past leaked out.
"If nothing else," Rhiow said finally, "you've got a quick grasp of the fundamentals … as they apply to implementation, anyway. I can see the ethics end of things is going to take longer." Arhu turned, opened his mouth to say something. "Don't start with me," Rhiow said. "Talk to the Whisperer about it, if you don't believe us: but stealing is only going to be trouble for you eventually. Meanwhile, where shall we meet in the morning?"
Urruah looked around him as Arhu got up again, looking a little recovered. "I guess here is as good a place as any. Five thirty?"
That was opening time for the station, and would be fairly calm, if any time of the day in a place as big and busy as Grand Central could accurately be described as calm. "Good enough," Rhiow said.
They started to walk out down the Graybar Passage again, to the Lexington Avenue doors. "Arhu?" Rhiow said to him as they came out and slide sideways to hug the wall, heading for the corner of Forty– Third. "An hour before first twilight, two hours before the Old Tom's Eye sets."
"I know when five thirty is," Arhu said, sounding slightly affronted.
They do shift change at the garage a moonwidth after that."
"All right," Urruah said. "Anything else you need to take care of, like telling the little marmalade number – "
"Her name's Hffeu," Arhu said.
"Hffeu it is," Rhiow said. "She excited to be going out with a wizard?"
Arhu gave Rhiow a look of pure pleasure: if his whiskers had gone any further forward, they would have fallen off in the street.
She had to smile back: there were moods in which this kit was, unfortunately, irresistible. "Go on, then – tell her goodbye for a few days: you're going to be busy. And Arhu – "
"I know, 'be careful'." He was laughing at her. "Luck, Rhiow."
"Luck," she said, as he bounded off across the traffic running down Forty-Third, narrowly being missed by a taxi taking the corner. She breathed out. Next to her, Urruah laughed softly as they slipped into the door of the post office to sidle, then waited for the light to change. "You worry too much about that kit. He'll be all right."
"Oh, his survival is between him and the Powers now," she said, "I know. But still … "
" … you still feel responsible for him," Urruah said as the light turned and they trotted out to cross the street, "because for a while he was our responsibility. Well, he's passed his Ordeal, and we're off that hook. But now we have to teach him teamwork."
"It's going to make the last month look like ten dead birds and no one to share them with," Rhiow said. She peered up Lexington, trying to see past the hurrying ehhif. Humans could not see into that neighboring universe where cats went when sidled and in which string structure was obvious, but she could just make out Arhu's little black-and-white shape, trailing radiance from passing resonated hyperstrings as he ran.
"At least he's willing," Urruah said. "More than he was before."
"Well, we owe a lot of that to you … your good example."
Urruah put his whiskers forward, pleased, as they came to the next corner and went across the side street at a trot. "Feels a little odd sometimes," he said.
"What," Rhiow said, putting hers forward too, "that the original
breaker of every available rule should now be the big, stern, tough ii
"I didn't break that many rules." "Oh? What about that dog, last month?" "Come on, that was just a little fun."
"Not for the dog. And the sausage guy on Thirty-Third – "
"That was an intervention. Those sausages were terrible."
"As you found after tricking him into dropping one. And last year, the lady with the – "
"All right, all right!' Urruah was laughing as they came to Fifty– Fifth. "So I like the occasional practical joke. Rhi, I don't break any of the real rules. I do my job."
She sighed, and then bumped her head against his as they stood by the corner of the building at Forty-Fifth and Lex, waiting for the light to change. "You do," she said. "You are a wizard's wizard, for all your jokes. Now get out of here and do whatever you have to do with your dumpster."
"I thought you weren't going to mention that," Urruah said, and grinned. "Luck, Rhi – "
He galloped off across the street and down Forty-Fifth as the light changed, leaving her looking after him in mild bemusement.
He heard me thinking.
Well, wizards did occasionally overhear one another's private thought when they had worked closely together for long enough. She and Saash had sometimes "underheard" each other this way: usually without warning, but not always at times of stress. It had been happening a little more frequently since Arhu came. Something to do with the change in the make-up of the team? … she thought. There was no way to tell.
And no time to spend worrying about it now. But even as Rhiow set off for her own lair, trotting on up Lex toward the upper East Side, she had to smile ironically at that. It was precisely because she was so good at worrying that she was the leader of this particular team. Losing the habit could mean losing the team … or worse.
For the time being, she would stick to worrying.
The way home was straightforward, this time of day: up Lex to Seventieth, then eastward to the block between First and Second. The street was fairly quiet for a change. Mostly it was old converted brownstones, though the corner apartment buildings were newer ones, and a few small cafes and stores were scattered along the block. She paused at the corner of Seventieth and Second to greet the big stocky duffel-coated doorman there, who always stooped to pet her. He was opening the door for one of the tenants: now he turned, bent down to her. "Hey there, Midnight, how ya doing?"
"No problems today, Ffran'kh," Rhiow said, rearing up to rub against him: he might not hear or understand her spoken language any more than any other ehhif, but body language he understood just fine. Ffran'kh was a nice man, not above slipping Rhiow the occasional piece of baloney from a sandwich, and also not above slipping some of the harder-up homeless people in the area a five– or ten-dollar bill on the sly. Carers were hard enough to come by in this world, wizardly or not, and Rhiow could hardly fail to appreciate one who was also in the neighborhood.
