by Diane Duane
She didn’t finish the sentence, but she was somewhat fluffed up, and didn’t try to disguise it.
“You’re willing to pay the price?” Tom said.
Rhiow licked her nose. Such exceptions did not come cheap. Of course, not even the smallest wizardry was without its price: usually you paid in your own stamina, in the work and pains you took over the construction of the spell, the personal energy required to perform it, and the energy you spent in dealing with the consequences. But for extra services, you paid extra… and the coin was usually time off your lifespan. Days, months: a dangerous equation, when you didn’t know for sure how much time you might have left… but sometimes necessary.
She licked her nose again. “Yes,” she said.
Tom looked at her, and sighed. “I’ll talk to you at noontime,” he said. “Saash, the catenaries will go down in half an hour—that’ll give everyone worldwide who might be transiting plenty of time to finish their transits or change their plans.”
“Fine,” Saash said. “We’ll use the Thirty gate again for the access: having just worked on it, I’m happiest with its function. If you’ll see to it that power is running to that one gate for noon—”
“Consider it done.” Tom stood up again. “Listen, you three… I’m sorry this is going to be so rough on you. I appreciate what you’re doing.”
Do you, I wonder, Rhiow thought, but then she felt guilty, for the thought was unworthy. Of course he does. It’s his job. AH we can do is do ours.
“Let’s go, you two,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of preparation to do. T’hom—go well.”
“So may we all,” he said, and vanished.
* * *
The three of them repaired to Rhiow’s rooftop and spent the next few hours discussing what spells they might possibly bring with them that would do any good against a force much bigger and more dangerous than the saurians they had met the other day. It was certain that they would meet such force, since they had defeated the saurians so bloodily last time, and (worse) because Har’lh’s disappearance was almost certainly a provocation to draw them, or others like them, down again.
“My guess is that they’re going to try something more spectacular than the last time,” Urruah said. “If you’re right, and they managed to sabotage the catenary … then worse is coming. We’ve got to get down there and have enough power to stop whatever we find.”
“If T’hom gets us that override,” Saash said, looking out over the rooftops as the sun came up, “it’s going to make our jobs a lot easier.”
“Plan for it,” Rhiow said, “but also plan without it I for one am going to be prepared to survive this intervention: I’m not going to plan to get stuck in circle again, either. I know the Oath says we have to let these creatures survive if at all possible—but not at the cost of our own lives or our mission. I’m going to use that neural degenerator as liberally as I need.”
“So will I,” Urruah said, “but Rhi… even an override may not be enough to save us, if the kind of numbers turn up that you’re expecting.”
“What are you suggesting we do about it?”
“Conjunct coupling,” Urruah said, and licked his nose.
So did Rhiow. Saash just stared at him, round-eyed, then turned around and started to wash her back.
“I’ve been thinking about what Arhu was saying,” Urruah said. “ ‘He’s coming. The father … the son.’ Something bigger than the rest of the lizards. Something much more dangerous … that was the impression I got, anyway.”
Rhiow switched her tail in reluctant agreement. “You’re saying you think conjunct is the only way we’re going to be able to maintain power levels high enough to handle something like … that.” Whatever that was: she was becoming afraid to follow that line of reasoning to its rational conclusion, even here in the burgeoning light of day.
“It means,” Urruah said, “that no matter whether one or another of us has a lapse, the others’ combined power will be able to feed the wizardry they’re doing, and keep it going.”
Saash sat up and glared at him. “It also means that if we go down there hooked up in conjunct, we all have to come back that way … or none of us can come back up again at all! If any of us die down there, the others will be stranded—!”
