The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Five

The walk down to Fifth and Forty-second is never an easy one, even on weekends: too many windowshoppers in from out of town, too many tourists, and even a sidled cat has to watch where it walks on Fifth Avenue on Sunday. But by nine-thirty on a Sunday night, almost everything is closed, even the electronics shops that litter the middle reaches of Fifth, festooned with signs declaring closing-out sale! everything must go! and attracting the unsuspecting passersby who haven’t yet worked out that, come next week, nothing will be gone but their money. As a result, a pedestrian, whether on two feet or four, can stand for a moment and gaze across at the splendid Beaux-Arts facade of the New York Public Library’s Forty-second Street building—especially in the evening, when it glows golden with its landmark lighting—and enjoy the look of the place without being trampled by man, machine, or beast.

The four of them crossed with care in the lull between red lights, and Arhu stood looking up the big flight of steps, and from one side to the other, at the massive shapes of the two lions carved out of the pale pink Tennessee marble. Feral Arhu might have been, but no cat with brains enough to think could have failed to recognize the two huge, silent figures as images of relatives.

“Who are they?” Arhu said.

“Gods,” Urruah said pointedly. “Some of ours.”

Rhiow smiled. “They’re Sef and Hhu’au,” she said, “the lion-Powers of Yesterday and Today.”

Arhu stared. “Are they real?”

Saash smiled slightly. “If you mean, do they exist? Yes. If you mean, do they walk around looking like that? No,” Saash said. “But they’re like that. Big, and powerful… and predatory, each in his or her own way. They stand for the barriers between what was, which we can’t affect, and what will be—which we can, but only by what we do in the present moment.”

“Except if you get access to a timeslide,” Urruah said, “when you can go back in time and—”

“Urruah,” Rhiow said, glaring at him, “go eat something, or do something useful with that mouth, all right?” To Arhu she said, “We do not tamper with time without authorization from Them, from the Powers That Be. And even They don’t do it lightly. You can destroy a whole world if you’re not careful or else you can wipe yourself out of existence, which tends to have the same effect at the personal level even if you’re lucky enough not to have caused everyone else not to have existed as well. So don’t even think about it. And you’ll find,” she added, as the smug we’ll-see-about-that expression settled itself over Arhu’s face, “when you ask the One Who Whispers for details on time travel anyway, that you won’t be given that information, no matter how you wheedle. If you press Her on the subject, your ears will ring for days. But don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and ask.”

Arhu’s face went a little less smug as he looked from Saash to Urruah and saw their knowing grins: especially Urruah’s, which had a little too much anticipation in it. Rhiow looked sidewise at Saash. This “heavy-pawed dam” role isn’t one I ever imagined myself in, Rhiow said silently. And I’m not sure I like it…

Saash glanced at her, a little amused. You’re betraying a natural talent, though…

Thanks loads.

“If they’re Yesterday and Today,” Arhu said, “then where’s Tomorrow?”

“Invisible,” Urruah said. “Hard to make an image of something that hasn’t happened yet. But he’s there, Reh-t is, whether you see him or not. Like all the best predators, you never see him till it’s much too late. Walk right through him, feel the chill: he’s there.”

Arhu stared at the empty space between the two statues, and shivered. It was a little odd. Rhiow looked at him in mild concern for a moment.

They went in, trotting up the stairs and weaving to avoid the ehhif. Arhu kept well over to the right side, skirting the pedestal of Sef’s statue. You scared the child, Rhiow said to Urruah.

It’s good for him, Urruah said, untroubled. He can use some scaring, if you ask me.

They came up to the top of the steps, and Rhiow took a moment to coach Arhu in how to handle the revolving door. Inside the polished brass doors, they stood for a moment, looking up at the great entrance hall, all resplendent in its white marble staircases. Then Rhiow said, “Come on, this way…” and led them off to the left, under the staircase and the second-floor gallery, and past the green travertine marble doorway that opened into the writers’ room; then right, around the corner to a door adorned with a sign reading staff only, and an arrow pointing down with the word

Arhu sniffed the air appreciatively. “Don’t get any ideas,” Urruah growled, “that’s today’s lunch you’re smelling, and it’s long eaten.”

Rhiow heard his stomach growl, and carefully didn’t chuckle out loud. She reared up and pushed the door open: outside of opening hours, it wasn’t locked. It leaned inward with the usual squeak, and they trotted in and up the stairs to the central level of the stacks.

When they were out of the stairwell, Arhu loped over to the edge of the inner stack corridor and looked down through the railings. “Wow,” he said, “what is all this stuff?”

“Knowledge,” Rhiow said, stepping up beside him and looking up at the skylights and four stories of books, and down at three stories more: four and a half miles of shelving, here and in the tunneled-out space under Bryant Park, pierced here and there by the several staircases that allowed access between levels, and the selective retrieval system that moved between levels, its vertical conveyor arms picking up books that had been called for and dropping off books to be returned. It was the genius of this building, its arrangement in such a way as to hide this great mass of shelf space—so that even when you knew it was here, it was always a shock to see it, as much cubic space as would be in a good-sized apartment building, and not an inch of it wasted.

In the center of it all, on the level at which they had entered, was a large pitlike area filled with desks and carrels, with a wide wooden-arched opening off to one side. Right now this opening, where ehhif would come from the main reading room on the side to pick up books, was shuttered and locked, in case thieves should somehow get in through the great reading room windows by night and try to steal books for collectors. The rarest books were all now up in little wood-paneled, iron-grilled jails in the Special Collections, second-floor front, isolated from the main reference stacks by thick concrete walls and alarm systems. Ehef had told Rhiow once that you could hear the books whispering to each other in the dark through the trefoil-pierced gratings, in a tiny rustling of page chafing against page, prisoners waiting for release. Rhiow had come away wondering whether he had been teasing her. Wizards do not lie: words are their tool and currency, which they dare not devalue. But even wizardry, in which a word can shape a world, has room for humor, and there had been a whimsical glint in Ehef’s eyes that night…

She smiled slightly. “This way,” Rhiow said, and led the way over to the central core of carrels, where the computers sat two to a desk, or sometimes three. Several of the monitors were turned on, casting a soft blue-white glow over the desks; and on one desk, sprawled comfortably with one paw on the keyboard, and looking thoughtfully at the screen in front of him, lay Ehef.

He looked over at them with only mild interest as they came, though when his eyes came to rest on Arhu, the expression became more awake. Ehef’s coloration was what People called vefessh, and ehhif called “blue”; his eyes, wide and round in a big round platter of a face, were a vivid green that set off the plush blue fur splendidly. Those eyes reflected the shifting images on the screen, pages scrolling by. “Useless,” he said softly. “Not even wizardry can do anything about the overcrowding on these lines. Phone company’s gotta do something. —Good evening, Rhiow, and hunt’s luck to you.”

“Hunt’s luck, Senior,” she said, sitting down.

“Wondered when you were going to get down to see me. Urruah? How they squealin’?”

“Loudly,” Urruah said, and grinned.

“That’s what I like to hear. Saash? Life treating you well?”

She sat down, threw a look at Arhu, and immediately began to scratch. “No complaints, Ehef,” she said.

“So I see.” He looked at Arhu again, got up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down off the desk, crossing to them. “And I smell new wizardry. What’s your name, youngster?”

“Arhu.”

Ehef leaned close to breathe breaths with him: Arhu held still for it, just. “Huh. Pastrami,” said Ehef. “Well, hunt’s luck to you too, Arhu. You still hungry? Care for a mouse?”

“There are mice here?”

“Are there mice here, he asks.” Ehef looked at the others as if asking for patience in the face of idiocy. “As if there’s any building in this city that doesn’t have either mice, rats, or cockroaches. Mice! There are hundreds of mice! Thousands! … Well, all right, some.”

