The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Four

The hour’s main news stories, from National Public Radio: I’m Bob Edwards… The South Kamchatka oil spill has begun to disperse after Tropical Storm Bertram shifted course northeastward in the early morning hours, Pacific time, causing near-record swells between the Bay of Kronockji and Shumshu Island at the southern end of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The spill from the crippled Japanese tanker Amaterasu Maru threatened the economically important fishing grounds off the disputed Kurile Islands, and had significantly increased tensions between Russia and Japan at a time when the disposition of the Kuriles, claimed by Japan but occupied by the Soviet Union since the end of World War Two, had been thought by diplomatic sources to be nearing resolution. —President Yeltsin’s special envoy Anatoly Krischov has returned to Moscow from Teheran after talks aimed at resolving the escalating border crisis in the Atrek valley between Iran and Turkmenistan, where rebel tribesmen have clashed with both Iranian and Russian government forces for the fourth day in…”

Rhiow rolled over on her back, stretched all her legs in the air, and yawned, blinking in the late afternoon light. The sound of the ra’hio being turned on had awakened her. A long day, she thought. I don’t usually oversleep like this…

She twisted her head around so that she was looking at the living room upside down. A soft rustling of papers had told Rhiow even before her eyes were open that Hhuha had just sat back down at the other end of the couch. Iaehh was nowhere to be seen; Rhiow’s ears told her that he was not in the sleeping room, or the room where he and Hhuha bathed and did their hiouh. So he was out running, and could be gone for as little as a few minutes or as long as several hours.

Rhiow knew in a general way that Iaehh was doing this to stay healthy, but sometimes she thought he overdid it, and Hhuha thought so, too; depending on her mood, she either teased or scolded him about it. “You’re really increasing your chances of getting hit by a truck one of these days,” she would say, either laughing or frowning, and Iaehh would retort, “Better that than increasing my chances of getting hit by a massive cardiac, like Dad, and Uncle Robbie, and…” Then they would box each other’s ears verbally for a while, and end up stroking each other for a while after that. Really, they were very much like People sometimes.

Rhiow yawned again, looking upside down at Hhuha. Hhuha glanced over at her and said, “You slept a long time, puss.” She reached over and stroked her.

Rhiow grabbed Hhuha’s hand, gave it a quick lick, then let it go and started washing before going for her breakfast. So, Rhiow thought while the news headlines finished, there’s still an oil spill. This by itself didn’t surprise her. Timeslides, like any wizardry meant to alter the natural flow and unfolding of time, were rarely sanctioned when other options were available. Probably the Area Advisory for the Pacific Region had noticed the availability of a handy alternative instrumentality: natural, “transparent” in terms of being unlikely to arouse ehhif suspicions, and fairly easily influenced—of all the languages that humans use, only the wizardly Speech has no equivalent idiom for “everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.”

Oh well, Rhiow thought. One less thing to worry about. She spent a couple more minutes putting her back fur and tail in order, then got down off the couch, stretched fore and aft, and strolled over to the food dish. Halfway across the room, her nose told her it was that tuna stuff again, but she was too hungry to argue the point.

Wouldn’t I just love to walk over to you, she thought about halfway down the bowl, looking over her shoulder at Hhuha, and say to you, loud and clear, “I’d think that last raise would let you spend at least sixty cents a can.” But rules are rules…

Rhiow had a long drink, then strolled back to jump up on the couch and have a proper wash this time. She had finished with her head and ears when Hhuha got up, went to the dining room, and came back with still more papers. Rhiow looked at them with distaste.

As Hhuha sighed and put the new load down on the couch, Rhiow got up, stretched again, and carefully sat herself down on the papers; then she put her left rear leg up past her left ear and began to wash her back end. It was body language that even humans seemed sometimes to understand.

Rhiow was pretty sure that Hhuha understood it, but right now she just breathed out wearily. She picked Rhiow up off the pile and put her on the couch next to it, saying, “Oh, come on, you, why do you always have to sit on my paperwork?”

“I’m sitting on it because you hate it,” Rhiow said. She sat down on it again, then hunkered down and began kneading her claws into the paperwork, punching holes in the top sheet and wrinkling it and all the others under it.

“Hey, don’t do that, I need those!”

“No, you don’t. They make you crazy. You shouldn’t do this stuff on the weekend: it’s bad enough that they make you do it all day during the week.” Rhiow rolled over off the paper-pile, grabbing some of the papers as she went, and throwing them in the air.

“Oh, kitty, don’t!” Hhuha began picking the papers up. “Not that I wouldn’t like to myself,” she added under her breath.

“See? And why you should pay attention to that stuff when I’m here, I can’t understand,” Rhiow muttered, as Hhuha picked her up and put her in her lap. “See, isn’t that better? You don’t need this junk. You need a cat.”

“Talk talk, chatter chatter,” Hhuha said under her breath, straightening the paperwork out. “Probably you’re trying to tell me I shouldn’t bring my work home. Or more likely it’s something about cat food.”

“Yes, now that you mention—” Rhiow made a last swipe at one piece of the paperwork as it went past her nose in Hhuha’s hand. “Hey, watch those claws,” Hhuha said.

“I would never scratch you, you know that,” Rhiow said, settling. “Unless you got slow. Put that stuff down…”

Hhuha started rubbing behind Rhiow’s ears, and Rhiow went unfocused for a little while, purring. There were People, she knew, who saw the whole business of “having” an ehhif as being, at best, old-fashioned—at worst, very politically incorrect. The two species really had no common ground, some People said. They claimed that there could be no real relationships between carnivores and omnivores, predators and hunter-gatherers: only cohabitation of a crude and finally unsatisfactory kind. Cats who held this opinion usually would go on at great length about the imprisonment of People against their will, and the necessity to free them from their captivity if at all possible—or, at the very least, to raise their consciousness about it so that, no matter how pleasant the environment, no matter how tasty the food and how “kind” the treatment, they would never forget that they were prisoners, and never forget their own identity as a People presently oppressed, but who someday would be free.

When all ehhif civilization falls, maybe, Rhiow thought, with a dry look. Make every ehhif in the city vanish, right this second, and turn every cat in Manhattan loose: how many of them will be alive in three weeks? Cry “freedom!”—and then try to find something to eat when all you know about is Friskies Buffet.

She made a small face, then, at her own irony. Maybe it would be better if all cats lived free in the wild, out of buildings, out of ehhif influence; maybe it would be better if that influence had never come about in the first place. But the world was the way that it was, and such things weren’t going to be happening any time soon. The truth remained that ehhif kept People and that a lot of People liked it… and she was one.

That’s the problem, of course, she thought. We’re embarrassed to admit enjoying interdependence. Too many of us have bought into the idea that we’re somehow “independent” in our environment to start with. As if we can stop eating or breathing any time we want…

She sighed and stretched again while Hhuha paused in her scratching and started going through her papers once more. Anyway, what’s the point, Rhiow thought, in making sure People are so very aware that they’re oppressed, when for most of them there’s nothing they can do about it? And in many cases, when they truly don’t want to do anything, the awareness does nothing but make them feel guilty… thus making them more like ehhif than anything else that could have been done to them. That outwardly imposed awareness satisfies no one but the “activist” People who impose it. “I suffer, therefore you should too…”

Granted, Rhiow’s own position was a privileged one and made holding such a viewpoint easy. All languages are subsets of the Speech, and a wizard, by definition at least conversant with the Speech if not fluent in it, is able to understand anything that can speak (and many things that can’t). Rhiow’s life with her ehhif was certainly made simpler by the fact that she could clearly understand what they were saying. Unfortunately, most cats couldn’t do the same, which tended to create a fair amount of friction.

Not that matters were perfect for her either. Rhiow found, to her annoyance, that she had slowly started becoming bilingual in Human and Ailurin. She kept finding herself thinking in slang-ehhif terms like ra’hio and o’hra: poor usage at best. Her dam, who had always been so carefully spoken, would have been shocked.

Rhi? said Saash inside her.

I’m awake, Rhiow said silently.

Took you long enough, Saash said. Believe me, when this is over, I’ve got a lot of sleep to make up.

Oh? Rhiow said.

Our youngster, Saash said dryly, has been awake and lively for a good while now. It’s been exciting trying to keep him in here, and I don’t think I’ll be able to do it much longer. I had to teach him to sidle to distract him even this long—

You mean you had to try to teach him to sidle, Rhiow said.

I mean he’s been sidling for the last two hours, said Saash.

Rhiow bunked at that. Nearly all wizardry cats had an aptitude for sidling, but most took at least a week to learn it; many took months. Sweet Queen about us, Rhiow thought, what have the Powers sent us? Besides trouble…

All right, Rhiow said to Saash. I’ll be along in half an hour or so. Where’s Urruah?

He’s having a break, Saash said. I sent him off early… I thought maybe there was going to be a murder.

Oh joy, Rhiow thought. To Saash, she said, Did he go off to the park? He mentioned the other day that some big tom thing would be going on over there.

He mentioned it to me too, Saash said. Not that I understood one word in five of what he was saying: it got technical. He left in a hurry, anyway, and I didn’t want to try to keep him.

I just bet, Rhiow thought. When Urruah was in one of those moods, it was more than your ears were worth to try to slow him down. All right. Hold the den; I’ll be along.

Somewhat regretfully—for quiet times like this seemed to be getting rarer and rarer these days—Rhiow got down out of Hhuha’s lap, sat down on the floor and finished her wash, then went out to the terrace to use the hiouh-box.