Having said hello in passing, she went on her way down the block, not bothering to sidle even this close to home. Iaehh rarely came down the block this way anyhow, preferring for some reason to approach from the First Avenue side, possibly because of the deli down on that corner. She strolled down the sidewalk, glancing around her idly at the brownstones, the garbage, the trees and the weeds growing up around them; more or less effortlessly she avoided the ehhif who came walking past her with shopping bags or briefcases or baby strollers.
Halfway down was a browner brownstone than usual, with the usual stairway up to the front door and a side stairway to the basement apartment. On one of the squared-off tops of the stone balusters flanking the stairway sat a rather grungy looking white-furred shape, washing. He was always washing, Rhiow thought, not that it did him any good. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
"Hunt's luck, Yafh!"
He looked down at her and blinked for a moment. Green eyes in a face as round as a saucer full of cream, and almost as big: big shoulders, huge paws, and an overall scarred and beat-up look, as if he had had an abortive argument with a meat grinder: that was Yafh. However, you got the impression that the meat grinder had lost the argument. "Luck, Rhi," he said cheerfully. "I've had mine for today. Care for a rat?"
"That's very kind of you," she said, "but I'm on my way to dinner, and if I spoil my appetite, my ehhif will notice. Bite its head off on my behalf, if you would … "
"My pleasure." Yafh bent down and suited the action to the word.
She trotted up the steps and sat down beside Yafh for a moment, looking down the street while he crunched. Yafh was one of those People who, while ostensibly denned with ehhif, was neglected totally by them. He subsisted on stolen scraps scavenged from the neighborhood garbage bags, and on rats and mice and bugs – not difficult in this particular building, its landlord apparently not having had the exterminators in since early in the century.
"You off for the day?" Yafh said, when he finished crunching.
"The day, yes," she said, "but tomorrow early we have to go to Hlon'hohn."
"That's right across the East River, isn't it?"
"Uh, yes, all the way across." Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. So did Yafh.
"They're making you work again, 'Rioh," Yafh said. The name was a pun on her name and on an Ailurin word for "beast of burden', though you could also use it for a wheelbarrow or a grocery cart or anything else that ehhif pushed around. "It's all a plot. People shouldn't work. People should lie on cushions and be fed cream, and filleted fish, and ragout of free-range crunchy mouse in a rich gravy."
"Oh," Rhiow said. "The way you are … "
Yafh laughed that rough, buttery laugh of his: he leaned back and hit the headless body of the rat a couple of times in a pleased and absent way. "Exactly. But at least I'm my own boss. Are you?"
"This isn't slavery, if that's what you're asking," Rhiow said, bristling very slightly. "It's service. There is a difference."
"Oh, I know," Yafh said. "What wizards do is important, regardless of what some People think." He picked the rat up one more time, dangled it from a razory claw, flipped it in the air and caught it expertly. "And at least from what you tell me you have it better than the poor ehhif wizards do: your own kind at least know about you … But Rhi, it's just that you never seem to have much time to yourself. When do you lie around and just be People?"
"I get some time off, every now and then … "
"Uh huh," Yafh said, and smiled slightly: that scarred, beat-up, amiable look that had fooled various of the other cats (and some dogs) in the neighborhood into thinking that he was no particular threat. "Not enough, I think. And things have been tough for you lately … "
"Yes," Rhiow said, and sighed. "Well, we all have bad times occasionally: not even wizardry can stop that."
"It stops other People's bad times, maybe," Yafh said, "but not your own … It just seems hard, that's all."
"It is," Rhiow said after a moment, gazing up toward her ehhif's apartment building near the corner. Sometimes lately she had dreaded going home to the familiar den that suddenly had gone unfamiliar without Hhuha in it. But Iaehh was still there, and he expected her to be there on a regular basis. As far as he knew, she was only able to get out onto the apartment's terrace and from there to the roof of the building next door, from which Iaehh supposed there was no way down … and if she didn't come in every day or so, he worried.
"You sure you don't want the rest of this rat?" Yafh said quietly.
Rhiow turned toward him, apologetic. "Oh, Yafh, I appreciate it, but food won't help. Work will … though I hate to admit it. You go ahead and have that, now. Look at the size of it! It's a meal by itself."
"They're getting bigger all the time," Yafh said, lifting the headless rat delicately on one claw again and examining it with a more clinical look. "Saw one the other night that was half your size."
Rhiow's jaw chattered in relish and disgust at the thought of dancing in the moonlight with such a partner. The dance would be brief: Rhiow prided herself on her skill in the hunt. At the same time, it was disturbing … for the rats did keep getting bigger. "The rate they're going," she said as she got up, "we're going to start needing bigger People."
Yafh gave her an amused look. "I'm doing my part," he said, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward, knowing he had sired at least fifty kittens in this area alone over the past year.
"You do more than that," she said. "Hunt's luck, Yafh … I'll see you in a few days. Can I bring you something from Hlon'hohn?"
"How are the rats?" he said.
"Oh please," Rhiow said, laughing, and trotted down the steps toward home.