“I want to catch some! Where are they?”

Ehef gave Rhiow a look. “He’s new at this, I take it.”

Arhu was about to shoot off past Rhiow when he suddenly found Urruah standing in front of him, with an attentive and entirely too interested expression. “When you’re on someone else’s hunting ground,” Urruah said, “it’s manners to ask permission first.”

“If there are thousands, why should I? I wanna—”

“You should ask permission, young fastmouth,” said Ehef, his voice scaling up into a hiss as he leaned in past Urruah’s shoulder with a paw raised, “because if you don’t, I personally will rip the fur off your tail and stuff it all right down your greedy face, are we clear about that? Young people these days, I ask you.”

Arhu crouched down a little, wide-eyed, and Rhiow kept her face scrupulously straight. Ehef might look superficially well-fed and well-to-do, but to anyone who had spent much time in this city, the glint in his eyes and the muscles under his pelt spoke of a kittenhood spent on the West Side docks among the smugglers and the drug dealers, with rats the size of dogs, dogs the size of ponies, and ehhif who (unlike the tunnel-ehhif) counted one of the People good eating if they could catch one.

“Please don’t rip him up, Ehef,” Rhiow said mildly. “He’s a little short on the social graces. We’re working on it.”

“Huh,” Ehef said. “He better work fast, otherwise somebody with less patience is going to tear his ears off for him. Right, Mr. Wisemouth?” He moved so fast that even Rhiow, who was half-expecting it, only caught sight of Ehef’s paw as it was just missing Arhu’s right ear; the ear went flat, which was just as well, for Ehef’s claws were out, and Arhu crouched farther down.

“Right,” said Ehef. “Well, because Rhiow suggests it, I’ll cut you a little slack. You can’t help it if you were raised in a sewer, a lot of us were. So what you say is, ‘Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?’ And then I say, ‘Hunt, but not to the last life, for even prey have Gods.’ So come on, let’s hear it.”

Only a little sullenly—for there was a faint, tantalizing rustling and squeaking to be heard down at the bottom of the stacks—Arhu said, “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground.”

“Was that a question? Who were you asking, the floor? One more time.”

Arhu started to make a face, then controlled it as one of Ehef’s paws twitched. “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?”

“Sure, go on, you, catch yourself some mice, there’s a steady supply, I make sure of that. But don’t eat them all or I’ll skin you before anybody’s gods get a chance. Go on, what are you waiting for, don’t you hear them messing around down there? Screwing each other, that’s what that noise is, mouse sex, disgusting.”

Hurriedly, Arhu got up and scurried off. Rhiow and the others looked after him, then sat down with Ehef.

“Thanks, Ehef,” Rhiow said. “I’m sorry he’s so rude.”

“Aah, don’t worry about it, we all need a little knocking around in this life before we’re fit to wash each other’s ears. I was like that once. He’ll learn better; or get dead trying.”

“That’s what we’re hoping to avoid…”

Saash blinked, one ear swiveling backward to follow the rustling going on above. “ ‘I make sure there’s a steady supply’? I wouldn’t think that’s a very professional attitude for a mouser.”

“I got more than one profession, you know that. But the day I eat every mouse in the place, that’s the day they decide they don’t need a cat anymore.”

“And, besides,” Saash said dryly, “ ‘even prey have gods.’ ”

“Sure they do.” Ehef settled himself, stretched out a paw. “But ethics aside, look, it’s not like the old times anymore, no more ‘jobs for life.’ With the budget cuts, if these people want to give me cat food, they have to pay for it themselves. Bad situation, nothing I can do about it. So I make sure they think I’m useful, and I make sure I don’t have to go out of my way to do it. Why should I go hunting out when I can eat in? I bring the librarians dead mice every day, they bring me cat food, everybody’s happy. Leaves me free for other work. Such as consultation, which reminds me, why didn’t you call to make sure I was available first?”

Rhiow smiled. “You’re always available.”

“The disrespect of youth.”

“When have I ever been disrespectful to you? But it’s true, you know it is. And I usually do call first, but I had a problem.”

Ehef’s ears swiveled as he heard the scampering downstairs. “So I see. Not the one I thought, though.” His whiskers went forward in a dry smile. “Thought you finally figured out what to do with that spell.”

“What? Oh, that.” Rhiow laughed. “No, I’m still doing analysis on it, when I have the time. Not much, lately. The gates seem to take up most of it… and that’s the problem now.”

“All right.” He blinked and looked vague for a moment, then said, “I keep a sound-damper spell emplaced around the desks: it’s active now, he won’t hear. Tell me your troubles.”

She told him about their earlier failure with the gate. Ehef settled down into a pose that Rhiow had become very familiar with over the years: paws tucked in and folded together at the wrists, eyes half-closed as he listened. Only once or twice did he speak, to ask a technical question about the structure of the gate. Finally he opened one eye, then the second, and looked up.

So did Rhiow. It was very quiet downstairs.

“He couldn’t get out of here, could he?” she said.

“Not without help. Or not without turning himself into a mouse,” said Ehef, “which fortunately he can’t do yet, though I bet that won’t last long. But never mind. Pretty unsettling, Rhi, but you have to see where this line of reasoning is going to take you.”

“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I thought a second opinion—”

“You hoped I would get you off the hook somehow,” Ehef said with that slightly cockeyed grin that showed off the broken upper canine. “You’ve already talked this through with Saash, I know—otherwise you wouldn’t waste my time—and she couldn’t suggest anything at our level of reality that could cause such a malfunction.” He glanced up at Saash: she lashed her tail “no.” “So the problem has to be farther in, at a more central, more senior level. Somewhere in the Old Downside.”

This agreed with Rhiow’s opinion, and it was not at all reassuring. Wizards most frequently tend to rank universes in terms of their distance to or from the most central reality known—the one that all universes mirror, to greater degree or lesser, and about which all worlds and dimensions are arranged. That most senior reality had many names, across existence. Wizards of the People called it Auhw-t, the Hearth: ehhif wizards called it Timeheart. It was the core-reality of the universes: some said it was the seed-reality, parent of all others. Whether this was the case or not, worlds situated closer to the Hearth had an increased power to affect worlds farther out in life’s structure. The Old Downside was certainly much more central than the universe in which Earth moved, so that what happened there was bound to happen here, sooner or later. And a failure in the effect of the laws of wizardry in a universe so central to the scheme of things had bad implications for the effectiveness of wizardry here and now, on Earth, in the long term.

“You mean,” Rhiow said, “that something is changing the way the Downside gating structures behave?”

Ehef shrugged his tail. “Possible.”

“Or else something’s changing the locks on the gates,” Saash said suddenly, with a peculiar and disturbed look on her face.

“That would probably be the lesser of the two evils,” Ehef said, “but neither one’s any good. Worldgating’s one of the things that keeps this planet running … not that the world at large notices, or ought to. If wizards in high-population areas like this have to start diverting energy from specialized wizardries just to handle ‘rapid transit,’ they’re not going to be able to do their jobs at peak effectiveness … and the results are going to start to show in a hurry. Someone’s going to have to find out what’s going wrong, and fast.” Ehef looked up at Rhiow. “And you found the problem … so you know what that means. You get to fix it.”

Rhiow hissed very softly. “Which means a trip Downside. Hiouh. Well, you can tell the Powers from me that they’re going to have to find someone else to mind the baby while we do what we’re doing. He’s on Ordeal, but he doesn’t understand the ramifications of the Oath as yet, and we’re not going to have time to teach him and do this at the same time. Nor can we take the chance that he might sabotage something we’re doing in a moment of high spirits—”

“Sony, Rhi,” Ehef said. “You’re stuck with him. The ‘you found the problem, you fix it’ rule applies to Arhu as well. Your team must have something to offer him that no other wizards now working have; otherwise he wouldn’t be here with you.”