Afterward, she made her way down from the terrace to the top of the nearby building and did her meditation—not facing east for once, but westward. The smog had been bad today; Rhiow was glad she had been inside with the air-conditioning. But now that the day was cooling, a slight offshore breeze had sprung up, and the ozone level was dropping, so that you could at least breathe without your chest feeling tight. And—probably the only positive aspect to such a day—the Sun was going down in a blaze of unaccustomed splendor, its disk bloated to half again its proper size and blunted to a beaten-copper radiance by the thick warm air. Down the westward-reaching street, windows flashed the orange-gold light back in fragments; to either side of Rhiow, and behind her, skyscraper-glass glowed and in the heat-haze almost seemed to run, glazed red or gold or molten smoky amber by the westering light.

Rhiow tucked herself down and considered the disk of fire as it sank toward the Palisades, gilding the waters of the Hudson. As a wizard, she knew quite well that what she saw was Earth’s nearest star, a glimpse of the fusion that was stepchild to the power that started this universe running. Rhoua was what People called it. The word was a metonymy: Rhoua was a name of Queen Iau, of the One, in Her aspect as beginner and ender of physical life. Once cats had understood the Sun only in the abstract, as life’s kindler. It had taken a while for them to grasp the concept of the Sun as just one more star among many, but when they did, they still kept the old nickname.

The older name for the Sun had been Rhoua’i’th, Rhoua’s Eye: the only one of Her eyes that the world saw, or would see, at least for a good while yet. That one open Eye saw thoughts, saw hearts, knew the realities beneath external seemings. The other Eye saw those and everything else as well; but no one saw it. It would not open until matter was needed no more, and in its opening, all solid things would fade like sleep from an opening eye. A blink or two, and everything that still existed would be revealed in true form, perhaps final form—though that was uncertain, for the gathered knowledge of matters wizardly, which cat-wizards called The Gaze of Rhoua’s Eye, said little about time after the Last Time or about how existence would go after Existence, in terms of matter, past its sell-by date. But there was little need to worry about it just yet while Rhoua still winked. The day the wink turned to a two-eyed gaze … then would be the time to be concerned.

…For my own part, Rhiow told the fading day, 7 know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. Some I will meet today who think that day is blind and that night lies with its eyes closed; that the Gaze doesn’t see them, or doesn’t care. Their certainty of blindness, though, need not mean anything to me. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always…

Rhiow finished her meditation and stood, stretching herself thoroughly and giving one last look to that great burning disk as the apartment buildings of the western Hudson shore began to rear black against it. Having, like many other wizards, done her share of off-planet work, Rhiow found it difficult to think of Rhoua’s Eye as anything less than the fiery heart of the solar system. It still amused her, sometimes, that when the People had found out about this, they had had a lot of trouble explaining the concept to the ehhif. Some of the earlier paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art were potentially rather embarrassing, or at best amusing, in this regard—images of big eyes and sun-disks teetering precariously on top of cat-headed people, all hilariously eloquent of ehhif confusion, even in those days when ehhif language was much closer to Hauhai, and understanding should have been at least possible if not easy.

Rhiow made her way down to the street, sidled before she passed the iron door between her and the sidewalk, and then slipped under, heading west for Central Park.

She was surprised to meet Urruah halfway, making his way along East Sixty-eighth Street through the softly falling twilight, with a slightly dejected air. He slipped into the doorway of a brownstone and sat down, looking absently across the street at the open kitchen door of a Chinese restaurant. Clouds of fluorescent-lit steam and good smells were coming out of it, along with the sounds of a lot of shouting and the frantic stirring of woks.

“I would have thought you’d still be in the park,” Rhiow said, sitting down beside him.

“The rehearsal’s been put off until tomorrow,” Urruah said. “One of the toms is off his song.”

Rhiow made an oh-really expression. Urruah, like most toms, had a more or less constant fascination with song. She had originally been completely unable to understand why a tom should be interested in the mating noises that another species made: still less when the other species was not making these noises as part of mating, but because it was thinking about mating, in the abstract. But Urruah had gone on to explain that this particular kind of ehhif singing, called o’hra, was not simply about sex but was also some kind of storytelling. That had made Rhiow feel somewhat better about it all, for storytelling was another matter. Dams sang stories to their kits, grown People purred them to one another—gossip and myth, history and legend: no one simply spoke the past. It was rude. The thought that ehhif did the same in song made Rhiow feel oddly closer to them, and made her feel less like Urruah was doing something culturally, if not morally, perverse.

“So,” Rhiow said, “what will they do now?”

“They’ll keep building that big structure down at the end of the Great Lawn; that wasn’t going to be finished until tonight anyway. Tomorrow they’ll do the sound tests and the rest of the rehearsal. The other two toms are fine, so there shouldn’t be any more delays.”

Rhiow washed an ear briefly. “All right,” she said. “We’re going to have to take Arhu out and show him our beat… not that I particularly care to be doing that so soon, but he already knows how to sidle—”

“Whose good idea was that?” Urruah said, narrowing his eyes in annoyance.

“Mine,” Rhiow said, “since you ask. Come on, Urruah! He would have had to learn eventually anyway … and it turns out he’s a quick study. That may save his life, or, if he dies on Ordeal, who knows, it may make the difference between him getting his job done and not getting it done. Which is what counts, isn’t it?”

“Humf,” Urruah said, and looked across the street again at the restaurant. “Chicken…”

“Never mind the chicken. I want you on-site with him for this first evening at least, and as many of the next few evenings as possible. He needs a good male role model so that we can start getting him in shape for whatever’s going to happen to him.” She gave him an approving look. “I just want you to know that I think you’re handling all this very well.”

“I am a professional,” Urruah said, “even if he does make my teeth itch… But something else is on my mind, not just o’hra, as you doubtless believe. That oil spill intervention you mentioned? I heard that they got the authorization for the timeslide they wanted.”

Rhiow bunked at that. “Really? Then why is the spill still on the news? That whole timeline should have ‘healed over’… excised itself. We’re well past the ‘uncertainty period’ for such small change.”

“Something went wrong with it.”

Rhiow put her whiskers back in concern. Timeslides were expensive wizardries, but also fairly simple and straightforward ones: hearing that something had “gone wrong” with a timeslide was like hearing that something had gone wrong with gravity. “Where did you hear about that?”

“Rahiw told me; he heard it from Ehef—he saw him this morning.”

The source was certainly reliable. “Well, the situation’s not a total loss anyway,” Rhiow said. “That tropical storm sure ‘changed course.’ You could tell that was an intervention with your whiskers cut off.”

“Well, of course. But not the intended one. And a failed timeslide…” Urruah’s tail lashed. “Pretty weird, if you ask me.”

“Probably some local problem,” Rhiow said. “Sunspots, for all I know: we’re near the eleven-year maximum. If I talk to Har’lh again this week, I’ll ask him about it.”

“Sunspots,” Urruah said, as if not at all convinced. But he got up, stretched, and the two of them headed back down East Sixty-eighth together.

They wove their way along the sidewalk, taking care to avoid the hurrying pedestrians. As they paused at the corner of Sixty-eighth and Lex, Urruah said, “There he is.”

“Where?”

“The billboard.”

Rhiow tucked herself well in from the corner, right against the wall of the dry cleaner’s there, to look at the billboard on the building across the street. There was a picture on it—one of those flat representations that ehhif used—and some words. Rhiow looked at those first, deciphering them; though the Speech gave her understanding of the words, sometimes the letterings that ehhif used could slow you down. ‘The—three—’ What’s a ‘tenor’?”

“It’s a kind of voice. Fvais, we would say; a little on the high side, but not the highest.”

Rhiow turned her attention to the picture and squinted at it for a good while; there was a trick to seeing these flat representations that ehhif used—you had to look at them just right. When she finally thought she had grasped the meaning of what she saw, she said to Urruah, “So after they sing, are they going to fight?” The word she used was sth’hruiss, suggesting the kind of physical altercation that often broke out when territory or multiple females were at issue.

“No, it’s just hrui’t: voices only, no claws. They do it everywhere they go.”

That made Rhiow stare, and then shake her head till her ears rattled. “Are they a pride? A pride of males? What a weird idea.”

Urruah shook his head. “I don’t know if I understand it myself,” he said. “I think ehhif manage that kind of thing differently … but don’t ask me for details.”

Rhiow was determined not to. “Which one’s your fellow, then? The one who went off voice.”

“The one in the middle.”

“He’s awfully big for an ehhif, isn’t he?”

“Very,” Urruah had said with satisfaction and (Rhiow thought) a touch of envy. “He must have won hundreds of fights. Probably a tremendous success with the shes.”

Rhiow thought that it didn’t look like the kind of “big” that won fights. She had seen pictures of the ehhif-toms who fought for audiences over at Madison Square Garden, and they seemed to carry a lot less weight than this ehhif. However, she supposed you couldn’t always judge by sight. This one might be better with the claws and teeth than he looked.

“So all these ehhif are coming to listen to him in, what is it, three nights from now? Is he that good?”

“He is magnificently loud,” said Urruah, his voice nearly reverent. “You can hear him for miles on a still night, even without artificial aids.”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward, impressed almost against her will. “If I’m free tomorrow,” she said, “maybe I’ll go with you to have a look at this rehearsal.”