For the last part of the run, she sidled, since the building next to her ehhif's apartment house had windows that were not blind. Down by the locked steel door that separated the alley beside the building from the street, Rhiow looked up and down to make sure no one was looking directly at her, and then stepped sideways without moving. Whiskers and ear-tips and Rhiow's tail-tip sizzled slightly as she sidled, making the shift into the alternate universe where the hyperstrings that stitched empty space and solid matter together were clearly visible, even in the afternoon light. They surrounded her now, a jangle and jumble of hair-thin harpstrings of multicolored light, running up toward vanishing-points up in space and down to other vanishing-points in the Earth's core or beyond it. Rhiow threaded her way among them, and slipped under the gate and into the alleyway.
The garbage was piling up again. She paused to listen for any telltale rustling among the black plastic bags: nothing. No rats today. But then for all I know, Yafh's been here already … Rhiow stalked past the bags, looked up toward the roof of the building whose left-paw wall partly defined the alleyway, and said several words under her breath in the Speech.
Everything living understands the Speech in which wizards work, as well as many things that are not living now, or once were, or which someday might be. Air was malleable stuff, and could be reminded that it had once been trapped in oxides and nitrates in the archeaean stone. It had been in and out of so many lungs since its release that there was controversy among wizards whether air should any longer simply be considered as an element, but also as something once alive. Either way, it was easy to work with. A few words more, and the hyperstrings in the empty air of the alley knotted themselves together into the outline of an invisible stairway: the air, obliging, went solid within the outlines.
Invisible herself, Rhiow trotted up eight stories to the roof of the building on the left, and leapt up over the parapet to the gray gravel on top. Wincing a little as always at the way it hurt her feet, she glanced over her shoulder and said the word of release: the strings unknotted and the air went back to being no more solid than the smog made it. Rhiow made her way along to the back left-paw corner where the next building along, her ehhif's building, abutted this one's roof.
When the ehhif who built her building had done its brickwork, they had left a repeating diamond pattern down its side of bricks that jutted out an inch or so. The bottom of one of these diamonds made a neat stairway straight up to where her ehhif's apartment's terrace jutted out.
Rhiow jumped up onto the parapet of the building she had just ascended, and then stepped carefully onto the first of the bricks. Slowly she made her way up, sure of the way, but in no rush: a fall would be embarrassing. Just before coming up to the last few bricks, she unsidled herself and then jumped to the terrace: slipped under the table and chairs there, nosed through the clear plastic cat door and went in.
"Hey, there you are … "
He was sitting halfway across the room, in the leather chair under the reading lamp. The apartment was a nice enough one, as far as Rhiow understood the denning requirements of ehhif, a "one-bedroom" apartment with a living room full of leather furniture and bookshelves, a big soft comfortable rug on the polished wood floor of the main room. It was clean and airy, but still had places where a Person could curl up and sleep undisturbed by too much sun or noise: a place not too crowded, not too empty.
Well, Rhiow thought … until recently, not too empty … She went over to Iaehh and jumped up in his lap before he had time to get up. It was always hard to get him to sit still, more so now than it had been even a month ago.
"Well, hello," Iaehh said, scratching her behind the ears: "aren't we friendly today?" He sighed: he sounded tired. Rhiow looked up into his face, wondering whether the crinkles around the eyes were a sign of age or of strain. He was good-looking, she supposed, as ehhif went: regular features, short dark hair, slim for his height and in good shape – Iaehh ran every morning. His eyes sometimes had the kind of glint of humor she caught in Urruah's, a suppression of what would have been uproarious laughter at some wildly inappropriate thing he was about to do. All such looks, though, had been muted in Iaehh's eyes for the last month.
"I'm always friendly with you," Rhiow said, stepping up onto the arm of the chair to bump her head against his upper arm. "You know that. Except when you hold me upside down and play 'swing the cat.' "
"Oooh," Iaehh said, "big purr … " He scratched her under the chin.
"Yes, well, you look like you can use it – you've got that busy-day look. I hope yours wasn't anything like mine … " It was folly to talk to ehhif in normal Ailurin: Iaehh couldn't hear the near– subsonics which People used for most of the verbal part of their speech. But like many People who denned with ehhif, Rhiow refused to treat him like some kind of dumb animal. At least her work meant she could clearly understand what he said to her, an advantage over most People, who had to guess from tone of voice and body language what was going on with their ehhif.
"You hungry? You didn't eat much of what I left you this morning."
"You forgot to wash the bowl again," Rhiow said, starting to step down into his lap, then pausing while Iaehh resettled himself. "With all the dried stuff from yesterday and the day before yesterday stuck to it, it wasn't exactly conducive to gourmet dining. I'll get some of the dry food in a while."
She settled down in his lap and made herself comfortable while he stroked her. "You're a nice kitty," Iaehh said. "Aren't you?"
"Under the throat," Rhiow said, "yes, right there, that's the spot … " She stretched her neck out and purred, and for a while they just sat there together while bright squares of the late afternoon sun worked their way slowly across the apartment.
"Now, why can't the people at work be as laid back as you," Iaehh said. "You just take everything as it comes … you never get stressed out … "
She stretched her forepaws out and closed her eyes. "If you only knew," Rhiow said.
