“That’s very convenient.”
“It is,” Rhiow said, though privately she thought that what would not be convenient was the headache she would have afterwards. “If you’ll give me a moment to set up the spell, we can get started.”
It was nearly five hours later that she made her way out of Hhuhm’hri’s back garden: the sun was going down, and even the dimming sunset light made Rhiow’s eyes hurt. Her whole head was clanging inside as if someone was banging a cat-food can with a spoon. And I’m ravenous, too, she thought, heading back to the vacant lot into which she had originally gated. Parts or no parts, if I go straight home after this, I’m eating whatever Iaehh gives me.
It had been worth it, though. Her brains felt so crammed full of ehhif political and non-political history of the 1870s that she could barely think: and after a sleep, she would be able to access it through the Knowledge, as if taking counsel with the Whisperer, and sort it for the specific threads and personalities they needed. It helped, too, that Hhuhm’hri’s point of view was such a lucid one, carefully kept clear of uninformed opinion or personal agendas. It had apparently been an article of honor for the long line of Downing Street cats to make sure that the information they passed down the line was reliable and as free from bias as it could be, while still having an essentially feline point of view. They counted themselves as chroniclers, both of public information and of the words spoken in silence behind the closed doors of power, in Downing Street and elsewhere: and they suffered the amused way that ehhif treated them, put up with the cute names and the often condescending attention, for the sake of making sure someone knew the truth about what was going on, and preserved it. Not that there hadn’t been affection involved, as welclass="underline" Hhuhm’hri had been quite close to the Prime Minister before the present one, and Churchill’s affection for the People he lived with had been famous—Rhiow could not get rid of the image of the great ehhif sitting up in bed with a brandy and a cigar, dictating his memoirs and pausing occasionally to growl, “Isn’t that right, Cat Darling?” to the redoubtable orange-striped “Cat’, veteran of the Blitz, who had worked so hard to keep his ehhif’s emotions stable through that terrible time.
They were an unusual group, the Downing Street cats: genuine civil servants, and talented ones. Over the many, many years they had been in residence, they had learned to understand clearly ehhif speech of various kinds—the first “cabinet’ cats, dating back to the pride-ruler Henry VI, had been ehhif-bilingual in English and French—and they were assiduous about training their replacements to make sure the talent wasn’t lost in this most special of the branches of the Civil Service. Not quite wizards, Rhiow thought: though there may be wizardly blood in their line somewhere, or occasional infusions of it from outside -for not all the Downing Street group were related. They were a rrai’theh, a working pride without blood affinities, part of the much larger pride which referred to itself as “the Old Cats’ Network”. Rhiow wondered if, as in other non-wizardly cats, another talent to “spill over” from wizardly stock had been the one for passing through closed doors unnoticed. She suspected it had: in their line of work, such an ability would have been invaluable.
She made her way down to the Tower Hill Underground station with her head still buzzing with Hhuhm’hri’s briefing. It was unnerving, the way thinking about ehhif affairs for four or five hours straight could make you start looking at the world the way they did. Rhiow wasn’t sure she liked it. Oh well … an occupational hazard. But the one word which seemed to have come up most frequently in Hhuhm’hri’s reminiscences was “war”. Try as she might, Rhiow could not understand why ehhif could kill each other in such large numbers for what seemed to her completely useless purposes. Fighting for land to live on, for a territory that would provide food to eat, that she could understand. All People who ran in prides, from the microfelids to the great cats of this world, did the same. But they usually didn’t kill each other: a fight that resulted in the other pride running away was more than sufficient. If they tried to come back, you just drove them away again.
Ehhif, though, seemed not to find this kind of fighting sufficient. What troubled Rhiow most severely was tales of ehhif killing one another in large numbers for the sake of land that was nearly worthless—going to war simply because they had said that a given piece of land was theirs, and some other ehhif had disputed the claim. Or when they went to war for the sake of prestige or injured pride: that was strangest to her of all. And it seemed to her, from what Hhuhm’hri had told her, that the pride-of-prides, which its ehhif called Britain, had gone to war for all these reasons, and for numerous other ones, over the past couple of centuries. Granted, they had done so genuinely to preserve their own people from being killed as welclass="underline" the second of the great conflicts of this century had been one of that kind, and the British had defended themselves with courage and cleverness at least equal to their enemies’. Nevertheless, Rhiow was beginning to think she knew who most likely would have blown up atomic weapons on the Moon in 1875, if they’d had access to them.
And how did they get them? And how can we undo it?
It was going to take time to work that out. At least they had a little time to work with … but not much.
She made her way among the ehhif at the Underground ticket machines and past them, under the gates and down to the platform where the malfunctioning gate and its power source were being held. Hhuhm’hri had told Rhiow that thousands of ehhif had hidden in tunnels and basements near here during the bombings of London in that second great war. That had resolved, for Rhiow, the question of something she had been feeling since she came down here first—a faint buzzing in the walls, as if at the edge of hearing: the ghost-memory in the tunnels and the stones of ehhif not just passing through here, but staying, and sleeping near here in the faintly electric-lit darkness. Their troubled and frightened dreams still saturated the bricks and mortar and tile of the tunnels—and “behind” them, if you were sensitive to such things and you listened very hard, you could just catch the faintest sound of the shudder and rumble of falling bombs. That un-sound, intruding at the very edge of a sensitive’s consciousness, could easily get lost in or confused with the rumble of present-day trains through the stone.
At least I know what it is now, Rhiow thought, making her way to the platform, and jumping up. A relief. I thought I was going a little strange…
Only Urruah and Arhu were there just now. “Luck,” Rhiow said, going over to breathe breaths with Urruah, who was sitting and looking at his timeslide-spell, apparently taking a break after having doing an afternoon’s worth of troubleshooting. The timeslide was presently lying quiescent on the platform floor, in a tangle of barely-seen lines. “How’s it going?”
“Slow,” he said. “I wanted to have another look at the disconnected gate’s logs before I started changing my own settings around.”
“Find anything useful?” Rhiow said, glancing over at Arhu. He was tucked down in “meatloaf” configuration with his eyes half-closed, unmoving.