“Oh, Rhiow, you’ll love it!” They crossed the street and walked back toward the garage where Saash stayed, and Urruah started telling Rhiow all about ah’rias and ssoh’phraohs and endless other specialized terms and details, and Dam knew what all else, until Rhiow simply began saying “Yes,” and “Isn’t that interesting,” and anything else she could think of, so as not to let on how wildly boring all this was. For me, anyway, she thought. Occasionally, thinking he’d been invited to, or that someone nearby was in the slightest bit interested, Urruah went off on one of these tangents. If you didn’t want to hurt his feelings—and mostly his partners didn’t, knowing how it felt to have a personal passion used as a scratching-post by the uncaring—there was nothing much you could do but nod and listen as politely as you could for as long as you could, then escape: the suddenly discovered need to do houih was usually a good excuse. Rhiow couldn’t do that just now, but once more she found herself thinking that Urruah was a wonderful example of one of a wizard’s most useful traits: the ability to carry around large amounts of potentially useless information for prolonged periods. That, she thought, he’s got in abundance.

“Oh, I forgot,” she said at last, almost grateful to have something else to talk about. “Did you talk to the canine Senior about that houff?”

“Yes,” Urruah said. “Rraah’s going to arrange some kind of accident for him—have him ‘accidentally’ cut loose from the building site, late one night. Apparently he’s got a home waiting for him already.”

“Good,” Rhiow said. They turned the corner into Fifty-sixth, and down the street Rhiow saw Saash sitting outside the garage, a little to one side of the door, through which light poured out into the evening. She wasn’t even sidled, and her fur looked somewhat ruffled, as if she was too annoyed to put it in order. Cars were going in and out at the usual rate, and Saash was ignoring them, which was unusual; she was normally very traffic-shy, but right now she just sat there and glared.

Saash looked at Rhiow and Urruah as they came up to her, and as the saying goes, if looks were claws, their ears would have been in rags. “What kept you?” she said.

“Where’s the wonder child?” Urraah said.

“He’s inside,” Saash said, “playing hide-and-seek with the staff. Abha’h’s going out of his mind; he can’t understand why one minute he can see the new kitten and the next minute he can’t. Fortunately he thinks it’s funny, and he just assumes that Arhu is hiding under one car or another. However, he’s also decided that the new kitten should have flea powder put on him, and needless to say, that’s the moment Arhu chooses to disappear and not come visible again, which means I got the flea powder instead of him—”

Urruah began to laugh. Saash gave him a sour look and said, “Oh yes, it’s just hilarious. You should have heard the little sswiass laughing. I hope I get to hear him laugh at you like that.”

Rhiow suppressed her smile. “Who knows, you may get your chance. Did you get some sleep, finally?”

“Some. How about you?’

“I’ve slept better,” Rhiow said. “I had odd dreams…”

“After having been in the real Downside,” Saash said, relaxing enough to scratch, “that’s hardly a surprise. Just think of the last time…”

“I know.” Rhiow preferred not to. “But I’m not sure I noticed everything I should have there: I want to go talk to Ehef this evening.”

“About the gate?”

“Not entirely.” Rhiow twitched an ear back toward the depths of the garage. “The circumstances, our involvement with him… the situation isn’t strictly unusual, but it’s always good to get a second opinion.”

Saash flicked her tail in somewhat sardonic agreement. “Should be interesting. Come on,” she said, “let’s go see if Abha’h’s caught him yet.”

They waited for a break in the traffic, then slipped in through the door and made their way down into the garage and among the racks of parked cars. They passed Abad, who was looking under some of the cars racked up front in a resigned sort of way; he was holding a can of flea powder. Saash gave it a dirty look as they passed.

They found Arhu crouching under a car near the back of the garage, snickering to himself as he watched Abad’s feet going back and forth under the racks. He looked up as they came, with an expression that was much less alarmed than any Rhiow had seen on him yet, but the edge of hostility on his amusement was one that she didn’t care for much. “Well, hunt’s luck to you, Arhu,” she said, politely enough, “though it looks like you’re doing all right in that department … if you consider this a hunt and not mere mouse-play.” She and the others hunkered down by him.

“Might as well be,” Arhu said after a moment. He watched Abad go off. “They’re real easy to fool, ehhif.”

“If you couldn’t sidle, you’d be singing another song,” said Urruah.

“But I can. I’m a wizard!”

Rhiow smiled a slight, tart smile. “We are wizards,” she said. “You are still only a probationer-wizard, on Ordeal.”

“But I can do stuff already!” Arhu said. “I went through the doors last night! And I’m sidling!” He got up and did it while they watched, strolling to and fro under the metal ramp-framework, and weaving in and out among the strings: there one moment and gone the next, and then briefly occluded in stripes of visibility and nonvisibility, as if strutting behind a set of invisible, vertical Venetian blinds. He looked ineffably smug, as only a new wizard can when he first feels the power sizzling under his skin.

“Not a bad start,” Saash said.

Urruah snorted. “You kidding? That’s one of the most basic wizardries there is. Even some cats who aren’t wizards can do it. Don’t flatter him, Saash. He’ll think he really might amount to something.” His slow smile began. “Then again, go ahead, let him think that. He’ll just try some dumb stunt and get killed sooner. One less thing to worry about.”

Rhiow turned and clouted Urruah on the top of his head, with her claws out, though not hard enough to really addle him. He crouched down a very little, eyeing her, his ears a bit flat. When I want your assessment of his talents, she said silently, I’ll ask you for it, Mister Couldn’t-keep-a-dog-from-eating-his-mouse-earlier. Aloud she said, “You know as well as I do that the Oath requires the protection of all life, including life that annoys you. So just stuff your tail in it”

Urruah glared at her, turned his head away. Rhiow looked back at Arhu. “Tell me something to start with. What do you know about wizards? I don’t mean what Saash has been telling you, though it’s plain she hasn’t been able to get much through your thick little skull. I want to hear what you know from before we met you.”

He squirmed a little, scowling. “Wizards can do stuff.”

“What stuff? How?”

“Good stuff, I guess. I never saw any. But People talk about them.”

“And what do they say?” Urruah said.

Arhu glared back at him. “That they’re stuck up, that they think they’re important because they can do things.”

Urruah started slowly to stand up. Rhiow glanced at him; he settled back again. “And probably,” Rhiow said just a touch wearily to Arhu, “you’ve heard People say that wizards are using their power somehow to help ehhif control People. Or that they’re just trying to make all the other People around be their servants somehow. And somebody has to have told you that it’s not real wizardry at all, just some kind of trick used to get power or advantage, some kind of hauissh or power game.”

Arhu looked at her. “Yeah,” he said. “All that.”

“Well.” Rhiow sat down. “ ‘Just tricks’; do you think that? After you went through the doors?”

She watched him struggle a little, inwardly, before speaking. He desperately did not want to admit that he didn’t understand something, or (on the other side) admit to feeling more than cool and blase about anything … especially not in front of Urruah. Yet at the same time, he liked the feel of what he’d done the night before: Rhiow recognized the reaction immediately … knowing it very well herself. And she knew that the thought that there might be more of that was tantalizing him. It was the Queen’s greatest recruitment tool, the one that was the most effective, and the most unfair, for any living being—but especially for cats: curiosity. You are unscrupulous, she said privately to the Powers That Be. But then You can’t afford to be otherwise…

“That happened,” Arhu said finally. He looked, not at Rhiow, but at Urruah, as if for confirmation: Urruah simply closed his eyes … assent, though low-key. “I felt it. It was real.”

“Urruah’s right, you know,” Rhiow said. “Even nonwizardly cats can sometimes walk through things … though usually only in moments of crisis: if you’re not a wizard, the act can’t be performed at will. You’ll be able to, though … if you live through what follows.”

“Whatever it is, I can take it,” Arhu said fiercely. “I’m a survivor.”

Saash shook herself all over, then sat down and scratched. “That’s nice,” she said, very soft-voiced. “We get a lot of ‘survivors’ in wizardry. Mostly they die.”

Rhiow tucked herself down in the compact position that Hhuha sometimes called “half-meatloaf,” the better to look eye-to-eye with the kit. “You said you heard a voice that said ‘I dare you,’ ” she said. “We’ve all heard that voice. She speaks to every potential wizard, sooner or later, and offers each one the Ordeal. It’s a test to see if you have what it takes. If you don’t, you’ll die. If you do, you’ll be a wizard when the test is over.”

“How long does it take?”

“Might be hours,” Urruah said. “Might be months. You’ll know when it’s over. You’ll either have a lot of power that you didn’t have a moment before … or you’ll find yourself with just enough time for a quick wash between lives.”

“What’s the power for, though?” Arhu said, eager. “Can you use it for anything you want?”

“Within limits,” Saash said. “Walk in other elements and other worlds, talk to other creatures, even not-live things sometimes—go places no other People not wizards have ever been or seen—”

“Other creatures?” Arhu said. “Wow! Any other creatures?”

“Well, mostly”

“Even ehhif? Cool! Let’s go talk to that cop and freak him out!” He started toward the garage door.

Rhiow grabbed him by the scruff and pushed him down with one paw. “No. You may not use the Speech to communicate with members of other species unless they’re wizards, or unless you’re on errantry and the job specifically requires it.”

“But that’s dumb!”

“Listen, killing,” Urruah said, leaning over Arhu with a thoughtful expression. “If you start routinely talking to ehhif so they can understand, there’s a chance that eventually one of them’s going to believe that you’re talking. And before you know it they’ve thrown you in a scientific institute somewhere and started drilling holes in your skull, or else they’re taking you apart in some other interesting way. More to the point, if you do that, they’ll start doing it to other People too. A lot of them. I wouldn’t want to cause something like that, not ever, because sooner or later you’re going to find yourself between lives, and the explanations that would be demanded of you by the Powers That Be—” He shook his head slowly. “If I started seriously thinking that you might actually pull a stunt like that, I’d just grab you and kick your guts out right now, Ordeal or no Ordeal. So take notice.”