" … you don't have any worries. You have a nice bed to sleep on, nice food whenever you want it … "
"As regards the food, 'nice' is relative," Rhiow said with some amusement, kneading with her paws on Iaehh's knee. "That 'choice parts' thing you gave me the day before yesterday was parts, all right, but as for 'choice'? Please. I'd be tempted to go out and kill my own cows, except that getting them in the cat door would be a nuisance."
"Ow, ow, don't do that … ! You go in and out whenever you like, you don't have a job, you don't have to worry about anyone depending on you … "
Rhiow's tail twitched ironically. "Wouldn't it be nice if it were so," she said softly, and sighed. Any wizard had daily concerns over whether or not she was doing her job well: you pushed past those doubts and fears as best you could, secure in the knowledge that the Powers that Be would not long allow you to go on uncorrected if you were messing up. Yet that routine, negative sort of approval sometimes fell short of one's emotional needs … it left you wondering, am I giving enough? The Powers which made the Universe have poured Their virtue into me for the purpose of saving that Universe, piece by piece, day by day. Am I giving enough of it back? And – more to the point – is it working?
"What a life," Iaehh said.
"You're not kidding," Rhiow said.
"But I still wonder … is it good enough … "
She opened an eye and looked up at him.
"I don't know sometimes," Iaehh said, stroking her steadily, "if it's fair for me to keep you. Just because … you're all that's left of her … I don't know, is that a fair reason to keep a pet?"
Rhiow sighed again. His tone was reflective, his face was still: but the intensity of Iaehh's grief for Hhuha was no less obvious for lacking tears. For one thing, Rhiow could hear the echoes of his emotions: even non-wizardly People could manage that much with the ehhif with whom they spent most of their time. For another thing, Rhiow was an experienced wizard, fluent in the Speech. Understanding it, you could thereby understand anything that spoke. You could also speak to anything that spoke, and make yourself understood: but this was strictly forbidden to wizards except when engaged in errantry, on wizardly business that required it. Rhiow had sometimes been tempted to break her silence, but she had never done it – not even when Iaehh had clutched her and wept into her fur, moaning the name that Rhiow herself also would have moaned aloud in shared grief, if only it had been allowed: Susan, Susan …
Iaehh stroked her, and Rhiow could hear and feel his pain, a little blunted from that first terrible night, but no less easy to bear. She knew the way it came to him in sudden stabs, without warning, at the sound of a telephone ringing or a ra'hio commercial that had always made Hhuha laugh. "I worry that you're lonely," Iaehh said slowly. "I worry that I don't take care of you right. I worry … "
"Don't worry," she said, snuggling a little closer to him.
"And this place is expensive," he said. "Too big for one, really. I think I ought to move … but finding another building that allows pets is going to be such a hassle. I wonder if I shouldn't find you somewhere else to live … "
Rhiow's heart leaped in instant reaction: fear. He's going to try to rehome me, she thought. Someone would adopt her who she hated, and she wouldn't be able to get out and go about her business. Or –­there were ehhif who, meaning nothing but the best, would not give away a pet if they could no longer keep it. They would take their cat to the vet and have it –­Ridiculous, another part of her mind snapped. You're a wizard. If he seriously starts thinking about giving you away, then one day you can just vanish.
Yes, said another part of her mind: and to where? To live with whom? Wizard Rhiow might be, but she was also a Person … and the one thing People hate above all is to have their routine disrupted. To lose the comfortable den, the sympathetic tone-of-mind of Iaehh, the food at regular intervals, and find herself … where? Living in a dumpster, like Urruah? Rhiow shuddered. "Iaehh," she said, "this is a bad idea, I'd really you rather didn't follow this line of thought any further … "
But what about him? said still another part of her mind, and Rhiow much disliked its tone, for it was like the voice which often spoke of wizardry and its responsibilities. What about his needs? How much pain do you cause him by being here, reminding him of Hhuha every time he sees you?
And what about my needs? Rhiow retorted, fluffing up slightly. Don't you think I miss her? Damn it, what about my pain? Haven't I done enough in service to the Queen and the worlds to be allowed a little comfort, to think of myself first, just this once?
No reply came. Rhiow disliked the silence as much as she had the voice when it spoke. It sounded entirely too much like the Whisperer, like Hrau'f the Silent, that daughter of Iau's who imparted knowledge of wizardry and the worlds to feline wizards … and who often seemed to have left a kind of goddaughter to Herself inside you, stern as a goddess, inflexible as one, asking the questions you would rather not answer.
What then? Rhiow said silently. Do I have to let him do this? Do I have to let him get rid of me?
Silence: and Iaehh's stroking, all wound up with his pain and the way he missed Hhuha. Rhiow licked her nose in fear. She could practically feel his anguish through her fur.
The Oath was clear enough on the matter, the Oath which every wizard of whatever species took in one form or another. I will guard growth and ease pain … And you kept the Oath, or soon enough you began to slip away from the practice of your wizardry into something which did not bear consideration: into the service of the Lone Power, Who had invented death and pain. Entropy was running, the energy bleeding slowly away out of the universe: the Lone One would widen the wound, hurry the bleeding in any way It could. Tricking or manipulating wizards so that they used their power to Its ends was one of the Lone One's preferred techniques.
I will not be Its claw, to rip the wound wider, Rhiow thought. Brave words, the right words for a wizard. But it was inside her that she felt the claw, already beginning to set in deep. She looked away from Iaehh.