“Maybe they do,” Rhiow said, starting to get angry, “but what about my team, then? How’re they supposed to cope, having to do their jobs—and particularly nasty ones, now— while playing milk-dam to a half-feral kitten? He’s an unknown quantity, Ehef: he sounds odd sometimes. And I have no idea what he’s going to do from one moment to the next, even when he’s not sounding odd. Why should my team be endangered, having to look out for him? They’re past their own Ordeals, trained, experienced, and necessary—who’s looking out for their needs?”

“The same Ones who look after them usually,” Ehef said. “No wizard is sent a problem that is inappropriate to him or to his needs. Problems sent to a team are always appropriate to the whole team … whether it looks that way, at this end of causality, or not. Right now, you can question that appropriateness … what wizard doesn’t, occasionally? But afterward, things always look different.”

“They’ll look a lot more different if we’re dead,” Urruah said softly.

“Yeah, well, we all take that chance, don’t we? But even crossing the street’s not safe around here, you know that. At least if you die on errantry, you know it was for a purpose. More assurance than most People get. Or most other sentient beings of whatever kind.” He glanced up at the stairway to the next level of the stacks, where scampering sounds could be heard again. “As for him, he’s almost certainly part of the solution to this problem. Look at him: almost too young to be doing this kind of thing … and all the more powerful for it. You know how it is with the youngest wizards: they don’t know what’s impossible, so they have less trouble doing it. And just as well. We learn our limits too soon as it is…”

“If we survive to find them,” Saash said, dry-voiced.

“Yeah, well. I didn’t hold out much hope for you when we first met,” Ehef said. “You’d jump at the sight of your own shadow.” Saash glanced away. “And look at you now. Nice work, that, yesterday: you kept cool. So keep cool now. That might be what this youngster’s been sent to you for. But there’s no way to tell which of you will make the difference for him.” He glanced at Urruah, somewhat ironically.

Urruah closed his eyes, a you-must-be-joking expression, and turned his head away.

Rhiow opened her mouth, then closed it again, seeing Ehef’s expression—annoyed, but also very concerned. “Rhiow,” he said, “you know the Powers don’t waste energy: that’s what all this is about If you found the problem, you’re meant to solve it. You’re going to have to go down there, and I’m glad it’s not me, that’s all I can say.”

Rhiow made a face not much different from Arhu’s earlier one. “I was hoping you could suggest something else.”

“Of course you were. If I were in your place, I would too! But it’s my job to advise you correctly, and you know as well as I do that that’s the correct advice. Prepare an intervention, and get your tails down there. Look around. See what’s the matter… then come home and report.”

Down below, the soft sound of squeaking began again. Ehef wrinkled his nose. “I wish they could do that more quietly,” he muttered.

“Oh?” Rhiow said, breathing out in annoyance. “Like toms do?”

“Heh. Rhi, I’ll help every way I can. But my going along wouldn’t be useful in an intervention like this. Adding someone else on wouldn’t help… might hurt.”

“And him?” Urruah flicked an ear at the stacks above them. “He sure got added on.”

“Not by me. By Them. You gonna argue with the hard-to-see type standing out there between those two big guys out front? Or with the Queen? I don’t mink so. She has Her reasons.”

“What possible good can he be?”

“What do I look like, Hrau’f the Silent? How would I know? Go down there and find out. But go prepared.”

They thought about that for a while. Then Ehef said to Urruah, “Toms. That reminds me. You going to that rehearsal tomorrow morning? I heard tonight’s was canceled.”

“Uh, yes, I’m going.”

“You know Rahiw?”

“Yeah, I saw him earlier.”

“Fine. You see him there, you tell him I have the answer to that problem he left with me. Tell him to get his tail back up here when it’s convenient.”

“All right. You’re not going, though?”

“Aah, that kind of thing, ehhif stuff, I know multicultural is good, but I got no taste for it, my time of life. You youngsters, you get out there, have a good time, listen to the music, maybe make a little of your own, huh?”

Urruah squeezed his eyes shut, a tolerant expression, eloquent of a tom dealing with someone who’d been ffeih for so long that he couldn’t remember the good things in life. Ehef grinned back and cuffed Urruah in front of one ear, a lazy gesture with the claws out, but not enough force or speed to do any harm. “You just lick that look out of your whiskers, sonny boy,” he said. “I knew you when you didn’t know where your balls were yet, let alone how many of them to expect. I’ve got other things to do with my spare time lately.” He threw an annoyed glance at the computer.

Rhiow smiled, for this was hardly news, although getting Ehef to talk about this new hobby had been difficult at first She had known what was going on, though, for some years—since the library installed its first computer system and announced that it was calling it CATNYP.

“I wouldn’t have thought you were the techie type,” Saash murmured.

“Yeah, well, it grows on you,” Ehef said. “Horrifying. But we have an ehhif colleague working with the less, shall we say, ‘visible’ aspects of the CATNYP system. She’s been busy porting in the software for putting The Book of Night with Moon online.”

Rhiow blinked at that. The Book of Night with Moon was probably the oldest of the human names for what cat-wizards called The Gaze of Rhoua’s Eye, the entire assembled body of spells and wizardly reference material, out of which Hrau’f whispered you excerpts when you needed them. Humans had a lot of other regional names for the Book, many of them translating into “the Knowledge” or a similar variant. Ehhif wizards who got their information from the Powers That Be in a concrete written or printed form, rather than as words whispered in their ears or their minds, often carried parts of the Book as small volumes that were usually referred to casually as “the Manual,” and used for daily reference. “Wouldn’t have thought it was possible,” Rhiow said. “The complexity … and the sheer volume of information that would have to be there…”

“It works, though,” Ehef said, jumping up onto one of the nearby desks with a computer terminal on it. “Or at least it’s starting to … the beta-test teams have been working on it for some years now. There was some delay—I think the archetypal ‘hard copy’ of the Book was missing for a while— but a team out on errantry found it and brought it back. Since then the work’s been going ahead steadily on versions tailored to several different platforms, mostly portable computers and organizers. This is the first mainframe implementation, though. We’re trying to give it a more intuitive interface than previously, a little less structured: more like the input you get from the Whisperer when you ask advice.”

Rhiow jumped up after him, followed a moment later by Urruah and Saash. “I’ve seen the ehhif Manuals,” Saash said, sitting down and tucking her tail around her as she looked with interest at the computer. “They change in size— the information comes and goes as the wizard needs it How does a computer version of the Gaze handle mat?”

“You’re asking me?” Ehef said, looking at the computer’s screen, which at the moment was showing a screen-saver image of flowing stars… but me stars looked unnervingly more real than the ones on Rhiow’s ehhif’s computer screen. “Not my specialty area. Dawn says the software has ‘metaextensions into other continua,’ whatever that means.” He put out a paw, touched the screen: die stars went away, replaced by the white page and lion logo for the library.

’Touch-sensitive,” Rhiow said. “Nice.”

“Gives the Keyboards a little relief. Or they can use these.” He put a paw on the nearby mouse, waggled it around.

Urruah looked at it. “I always wondered why they called these things ‘mice.’ ”

“Has a tail. Makes little clicky squeaky noises. Breaks if you use it hard enough to have any real fun with it. Would have thought that was obvious.”

“But to ehhif?”

Ehef shrugged his tail. “Anyway, this is convenient enough for wizards who use a text-based version of the Book’s information and need to stop into the research libraries to check some piece of fine detail. Later, when we work the bugs out, we’ll allow access from outside. Maybe let it loose on the Internet, or whatever that turns into next.”

“You mean whatever you turn it into,” Rhiow said, with a slight smile.