There was a pause. “Yes,” Urruah said, “it would mean that. But think about the alternative, even with the override that T’hom may or may not be able to get us. You’re doing a wizardry. Your concentration, or your power flow, fails. You blow the wizardry … and you die … and then the others are put at risk trying to keep you from dying, and their wizardries fail.” He would not look away from Saash. She stared back at him; the tension stretched itself across the air between them. “Everyone dies. The whole job goes straight to sa’Rrahh. And not just our lives … whatever happens to them when you die down there. A whole lot of other lives. All those that depend on the gates working. Har’lh’s, too, for all we know. —At least this way we would have a better chance of supporting one another’s wizardries. I’m no hero … but it’s all about getting the job done, isn’t it? Rhi?” He turned to her.
Rhiow looked down at the gravel where she sat, her tail twitching. Finally she glanced up again. “If it were just me,” she said at last, “I would sanction it. But it’s not just me. There are two other team members who must agree to be bound in this manner… and this isn’t something I can decide for the others involved.”
Saash would not look at her. “I’m not going to ask for a decision now,” Rhiow said. “Noon will be soon enough. Between now and then I’m going to have to go explain it all to Arhu anyway, which should be interesting.” She looked east, at Rhoua’s Eye, rising nonchalantly in the sky as if this were just another day; and from the streets came the early hoots and tire-screeches of the beginning of rush-hour traffic, reinforcing the feeling of normalcy, spurious though it was.
“It’s all in the Queen’s womb anyway,” she said. “All we can do is wait and see how the litter comes out… and meantime, make sure our claws are sharp. Saash, wait awhile before you head back to the garage.”
She walked off to her usual stairway in the air, leaving Saash and Urruah pointedly not looking at each other. Please, Iau, let them sort it out, she thought.
But she couldn’t help but wonder how effective prayer was likely to be today, of all days…
* * *
The garage was deep in its morning business, cars going in and out at a great rate, and Rhiow questioned whether the ehhif working there would have seen her whether she had been sidled or not As it was, she was, and she walked up the air again to the high ledge in the back, where Arhu was sleeping.
She sat down on the concrete and simply looked at him for a moment. He was sleeping a little more easily, if nothing else: stretched out long and leggy, rather than hunched up in the little ball of previous days. He’s beginning to fill out a little, Rhiow thought, even after just a few days. A few months of this and he’s going to start looking like a proper young tom.
If we survive that long…
She was aware, suddenly, of eyes half-open and looking at her.
“I heard you,” Arhu said, not moving, just watching her with a sleepy look, but one that was nonetheless unusually knowing.
Rhiow stuck out a leg and began to wash it in a casual manner.
“Something bad’s happening, isn’t it?” Arhu said.
“Much worse than usual,” Rhiow said. “Har’lh is missing.”
“I know,” Arhu said, rolling over to lie upright. “I see that. Or, at least, I know it’s happened… but I don’t know how or why.”
He paused, as if looking at something else; then said, “You can’t go after him now. Something’s coming ,… trying to break through.”
“What?” Rhiow said.
“The one who chooses,” Arhu said, gazing out into the fumy air of the garage. “And the one who didn’t choose. There’s a darkness pushing against the gate; I see it bending outward, and there ar
e eyes, they’re staring, they want—” Suddenly Arhu scrabbled to bis feet and pushed himself right back against the concrete wall, as if he had forgotten how to melt through it, and he started to pant as if he had been running. “It’s coming,” he gasped, “they’re coming, all the choices, all the eyes … coming upward…”
“Sit down, Arhu,” Rhiow said, and went over to him, leaning to wash behind his ear briefly. He sat, but he was still staring out into the dimness, his eyes flickering wildly from side to side as he watched what Rhiow couldn’t see.
’This one’s scary,” Arhu said softly, his breathing beginning to slow a little; but his eyes were still wide, fixed on some spot out of Rhiow’s vision, or anyone else’s. “This one really wants to be real, this choice. It’s going to do it soon.” He quieted a little more, but a few seconds later, he said, “They can’t use the gates.”
“I know,” Rhiow said. “Tom has had them shut down.”
“That’s not the problem,” Arhu said. He looked at her, with some confusion, Rhiow thought, and said, “All these choices …How did we choose?”
