Rhiow sighed with the sheer pleasure of having had a good night’s sleep: it was rare enough, in her business. She got up and ate, then washed at leisure, and went out to use the box: and finally she checked the security spell on the apartment’s door before heading downtown to Grand Central again.
Arhu was there early again, sitting in front of the gate. It was patent, showing the view down toward the Thames from near the main entrance to the Tower, and shedding a cool blue light around him. “Luck, Arhu,” she said, jumping up onto the platform. “Where’s Urruah?”
“He went through already,” Arhu said, watching a barge full of ehhif tourists loading up at the dock near HMS Belfast for a tour down the river. “Wanted to go over early to get the timeslide set up with Fhrio: and he wanted to make sure the two Samnaun-based transfer gates were in place and working without messing everything else up.”
Rhiow waved her tail slowly in acknowledgment, looking at the serene vista. It was a sunny morning over there: she had seen few of those so far. “Before we go—’ she said.
“I’m not going to die of it,” Arhu said, “so don’t worry.”
Rhiow blinked. “Die of what?”
“You know. Siffha’h,” he said, though his voice was so mournful that Rhiow wondered if perhaps he wasn’t all that sure of the outcome.
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask you,” she said, taking a swipe at his left ear, and missing entirely: Arhu ducked without even looking. “You are getting good at that,” Rhiow added, unable to conceal slight admiration.
“I don’t like pain,” Arhu said. “It hurts.”
Which is why it’s such an effective teaching medium for kittens, Rhiow thought, not least among them you. “What I was going to ask you,” she said, “was whether you had had any further insights into what was going to happen on this run.”
His tail lashed. “Nothing that I can describe,” Arhu said. “I keep getting flashes … but they slip away. Believe me, Rhiow, if I see anything that I can describe—then or afterwards—I’ll tell you. But it doesn’t always come that way. I keep getting stuff that just pops out without warning, and before I can get hold of it to see what it means, it’s gone and taken all the—the meanings, the—”
“Context?”
“Yeah, the context—it all just goes. While the context’s there, everything makes sense—but when I lose that …” He sighed. “It’s really frustrating. It makes me want to hit things.”
“Don’t be tempted,” Rhiow said, thinking of Fhrio.
Arhu laughed out loud. “I wouldn’t bother. For one thing, beating him up wouldn’t be any big deal, and for another, it’s not exactly polite, is it?”
She blinked again. Rhiow couldn’t think if she had ever before heard Arhu use the word. If this is the kind of effect that having a crush is going to have on him, she thought, I’m all for it, even if it makes him ache a little…
“So are you ready?” Arhu said.
“By all means, let’s go,” said Rhiow. They stepped through into the bright London day, and Arhu shut the worldgate behind them. There by the Tower entrance, the two of them sidled. They made their way among the unseeing tourists down into the Tower Hill Underground station, and down to the passages leading to the platform where the London team had confined their unruly worldgate.
The spot was busy, though not so much with wizards as with equipment. The malfunctioning gate itself was disconnected from its power source, only visible to Rhiow as the thinnest ghost oval traced in the air, like a structure woven of smoke. The “catenary”, the insubstantial power conduit which was finally rooted in the Old Downside and which normally served this gate, lay coiling along the floor like some bright serpent: the end of it which would normally have terminated in the gate was now faired into a glowing new spell-circle which had been traced on the floor. If the last one had looked like vines twining amongst one another, this one looked more like a circular hedge. It was complex, for Rhiow could see that Urruah, rather than using specific physical objects to twist local space into the shapes he required, was using the spell structure itself. The “hedge” blazed and flowed with multicolored fire, the radiance of it stuttering here and there as one spell subroutine or another came active, did its job, and deactivated itself. Urruah was pacing around the diagram, checking his spelling, while Fhrio crouched nearby and inspected the connection of the catenary to the diagram: off to one side, Auhlae was sitting with her tail neatly tucked about her forefeet, watching him work.
“Go check your name in that,” Rhiow said to Arhu. He went straight over to the spell to do it. There were few such important aspects of spelling as to make sure you were correctly named in a “written’ spell. Like all the other sciences, wizardry always works: a wizard whose “written” name specified a different nature than the usual in a given spell would come out of that spell changed … and not always in ways he or she would prefer.
Rhiow turned her attention briefly to the other gate which was hanging at one end of the platform, shimmering in the darkness. This was one of the “transfer” gates which would be taking some of the pressure off the London complex while the malfunctioning gate structure was completely offline. A transiting wizard using one of the London gates would now find themselves briefly under the peak of Muottas Muragl, at the “restored” prehistoric gating facility at Samnaun in the Alps, before finishing at their intended destination. It would be a slight inconvenience: but Rhiow couldn’t believe any wizard in her right mind would grudge the momentary view out of the great transverse crevasse and down the side of the mountain … and the skiiers above would never notice.
“Luck, Fhrio,” Rhiow said, as she walked over to him. “Everything working satisfactorily?”
“Insofar as anything can be ‘satisfactory’ when it’s all ripped up like this,” Fhrio said, “yes.” For once he sounded merely tired rather than actively quarrelsome.
“You were up all night,” Rhiow said.
“Yes I was,” said Fhrio, and gave her a glance as if looking to see whether she was mocking him.
All Rhiow could do, hoping he wouldn’t misunderstand the gesture, was lower her head and bump his briefly. “I appreciate the effort,” she said: “we all do.” And she moved away before either of them would have a chance to be embarrassed.
She went over to the timeslide spell to have a look at her own name, checking the arabesques and curls of it in the graphic form of the Speech as it and the “personality” stratum to which it was attached wove in and out among the power-management routines and the “entasis” structures which controlled how tightly spacetime was bent back on itself. Everything looked all right, though she checked again just to be certain: she was not about to forget one spell some years ago, worked in haste by Urruah, which had been perfect in ninety-nine per cent of its detail, but in which he had changed the sign on one minor symbol. The spell would have worked all right, but Rhiow would have exited it pure white, blue-eyed, and possibly deaf. She had been teasing Urruah about that one for a long time, but—judging by the intent look on his face—today might not be the best time to do it.
Auhlae got up and came over to greet Rhiow: they breathed breaths for a moment. “Oh, Auhlae,” Rhiow said, “more sausages—I don’t know how you cope with all this rich food. I’d be the size of a houff by now.”
Auhlae put her whiskers forward. “I control myself mostly,” she said, “but since things started to misbehave, my appetite’s been raging … and I confess I’ve been humoring it. I can always eat grass for a few days, later on …”