If this situation doesn't improve …
… then leaving may be something I have to consider.
"No," Iaehh said, "of course not, stupid idea, it's a stupid idea … " He stroked her. "If I have to move, it'll be to somewhere with pets, of course it will. Sue would be furious if I ever let anything happen to you – "
He put her aside suddenly, got up. Rhiow, climbing up to stand on the arm of the chair where he had set her down, looked after Iaehh, not at all reassured.
If he keeps hurting this way – then you may have to let him think that something has "happened to you'. Regardless of how well you like this warm, snug place.
"Look at that, it's half an hour past your dinnertime," Iaehh said, fumbling at the kitchen cabinet where the cat food was, as if he was having trouble seeing it: and he sounded stuffed up. "Come on, let's get you fed. Oh, jeez, look at this bowl, I keep forgetting to wash it, no wonder you didn't want to eat out of it – "
Rhiow jumped down from the chair and went to him. If this doesn't get better …
Sweet Queen about us, what will become of me … ? TWO
She was out early the next morning, as (to her relief) Iaehh was: on mornings when the weather was fair, he did his jogging around dawn, to take advantage of the City's quietest time. Rhiow had already been awake for a couple of hours and was doing her morning's washing in the reading chair when he bent over her and scratched her head.
"See you later, plumptious – "
She gave him a rub and a purr, then went back to her washing as he went out, shut the door behind him and locked all the locks. Iaehh was pleased with those locks – their apartment had never been broken into, even though others in the building had. Rhiow smiled to herself as she finished scrubbing behind her ears, for she had heard attempts being made on all those locks at one time or another during the day when she happened to be home. Some of those attempts would have succeeded, had there not been a wizard on the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the low-maintenance spell which made access to the apartment impossible. Should anyone try to get in, the wizardry simply convinced the wall and the door that they were one unit for the duration: and various frustrated thieves had occasionally left strangely ineffectual sledgehammer marks on the outside, the whole door structure having possessed, for the duration of the attack, a non-gravitic density similar to that of lead. Rhiow was pleased with that particular piece of spelling: it required only a recharge once a week, and kept her ehhif's routine, and hers, from being upset.
Rhiow finished washing, stretched fore and aft, and headed out the cat-door to the hiouh-box on the terrace. There she went briefly unfocused in the cool darkness as she did her business, thinking about other things. She had reviewed the basic structures and relationships of the London gates in the Knowledge, the body of wizardly information which the Whisperer held ready for routine reference: she had looked at the specs for the gates under normal circumstances. Being rooted in the Old Downside's gates, the London "bundle" had similarities to them … but being a continent away and subject to much different spatial stresses, there were also significant differences. She would assess those more accurately when she was right down in the gating complex with their hosts.
Rhiow finished with the box, shook herself, and stepped out onto the terrace and then down onto the brick "stairway", making her way down to the roof of the next building. There she made her way across the gravel again, this time to leap up on the Seventieth Street side of the roof's parapet and balance there for a moment, breathing the predawn air. For once it was very quiet, no car alarms going off, even the traffic over on First muted, as yet. The low soft hhhhhhhhhh of the City all around her was there: the breathing of all the air– conditioning systems, the omni-directional soft sound of traffic. Only during a significant snowstorm did that low breathing hiss fade reluctantly to silence … and even then you imagined you heard it, though softer, as the breathing in and out of ten million pairs of lungs. It was the sound of life: it was what Rhiow worked for.
She looked eastward toward the River. Her view was partially blocked by the buildings of Cornell Medical Center and New York Hospital: but she could smell the water, and faintly she could even hear it flowing, a different soft rushing noise than that of the traffic. Past the East River and the hazy sodium lights of Brooklyn on the far side, she could smell the dawn, though she couldn't yet see it. Another job, Rhiow thought, another day …
She closed her eyes most of the way, in order to clearly see more and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, Rhiow thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: they will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always. I shall walk through Their worlds as do the Powers that Be, seeing and knowing with Them and for Them, tending Their worlds as if they were mine: for so indeed they are. Silently shall I strive to go my way, as They do, doing my work unseen; the light needs no reminding by me of good deeds done by night. And in this long progress through all that is, though I will know doubt and fear in the strange places where I must walk, I will put these both aside, as the Oath requires, and hold myself to my work … for if They and I together cannot mend what is marred, who can – ? And having done my work aright, though I may know weariness at day's end, come awakening I shall rise up and say again, with Them, as if surprised, "behold, the world is made new … !"
There was more to the Meditation, of course; it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case … a reminder of priorities, a "mission statement'. It was perhaps also, just slightly, what ehhif might term "a call to arms": there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.
Rhiow got up, shook herself and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down. The joke is, she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air, that knowing the Powers are there, and listening, doesn't really solve that many problems. It seemed to her that ehhif had the same problem, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their Gods existed, or not very sure at all: and those who were most certain seemed to be no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The City was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in which ehhif gathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers that Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious – as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).