“Come on, Rhi, it doesn’t show that much,” Ehef said mildly. “Anyway, someone has to help manage something so big. And ehhif are so anarchic… Au, what do I need this for right now?” Ehef muttered, and reached out for the mouse, moved it a little on the table.

“What?” Rhiow said. She peered at the screen. A little symbol, a stroke with a dot under it, had appeared down in the right-hand corner: what ehhif called an “exclamation point.” Ehef had clicked on it, and another little window had popped up on the screen: this now flickered and filled with words.

“It’s the usual thing,” he growled: “I’m between systems here, and half the time She Whispers, and half the time She sends me E-mail, and sometimes she does both, and I never know which to— All right, now what is it?”

Rhiow turned away politely, as the others did, but privately she was wondering about Ehef’s relationship with one of the Powers That Be, and how he could take such a tone with Hrau’f herself. “Huh,” Ehef said finally, finishing his reading. “Well. Not that serious. Rhi, there’s something in the Met you’re supposed to have a look at. They’ve been bringing out some archival material that was in storage in Egyptian. Written stuff, in old ehhif. She says, check the palimpsest cases.”

“For what?” Rhiow flicked her ears forward but could hear nothing from the Whisperer herself.

“She says you’ll know it when you see it”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward good-humoredly at that: it often seemed that Hrau’f was not above making you do a little extra work for your own good. “Strange,” she said, “getting news from her written down like that.”

“Ffff,” Ehef said, a disgusted noise, “you don’t know how strange it looked until we got the Hauhai font designed. Technology.” He pronounced it as a curse word, and spat softly. “If I ever find out which of us suggested to the ehhif that the wheel should be round instead of square, I’m going to dig up her last grave and shred her ears. —Oh, there you are, finally. You leave me some?”

Arhu was standing by the desk, looking considerably thicker around the middle than he had just a little while ago. Rhiow was briefly shocked at how thin Arhu was, when a full meal produced a whopping gut-bulge like the one he presently sported.

“Thank you,” Arhu said, and burped.

“Well, may Iau send you good of it, you young slob,” Ehef said, ironic, but still amused.

“Yeah, that reminds me,” Arhu said, and burped again, “who is this Iau you’re all yowling about all the time?”

Rhiow opened her mouth, then shut it again and looked away in embarrassment.

To her surprise, though, Ehef merely produced a very crooked smile. “Killing, we got a saying in this business. ‘Stupidity can be accidental. Ignorance is on purpose.’ Ignorance gets your ears shredded The only thing that saved you is, you asked the question. Always ask. You may get your ears shredded anyway, but afterward you’ll still be alive to wear them. Maybe.” He gave Rhiow a dry look. “Maybe you should take him up to the Met with you. He keeps going on like this, he’s likely to run into the Queen in the street one day and get his features rearranged. She’s patient, but I don’t know if She’s this patient.”

“It won’t be tonight, I don’t mink,” Rhiow said.

He looked at her narrow-eyed for a moment. “You think it’s wise to put this off?”

“I’m only feline, Ehef,” Rhiow said, and yawned; there was no point in hiding it “Give me a break. It’s been a lively couple of days, and it’s going to get worse. We’ll get it taken care of… but my team and I need some sleep first, and I need a good long talk with the Whisperer tonight before we go Downside. I want to make sure I have the right spells ready to protect us. You know why.”

“Yes,” Ehef said. “Look, I’ll ask the Perm team to keep an eye on your open gate. But that’s going to have to be your main concern when you’ve had a little rest. You did a nice interim solution, but you know it won’t last. They’ll be cutting that piece of bad track out even as we speak. Tomorrow night—morning after next, tops—they’ll replace it, and if that gate’s not behaving right, then where are we? Go home, get your sleep. Meanwhile, we’ll get some help to watch the top side of the gate for you, act as liaison if you need anything from Above when you’re ready to get working down there.”

“Thanks, Ehef,” Rhiow said. Til appreciate that.”

Arhu yawned, too, and looked somewhat surprised as he did so. “I’m tired,” he said. “Can we go back to that little den now?”

“Not a bad idea,” Saash said. “Rhi, when should we meet tomorrow?”

“A little after noon, I guess,” she said. “Sound all right? Urruah?”

“I’ll be up earlier,” he said. “That rehearsal. I’ll walk you three home first, though.”

“The Tom’s own chivalry. Senior… thanks again for the help.”

“We’re all in this together,” Ehef said, settling down on the desk again. “Go well on the errand, wizards.”

They purred their thanks, all but Arhu, and headed out. As they made their way toward the door to the main front hall, Arhu whispered, none too quietly, “What do you want more spells for? Are we going to have a fight? Is something going to happen?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Saash said, “when your Ordeal really gets started.”

“This looks pretty much like an ordeal already,” Arhu muttered, glancing from Rhiow to Saash. He did not look at Urruah.

Urruah smiled, and they went out.

As it turned out, they got slightly sidetracked on the way home. Rhiow wanted Arhu to know the way to her own neighborhood, so they went there first. There was no rush to get anywhere, so Rhiow and the others strolled down Seventy-first at their ease: Rhiow, in particular, with the intense pleasure of someone who is off shift for the moment and has the luxury of enough time to stop and smell the roses. Or, more accurately, time to smell and appreciate, each in its proper way, the trees, air, cars, gutters, weeds, flowers, garbage cans, and other endemic wildlife of the city: the squirrels, sparrows, starlings, passing ehhif and houiff, the rustlings above and below ground, the echoes and the whispers; steam hissing, tires and footsteps on concrete, voices indoors and outdoors: and above and around it all, the soft rush of water, the breeze pouring past the buildings— now that there was enough temperature differential for there to be a breeze—and very occasionally, from high up, the cry of one of the Princes of the Air about his business, which in this part of the world mostly amounted to killing and eating pigeons. Her Oath aside, Rhiow’s personal opinion was that the city was oversupplied with pigeons, and as part of their position in the natural order of things, the Princes were welcome to as many of them as they could eat. They reminded her too much of rats, with the unwelcome and unnecessary addition of wings.

There were no pigeons in the street at the moment, though, because hauissh was in progress … and any pigeon careless or foolish enough to drop itself into the middle of a bout of hauissh rapidly became an aspect of play, and shortly thereafter an object of digestion. Cars, ehhif, and houiff did pass through, and took part in play, without knowing they did.

Indeed there was nothing overt that would have led any ehhif to suspect that a game as old as felinity was going on up and down the length of the block of Seventy-first between First and Second; reputations were on the line, and from many windows eyes watched, hindered from game-play, perhaps, but not from intelligent and passionate interest.

Rhiow sidled through it all with her tail up, as did the rest of the team. So close to home, it wouldn’t have done to be visible on the street: if one of the neighbors should mention her presence there to Iaehh or Hhuha, there would be endless trouble. As it was, she needed to be sidled anyway, to avoid the many ehhif who were on the street this time of the evening.

“Hey, ffeih-wizard!” came a comment from one of the streetside terraces above. “Had a good roll on your back lately?”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward and strolled on by, not even bothering to look up, though Arhu did. Urraah and Saash wore expressions suggesting calm tolerance of idiocy. “… If she’s so terrific and powerful and all,” said the predictable second voice, “why can’t she make the kittening part grow back, and do something really useful with herself?”

Rhiow kept walking, showing no reaction to the others and schooling herself to be slightly amused. There were People in her neighborhood, as in every neighborhood where a feline wizard worked, who knew about her and found her either funny or repugnant; and who found the concept of wizardry laughable or even hateful. These People in particular—the two extremely spoiled and opinionated pedigreed Himalayans six stories up, in one of the penthouse apartments of the new building near the corner—were sure that Rhiow was living evidence of some kind of convoluted plot against their well-being: a parasite, possibly a traitor, and certainly not proper breeding material. Rhiow, for her own part, was sure that they were pitifully bored and ignorant, had nothing to do with their days but culture their spite, and had almost certainly never done a useful thing since their eyes came open. “… can’t really be much of a Person,” one of them said spitefully, meaning to be heard, “if you haven’t even made kittens once…”

“Not much point in making them if you’re not going to be able to tell what they are, my dear.”

