by Diane Duane
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-dinosaurs part. 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.
* * *
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 of plans 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.
* * *
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…”
* * *
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…”