“Don’t know how good it is,” Urruah said, “but it’s what She specified. She may have spoken to them already. Ah hah, here he comes.”
The small black-and-white form came trotting insouciantly down the platform, not even sidled. “Arhu,” Rhiow said as he came up to them, “come on. You know how they are about cats in here—”
“Not about cats they can’t find,” Arhu said, licking his chops, and sidled. Rhiow sighed, leaned over and breathed breaths with him: and she blinked. “Sweet Iau in a basket, what’s that?”
“Chilli pickle.”
Rhiow turned to Urruah. “You have created a monster,” she said.
Urruah laughed out loud. “Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first.”
“Yes, but you encourage him all the time, and—”
“Hey, come on, Rhi, it’s good,” Arhu said. “The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke.” Arhu grinned. “Now the joke’s on him: I like it. But he’s good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chillies for him the other day. He thinks it’s cooclass="underline" he makes other people come and see me eat it.”
“Not the transit police, I hope,” Rhiow said.
“Naah. I wouldn’t go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they’re down on the tracks,” Arhu said.
Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary. “All right. Are you ready?”
“I was ready an hour before you got here.”
“So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: you did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let’s go.”
Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side-effect of the patency.
“Go ahead,” Arhu said. Urruah, already sidled, leapt through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.
The darkness stripped away behind her as she leapt through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, more busy, one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, and ehhif were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate which led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on to another expanse of cobblestones which sloped down toward the river.
As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him, and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.
“That’s our tripwire,” Arhu said. “Pull it and it activates the gate to open again.”
“And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we’re gone?” Rhiow said.
Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself. “It won’t interfere … the gate proper’s back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string of the selective-memory ‘woof’.”
“Very good,” Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.
They looked around them for a few moments more in the sun. It was a breezy morning: clouds raced by, their shadows patterning the silver river with gray and adding new shades to the gray-brown-silver dazzle-painting of the battleship which was moored on the other side of the river. Arhu had no eyes for that, though, or for the traffic, or the ehhif passing them by. He was looking at the stone walls of the Tower, and his ears were back.
“It’s old here,” Arhu said. His ears went forward, and then back again, and kept doing that, as if he was was trying to listen to a lot of things at once … things that made him nervous.
“It’s old in New York, too,” Urruah said.
“Yeah, but not like this …”
“It’s the ehhif,” Rhiow said. “They’ve been here so long … first thousands, then hundreds of thousands of them, then millions, all denning on the two sides of this river. A thousand years now, and more …”
“There’s more to it than that,” Arhu said. He was staring at the Tower. “I smell blood …”
“Yes,” said a big deep voice behind them. “So do we …”
They turned in some surprise, for he had come up behind them very quietly, even for a Person. Rhiow, taking him in at first glance, decided that she should revise her ideas about bigger cats being needed in the world: they were already here. This was without any question one of the biggest cats she had ever seen, not to mention the fluffiest. His fur, mostly black on his back, shaded to a blended silver-brown and then to white on his underparts, with four white feet and a white bib making the dark colors more striking. He had a broad, slightly tabby-striped face with surprisingly delicate-looking slanted green eyes in it, and a nose with a smudge: the splendid plume of gray-black tail held up confidently behind him looked a third the thickness of his body, which was considerable. If this Person was lacking for anything, it wasn’t food.
“We are on errantry,” Rhiow said, “and we greet you.”
“Well met on the errand,” said the Person. “I’m Huff: I lead the London gating team. And you would be Rhiow?”
“So I would. Hunt’s luck to you, cousin.” They bumped noses in meeting-courtesy. “And here is Urruah, my older teammate: and Arhu, who’s just joined us.”
Noses were bumped all around: Arhu was a little hesitant about it at first. “I won’t bite,” Huff said, and indeed it seemed unlikely. Rhiow got an almost immediate impression from him that this was one of those jovial and easy-going souls who regret biting even mice.
“I’m sorry to meet you without the rest of the team,” Huff said, “but we had another emergency this morning, and they’re in the middle of handling it. I’ll bring you down to them, if you’ll come with me. Anyway, I thought you might like to see something of the “outside” of the gating complex before we got down into the heart of the trouble.”
“It’s good of you,” Urruah said, falling into step on one side of him, Rhiow pacing along on the other: Arhu brought up the rear, still looking thoughtfully at the Tower. “Did I see right from the history in the Whispering, that the gates actually used to be above ground here, and were relocated?”
“That’s right,” Huff said as he plodded along. He led Rhiow and her team through an iron gate in a nearby hedge, and down onto a sunken paved walk which made its way behind that hedge around the busy-street side of the Tower, and into an underpass leading away under that street. “See this grassy area over to the right, the other side of the railings? That was the moat … but much earlier, before the Imperial people were here, it was a swamp with a cave nearby that led into the old hillside. That was where the first gate formed, when this was just a village of a few mud-and-wattle huts.”
“How come a gate spawned here, then,” Arhu said, “if there were so few ehhif around?”