Her first temptation was to tell him to look himself at the ancient memories the Whisperer would show him; but then it occurred to Rhiow that he was already seeing enough at the moment—he seemed to be caught in some kind of visionary fugue—and adding more imagery on top of it might make him even more confused or cloud some perception that might be of more importance.
Rhiow nudged Arhu down into the “sphinx” position he had been lying in earlier, and hunched next to him, tucking her forepaws in. “I suppose all the Choices are odd,” she said, “but ours, well, it had its own quirks. We were made before the ehhif, supposedly, but well after the cetaceans and the saurians, of course. The saurians had passed by then; their failed Choice had killed all of them. There were a very few saurians, you know,” she said, settling her front paws more comfortably, “who had rejected that image of world-ruling power than the Lone Power offered them. They took the vegetarian option to use less life, more sparingly—but there were not enough of them in the Choice to turn it aside, and they died under the fangs of the others. The Lone One’s long black winter killed the rest.
“Then, much later, after the winter was gone and the world was warm and green again, our foremothers came. There wasn’t any differentiation among the various kinds of feline families yet: just one kind, who didn’t look so much different from us, although they were bigger, more houff-sized. They all ran in prides, and so when they grew into mind, the First Queens made the Choice for them, as queens decide what their prides will do today.”
“What did It—what did she say?”
“Well, sa’Rrahh came and said to them that the way of life that Iau had held out to them—to kill responsibly, to take only what they needed—was just Her plot to keep them small and weak, living on subsistence, on sufferance, and eventually to make slaves of them. The Destroyer held out to them the promise of rule over the world, the land the saurians had wielded: power and terror, domination, all other life fleeing before them. And the Queen-mothers of the First Prides, wizards and nonwizards both—because there are always wizards in a Choice, at least a few—considered the Choice; but, being People after all, they disagreed on what to do, just as the saurians had.”
“So some took sa’Rrahh’s offer—”
Arhu had that faraway look again: Rhiow had no idea what he might be seeing, and continued as she had been doing. “Most did, and their Choice ruled the others. The Hungry, those who made that Choice, grew great and terrible in body, killing for power and success, but like the carnivorous saurians, they hadn’t paid enough attention to the wording and intention of the Lone One’s offer. They had their time to rule, but it was short—soon enough the ice crept down from the poles and buried the forests where they hunted, killing their game, and then most of them as well. There was a second group of the Eldest Kindred who rejected power and rule over the Earth, and elected to kill what they needed, only. They were the Mindful. They stayed small, for the most part, but grew wise, enough so to survive the ice when it came.”
She fell silent for a moment, wondering what to make of the look on Arhu’s face. “But there were more—” he said.
Rhiow switched her tail “yes.” “They weren’t very many, that last group: the Failed. They recognized as potentially deadly the Choice the Lone Power was offering, and they attacked her and died. But they’re reborn, again and again, in one or another of our sundered Kindreds.”
“They’re wizards,” Arhu said suddenly, and looked up at Rhiow.
“Yes,” she said. “Still we die: there’s no escaping the fate of the rest of our kind. But we’re set apart; and we alone of all felinity may come again to that time and place where cats’ bodies are once again the size of their souls… Other confusions between size and Kindred have come about over time. The Hungry are born among the smaller kindreds, and the Mindful among the great; the savage and the kindly mingle. You never know which sort you’ll find yourself dealing with. Yet every feline, great or small, carries all of them within herself; we all have to make the Choice again and again, a hundred times in a life, or a thousand. Sum up all the choices, over nine lives, and your fate’s decided, they say. If you fail, then there’s nothing at the end of it all but silence, and the night. Pass through that last summing-up, though, under Iau’s eye, and there’s the last life, which doesn’t end—”
“—the Tenth Life and the truest,” Arhu said slowly, “of those whose spirits outwear and overmaster their bodies, untiring of the chase, the Choice, the battle, and go on in the world and beyond it; immortal, dangerous and fair, cats-become-Powers, who move in and out of physicality on the One’s business—”
He looked at Rhiow, his eyes clearing. “They can’t help us,” Arhu said. “Something is breaking through: everything is bending, changing … so that there’s nowhere solid for them to step. There isn’t any help but what we already have.”