She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than most ehhif works he heard live in concert in town. He'd gone to one service in the great "cathedral' in midtown to do some translation of the music's verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by the ehhif there to the Powers that Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery which even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors – but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers' countenance – even, amazingly, the One's – and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings which did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things some ehhif did
Rhiow stood at the corner of Seventieth and Second, by the corner of the dry-cleaners' there, waiting for the traffic to finish passing so that she could cross. They're scared, she thought: they feel they need protection from the Universe. Nor does it help that though they may know the Powers exist, ehhif aren't even sure what happens to them when they die. There was an unsettling sense of permanence about ehhif death, in which Rhiow was no expert despite her recent brush with it. The ehhif themselves seemed to have been told a great many mutually exclusive stories about what happened After. Her own ehhif was somewhere benevolent, Rhiow knew. But where? And would Hhuha ever come back, the way you might expect a Person to, during the first nine lives at least … ? Not that – certainties aside – it wasn't always a slight shock when you looked into the eyes of some new acquaintance and suddenly saw an old one there, and saw the glint of recognition as they knew you too. Rhiow's fur had stood up all over her, the first time it had happened, a couple of lives back. You got used to it, though. Some People tended to seek out friends they had known, finishing unfinished business or starting over again when everyone had moved a life or so on, in new and uncontaminated circumstances …
She crossed Second and turned south, trotting down the avenue at a good rate, while above her, the last against the brightening sky, yellow streetlights stuttered out. Rhiow crossed Second diagonally at Sixty-Seventh and kept heading south and west, using the sidewalk openly for as long as the pedestrian traffic stayed light. It was unwise to attract too much attention, even this early: there were always ehhif out walking their houiff before they went to work. But you can't really feel things as clearly when you're sidled, Rhiow thought, and anyway, there's no houff I couldn't handle … If the sidewalk got too crowded, Rhiow knew five or six easy ways to do her commute out of sight. But she liked taking the "surface streets": more of the variety of the life of the city showed there. There were doubtless People who would feel that Rhiow should be paying more attention to her own kind … but by taking care of the ehhif, she took care of People too.
Southward and westward: Park Avenue and Fifty-Seventh … Here there was considerable pedestrian traffic even at this time of morning, people heading home from night shifts or going to breakfast before work, and the two greenery-separated lanes of Park were becoming a steady stream of cabs and trucks and cars. Though she was fifteen blocks north of Grand Central proper, Rhiow was now right on top of the Terminal's track array: at least the part of it where it spread from the four "ingress" tracks into the main two-level array, forty– two tracks above and twenty-three below. As she stood on the southwest corner of Fifty-Seventh and Park, beside one of the handsome old apartment buildings of the area, Tower U was some fifteen or twenty feet directly below her: from below came the expected echoing rumble, the tremor in the sidewalk easily felt through her paw-pads – one of the first trains of the morning being moved into position.
Five twenty-three, Rhiow thought, knowing the train in question. She looked up one last time at the paling sky, then headed for the grate in the sidewalk just west of the corner by the curb.
She slipped in between the bars, stepped down the slope of the grainy, eroded concrete under the grating, and paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Ahead of her the slope dropped away suddenly.
It was a moderately long drop, ten feet: she took a breath, jumped, came down on top of a tall cement-block wiring box, and jumped from there another eight feet or so to the gravel in the access tunnel. Rhiow trotted down the cast-cement tunnel, all streaked with old iron-stains, to where it joined the main train tunnel underneath Park. There in front of her was the little concrete bunker of Tower U, its lights dark at the moment. To her left were the four tracks which almost immediately flowered into ten – seven active tracks, three sidings – by the time they reached Fifty-Fifth.
Rhiow looked both ways, listened, then bounded over to the left-hand side of the tracks and began following them southward, along the line of the eastward sidings. Ahead, the fluorescents were still on night­time configuration, one-quarter of them on and three-quarters off, striping the platforms in horizontal bands of light against the rusty dimness. She trotted toward them, seeing something small move down by the bottom of Track Twenty-Four: and she caught a glimpse of something that didn't belong down here, a glitter of white or hazy blue light concentrated in one spot …
Bong, said the ghost-voice of the clock in the Main Concourse, as Rhiow cut across a few intervening tracks and jumped up onto the platform for Twenty-Four. There was Urruah, sitting and looking at the dimly-seen warp and weft of the worldgate, the oval of its access matrix a little larger than usual.
"Luck, Ruah," Rhiow said, and stood by him a moment with her tail laid over his back in greeting. "Where's the wonder child?"
"Upstairs 'begging' for pastrami from the deli guy."
Rhiow sighed. "There's one habit of his I wish you wouldn't encourage."
"Oh, indeed? I seem to remember where he got it. Someone took him upstairs and – "
"Oh, all right." Rhiow grinned. "We all slip sometimes. Did you open this?"
"No, he did, while he was 'waiting for us'." "For us? You weren't here?"
"He was early. Got impatient, apparently."
Rhiow put one ear back. "Not sure I like him doing this by himself, as yet … "
"How were you planning to stop him? Come on, Rhi, look at it. The synchronization's exact. He would have stayed here to keep an eye on it," Urruah added, forestalling her as she opened her mouth, "but I told him to go on upstairs and get himself a snack. The guy likes him: he won't get in trouble,"
Rhiow put her ear forward again, though she had a definite feeling of being "ganged up on by the toms". It may be something I'm going to have to get used to … "All right," she said, studying the gate. It was open on London, set for nonpatency and a nonvisible matrix on the far side: this side would have been invisible to her, too, except that she could see where Arhu had carefully laid in the "graphic" Speech-form of her name, and Urruah's and his own, in the portion of the spell matrix which controlled selective visibility and patency configurations. Beyond the matrix, light glittered off the river that ran by the big old stone building on which the view was centered: a huge square building of massive stone walls, with what appeared to be more buildings inside it, like a little walled city.