“Ooh, meow,” Rhiow muttered, and kept walking.

“They need a nice little plague of fleas to take their minds off their ‘troubles,’ ” Urruah said under his breath, coming up alongside her.

“Please. That would be so unethical.”

“But satisfying. Just think of them scratching…”

“… and give them the satisfaction of thinking the universe really is after them? Please.” All the same…

The team paused about a third of the way down the street; Rhiow ducked into the entranceway of an apartment building and sat for a moment, peering down the sidewalk.There was a row of five brownstones across the street, their front steps still largely identical despite the renovations of the past few decades; they faced across to a large modem apartment building and two other brownstones, one on each side of it. On the first floor, far left windowsill of the left-hand brownstone, a small milk-chocolate-colored cat sat hunched up, round-backed, golden eyes half-shut, as if looking at nothing. Across the street, sitting upright, was a large, dirty white tom; he was looking intently at the top of a wall between the two brownstones directly across from him. Shadows fell across that wall, cast by a thick raggy carpet of some kind of climbing vine that scaled up the nearest wall of the adjoining building.

Rhiow stood for a moment and waited to see if any other players would reveal themselves to so cursory an analysis, but after a few seconds she gave it up. “Come on,” she said, and walked with the others over to where the white cat sat; he glanced at them as they came. It was Yafh, of course, dominating the block’s gameplay as usual. It was a good thing he was so genial about it; life with him could have become extremely annoying otherwise.

She went up the stairs toward the other two, pausing briefly beside Yafh as she came up even with him. Protocol dictated that a nonplayer await permission from players before passing or approaching their chosen stances too closely; to obstruct or intervene in a player’s field of view while another player was moving could damage not only that player’s score, but others’ scores as well.

Yafh had been sitting with eyes half-closed, watching the brown cat across the street without seeming to watch her. Now he stood, stretched fore and aft, and turned his back on the proceedings: a gesture readable to all players as indicating the intention to temporarily abandon play without loss of stance.

“Hey there, Rhiow,” he said, and stalked off to one side of his stance. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Business,” she said, and they breathed breaths companionably before she sat down. “Goodness, who gave you the fish?”

“Restaurant round the corner,” Yafh said. “Perfectly lovely fish heads, why they don’t keep them I can’t imagine. Ehhif have no taste. Urruah? How’s the hunting?”

“Not bad, not bad.”

“Saash… don’t often see you down this way. ’Luck to you. And who’s this youngster?”

“Arhu.”

“ ’Luck to you, son. Come to see how the professionals do it?”

“Nowhere better,” Urruah said, before Arhu could open his mouth. “How’s the bout going?”

“Third sequence, twenty-eighth passage,” Yafh said. “The balances have shifted.”

“You mean you’re not winning as usual?”

“ ‘Winning.’ What an ehhif word. We’ll see how the situation looks by next week.”

“You want to understand the Game,” Urruah said to Arhu, “this is the Person you come to.”

“I don’t understand it very well,” Arhu said, in a small voice.

Rhiow glanced at him, wondering briefly where this sudden and becoming modesty had come from. Or maybe he was simply impressed by all of Yafh’s scars. “Well, mat’s no surprise,” Rhiow said. “Years now I’ve been following hauissh, and I’m not sure 7 understand anything but the basics yet. Yafh is a master, though; what he doesn’t know about it isn’t worth knowing.”

“All you need to know, young tom,” Yafh said, “is that hauissh is the Fight—or the best version of it we’ve got left. Everything else is commentary.”

“But …She says life is the Fight,” Arhu said.

“ ‘She’?” Yafh said. “Oh, the One Who you wizards say Whispers to you? Well, probably she’s right. But one thing’s for sure, life is hauissh.”

“There speaks the enthusiast,” Saash said dryly. “Arhu, don’t let him fool you. Yafh eats, drinks, washes and sleeps hauissh. If it didn’t exist, he would have to invent it.”

“Don’t talk naughty,” Yafh said, settling himself down in a way that suggested he had less concern about the elegance of his position than his comfort. “Takes a god to invent something this complex, something with this kind of elegance, this subtlety. You tell me now, young tom: who do you mink’s holding down the most important stance at the moment?”

Arhu looked around him in bemusement. “Her,” he said, flirting his tail sideways to indicate the handsome chocolate-brown cat who crouched, immobile as a statue, on one of the nearby walls between two buildings.

“And you wouldn’t be too far off. Trust Hmahilh’ to hog a good spot at the earliest opportunity. But why?”

Arhu looked up and down the street. “Because she can see everybody else,” he said, “and not everybody else can see her.

“Right That’s part of it, but not all. So try this. We have six players out there: seven, counting me, as of a moment ago. I don’t officially count right now, but for this analysis, you can keep my stance in. Look at the pattern, see what you see about it. Not the People: the relationships. Take your time, don’t look too hard.”

Yafh sat washing his face, ineffectively as usual: the grime never did seem to come off, but at least he was always seen to be making the effort. Arhu looked out at the street for a few moments, and then said, “There’s— Is there an empty place they’re all pointed at, in the street? Between the cab parked there and the big car?”

“A natural talent,” Yafh said, looking around at Rhiow and Urruah with approval. “Boy’s got the eye. That’s the spot,” he said to Arhu. “That’s where the Tree is: with the Serpent wound around it, gnawing at the root…”

“There’s no Tree there! That’s the middle of the street!”

“It’s there in spirit,” Yafh said. “All hauissh is anchored at the Tree. It’s all the original Fight, really; but since we can’t chuck lightningbolts at the Old Snake the way Aaurh and Urrau did, we use movement and stealth as a weapon, and seeing as the bolt we strike with, and position as influence. Anyone who sees anyone else could strike them with a lightningbolt if they had one. And the Tree is always the center.”

Arhu sat down, looking puzzled for a moment. “Maybe I do see…”

Yafh scrubbed behind one ear. “Hmahilh’ there is in one of the classic positions just now, the fouarhweh. Thousands of hours of commentary have been made about it, just in the last century; it would take you a fair amount of study to understand even a few of the major implications for play as it might progress over the next several hours or days. But she’s holding down a variant of the position the Great Tom would have held—”

“—before he dies,” Arhu said, looking at the empty spot, the life slowly starting to drain out of his voice. “For the Old Serpent rises against him and strikes him with its venom, and the Great Cat falls with a great cry, and striveth to rise but cannot; and breath and warmth swiftly go from him so that his Enemy rises over his poisoned body and leaps upon Aaurh the Mighty. Great and terrible is their struggle, so that seas leap from their beds and the earth is riven, and the tom sky rains fire—”

Yafh looked at Rhiow with mild surprise. Urruah was watching Arhu uneasily, but Arhu paid no attention at all, his whole regard being bent on the spot in the street, through which an ehhif with a houff on the leash was walking. The houff, at the sight of them sitting on the steps, started to bark, but for Arhu, it might not have been there at all. “—Yet even so Aaurh at last is lapped in the Serpent’s coils, and crushed in them, and she falls, and her power fails out of the world. Then Iau sees that the light has gone from the Moon, and the Sun is blackened with fair Aaurh’s dying; and She rises in Her majesty and says, What has become of My children ? Where is Aaurh the warrior, and sa’Rrahh the Tearer, wayward but dear to Me? And what has become of My Consort and the light of his eye, without which My own is dark? —Then Iau draws Her power about Her, and goes forth in grief and rage; and all things hear Her cry: Old Serpent, turn You and face Us, for the fight is not done—!”