“Then this wizardry isn’t any use,” Arhu muttered, scowling. “You say you can do all this stuff, and then you say you’re not allowed to do it! What’s the point?”

Rhiow felt herself starting to fluff up. Urruah, though, said mildly, “It’s not quite like that. Are you allowed to fight with me, killing?”

Arhu glared at Urruah, then he too began to bristle. Finally he burst out: “Yes, I am! But if I did, you’d shred me!”

“Then you understand the principle,” Urruah said. “We’re allowed to do all kinds of things. But we don’t do them, because the result in the long term would be unfortunate.” He smiled at Arhu. “For us or someone else. Till you come to know better, just assume that the results would be unfortunate for you. And in either the long term or the short… they would be.”

Rhiow noticed that his claws were showing more than usual. Wonderful, she thought, remembering the saying: Old tom, young tom, trouble coming! “You’ll find in the next few days,” Rhiow said, “that there are a fair number of things you can do… and they’ll be useful enough. You’ll like them, too. Keep your ears open: when you hear the whisper… listen. She doesn’t repeat herself much, the One Who Whispers.”

Arhu looked up at that. “We’re not working for anyone, are we?” he said, suspicious. “The People ate free,”

Rhiow wanted to roll her eyes but didn’t quite dare: Arhu was a little too sensitive to such things. “She’ll suggest something you might do,” Rhiow said, “but whether you do it or not is your choice.”

“That’s not exactly an answer.”

Urruah stood up. “He makes my head hurt,” Urruah said. “Give him the power to change the world and he complains about it. But then, if he’s not willing to cooperate with the Powers Who’re the source of the power, why should he learn anything more about it? Not that he will” He looked amused.

“All right, all right,” Arhu said hastily, “so I want to learn. So when do I start?”

They looked at one another. “Right away,” Rhiow said. “We have to go inspect the place we take care of, make sure things are going right there. You should come with us and see what we do.”

Arhu looked at them a little suspiciously. “You mean your den? You’re a pride?”

“Not the way you mean it. But yes, we are. The place we take care of—you remember it: the place where we found you. Ehhif living here use it as a beginning and ending to their journeys. So do ehhif wizards, and other wizards too, though the journeys are to stranger places than the trains go…”

“There are ehhif wizards?” Arhu laughed out loud at the idea. “No way! They’re too dumb!”

“Now who’s being ‘stuck up’?” Urruah said. “There are plenty of ehhif wizards. Very nice people. And from other species too, just on this planet. Wizards who’re other primates, who’re whales … even wizards who’re houiff.”

Arhu snickered even harder. “I wouldn’t pay any attention to them. Houiff don’t impress me.”

“You may yet meet Rraah-yarh,” said Urruah, looking slightly amused, “who’s Senior among the houiff here: and if you’re wise, you’ll pay attention to her. 7 wouldn’t cross her … and not because she’s a houff, either. She may look like half an ad for some brand of ehhif Scotch, but she’s got more power in one dewclaw than you’ve got in your whole body, and she could skin you with a glance and wear you for a doggie-jacket on cold days.”

Rhiow kept quiet and tried to keep her face straight over the thought that everything toms discussed seemed to come down to physical violence sooner or later. Saash, though, leaned close to Arhu and said, “You are now on the brink of joining a great community of people from many sentient species … a fellowship reaching from here to the stars, and farther. Some of your fellow-wizards are so strange or awful to look at that your first sight of them could nearly turn your wits right around in your head. But they’ve all taken the same Oath you have. They’ve sworn to slow down the heat-death of the Universe, to keep the worlds going as best they can, for as long as they can … so that the rest of Life can get on with its job. You want great adventure? It’s here. Scary things, amazing things? You’ll never run out of them… there are any nine lives’ worth, and more. But if you don’t pass your Ordeal, this life, none of it’s ever going to happen.”

“You willing to find out how hot you really are?” Urruah said. “That’s why the Whisperer has spoken to you. Take her up on her offer… and the Universe gets very busy trying to kill you. Live through it, though… and there’ll be good reason for the queens to listen to you when you sing.”

Once more Rhiow kept her smile under control, for this kind of precisely applied power play was exactly what she had needed Urruah for. Tom-wizards tended to equate management of their power with management of their maleness: no surprise, since for toms in general all of life was about power and procreation. But it was language Arhu wouldn’t understand until he grew old enough to understand wizardry, and life in general, in terms of hauissh, the power-and-placement game that ran through all feline culture. Rhiow almost smiled at the memory of Har’lh once equating hauissh with an old human strategy-game and referring to it as “cat chess,” but the metaphor was close enough. All cat life was intrinsically ha’hauissheh, or “political” as Har’lh had translated it; and as the saying went, those who did not play hauissh had hauissh played on them, usually to their detriment. As a team manager, Rhiow had long since made her peace with this aspect of the job, and always made sure her own placement in the game was very secure, then directed her attention to placing her team members where they would do the most good, and felt guilty about the manipulation only later, if ever.

“So,” Rhiow said. “Let’s get on with it, young wizard. We usually walk, and you’ll need to learn the various routes before we teach you the faster ways to go.” She stood up. “First route, then: the hardest one, but the one that exposes us least to notice. Can you climb?”

Arhu positively hissed with indignation. Rhiow turned away, for fear the smile would slip right out, and as she passed, Saash lowered her head so that (without seeming to do so on purpose) it bumped against Rhiow’s in passing, their whiskers brushing through one another’s and trembling with shared and secretive hilarity. Oh, Rhi, Saash said silently, were we ever this unbearable?

I was, Rhiow said, and you would have been if you’d had the nerve. Let’s dull his claws a little, shall we?…

The run to Grand Central along the High Road, which normally would have taken the three of them perhaps twenty minutes, took nearly an hour and a half; and the dulling of Arhu’s claws, which Rhiow had intended in strictly the metaphorical sense, happened for real—so that when they finally sat down on the copper-flashed upper cornice of the great peaked roof, looking down at Forty-second, Arhu was bedraggled, shaking, and furious, and Rhiow was heartily sorry she had ever asked him whether he could climb.

He couldn’t. He was one of those cats who seem to have been asleep in the sun somewhere when Queen Iau was giving out the skill, grace, and dexterity: he couldn’t seem to put a paw right. He fell off walls, missed jumps that he should have been able to make with bis eyes closed, and clutched and clung to angled walks that he should have been confident to run straight up and down without trouble. It was a good thing he was so talented at sidling, since (if this performance was anything to judge by) he was the cat Rhiow would choose as most likely to spend the rest of his life using surface streets to get around: a horrible fate. It may change, she thought. This could be something he’ll grow out of. Dear gods, I hope so… Finally she’d said to the others, out loud, “I could use a few minutes to get my breath back,” and she’d sat down on the crest of the terminal roof. It was not her breath Rhiow was concerned about, while Arhu sat there gasping and glaring at the traffic below.

Why is he so clumsy? Urruah said silently as they sat there, letting Arhu calm himself down again. There’s nothing wrong with him physically, nothing wrong with his nerves… they’re the right “age” for the way his body is developing. He was the one of them best talented at feeling the insides of others’ bodies, so Rhiow was inclined to trust his judgment in this regard.

It’s like he can’t see the jump ahead of him, Saash said. There’s nothing wrong with his eyes, is there?

No. Urruah washed one paw idly. Might just be shock left over from last night, and the healing, and everything else that’s happening.

He didn’t look shocky to me in the garage, Rhiow said.

Believe me, Saash said, especially before you got there, shock was the last thing he was exhibiting. This is something of a revelation.

After a few moments, Rhiow got up and walked along the rounded copper plaques of the roofs peak to where Arhu sat staring down at the traffic. “That last part of the climb,” she said as conversationally as she could, “can be a little on the rough side. Thanks for letting me rest”

He gave her a sidelong look, then stared down again at the traffic and the ehhif going about their business on the far side of Forty-second Street, walking through the glare of orange sodium-vapor light. “How far down is it?” he said softly.

It was the first thing Rhiow had heard him say that hadn’t sounded either angry or overly bold. “About fifty lengths, I’d say. Not a fall you’d want…” She looked across the street, watching the cabs on Vanderbilt being released by the change of lights to flow through the intersection into Forty-second. A thought struck her. “Arhu,” she said, “you don’t have trouble with heights, do you?”

He flicked his tail sideways in negation, not taking his eyes off the traffic below. “Only with getting to them,” he said, again so quietly as to be almost inaudible.

“I think the sooner we teach you to walk on air, the better,” Rhiow said. “We’ll start you on that tomorrow.”

He stared at her. “Can you do that? I mean, can I—”

“Yes.”

She sat still a moment, looking down. After a few breaths Saash came up behind, stepping as delicately and effortlessly as usual, and looked over Rhiow’s shoulder at the traffic and at the dark, graceful, sculpted silhouettes that came between them and the orange glow from beneath. “A closer view than you get from the street,” she said to Arhu. “Though you do miss some of the fine detail from this angle.”

“What are they?”

“ ‘Who,’ actually,” Saash said. “Ehhif gods.”

“What’s a god?”

Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another. My, Urruah said silently, we are going to have to start from scratch with this one, aren’t we? … Hope he doesn’t survive to breed. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the next generation.