"The Tower of London," Urruah said.
"Doesn't look like a tower … "
"There's one inside it," Urruah said, "the original. The gating complex proper is a little to the north: this is a quieter place for a meeting, the Whisperer suggested. Local time's four hours or so after sunrise."
"Ten thirty … " Rhiow said. "Is this a good time for the gating team there?"
"Don't know how good it is," Urruah said, "but it's what She specified. She may have spoken to them already. Ah hah, here he comes."
The small black-and-white form came trotting insouciantly down the platform, not even sidled. "Arhu," Rhiow said as he came up to them, "come on. You know how they are about cats in here – "
"Not about cats they can't find," Arhu said, licking his chops, and sidled. Rhiow sighed, leaned over and breathed breaths with him: and she blinked. "Sweet Iau in a basket, what's that?"
"Chilli pickle."
Rhiow turned to Urruah. "You have created a monster," she said.
Urruah laughed out loud. "Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first."
"Yes, but you encourage him all the time, and – "
"Hey, come on, Rhi, it's good," Arhu said. "The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke." Arhu grinned. "Now the joke's on him: I like it. But he's good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chillies for him the other day. He thinks it's cool: he makes other people come and see me eat it."
"Not the transit police, I hope," Rhiow said.
"Naah. I wouldn't go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they're down on the tracks," Arhu said.
Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary. "All right. Are you ready?" "I was ready an hour before you got here."
"So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: you did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let's go."
Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side-effect of the patency.
"Go ahead," Arhu said. Urruah, already sidled, leapt through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.
The darkness stripped away behind her as she leapt through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, more busy, one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, and ehhif were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate which led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on to another expanse of cobblestones which sloped down toward the river.
As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him, and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.
"That's our tripwire," Arhu said. "Pull it and it activates the gate to open again."
"And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we're gone?" Rhiow said.
Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself. "It won't interfere … the gate proper's back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string of the selective-memory 'woof'."
"Very good," Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.
They looked around them for a few moments more in the sun. It was a breezy morning: clouds raced by, their shadows patterning the silver river with gray and adding new shades to the gray-brown-silver dazzle-painting of the battleship which was moored on the other side of the river. Arhu had no eyes for that, though, or for the traffic, or the ehhif passing them by. He was looking at the stone walls of the Tower, and his ears were back.
"It's old here," Arhu said. His ears went forward, and then back again, and kept doing that, as if he was was trying to listen to a lot of things at once … things that made him nervous.
"It's old in New York, too," Urruah said.
"Yeah, but not like this … "
"It's the ehhif," Rhiow said. "They've been here so long … first thousands, then hundreds of thousands of them, then millions, all denning on the two sides of this river. A thousand years now, and more … "
"There's more to it than that," Arhu said. He was staring at the Tower. "I smell blood … "
"Yes," said a big deep voice behind them. "So do we … "
They turned in some surprise, for he had come up behind them very quietly, even for a Person. Rhiow, taking him in at first glance, decided that she should revise her ideas about bigger cats being needed in the world: they were already here. This was without any question one of the biggest cats she had ever seen, not to mention the fluffiest. His fur, mostly black on his back, shaded to a blended silver-brown and then to white on his underparts, with four white feet and a white bib making the dark colors more striking. He had a broad, slightly tabby-striped face with surprisingly delicate-looking slanted green eyes in it, and a nose with a smudge: the splendid plume of gray-black tail held up confidently behind him looked a third the thickness of his body, which was considerable. If this Person was lacking for anything, it wasn't food.
"We are on errantry," Rhiow said, "and we greet you."
"Well met on the errand," said the Person. "I'm Huff: I lead the London gating team. And you would be Rhiow?"
"So I would. Hunt's luck to you, cousin." They bumped noses in meeting-courtesy. "And here is Urruah, my older teammate: and Arhu, who's just joined us."
Noses were bumped all around: Arhu was a little hesitant about it at first. "I won't bite," Huff said, and indeed it seemed unlikely. Rhiow got an almost immediate impression from him that this was one of those jovial and easy-going souls who regret biting even mice.
"I'm sorry to meet you without the rest of the team," Huff said, "but we had another emergency this morning, and they're in the middle of handling it. I'll bring you down to them, if you'll come with me. Anyway, I thought you might like to see something of the "outside" of the gating complex before we got down into the heart of the trouble."
"It's good of you," Urruah said, falling into step on one side of him, Rhiow pacing along on the other: Arhu brought up the rear, still looking thoughtfully at the Tower. "Did I see right from the history in the Whispering, that the gates actually used to be above ground here, and were relocated?"