“He’s been well educated, I’ll give you that,” Yafh said to Rhiow, blinking a little.

“All the best teachers,” Urruah said, dry, but still unsettled.

“That’s right, young tom,” Yafh said to Arhu, as Arhu abruptly sat up a little straighter, blinking himself. “That’s the whole pattern of the gameplay of hauissh, right there in the old words. There are endless variations on the theme, as you might well think. But the Queen raises up Her dead, though not forever, as we know; and then the Fight starts up again … and so it goes.”

“Yafh,” came a deafening and strangely pitched shout from across the street, “let’s get on with this! Are you in stance, or out?”

Everyone winced at the noise. Rhiow smiled, a little crookedly. The source was Hmahilh’. Delicate, graceful little creature though she was, with her demure semi-ehhif smile, she was also profoundly deaf: when she spoke, the noise was so alarming that Rhiow was often amazed that bricks didn’t shatter. Rhiow had tried several times, as any wizard might, to treat the deafness, but there was something about the nerve damage that resisted treatment. Rhiow half-suspected that the trouble was not the nerves, but the less educable “limbic” areas of Hmahilh’s brain, which had gotten so used to being deaf that they couldn’t understand there were other options, and so ignored or stubbornly undid any repair to the cranial nerves involved. As a result, a conversation with Hmahilh’, while enjoyable enough for her cultured and humorous qualities, otherwise tended to resemble an interview with a fire siren.

“Here, young tom,” Yafh said, “you watch this now. She’s always worth watching. All right, all right,” he yowled back at Hmahilh’, “I’m in, already.”

“What??”

With a sigh, he turned to face her, a signal she would recognize. Arhu sat watching this, seemingly fascinated, and Rhiow took the opportunity to gesture the others over to a neighboring doorstep where they could watch without being anywhere near another player’s stance.

As they went, Rhiow said to Saash, “Are you feeling all right? It’s been a busy day … but you look tireder than usual.”

“Yes, well. There were some more mice in the garage this morning. I was trying to catch them…”

“And?”

Saash flicked her ears backward and forward, a hopeless gesture. “Nothing. As usual. I’m so glad I live in the city, and have access to an ehhif with a can opener. If I were a country Person, I’d be dead of starvation by now.”

Rhiow gave Saash a sympathetic look. She had never been a hunter: it was as if there were something missing in her makeup, perhaps the essential sense of timing that told you when to jump. Either way, the situation had always struck Rhiow as a little unfortunate, or strange, in someone whose technical expertise and timing in other matters were so perfect.

“So what did you do about it, finally?”

“This morning? Nothing. I mean, I could have blown the mice up, but besides being overkill, what good would that have been? The garage ehhif would just have thought a car ran them over or something. When Arhu’s done here, I’ll ask him to see what he can do. Have to keep the ehhif impressed with our usefulness, after all: otherwise we might have to find somewhere else to stay…”

“Oh, surely not. Abha’h likes you, he wouldn’t try to get rid of you!”

’True. But he’s not the boss in the garage. I’ll be making sure George sees whatever we catch.”

Rhiow sighed. “You let me know if you need any help,” she said.

They sat on the doorstep two doors down from Yafh’s stance. “Our boy is spending more and more time in weird-vision land,” Urruah said, looking with some concern at Arhu.

“Just as well,” Rhiow said. “It’s his wizardry … He seems to see things … and then try to avoid seeing them. I’m getting concerned about the avoidance.”

“Can you blame him? I’m not sure I’d want to be sitting on a doorstep one moment and looking at the original Battle at the Dawn of Time the next!”

Saash sat straight and scratched for a moment or so, then started washing. “I think the problem might be that he hasn’t really done much wizardry yet. Spells, I mean.”

“Yes,” Rhiow said. “Everything has sort of been done to him, hasn’t it?” Rhiow cocked her ears, then; for the statement, once made, created a sort of silence around itself. When you were a wizard, you learned to pay attention to those silences: they were often diagnostic. Sometimes the Whisperer whispered very quietly indeed. “And you’re right: I haven’t really seen him do a spell. Initiate one, I mean. Well, he walked through a door or so, and in the air. And the sidling…”

“As regards the physical stuff, he’s pretty good,” Saash said. “It’s the nonphysical I’m more worried about. Nine-tenths of our work is nonphysical…”

“There are a lot of different styles of wizardry,” Urruah said. “I think we should try to cut him a little slack, here. Not everyone jumps straight in and starts doing fifty spells a day.”

“You did,” Saash and Rhiow said, practically in unison.

“Well, we can’t all be me.”

Rhiow and Saash looked at each other and gave silent praise to Ian the Queen of Everything that this was so. “But it’s not like there’s a quota,” Urruah said. “Or some kind of template for Ordeals. Everybody knows you get the occasional ‘sleeper’ Ordeal that takes months or years. Or ‘second’ Ordeals, if you don’t finish your first one.”

“The universe doesn’t usually have that much time to spare for the first kind,” Rhiow said, “as you know; and the second kind is as rare as working balls on a ffeih’d tom, as you also know. His passivity just worries me a little, that’s all.”

“He’s a tom,” Urruah said, with a wink. “He’ll grow out of it.”

This time Rhiow did not bother looking physically at Saash, and didn’t have to: she could inwardly hear the small, stifled groan. “You are in, how shall I put it, unusually male mode tonight,” Rhiow said. “Got another bout of o’hra coming on?”

“Night after next. It’s the big night, the concert. I’m going to need the time off, Rhi.”

“Take it, for Aaurh’s sake,” she said, waving her tail. “Get the hormones out of your system. If that’s possible.”

Urruah smirked briefly, but then folded himself down, and after a few seconds, looked a touch more serious. “Maybe the problem is that he just hasn’t noticed how much fun wizardry is,” Urruah said. “How good it feels.”

“I would suspect not,” Saash said, with a little more tooth in her voice than usual, “since his first experience of it came immediately before being almost bitten to shreds by rats…”

“ ’Ruah,” Rhiow said, “I have to admit that Saash has a point. And pushing Arhu won’t help. Till he comes to understand that satisfaction claws-on, there’s no point in describing it. If he has what it takes to make a good wizard, he’ll know it when he feels it… no matter how he may rationalize it to himself and others as time goes on.”

“… Well, I hope he has that time. Otherwise the crunch-part of his Ordeal may come upon him and he won’t have anything useful prepared. In which case…” Urruah chattered his teeth briefly, the way a cat will when seeing a rat or a bird, anticipating the jaw spasm that will snap its neck.

“We’ll see how he does,” Rhiow said, and yawned. “You going to see him home, Saash?”

“Yes. The mice…”

“That’s right All right, then … you call me in the morning when you’re ready, and I’ll take him down on patrol again: show him the differences between the gates, get him familiar with the track layout on the upper level.” She yawned once more. “Sweet Iau, but I have got to get off days… I am just not a day person. Urruah, you take tomorrow evening off, though I wouldn’t mind having you on call during the early daylight hours, at least till I get up.”

“No problem. This is going to be going on for a while, and Yarn’s right about one thing: watching Hmahilh’ is always educational. She’s some strategist.”

“Right. I’ll have a walk around the block, then turn in. ’Luck, you two.”

“ ’Luck, Rhi…”

She went down the steps, looked up at Yafh and Arhu as she passed. “Hunt’s luck, gentlemen… I’m done for today.”

“Don’t want to stay and see the epic struggle?” Yafh said. “You’re working too hard, Rhiow.”

“Smile when you say that, Yafh. ’Luck, Arhu … see you in the morning.”