“Very powerful beings,” said Saash, giving Urruah a look. “Cousins to the Whisperer: they’re all littermates under the One, or so we think. Each species has its own, even ehhif.”

Arhu sniffed at the idea and squinted at the carved figures. “One of them looks like he’s falling asleep.”

“She,” Rhiow said.

“How do you tell?”

Urruah opened his mouth, but Rhiow said, “Some other time. That one’s a queen, Arhu: the other two’re toms.”

“What’s that one got on his head?”

“It’s something ehhif wear,” Saash said; “it’s called a hha’t. But don’t ask me why it’s got wings on it.”

“Symbolic of something,” Rhiow said. “All these carvings are. That middle one is a messenger-god, I believe. The ‘sleepy’ one, she’s got a book; that’s a way ehhif communicate. The other one, he’s probably something to do with the trains. See the wheel?”

“There has to be more to it than just that, though,” Urruah said. “Someone involved in the construction has to have known what this was going to be, besides just a place where the trains come and go. It can’t just be coincidence that the Lord of Birds is shown there at the center of it all; they’ve always been the symbols of speed in getting around, especially of nonphysical travel. And then that one there, the queen, has the Manual, and the one in the middle has the stick with the Wise Ones wound around it: the emblem of what’s below, in the Downside, under the roots of the worldgates. There have to have been wizards on the building’s design team.”

“I’ll leave it to you to conduct some research on the subject,” Rhiow said “But there was wizardry enough about the place’s building, even at the merely physical level: it never shut down, even when the construction was heaviest. Eight hundred trains came and went each day, and some of them may have been late, but they never stopped… and neither did other kinds of transit. Speaking of which, let’s get on with our own business. We’re running late.”

She walked on down the roof-cornice, taking her time. “All very scenic,” she said casually to Urruah, “but tomorrow we’ll take the Low Road, all right?”

“The Queen’s voice purrs from your throat, oh most senior of us all,” Urruah said, following her at a respectable distance. She didn’t look at him, but she twitched one ear back and thought, I’m going to take this out of your hide eventually, O smart-mouthed one. Don’t give him ideas. And don’t make fun of his ignorance. It’s not his fault he has no education, and it’s our job to see that he gets one.

I would say, Urruah said with a silent wrinkling of his whiskers, that we have our job cut out for us.

Rhiow kept walking toward the end of the roof. “There’s an opening down here,” she said to Arhu as they went. “It’s a little tricky to get through, but once in, everything else is easy. How much other experience have you had with buildings?”

He shrugged. “Today.”

She nodded. He was young and inexperienced enough not even to have the usual cat-reference, which likened buildings to dens, or in the case of the taller ones, to trees hollowed out inside. Rhiow had always been a little amused by this, knowing what trees the city buildings were echoes of. She’d occasionally heard humans refer to the city as a jungle: that made her laugh, too, for she knew the real “jungle,” ancient and perilous, of which the shadowy streets were only a reflection.

“Well, you’re going to start picking up more experience fast,” she said. “This is one of the biggest buildings in this city, though not the tallest. If you laid the almost-tallest building on the island—see that one, the great spike with the colored lights around the top?—yes, that one—laid it down on its side and half-buried it as the Terminal’s buried, then this would still be larger than that. There are a hundred thousand dens in it, from the roof to the deepest-dug den under the streets, at the track levels. But we’ll start at the top, tonight. The path we’ll take leads under this roof-crest where we’re walking, to the substructure over the building’s inner roof. You said you came through the main concourse … did you look up and see blue, a blue like the sky, high up?”

Arhu stopped well clear of the edge of the roof, which they were nearing, and thought a moment. “Yes. There were lights in it. They were backwards…”

His eyes looked oddly unfocused. The height bothers him, Rhiow thought, no matter what he says… And then she changed her mind, for his eyes snapped back to what seemed normalcy. Well, never mind. A trick of the light…

“Backwards,” though. “Saw that, did you?” she said, which was another slight cause for surprise. “Very perceptive of you. Well, we’ll be walking above that: it’s all a built thing, and you’ll see the bones of it. Come here to the edge now and look down. See the hole?”

He saw it: she saw his tongue go in and out, touching his nose in fright, and heard him swallow.

“Right. That’s what I thought the first time. It’s easier than it looks. There’s just a tiny step under it, where the brick juts out. Stretch down, put your right forepaw down on that, turn around hard, and put yourself straight in through the hole. Urruah?”

“Like this,” Urruah said, slipping between them, and poured himself straight over the edge into the dark. Arhu watched him find the foothold, twist, and vanish into the little square hole among the bricks.

“Do that,” Rhiow said. “I’ll spot for you. You won’t fall: I promise.”

Arhu stared at her. “How can you be sure?”

Rhiow didn’t answer him, just gazed back. Sooner or later there was always a test of trust among team-working wizards—the sooner, the better. Demonstrations that the trust was well-founded never helped at this stage: start giving such proofs and you would soon find yourself handicapped by the need to provide them all the time. She kept her silence and spoke inwardly to the air under the little “step” of outward-jutting brick, naming the square footage of air that she needed to be solid for this little while—just in case. Arhu looked away, after a moment, and gingerly, foot by foot, started draping himself over the edge of the cornice, stretching and feeling with his forefeet for the step.

He found it, fumbled, staggered— Rhiow caught her breath and got ready to say the word that would harden the air below. But somehow Arhu managed to recover himself, and turned and writhed or fell through the hole. A scrabbling noise followed, and a thump.

Rhiow and Saash looked at each other, waiting, but mercifully there was no sound of laughter from Urruah. They went down after Arhu.

Inside the hole, they found Arhu sitting on the rough plank flooring that ran to the roofs edge underneath the peak, and washing his face in a very sincere bout of composure-grooming. A line of narrow horizontal windows, faintly orange-yellow with upward-reflected light from the street, ran down both sides of the roof, about six feet below its peak, and northward toward Lexington. From below those windows, thick metal supporting beams ran up to the peak and across the width of the room, and a long plank-floored gallery ran along one side, made for ehhif to walk on.

Cats needed no such conveniences. Urruah was already strolling away down the long supporting beam at just below window-level, the golden light turning his silver-gray markings to an unaccustomed marmalade shade.

Arhu finished his he’ihh and looked down the length of the huge attic. “See the planks under the beams and joists there?” Rhiow said. “On the other side of them is the sky-painting that the ehhif artist did all those years ago, to look like the summer sky above a sea a long way from here. The painting’s trapped, though: when they renovated the station some years back, they glued another surface all over the original painting, bored new holes for the stars, and did the whole thing over again.”

Arhu looked at Rhiow oddly. “But they had one there already!”

“It faded,” Saash said, shrugging her tail. “Seems like that bothered them, even though the real sky fades every day. Ehhif… go figure them.”

“Come on,” Rhiow said. They walked along the planks, ducking under the metal joists and beams every now and then, and Arhu looked with interest at the corded wires and cables reaching across the inside of the roof. “For the light bulbs,” Saash said. “The walking-gallery is so that, when one of the brighter stars burns out, the ehhif can come up here and replace it.”

Arhu flirted his tail in amusement and went on. “Here’s our way down,” Rhiow said as they came to the far side of the floor. “It’s all easy from here.”

A small doorway stood before them, let into the bare bricks of the wall: the door was shut. Urruah had leaped down beside it and was leaning against it, head to one side as if listening.

“Locked?” Rhiow said.

“Not this time, for a change. I think the new office staff are finally learning.” He looked thoughtfully at the doorknob.

The doorknob turned: the door clicked and swung open, inward. Beyond it was a curtain: Urruah peered through it “Clear,” he said a moment later, and slipped through.

Rhiow and Saash went after him, Arhu followed them. The little office had several desks in it, very standard-issue, banged-up gray metal desks, all littered with paperwork and manuals and computer terminals and piles of computer-printed documentation. More golden light came in from larger windows set at the same height as those out in the roof space.

“Some ehhif who help run the station work here during the ‘weekdays,’ ” Rhiow said to Arhu as they headed for the office’s outer door, “but this is a ‘weekend,’ so there’s no fear we’ll run into them now. We’re seven ‘stories,’ or ehhif-levels, over the main concourse; there’s a stepping-tree, a ‘stairway’ they call it, down to that level. That’s where we’re headed.”

Urruah reared up to touch the outer door with one paw, spoke in a low yowl to the workings in its lock: the door obligingly clicked open with a soft squeal of hinges, letting them out into the top of a narrow cylindrical stairwell lit from above by a single bare bulb set in the white-painted ceiling. The staircase before them was a spiral one, of openwork cast iron, and the spiral was tight. While Saash pushed the door shut again and spoke it locked, Urruah ran on down the stairs two or three at a time, as he usually did, and Rhiow found herself half-hoping (for Arhu’s benefit) that he would take at least one spill down the stairs, as he also usually did. But the Tom was apparently watching over Urruah this evening. Urruah vanished into the dimness below them without incident, leaving Rhiow and Saash pacing behind at a more sedate speed, while behind them came Arhu, cautiously picking his way.

Faint street sounds came to them through the walls as they went, but slowly another complex of sounds became more assertive: rushing, echoing sounds, and soft rumbles more felt than genuinely heard. At one point near the bottom of the stairs, Rhiow paused to look over her shoulder and saw Arhu standing still about hah7 a turn of the stairs above her, his ears twitching; bis tail lashed once, hard, an unsettled gesture.