"That's right," Huff said as he plodded along. He led Rhiow and her team through an iron gate in a nearby hedge, and down onto a sunken paved walk which made its way behind that hedge around the busy– street side of the Tower, and into an underpass leading away under that street. "See this grassy area over to the right, the other side of the railings? That was the moat … but much earlier, before the Imperial people were here, it was a swamp with a cave nearby that led into the old hillside. That was where the first gate formed, when this was just a village of a few mud-and-wattle huts."
"How come a gate spawned here, then," Arhu said, "if there were so few ehhif around?"
"Because they were around for two thousand years before the Imperials turned up," Huff said, "or maybe three. There's some argument about the dates. It's not certain what kept them here at first: some people think the fishing was good." Huff put his whiskers forward, and Rhiow got, with some amusement, the immediate sense that Huff approved of fish. "Whatever the reason, they stayed, and a gate came, as they tended to do near permanent settlements when the Earth was younger." He flicked his ears thoughtfully as they all stepped to one side to avoid a crowd of ehhif making their way up to the admission counters near the gateway they'd come in.
"It's had a rocky history, though," Rhiow said, "this gating complex. So Urruah tells me."
"That's right," Huff said, as they turned the corner and now walked parallel to the main street with all the traffic. "This has always been the heart of London, this hill … not that there's that much left of the hill any more. And the heart has had its share of seizures and arrests, I fear, and nearly stopped once or twice. Nonetheless … everything is still functioning."
"What exactly is the problem with the gates at the moment?" Rhiow said.
Huff got a pained look. "One of them is intermittently converting itself into an unstable timeslide," he said. "The other end seems to be anchoring somewhere nearby in the past – it has to, after all, you can't have a slide without an anchor – but the times at which it's anchoring seem to be changing without any cause that we can understand."
"How long has it been doing this?" Urruah said. His eyes had gone rather wide at the mention of the timeslide.
"We're not absolutely sure," Huff said. "Possibly for a long time, though only for micro-periods too small to allow anyone to pass through. In any case, none of the normal monitoring spells caught the gate at it. We only found out last week when Auhlae, that's my mate, was working on one of the neighboring gates … and something came out."
"Something?" Arhu said, looking scared.
"Someone, actually," Huff said, glancing over at the Tower as a shriek of children's laughter came from somewhere inside it. "It was an ehhif … and not a wizardly one. Very frightened … very confused. He ran through the gate and up and out into the Tube station – that's where our number-four gate is anchored, in the Tower Hill Underground station – and out into the night. Right over the turnstiles he went," Huff added, "and the Queen only knows what the poor ehhif who work there made of it all."
"Have you made any more headway in understanding why this is happening since our meeting was set up?" Rhiow said. She very much hoped so: this all sounded completely bizarre.
But Huff flirted his tail "no", a slightly annoyed gesture. "Nothing would please me better than to tell you that that was the case," he said.
Rhiow licked her nose. "Huff," she said, "believe me when I tell you that we're sorry for your trouble, and we wish we didn't need to be here in the first place."
"That's very kindly said," Huff said, turning those green eyes on her: they were somber. "My team are – well, they're annoyed, as you might imagine. I appreciate your concern a great deal, indeed I do."
Huff and Rhiow's team turned leftwards into the underpass, which was full of ehhif heading in various directions, and one ehhif who was tending a small mobile installation festooned with colored scarves and T-shirts: numerous prints of the Tower and other pictures of what Rhiow assumed were tourist attractions were taped to the walls, and some of what Rhiow assumed were tourists were studying them. "Huff," Urruah said, "what did the gate's logs look like after this ingress?"
"Muddled," Huff said, as they walked through the underpass, up the ramp on its for side, and fumed toward a set of stairs leading downwards into what Rhiow saw was the ticketing area of the Underground station: above the stairway was the circle-and-bar Underground logo, emblazoned with the words tower hill. "We found evidence of multiple ingresses of this kind, from different times into ours … and egresses from ours back to those times. The worst part of it is that only one of those egresses was a "return": all the others were "singles". The ehhif went through, in one direction or another, but they never made it back to their home times … "
Urruah's eyes went wide. "This way," Huff said, and led them under one of the turnstiles and off to the right.
Rhiow followed him closely, but Urruah's shocked look was on her mind. "What?" she said to him, as Huff leaped up onto the stainless– steel divider between two stairways.
"Single trips," Urruah said, following her up. "You know what that means – "
Rhiow flirted her tail in acquiescence. It was an uncomfortable image, the poor ehhif trapped in a time not their own, confused, possibly driven mad by the awful turn of events, and certainly thought mad by anyone who ran into them – But then she started having other things to think about as she followed Huff steeply down. The steel was slippery: the only way you could control your descent was by jumping from one to another of the upthrust steel wedges fastened at intervals to the middle of the divider, almost certainly to keep ehhif in a hurry from using the thing as a slide. Rhiow started to get into the rhythm of this, then almost lost it again as Arhu came down past her, yelling in delight. Various ehhif walking up on one side and down on the other looked curiously for the source of the happy yowling in the middle of the air.
"Arhu, look out," Rhiow said, "oh, look out, for the Queen's sake look – "
It was too late: Arhu had jumped right over the surprised Huff, but had built up so much speed that he couldn't stop himself at the next wedge: he hit it, shot into the air, fell and rolled for several yards, and shot off the end of the divider to fall to the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Rhiow sighed. He was so good there, she thought: … for about ten minutes …
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