“All right,” he said, but he was still gazing at that empty spot… with less of an estranged look, this time. The expression was thoughtful, and Rhiow was not entirely sure what to make of it… but then, that was becoming the story of her life, where Arhu was concerned.

She saluted them both with a flirt of her tail and walked on down the block. From above, a voice said, “Oh, look, she’s going to go out and try to get some after all.”

“It won’t matter… Even if she knew what to do with a tom, she couldn’t find any really select blood.”

Rhiow had had about enough for one night. She laughed out loud. “What, like yours?” she said, intending her voice to carry as well as theirs had. “Hairballs at one end, fur-mats at the other, and twenty pounds of flab apiece in the middle? This is considered ‘select’? Things must be pretty bad in the Himalayas.”

Feline laughter came from all up and down the street. There was a flustered silence from above, followed by annoyed hisses and growling. Rhiow turned the corner to finish her circuit of the block, then headed for home, walking up the air to her own rooftop and smiling slightly.

When Rhiow got home, she found that Hhuha had gone to bed already. Iaehh was sitting up late, in the big leather chair by the empty fireplace, reading. As Rhiow’s small door clicked, he looked up in slight surprise, rubbing his eyes. “Well, there you are. I was wondering if I was going to see you today.”

Rhiow sighed. “Yes, well,” she said, “we all have long workdays sometimes.” She went to her dish for a long drink of water.

Iaehh put his book down, got up, and took the dish right out from under her nose.

“Hey!”

“You can’t drink that,” Iaehh said, “it’s got cat food in if He started to refill it from the sink.

“As if I care at the moment!” Rhiow said. “Do you know how salty that pastrami can be? Put it back!”

“Here,” Iaehh said, “here’s some fresh.”

“Well, thanks,” Rhiow said, and sighed again, and started to drink once more.

“Your ‘mom,’ ” Iaehh said softly, sitting down with his book again, “is terrible about giving you fresh water.”

“My ‘mom,’ ” Rhiow said under her breath as she drank. She smiled slightly. There was no question that Iaehh had noticed over time that Rhiow was, to use the annoying ehhif phrase, more “her” cat than his: he teased them both about it, Hhuha directly and Rhiow in the usual one-sided dialogue.

Well, it wasn’t Iaehh’s fault, Rhiow supposed. He simply had no gift for making a lap the way Hhuha did. He somehow seemed to have more than the usual number of bones. Nor (when he did make a lap) did he seem capable of sitting still for more than thirty seconds. Always running in all directions was Iaehh: running to work, running home, running out to the store, just plain running. She liked him well enough: he was thoughtful. He just wasn’t soft or still the way Hhuha was; and when he held her, no matter how affectionately, there was never that sense that Rhiow had with Hhuha that there was a purr inside the ehhif too, and their two purrs were in synch. Just a personality thing. But he does mean well…

She finished with the water and came over to him to thank him: jumped up in his lap and began to knead his knee and purr. “Ow,” he said, “ow ow OW ow—”

“Sorry,” Rhiow said, and curled around and settled herself, still purring. “Here now, you just sit still and relax—”

He stroked her while propping the book off to one side, on the other knee, under the lamp. For a little while they sat that way, Rhiow closing her eyes and beginning to feel blessedly calmer after the day she’d had. Saash had reported in briefly that after they’d left the bout of hauissh, she’d bedded Arhu down without trouble; he’d be out until at least dawn and maybe longer, from the looks of him. Urruah had been very good, better than she’d expected. So had Saash.

How long they’d be that way, as tomorrow progressed, was a good question. For once it had become plain that they would all have to go Downside, she had felt Urruah’s and Saash’s fear at once. There was no hiding it from team members, not when the three of them had worked together so closely, for as long as they had…

Iaehh sighed and put the book down. “Oh, come on,” Rhiow said under her breath, “couldn’t you have made it a record? Thirty seconds or so?” But no: he lifted her, got up, and carefully put her down on the seat where he had been.

“I’m bushed,” he said. “This way when I get in bed and your mom says, ‘Did she come in?’ I can say, ‘Yes,’ and be allowed to go to sleep. ’Night, plumptious cat.”

She breathed out in resignation and watched him make the rounds of the apartment, checking the locks, turning out the lights, finally slipping through the bedroom door and closing it softly behind him.

Rhiow lay there, looking around the room in the fault yellow light that came up in stripes through the narrow Venetian blinds: reflection from the streetlights down the alley outside.

“Plumptious,” she thought. Is that a real ehhif word? I must look that up.

Oh, well… I have other things to do first.

Rhiow started washing, beginning as she did so to make a mental list of the spells she thought they would need for their journey. She felt like stuffing her head full of everything she could coax out of the Whisperer, and all the other spells she routinely carried with her, useful-seeming or not, from the air hardener right down to the “research” spell that had come with her Ordeal. But normally, the Whisperer would let you carry only so much; Her preference, apparently, was for you to call on Her as you needed new material. She would then provide it for you, whole, in your mind. There was a certain extra security, though, in having the spell ready to go, all spoken in your mind except for the final syllable…

But still.

Downside…

In the darkness, now that there was no one to see, Rhiow shuddered. Bad enough that tune had done nothing whatever to mellow her memories of the team’s last trip. But now there was an added problem: Ainu’s voice, dry and strange, crying: It doesn’t matter. It’s coming anyway.

And what had the rest of that meant? It came before. Once to see. Once to taste. Once to devour—

She tried washing a little to get her composure back, but it didn’t help. Finally she stopped and, instead of flinching away from the issue, “turned” in mind to face it.

Their intervention Downside had been bad the last time: bad. She had not been able to eat for days afterward: the mere feeling of food in her mouth made her retch and choke, so that her ehhif took her to the vet, where she endured indignities she couldn’t prevent for the sake of explanations she couldn’t make. Finally they had brought her home again, defeated by finding nothing physically wrong, and Rhiow had eventually found her appetite once more. But it had taken her a good while to gain back the lost weight, and all that time her food had tasted like dust, no matter what choice delicacies Iaehh and Hhuha had tempted her with.

She had seen the Ones Below, the Old Ones, the Wise Ones, the Children of the Serpent… and what they were doing to each other.

They were intelligent: that had been the worst of it. They had been the lords of the world, once. But something had gone very wrong.

…Like any wizard of every species from here to the galaxy’s rim, Rhiow knew the generalities. The Powers That Be had made the worlds, under the One’s instruction. Each Power had gone Its way, making the things that seemed to It most likely to forward the business of Creation as a whole. Abruptly, then, matters changed as one of the Powers, without warning, brought forth something that none of the others had expected or desired. It invented entropy: it created death.

War broke out in heaven. When the conflict died down, that one Power, furious with the others for the rejection of Its gift, was cast out into the darkness. But there was no getting rid of It so simply: the Lone Power (as various species called it) had been part of creation from the first, and It was part of it still.

There was relative quiet for a while after the battle as worlds formed, seas cooled, atmospheres condensed. Slowly life awakened in the worlds, ascended through each environment’s necessary stages of physical complexity, and became intelligent. The Powers relaxed, at first: it now seemed as if Creation was going well.

But each species that became intelligent found itself being offered a chance, a Choice, by an often beautiful form that appeared to its first members early in its history. The Choice, after other issues were stripped away, was usually fairly simple. Take the path that the Powers seemed to have put before it—or turn aside into a path destined to make the species that trod it wiser, more powerful and blessed … more like gods.

The Choice took countless forms, each cunningly tailored to the species to which it was offered. But under its many guises, no matter how fair, it always spelled Death. The Lone Power went from sentient race to race, intent on tricking them into it: offering, again and again, the poisoned apple, the casket that must not be opened. Many species believed the fair promises and accepted the gift, condemning themselves to entropy and death forever after. Some species accepted it only partially, came to understand their error, and rejected it with greater or lesser levels of success, often involving terrible sacrifices that resonated back to earlier battles and sacrifices deep in time. Some species, by wisdom, or luck, or the unwinding of complex circumstance, never accepted the poisoned Gift at all… with results that various other creatures find hard to accept: but even on Earth, there are species that are never seen to die.