“It’s like roaring,” he said quietly. “A long way down…”

He’s nervous about getting so close to where he almost came to grief, Rhiow thought. Well, if he’s going to be working with us, he’s just going to have to get used to it… “It does sound that way at first,” she said, “but you’d be surprised how fast you get used to it. And at how many things there are to distract you. Come on…”

He looked down at her, then experimentally jumped a couple of steps down, Urruah-style, caught up with her, and passed her by, bouncing downward from step to step with what looked like a little more confidence.

She followed him. In the dimness below them, she could see a wedge of light spilling across the floor: Urruah had already cracked open the bottom door. Through it, the echoes of the footfalls and voices of ehhif came more strongly.

“Now get sidled,” Saash was saying, “and keep your wits about you: this isn’t like running around under the cars in the garage. Ehhif can move pretty fast, especially when they’re late for a train, and you haven’t lived until you’ve tripped someone and had them drop a few loaded Bloomie’s bags on you.”

Arhu merely looked amused. He had sidled himself between one breath and the next. “I don’t see why we should hide,” he said. “If you take care of this place, like you say, then we have as much right to be here as all of them do.”

’The right, yes,” Rhiow said. “In our law. But not in theirs. And in wizardry, where one species is more vulnerable than the other to having its effectiveness damaged by the conflict of their two cultures, the more powerful or advanced culture gives way graciously. That’s us.”

“That’s not the way People should do it,” Arhu growled as they stepped cautiously out into the Graybar passage, one of the two hallways leading from Lexington Avenue to the concourse. “I don’t know a lot about hauissh yet, but I do know you have to fight to get a good position, or take it, and keep it.”

“Sometimes,” Urruah said. “In the cruder forms of the game … yes. But when you start playing hauissh for real someday, you’ll learn that some of the greatest players win by doing least. I know one master who dominates a whole square block in the West Eighties and never even so much as shows himself through a window: the other People there know his strength so well, they resign every day at the start of play.”

“What land of hauissh is that?” Arhu said, disgusted. “No blood, no glory—”

“No scars,” Urruah said, with a broad smile, looking hard at Arhu.

Arhu looked away, his ears down.

“Last time they counted his descendants,” Urruah added, “there were two hundred prides of them scattered all over the Upper West Side. Don’t take subdued or elegant play as a sign that someone can’t attract the queens.”

They came out into the concourse and paused by the east gallery, looking across the great echoing space glinting with polished beige marble and limestone, and golden with the brass of rails and light fixtures and the great round information desk and clock in the middle. The sound of ehhif footsteps was muted at the moment; there were perhaps only a hundred of them in the Terminal at any given moment now, coming and going from the Sunday evening trains at a leisurely rate. Then even the footstep-clatter was briefly lost in the massive bass note of the Accurist clock.

Arhu looked up and around nervously. “Just a time-message,” Saash said. “Nine hours past high-Eye.”

“Oh. All right. What are all those metal tubes stuck all over everything? And why are all the walls covered with that cloth stuff?”

“They’re renovating,” said Saash. “Putting back old parts of the building that were built over, years ago … getting rid of things that weren’t in the original plans. It should look lovely when they’re done. Right now it just means that the place is going to be noisier than usual for the next couple of years…”

“The worldgates have occasionally gotten misaligned due to the construction work,” Rhiow said. “It means we’ve had to keep an extra close eye on them. Sometimes we have to move a gate’s ‘opening’ end, its portal locus, closer to one platform or away from another. It was the gate by Track Thirty-two, last time: they were installing some kind of air-conditioning equipment on Thirty-two, and we had to move the locus far enough away to keep the ehhif workmen from seeing wizards passing through it, but not so close to any of the other gates’ loci to interfere with them…”

“What would happen if they did interfere?” Arhu said, with just a little too much interest for Rhiow’s liking.

Urruah sped up his pace just enough for Arhu to suddenly look right next to him and see a tom two and a half times his size, and maybe three times his weight. “What would happen if I pushed those big ears of yours down their earholes, and then put my claws far enough down your throat to pull them out that way?” Urruah said in a conversational tone. “I mean, what would be your opinion of that?”

They all kept walking, and when Arhu finally spoke again, it was in a very small voice. “That would be bad,” he said.

“Yes. That would be very bad. Just like coincident portal loci would be bad. If you were anywhere nearby when such a thing happened, it would feel similar. But it would be your whole body … and it would be forever. So wouldn’t you agree that these are both events that, as responsible wizards, we should do all we can to forestall?”

“Yeah. Uh, yes.”

’Track Thirty, team,” said Rhiow. “Right this way, and we’ll check that the Thirty-two gate is where it belongs. Saash, you want to go down first and check the gate’s logs?”

“My pleasure, Rhi.”

They strolled down the platform, empty now under its long line of fluorescent lights. No trains were expected on 30 until the 10:30 from Dover Plains and Brewster North; off to one side, on 25, a Metro-North “push-pull” locomotive sat up against the end-of-track barrier, thundering idly to itself while waiting for the cars for the 11:10 to Stamford and Rye to be pushed down to it and coupled on. Arhu stopped and gave it a long look.

“Loud,” Urruah said, shouting a little.

Arhu flicked his tail “no.” “It’s not that—”

“What is it, exactly?” Rhiow said.

“It roars.”

“Yes. As I said, you get used to the roaring.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He sat down, right where he was, and kept staring at the loco. “It—it knows it’s roaring.” He turned to Urruah, almost pleading. “It can’t—it can’t be alive?”

“You’d be surprised,” Urruah said.

“A lot of wizards can ‘hear’ what we normally consider inanimate things,” Rhiow said. “It’s not an uncommon talent. Talking to things and getting them to respond, the way you saw Urruah talk to the door upstairs, that takes more practice. You’ll find out quickly enough if you have the knack.”

Arhu got up as suddenly as he had sat down, and shook himself all over: it took a moment for Rhiow to realize that he was hiding a shudder. “This is all so strange…”

“The Downside is a strange place,” Urruah said, beginning again to stroll toward the end of the platform, where Saash had disappeared over the edge and down to track level. “Always has been. There are all kinds of odd stories about these tunnels, and the ‘underworld’ in this area. Lost colonies of web-footed mutant ehhif… alligators in the sewers…”

“And are there?”

“Alligators? No,” Urruah said. “Dragons, though…” He smiled.

Arhu stopped again, looked at him oddly. “Dragons…” He turned to Rhiow. “He’s making it up. Isn’t he?”

Arhu desperately wanted to think so, that was for sure. “About the dragons?” Rhiow said. “No, that’s true enough … though not the way you might think. The presence of the worldgates can make odd things happen, things that even wizardry can’t fully explain. These tunnels sometimes reach into places that have little to do with this city. They aren’t a place to wander unless you know them well. Sometimes not even then…”

“But the ehhif—I heard about them. Lots of them live down here, everybody says, and they’re always hungry, and they eat… rats, and, and…”

“People? No, not these ehhif, anyway,” Urruah said. “And while some ehhif do indeed live down in the tunnels and dens under the streets, it’s not as many as their stories, or ours, would make you think. Not as many People, either.”

“Problem is, ehhif don’t see well in the dark,” Saash said, leaping up out of it and walking down the platform toward them. “Either for real or in their minds. When they try to tell stories about what they think they’ve seen down here, they tend to get confused about detail. Even for People, it’s never that easy to be accurate about this darkness. It reaches down too deep, to things that are too old. A story that seemed plain when you started, soon starts drawing darkness about itself even while you think you have it pinned down broken-backed in the daylight.,…”

Arhu was looking unusually thoughtful. “How’s the gate?” Rhiow said.

“Answering interrogations normally,” Saash said. “No resonances from our wayward friend at the end of Twenty-six: it’s sitting over there and behaving itself as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”

“Its logs are all right?”

“They’re recording usage normally again, yes.”

“That’s so strange,” Urruah said. “How are you going to explain it all to Har’lh when he asks for that report?”

“I’m going to tell him the truth, as usual,” Rhiow said, “and in this case, that means we don’t have the slightest idea what went wrong. Come on, Arhu, we’ll show you how a gate looks when it’s working right.” They walked on down to the end of the platform and jumped off. Arhu came last: he was slow about it.

“Before we go on,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, if any of this starts to frighten you, say so. You had a bad day yesterday, and we know it. But we work down here all the time, and if you’re going to be with us, you’re going to need to get used to it. If you think you need time to do that, or if you can’t stay here long, say so.”

Arhu’s tongue came out and licked his nose nervously, twice in a row, before he finally said, “Let’s see what’s so hot down here.”

“One thing, anyway,” Urruah said, his voice full of approval. He headed off into the darkness.

The glitter and sheen of the hyperstrings of the gate was visible even before they were out of the glare of the fluorescents. The locus, a. broad oval hanging some twenty yards along from the end of Track 30, was relaxed but ready for use: its characteristic weave, which to Rhiow always looked a little like the pattern of the Chinese silk rug her ehhif had on the dining-room floor at home, radiated in shimmering patterns of orange, red, and infrared. Arhu stared at it.

“It is alive,” he said.

“Could be,” Rhiow said. “With some kinds of wizardry, especially the older and more powerful ones, it’s hard to tell…”

“Why is it here?”

“For wizards to use for travel, as I said.”

“No, wait, I don’t mean why. How did they get here? This one, and all the others I can feel—”

“I see what he means,” Saash said. “To have so many gates in one place is a little unusual. It may have to do with population pressure. All these millions of minds packed close together, pressing against the structure of reality, trying to get their world to do what they want… and hundreds of years of that kind of pressure, started by people who came here over great distances to found a city where they could live the way they wanted to, have things their way— Sooner or later, even the structure of physical reality will start to bend under such pressure. Or maybe not ‘bend.’ ‘Wear thin,’ so that other realities start showing through. They say that this is the city where you can get anything: in a way, it’s become true… If there’s no gate in so populous and hard-driven a place, the theory says, one will eventually appear. If there was already a naturally occurring gate, it’ll spawn others.”

