“It very well could,” Auhlae said. “She was a tremendous power in her time, though she had very little direct power—compared to some of the pride-leaders who went before her, anyway. Certainly they would have gone to war had she been assassinated, and if they were able to prove that some other pride they knew of had been involved. There was fierce rivalry between them for a long time: the shadows of it remain, though most of the ehhif powers in Europe are supposed to be working together now …”
“Huff,” Rhiow said, “how much do you know about ehhif history of that time? The eighteen seventies, say?”
“Very little,” he said. “It’s hardly my speciality: like most of us, if I need to know something I go to the Whispering.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “But you know,” he said, “there are People for whom it is a speciality. And they don’t live far from here. In fact, there’s one in particular who’s famous for it. He used to live at Whitehall, but now he’s out in the suburbs. You should go to see him. I’ll show you the coordinates, and you can lay them into one of the other gates.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” Rhiow said. “Would he be available today, do you think?”
“More than likely. Probably your best bet is simply to go out there and meet with him.”
“All right. What’s his name?”
“Humphrey.”
Rhiow blinked. “That’s not a Person’s name …”
“It is now,” Huff said, amused. “Wait till you meet him.”
“Meanwhile, I think the rest of us will be minding the other gates,” Fhrio said, “and watching to see if they start betraying any sign of instability. If they start acting up, we’ll know we have less time to deal with our troubles than we thought.”
Rhiow nodded. “And as for the rest of it,” she said, “we’ll meet again when it’s dark, and see who’s best sharpened their claws on the problem before us.”
The others agreed, then got up and shook themselves, preparatory to heading off in their various directions.
“Now look at this,” Arhu said, crouched down again, and oblivious. “ ‘Princess Christiana of Schleswig-Holstein visited His Majesty and remained to lunch—’ ”
Urruah looked up. “Does it say what they had?” he said, coming to gaze at the paper over Arhu’s shoulder.
Rhiow glanced over at Huff and wandered over to him. “You look tired,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m well enough,” he said. “Rhiow, we’re all too old for this! Except for them—” and he indicated Arhu, and off on the other side of the room, already heading for the back door, Siffha’h. “But no matter … we’ll cope.” He sighed, looked at her, as Auhlae came wandering over and laid her tail gently over his back. “It’s just hard, sometimes, discovering that after a long period of steady and not terribly dangerous work, your reward for getting it right is that you get to save the universe …” His look was dry.
“It’s always dangerous to demonstrate talent,” Auhlae said. “Least of all to Them. But that’s our job: we accepted it when it was offered us .… and what can we do now?”
“Do it the best we can,” Rhiow said. “There’s nothing else.” She rubbed cheeks with Huff, when he offered, and did the same, a little more tentatively, with Auhlae. The two of them headed off toward the front of the pub: and Rhiow made her way out toward the back, and the cat-door, thinking thoughts of quiet desperation … but determined not to give in to them.
Half an hour or so later, Rhiow was padding down a street in one of the northern suburbs of London, looking for a specific house in one small street. She had a description of the house, and a name for a Person: or rather, that peculiar ehhif nickname which Huff had given her. According to the Knowledge, the nickname (bizarrely) came from an ehhif television show, and was a reference to an astute but extremely twisty-minded politician. Rhiow was uncertain whether any Person, no matter how jovial, would really want to be called by such a name.
She found the house, at last. It was actually bumped sideways into another house, in a configuration which the ehhif here called “semidetached.” There was a narrow wall of decorative concrete blocks about four feet high separating the two houses’ front yards and driveways. Rhiow jumped up onto this and made her way back to where it met another wall, taller, one which divided the houses’ two back gardens from one another. This was actually less a wall than a series of screens of interwoven wood, fastened end to end. Rhiow jumped up onto the nearest of them and paced along it and the subsequent screens carefully, looking down on the left-hand side, as she had been instructed.
The right-hand garden was less a garden than a tangle of weeds and rosebushes run amuck. The left-hand one, though, had a lawn with stepping-stones in it, and carefully trimmed shrubs, and small trees making a shady place down at the far end. There was a birdbath standing in the shade, but no bird was fool enough to use it: for lying near the birdbath, upside down in the sun, was a black-and-white Person with long fluffy fur.
Rhiow paused there for a moment looking at him as he dozed, wondering how to proceed. From a tree nearby, a small bird appeared, perched on a nearby branch, and began yelling, “Cat! Cat! Cat!’ at Rhiow.
She rolled her eyes. One of the great annoyances associated with becoming a wizard was, oddly, identical with one of its great joys: learning enough of the Speech to readily understand the creatures around her. It was very hard to eat, with a clean conscience, anything you could talk to and get an intelligible answer back. “In your case, though,” she said to the small bird, “I’m willing to make an exception …”
Except that she wasn’t, really. Rhiow sighed and turned her attention away from the bird, to find that the black-and-white Person’s eyes had opened, at least partially, and he was looking at her, upside down.
“Hunt’s luck to you!’ she said. “I’m on errantry, and I greet you.”
He looked at her curiously, and rolled over so that he was right side up again. “You’re a long way from home, by your accent,” he said. “Come on down, make yourself comfortable.”
Rhiow jumped down form the wall and walked over to the respectable-looking Person, breathed breaths with him, and then said, “Please forgive me: I don’t know quite what to call you …”
“Which means you know the nickname,” he said, and put his whiskers forward. “Go ahead and use it: everyone else does, at this point, and there’s no real point in me trying to avoid it.”
“Hhuhm’hri, then. I’m Rhiow.”
“Hunt’s luck to you, Rhiow, and welcome to London. What brings you all this way?”
She sat down and explained, trying to keep the explanation brief and non-technical. But Hhuhm’hri was nodding a long time before she finished, and Rhiow realized that this was one of the more acute People she had met in a while, with a quick and deep grasp of issues for all his slightly ditzy, wide-eyed looks.