Rhiow shifted uncomfortably on the chair. The People had been offered the Choice just as everyone else had: like so many other species on Earth, they had not done well. They had been lucky, though, compared to the Wise Ones. Once upon a time, that had been a mighty people, coming to their dominance of the planet long before the primates or other mammals. Offered the Choice—and the Lone Power’s gift, disguised as the assurance that their dominion would never fail while the sun shone—the reptilian forefathers of the Wise Ones chose what the great dark-scaled shape offered them. For a while, Its words were true: the great lizards strode the world and devoured what they would. But it was little more than an eyeblink in terms of geological time before, without warning, the hammerblow fell from the sky. The skies darkened with the massive amounts of dust thrown up by the initial meteoric impact and the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that followed. The sun no longer shone. The winds rose and stripped the lands bare: the great lizards, almost all of them, starved and died, lamenting the ill-made Choice … and hearing, in the howl of the bitter wind and the endless storms of dust and snow, the cruel laughter of the One who had tricked them.

Not all of them had died, of course. Some had found refuge in other worlds, places more central. One of those worlds was the one where the Old Downside lay. Down under the roots of the Mountain, the descendants of the survivors of the Wise Ones had found their last refuge. There they nursed their slow cold anger at the changes that had come over the world they ruled. They were no friends toward mammals, which they considered upstarts—degenerate inheritors of their own lost greatness. And to a mammal, the alien reptilian mindset that (at the beginning of things) had made the great lizards the exponents of an oblique and unusual wisdom now merely made them almost impossible to understand—treacherous, dangerous. Even some of the older ehhif stories had apparently come to reflect a few shattered fragments of the truth: tales of a tree, of a serpent that spoke, of an ancient enmity between mammals and serpents.

The enmity certainly remained. It hardly seemed to Rhiow as long as a year ago when she and Urruah and Saash had gone down into the caves under the Mountain for the first time, in search of the cause of a recurrent malfunction plaguing the gate that normally resided over by the platform for the Lexington Avenue line. They had inspected the “mirror” gates up at the top of the caves and had found that intervention there would not be sufficient Slowly they had made their way down into the caverns—a night and a day it had taken them to reach the place; they had even had to sleep there, uneasy nightmare-ridden sleep that it had been. Finally they had found the secondary, “catenary” gate matrix, the place where the immaterial power “conduits” of the upper gates came up through the living stone.

They had also found the Wise Ones, waiting for them just before the cavern where the catenary matrix lay.

There had been a battle. Its outcome had not been a foregone conclusion, even though the three of them were wizards. Rhiow and her team, driven to it, much regretting it (except possibly for Urruah, Rhiow thought), had killed the lizards who’d attacked them, and then began repairs on the gate. It had been clumsily sabotaged, apparently by the lizards interfering with the hyperstrings that led the catenary’s energy conduit up through the stone: nonphysical though those “tethers” were, active tunneling under the right circumstances could displace them… and the Old Ones, by accident or other means, had gotten it right. Fortunately the damage had not been too serious. Rhiow and her team had rooted the gate-conduit more securely, caused new molten stone to flow in and reinforce its pathway through the stone, and had started to make their retreat.

That was when they found more of the lizards, furtive and hasty, devouring the bodies of those Rhiow and the others had killed. Urruah had charged them, scattering them: and the three of them had made their way hurriedly back to the surface and to the gateway to their own world. But Rhiow had not been able to forget the sight of an intelligent being, tearing the flesh of one of its own kind for food. What kind of life is that for any creature? Down there in the dark… with nothing to eat but…

She shivered again, then started breathing strong and slow to calm herself. Whisperer, she said silently, I have work to do. Tell me what I need to hear.

What do you have in mind? the answer came after a moment.

Rhiow told her. Shortly, what she needed to see had begun laying itself out before her mind: spell diagrams, the complex circles and spheres in which the words and signs of the Speech would be inscribed—either on some actual physical surface, or in her mind. From much practice and a natural aptitude, Rhiow had come to prefer die second method: she had discovered that a spell diagram, once “inscribed” in the right part of her memory, would stay there, complete except for the final stroke, or sigil, that would finish it. For the rest of it—words, equations, descriptions, and instructions—she simply memorized the information. Like other peoples with a lively oral tradition, cats have good memories. And Rhiow knew there was always backup, should a detail slip: the Whisperer was always there, ready to supply the needed information, as reliable as a book laid open would be for an ehhif.

You could carry too much, though—burden yourself with useless spells and find yourself without quick access to the one you really needed—so you had to learn to strike a balance, to “pack” cleverly. Rhiow selected several spells that could be used to operate on the “sick” gate—each tailored to a specific symptom it had been showing—and then several others. To the self-defense spells she gave particular thought. One line of reasoning was that the Old Ones, having been so thoroughly routed last time, wouldn’t try anything much now. But Rhiow was unwilling to trust that idea—though it would be nice if it turned out that way. She packed several very emphatic destructive spells, designed not to affect a delicate gate halfway through its readjustment: spells designed to work on the molecular structure of tissue rather than with sheer blunt destructive force on any kind of matter, knives rather than sledgehammers. It was like Saash’s approach to the rats—nasty but effective.

Finally Rhiow couldn’t think of anything else she would need. The knowledge settled itself into her brain, the images and diagrams steadying down where she could get at them quickly. She began to relax a little. There was really nothing more to be done now but sleep. She would make sure she ate well in the morning: going out underfueled on one of these forays was never smart.

Rhiow closed her eyes, “looking” at the spell diagrams littering the workspace in her mind, a glowing word-scattered landscape. Other spells, recently used, lay farther out on the bright plain, less distinct, as if seen through mist: the last few months’ worth of work, a foggy, dimly radiant tapestry. Even the spell that Ehef had mentioned was visible way off there, right at the edge of things, the “hobby” spell that she had picked up on her own Ordeal so long ago. Well, at least that’s behind me.

It’s not behind Arhu, though. Poor baby. I hope he makes it.

But so many of us don’t…

She sighed, feeling sleep coming, and passed gratefully into dream.

The warmth was all around her but slightly stronger from one side, like the fire her ehhif would light in the apartment’s old fireplace once in a while, in the winter, when they thought they could get away with it. The Whispering had died away some time ago; now there was only the comforting presence of the Silent One, and the hint of a rumbling, reassuring purr that ran through everything.

Madam, Rhiow said, I’m frightened.

So are we all, in the face of That, the answer came. Or almost all of us are. My sister the Firstborn wasn’t. But that was always her style, to go into battle laughing, as if there were no possibility of defeat. Maybe she knows something the rest of us don’t. Or that may simply be in her nature as our Dam made it. For the mortal and the semimortal, at least change, the learning of courage, is an option. But for those of us whose natures were set at the beginning of things, we must, I fear, simply be afraid while we keep on doing our jobs. A god that forgets the virtues of specialization, trying to do things It was never designed for, soon becomes no god, but a tyrant.

Like your other sister, madam…

I don’t speak of her, the answer came. We see enough of her as it is. You will shortly see more.

I really don’t want to, Rhiow said.

Little enough attention the worlds pay to what any of us want, the answer came. As always, there was a slight edge of humor in the Whisperer’s voice, but it was more muted than usual. Desire, though… and intention… those are other powers to which even the Powers must answer. Go do your job, daughter. I’ll do mine. Perhaps both of them may yet come to something…

The silence became complete, though, still reassuring, the warmth remained. The dim glow of the spells faded, and Rhiow slept.