“But there’s always been at least one gate here,” Urruah said, “since long before the city: the one leading to the true Downside, the Old Downside.”

“Oh, yes. If I had to pick one, I’d bet on the gate over by One-sixteen, myself: it just feels stabler than the others, somehow. But all the gates’ signatures have become so alike, after all this time, that you’d be hard put to prove which was eldest. Not my problem, fortunately…”

Rhiow sat down, looking the gate over. “It does seem to be behaving. You want to run it through the standard patency sequence? We should check that this week’s bout of construction hasn’t affected it.”

“Right.” Saash sat up on her hindquarters, settling herself and reaching up to the glowing weft, spreading her claws out to catch selected strings in them and pull—

She froze, then reached in and through the webbing of the gate once more, feeling for something—

“Rhi,” she said, “we’ve got a problem.”

Rhiow stared as Saash grasped for the strings again—and once more couldn’t get a grip on them. In the midst of this bizarre turn of affairs, the last thing Rhiow would have expected to hear was purring, except she did hear it, then turned in surprise and saw Arhu standing there rigid, looking not at Saash or the gate, but out into the darkness beyond them. The purr was not pleasure or contentment: it was that awful edgy purr that comes with terror or pain, and the sound of it made Rhiow’s hackles rise.

“Arhu—”

He paid no attention to her; just stood there, trembling violently, his eyes wide and dark, his throat rough with the purr of fear.

“Something’s coming,” he said.

They all listened for the telltale tick of rails, for the sound of an unscheduled loco down in the main tunnel past Tower U, where forty tracks narrowed to four. But no such sound could be heard. Neither could what Rhiow half-expected— the squeak of rats—though just the thought made her bristle.

Flashback, Urruah said silently. We’ve brought him down too soon.

“Arhu,” Rhiow said, “maybe you and Urruah should go back out to the concourse.”

“It won’t make any difference,” Arhu said, his voice oddly dry and drained-sounding. “It’s coming all the same. It came before. Once, to see. Once, to taste. Once, to devour—”

“Get him back out there,” Rhiow said to Urruah.

Urruah reached over past her, grabbed Arhu by the scruff of the neck as if he were a much smaller kitten than he was, leapt up onto the platform with him, and hurried off down it, half-dragging Arhu like a lion with a gazelle. Fortunately the youngster was still sidled: allowing any watching station staff to view the spectacle of him being dragged down the platform by something that wasn’t there, Rhiow thought, would have produced some choice remarks from Har’lh later.

Rhiow turned her attention back to Saash, who was hissing softly with consternation and anger. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I interrogated it not five minutes ago and it was fine! Here—” She pulled her paws out of the gate-weave, then carefully put out a single claw and hooked it behind the three-string bundle that led into the interrogation routines. Saash pulled, and the lines of light stretched outward and away from the weft structure, came alive with flickers of dark red fire that ran down the threads like water.

“See? That’s fine. But the gate won’t hyperextend, Rhi! The control functions aren’t answering. It’s simply refusing to open.”

“That can’t happen. It can’t.”

“I’d have thought a gate couldn’t have its logs erased, either,” Saash hissed, “but this seems to be our week for surprises. Now what do we do? There is simply no way I can do this”— she pushed her forepaws through the strings again, leaned back, and pulled, and her paws simply came out again, without a pause—“without getting a response. It’s like dropping something and having it not fall down. In fact, gravity would be easier to repeal than hyperstring function! What in Iau’s name is going on?”

“I wish I knew,” Rhiow said, and heartily she did, for life was now much more complicated than she wanted it to be. “We need advice, and a lot of it, and fast.” She looked over at the gate. “If it’s not functional, you’d better shut it down. FU notify Har’lh.”

“Rhi,” Saash said with exaggerated patience, “what I’m trying to tell you is that I cannot shut it down. Though the gate diagnoses correctly, none of the command structures are palpable. It’s going to have to hang here just like this until it starts answering properly, and we’d better pray to the Queen that the thing doesn’t come alive again without warning, with some train full of coffee-swigging commuters halfway through it.”

Rhiow swallowed. “Go check the others,” she said. “I want to make sure they’re not doing the same thing. Then get yourself right out of here.”

Saash loped off into the darkness. Rhiow sat and looked at the recalcitrant gate. I really need this right now, she thought.

The gate hung there and did nothing but glow and ripple subtly, splendid to look at, and about as useful for interspatial transit as that silk rug back in her ehhif’s den.

Miserable vhai’d thing, Rhiow thought, and looked out into the darkness, trying to calm herself down: there was no tune to indulge her annoyance. No trains were coming as yet, but something needed to be done so that the commuters would not meet this gate before it was functioning correctly again.

Rhiow trotted hurriedly westward down the track, toward Tower A. Directly opposite the tower was a portion of switched track, used to shunt trains into Tracks 23, 24, and 25, and crossing more shunting track for Tracks 30 through 34. She found the spot where the two “joints” of track interleaved in a shape like an ehhif letter X, or like an N or V, depending in which direction the interleave was set.

Rhiow glanced up hurriedly at the windows of the tower. There were a couple of the station ehhif sitting there, watching the board behind them, its colored lights indicating the presence of trains farther up the line. She could read those lights well enough, after some years of practice, to know that no moving train was anywhere near her, and the ehhif weren’t likely to turn and see her before she did what needed doing.

She stood on the little black box set down in the gravel beside the switch and looked at it with her eyes half-shut, seeing into it, watching how the current flowed. Not a complicated mechanism, fortunately: it simply moved the track one way or the other, depending on what the tower told it.

Rhiow closed her eyes all the way, put herself down into the flow of electricity in the switch, and told the switch that she was the tower, and it should move the track this way.

It did. Clunk, clunk, went the track, and it locked in position: the position that would shunt an incoming train away from Tracks 23, 24, and 25.

Rhiow glanced up at the tower. One of the men inside at the desk was looking over his shoulder at a control board, having heard something: an alarm, or maybe just a confirming click inside the tower that the switch was moving. Right, Rhiow thought, and leapt over to the switched track itself. The switch had been the hard part. This would be easier.

She put her paws on the cool metal of the track and spoke to it in the Speech. Why do you want to lie there with your atoms moving so slowly? Why so sluggish? Let them speed up a bit: here’s some energy to do it with.… A bit more. Go on, keep it up. Don’t stop till I tell you.

Then she got her paws off it in a hurry because the metal was taking her seriously. The segment of track went from cool to a neutral temperature she couldn’t feel, to warm, to hot, to really hot, in a matter of seconds. She loped away quickly while it was still shading up from a dull apple-red to cherry-red, to a beautiful glowing canary-yellow. A few seconds more to the buttercup-yellow stage, and the steel of the two pieces of track had fused together. All right, that’s fine, you can stop now, thank you! she yowled silently to the metal, jumped up onto the platform, and skittered back toward the concourse.

A few moments later the Terminal annunciator came alive and started asking the trainmaster to report to Tower A immediately. Rhiow, panting a little but pleased with herself, came out into the concourse and found Saash, Urruah, and Arhu waiting for her: Saash looking flustered and annoyed, Urruah looking very put-upon, and Arhu deep in composure-grooming again, with one ear momentarily inside out from the scrubbing he was giving it.

“I welded the switching track by Tower A,” she said to Saash. “Nothing’s going onto Tracks Twenty-three through Twenty-five that isn’t picked up and carried there, at least not until they replace that track. Might take them a couple of days.”

“Well, don’t expect me to know what’s wrong with that gate by then,” Saash said. “I haven’t got a clue. We need advice.”

“I agree. What about you?” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Are you all right?”

He glanced at her, then went back to washing. Urruah looked over his head and said to Rhiow, “He was a little rocky for a few moments when I brought him out. Then he just blinked and looked dozy.”

“Arhu?”

He looked up this time. “I’m all right,” he said. “I just remembered … you know.”

I wish I did know, Rhiow thought, for she still had no satisfactory explanation for what this killing had been doing down there the other day, or for exactly what had caused what happened.

“Come on,” she said, “let’s walk. This place is going to be crawling with station people in a few minutes.”

They headed for the Graybar passage again. Rhiow spared herself a few seconds more to revel, just briefly, in the relative quiet of the terminal this time of day, this time of week. The soft rush of sound, echoing from the ceiling 120 feet above, was soothing rather than frantic: an easygoing bustle. People down for a Sunday in the city, heading home again; people who lived here, returning after a day out of town; or subway riders emerging to pick up a sandwich or a late newspaper, or a coffee. That bizarre, dark smell… Rhiow wondered what Arhu thought of it, for it bad taken so long for her to get used to it as anything but a stink. Now she was so accustomed to the scent of coffee in the Terminal that she couldn’t imagine the place without it, any more than without the faint aromas of cinders and steel and ozone. “Arhu,” she said—

But he wasn’t mere. And Rhiow smelled something in the air besides coffee, and suddenly everything became plain.

All our worries about his education, she thought. Did any of us think about getting him something to eat??

The smell of roasting meat, and cold meat, and meat as yet uncooked, was extremely noticeable, and it was coming from right in front of them—from the Italian deli that had a branch here, one of a big chain. Also in front of them, and now much closer to the meat, was Arhu. “Oh, wow,” he shouted as he tore toward the open glass-fronted deli counter, mercifully inaudible over yet another noisy announcement-request, for the stationmaster this time, “what is that, I want some!”