Wonderful, Rhiow thought. “If you see anything that can be of use to us in what we’re going to have to do,” she said, “this would be a good time to let me know.”
He looked at her with a kind of helpless expression. “You’re carrying all the wrong spells,” he said. “You don’t want to open the gates. You need to shut them.”
That perplexed her. “But they’re shut already.”
“Not for long,” Arhu said, and very suddenly squeezed his eyes shut as if seeing something that frightened him badly.
“What?” Rhiow said.
“No…” He wouldn’t look at her.
I wish I could push him. But I don’t dare. “All right,” she said. “Arhu, we have another problem. Whatever you may say about opening or shutting gates, we are going to have to go Downside again, very soon, to look for Har’lh. It’s going to be much more dangerous than last time, and if our spells are to protect us so that we can do the job, we’re going to have to link ourselves together in a particular way. It means we’ll be stronger: each of us will have all our strengths to draw on. But it also means that, if one of us dies down there, all the others will be trapped; there’ll be no return.”
“I know,” Arhu said, painfully. “I see that.”
Rhiow shuddered. “I’m not going to tell you that you have to do that. You have to decide.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then, abruptly, he looked up at Rhiow again. “… What does Saash say?”
Rhiow looked curiously at him. Arhu looked at the floor. “Well,” he said, “she washed me. I must have tasted horrible. And she held me, even when I kicked, and called her names.”
So it’s going to come down to her, Rhiow thought Why can I not surprised? “She’s angry,” Rhiow said. “She doesn’t want to go down there again, and she hasn’t made her mind up.”
He switched his tail indecisively. “She’ll be here in a little while,” Rhiow said. “You can ask her then. When you’ve decided, speak to me in your head, or ask Saash to. We can’t wait v
ery long to go.”
“All right.” He turned his face to the wall.
Rhiow sighed, and stepped out onto the air, sidled again. “But you do have mostly the wrong spells,” Arhu said.
This is so reassuring. “Which ones should we have, then?” Rhiow said.
“The ones the Whisperer’s still working on…”
That made Rhiow blink.
“I’ll be at my den,” she said. “Go well.”
* * *
When she got in, Rhiow was surprised to find Hhuha still at home so far into the day. She was stalking around the apartment restlessly, dressed for work, but plainly not going there: paperwork was still lying scattered here and there, her briefcase sat open on the table. Something unusual was happening, and Hhuha was tense about it. Possibly that meeting she was planning has been rescheduled? Rhiow thought. In any case, she knew better than to interfere with Hhuha when she was in such a mood, though at the moment Rhiow’s stomach was growling nearly as loud as her purr could get under better conditions. She went and jumped on the sofa, and curled up there.
Hhuha stopped by the window, looked out, sighed, then went over to Rhiow and picked her up. “I hate calling in sick when I’m not,” Hhuha muttered into her fur. “It makes me feel duplicitous and foul. Come here, puss, and tell me I’m not duplicitous and foul.”
“You’re no more duplicitous than most cats are,” Rhiow said, purring as loudly as she could and bumping her head against Hhuha’s ear, “so why should you complain? As ehhif go, you’re a model of good behavior. And you’re not foul. The tuna is foul. —Oh, come on, my Hhuha, calm down.” She put her nose against Hhuha’s neck. “This is no good. You’re not calm, Iau knows I’m not calm, neither of us can do anything for each other.”
“My kitty,” Hhuha said, rubbing her behind the ears. “I wish I knew where you were half the time. You make me worry.”
“I wish I could just tell you! It would be so much easier. I swear, I’m going to start teaching you Ailurin when all this quiets down. If Rosie can learn it, so can you.”