They ran after him. Rhiow’s fur stood right up all over her in fear. Oh, Gods, look at him, he’s come visible—

Arhu had already dodged around the side of the deli counter and was now behind it, standing on his hind legs, reaching and pawing for the meat that the white-aproned ehhif there was slicing. Pastrami, Rhiow thought, her mouth starting to water as she ran, oh, -what I wouldn’t give for some pastrami at the moment… ! But Arhu couldn’t reach, and succeeded only in snagging the ehhif’s apron. Arhu crouched down, ready to jump up onto the deli counter—

He fell over backward in an utterly comical manner… or so it looked to the big swarthy ehhif, who glanced down to see what had caught in his apron. But the cause was Urruah, who (still sidled) had simply reared up on his hind legs again, grabbed Arhu once more by the scruff of the neck, and thrown himself over backward, so that the two of them fell down in a heap.

The ehhif stared. Arhu struggled, his legs waving around wildly, until he realized that he wasn’t going anywhere and that (to judge by the soft but very heartfelt growling noises coming from just behind him) he would be truncating his present life by trying to. The ehhif laughed out loud … as well he might have at the sight of a young and apparently very uncoordinated cat, lying on his back and kicking like a crab.

“Arhu!” Rhiow hissed at him. “Get out of there!”

Urruah let Arhu go, looking blackest murder at him. Arhu righted himself, shook himself all over, looked with desperate longing at the meat, and then at Urruah, and slunk back around the deli counter.

Urruah came close behind him. Rhiow thought for a moment, then came unsidled, and sat down against the wall as Urruah shouldered Arhu out into the concourse again, out of the ehhif’s direct view. He craned his neck to try to see where Arhu had gone, and couldn’t; then went back to his work, chuckling.

Urruah sat down between Arhu and the deli counter, and glanced over at Rhiow. I’m going to kill him. You know that.

I think you won’t Besides, you’d have to wait your turn, at the moment. “So,” Rhiow said to Arhu, who was on the point of turning around and trying to find another way around the counter. “What was that supposed to be?”

“I’m hungry! Look at all that stuff up there! They’re caching!”

He tried to get around Urruah again. Urruah hunched up his shoulders and narrowed his eyes in a way that suggested Arhu could do this only if he was willing to leave his skin behind.

“Ehhif save food,” Rhiow said. “It’s weird, I know, but they do it. Let it pass for the moment. You’re starting to look like one of those people who has to be taken everywhere twice: the second time, it’s always to apologize. Arhu, stop it and sit down for a moment!!”

“But I want it.”

“So do I, and we’ll have some shortly, but anybody with more than used hiouh-litter between their ears would know not to dance around the way you did! Like a houff, I swear. Anybody would think you’re a stray.” She used auuh, the worst of the numerous words for the concept.

“lama stray,” Arhu said sullenly.

“Not anymore, you’re not. You can be a ragged-eared, scarred-up, shameless, unwashed, thieving, bullying reprobate later in life if you want, or else you can be respectably nonaligned. Just as you please. But right now you’re in-pride, and you’ll behave yourself respectably, or I’ll know why.”

“Oh, yeah?” he spat. “Why?”

Rhiow hit him upside the head, hard, with her claws just barely in, and knocked Arhu flat. The thump was audible some feet away: one or two ehhif passing by glanced over at it.

“That’s why,” she said, as Arhu started to get up, then crouched down to avoid another blow, and glared up at Rhiow, wincing and flat-eared. She held the paw ready, watching him with eyes narrowed. “And don’t flatter yourself to think you can make so much trouble for me that I’ll let you run away from your beatings, either. The Powers sent you to us, and by Iau we’ll keep you and feed you and teach you to know better until you’re past your Ordeal, or of age, or this-life dead: you won’t get away from us any sooner than that.” She glanced around at the others. “Isn’t that so?”

Saash blinked and looked off vaguely in another direction. Urruah yawned, exhibiting every one of his teeth, long, white, and sharp; then he looked lazily at Arhu, and said, “I like the dead part.”

Oh, thank you so much for your help, Rhiow said silently to them both, growling softly. Saash, didn’t you think to get him something to eat, all today?

I was about to, when he started his little stunt with Abad. And then you showed up, and we went straight out, and I assumed you would stop for something, but no, we had to come straight here, by the High Road, no less, and by the time we got near food he was ravenous, and why do you expect him to have behaved otherwise?

Rhiow bristled … and then took a breath and let it out Well, you know, she said, after a moment, you may have something there. So box my ears and call me a squirrel.

Saash looked at her with annoyed affection. Not today. I’m saving up all your beatings to give them to you all at once. Probably kill you.

“What’s a life or two between friends?” Rhiow muttered. “I’m sorry. Now, Arhu, listen to me because you’ve got to get this through your head. We do not go out of our way to attract attention. A wizard’s business is not to be noticed. And it’s not ehhif attention we’re working to avoid! We’ve been doing strange things around them all through their history, and they still haven’t worked out what’s going on. There are much worse things to worry about. Though we work for the Powers That Be, not all the Powers are friendly … and if you carelessly raise your profile high enough to get noticed by one of them in particular, She’ll squash you flatter than road pizza, eat all your nine lives, spit them up like a hairball, and leave you nothing but a voice to howl in the dark with! She is no friend to wizards, or life, or any of the other things you took your Oath to defend. And even if you don’t take your Oath seriously yet, She does … and will, if She catches you.”

He stared at her, ears down, still wide-eyed: not the usual insolent look. Maybe it got through, she thought. I hope so. “So behave yourself,” Rhiow said, “because I’m personally going to see to it that your ears ring from moonrise to sunset until you do. —Meanwhile, we’re not going to linger here; we’ve been visible too long already. But for the Dam’s sweet sake if you have to come out in public and beg, at least do it with some dignity. Watch this.”

She slipped around the counter and strolled through the door over to the open space just beside the big glass counter laden with all the meat and cheese: then she sat down demurely and put her tail about her feet. There she waited.

The big man behind the counter had gone back to the business of making a pastrami and Swiss on rye. Rhiow gazed at him steadily, and when he felt the pressure of her look, she opened her mouth and trilled. It was practically a shout for a cat, but Rhiow knew mat ehhif beard this sound as a small conversational half-purr, not grating or intrusive, but inquisitive and polite. When he looked over at her, Rhiow did it again, stretching her mouth a bit out of shape to approximate the human smile, far more pronounced than a cat’s.

The man looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. Then he shrugged. He glanced from side to side to see whether anyone was watching, then reached down to the pile of pastrami he had already cut, and threw a big slice in Rhiow’s direction.

She was ready for this. In an instant she was up on her hind legs and had caught it in her paws. Then she dropped it, picked it up in her teeth, and trotted around the counter and out with it: not hurried, but businesslike, with her tail up and confident.

Off to one side, Rhiow dropped it for the others to share. The sound of the ehhif’s laughter was still loud behind the counter. “The outside’s got pepper on it: it’s an acquired taste,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “Better just eat the middle. — Now did you see how that went? I picked up that technique from my ehhif: don’t ask me why, but they think it’s hilarious. If I go back, that man will give me more to see me do it again.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Arhu muttered around his mouthful. “You could have just sidled and took it.”

“No, I couldn’t. You can’t take anything but yourself with you when you sidle. If you steal, you do it visibly… and that’s just as it should be.”

“Then you might as well have just taken it anyway. You could have gotten in and out of that glass thing before he knew what had happened.”

“No,” Rhiow said. “For one thing, you’d never be able to come back here and get more: they’d chase you on sight. But more importantly, it’s rude to them.”

“Who cares? They don’t care about us. Why should we care about them?”

The pastrami was gone. “Come on,” Urruah said, glancing around: “let’s get ourselves sidled before the transit cops show up and get on our case.”

They slipped around a corner from the deli and sidled, then started to walk back out toward the concourse. “They do care, some of them,” Saash said.

Arhu hissed softly in scorn. “Yeah? What about all the others? They’ll kick you or kill you for fun. And you can’t tell which kind they are until it’s too late.”

Rhiow and the others exchanged glances over Arhu’s head as they walked. “It’s not their fault,” Urruah said. “They generally don’t know any better. Most ehhif aren’t very well equipped for moral behavior as we understand it.”

“Then they’re just dumb animals,” Arhu said, “and we should take what they’ve got whenever we like.”

“Oh, stop it,” said Rhiow. “Just because we were made before they were doesn’t mean we get to act superior to them.”

“Even if we are?”

She gave him a sidelong look. “Queen Iau made them,” Rhiow said, “even if we’re not sure for what. Ten lives on, maybe we’ll all be told. Meanwhile, we work with them as we find them…” Arhu opened his mouth, and Rhiow said, “No. Later. We have to get moving if we’re going to catch Ehef during his business hours.”

“Who’s Ehef?” Arhu said.

“Our local Senior wizard,” Urruah said. “He’s five lives on, now. This Me alone, he must be, oh, how old, Rhi?”

“A hundred and sixty-odd moons-round,” Rhiow said, “thirteen or so if you do it by suns-round, ehhif-style. Oldish for this life.”

“A hundred and sixty moons?” Arhu goggled. “He’s ancient! Can he walk?’

Urruah burst out laughing. “Oh, please, gods,” he said between laughs, “let him ask Ehef that. Oh please.”

“Come on,” Rhiow said.