This little street ran parallel to the river inside the main outer wall. To the left, as Arhu went, was another wall studded down its length with several broad circular towers: this ran on for about an eighth of a mile, to where the outer wall came to a corner and bent leftwards. The stones in the left-hand wall were mostly rounded, as if they had come out of a river, but some had been cut down roughly into squarish shape, and they looked and smelled ancient. From them, as Rhiow had from the bricks and stones of the Underground, Arhu caught a faint sense of much contact with ehhif, but the flavor was strange, a compendium of old, faded triumph, and equally old abject fear. Arhu paused for a moment, feeling it on his fur, feeling it especially strongly from the right side where he passed a latticework gateway of metal that let out onto an archway leading down to the river. Traitor’s Gate, the Whispering said in his mind: and just briefly, as he did then, Rhiow saw, in a flicker, the way Arhu saw with the Eye.
A flicker, there and gone. Ehhif standing up, ehhif lying down and being brought up to the gate in boats, ehhif dying and in fear of dying coming in, ehhif dead going out: queen-ehhif and tom-ehhif, proud, dejected, defiant, afraid, bitter, reluctant, confident, desperate: plots and schemes, offended innocence, furious determination, all rolled together in a moment of vision, all spread out over long years of history, circumstance, and confusion; the conflicting needs and desires, the long-planned machinations of the powerful and the requirements of the moment, terror-horror-resignation-life-death-brightness-sickness-cold-blood-release-darkness—
—gone. The Eye closed, and Arhu stood and shook his head, trying to clear it: and an ehhif, not seeing him since he was sidled, tripped over Arhu, caught himself, and went on, looking behind him to try to see the cobblestone he thought he had stumbled on.
“Ow ow ow ow,” Arhu spat, and took himself over to the left-hand wall to recover himself a little. From inside the left-hand wall came a harsh cawing, a little like ehhif laughter, as if someone thought it was funny.
While he stood there and panted, Rhiow shivered all over at the thought of the burden Arhu was bearing. Better him than me, she said, somewhat ungraciously, to the Whisperer. The vision Arhu had been trying to describe to her turned out to be more like half-vision, and all the more maddening for it. For Arhu was looking, just briefly, through the eyes of Someone Who saw everything in the world as whole and seamless: thoughts, actions, past causes and present effects, the concrete and the abstract all welded into a single staggering completion. Rhiow understood a little of Arhu’s confusion and anger now, for trying to extract one piece of information from the all-surrounding vastness of the Whisperer’s perception seemed impossible, like trying to fish one drop of water out of your water bowl with your claw. You would always get a little bit of something else along with it: or a lot of something else. Rhiow thought with embarrassment of the facile way she had been telling him to concentrate, and grab hold of one part of it…
More, she now understood much better his confusion about tenses: for in the Whisperer’s mind, the world was finished, a made thing, a completed thing … though one that was constantly changing. It was a harrowing point of view for a Person to try to assimilate, or for any mortal being who lived in linear time and generally thought that one thing happened after another, and that the future was still indeterminate. It was not, to Her. The Whisperer, in Her mastery, saw it all laid out. The only place where Her uncertainties lay was in what you would do to change the future … in which case everything you did also became part of the ongoing completion, a law of the universe, as if it had been laid down so from the very beginning. The two visions of the future did not exclude one another, from Her point of view: they actually complemented one another, and made sense. To Rhiow, that was the most frightening concept of all.
She breathed out, wondering how she would apologize to Arhu for so completely misunderstanding what he had been dealing with, while Arhu got back his breath and his composure, and headed on down Water Lane again. Just across from Traitor’s Gate was an opening into the central part of the Tower complex, through a building called the Bloody Tower. He went under this archway as well, and turned immediately left.
Built into the wall here was a house with many long peaked roofs, the Queen’s House: and in front of it were arches with iron bars set in them. Behind those arches were some low, wizened trees and shrubs … and in the trees, and under at least one of the shrubs, sat the ravens.
Arhu had known they would be large, but he hadn’t thought they would be as large as a Person. Most of them were, though, and at least one of them which perched on that stone wall, above the bars, was as big as Huff: as big as a small houff. They were all resplendently glossy black, and they looked down at him and, to Arhu’s astonishment, saw him perfectly well, even though he was sidled.
“Look,” one of them said. “A kitty.”
“Oh, shut up, Cedric,” said another of them. “You had breakfast.”
Arhu licked his nose and sat down, trying to preserve some dignity in the face of so many small, black, intelligent, completely unafraid eyes staring at him. “I, uh, I’m on errantry. Hi,” Arhu said.
“And we greet you too, young wizard,” said one of the ravens. There was a muffled noise of cawing from the far side of Tower Green: Arhu looked over his shoulder.
“How many of you are there here?” he said. “Should I go over and say hi to them too?”
“No, they’re minding their territories at the moment,” said the raven. “After all, the place is full of tourists. Later in the day, when the warders chuck them all out and lock the place up, we can all get together in the quiet and the dark and have a chat. Meanwhile, anything you say to me, they’ll know. They can see it, after all.”
“I’m sorry,” Arhu said, “but I don’t know what to call you. There are ehhif names on the sign over there, but—”
“No, it’s all right: we use their names,” said the biggest of the ravens. “It’s a courtesy to them, and from them: they’ve made us officers in their army, after all.” She chuckled. “Even if we’re only noncoms. So I’m ‘Hugin’, and that’s ‘Hardy’.” She pointed with her beak at the raven sitting below her. “We have other names that we tell to no one, that come down from the Old Ones … but we can’t give you those. Sorry.”
“Uh, it’s OK. But look, is it right what the sign says, over there? That the ehhif think this place would ‘fall’ without you? Fall down?”
“Cease to exist,” said Hugin.
“Of course the place would fall without us,” said another of the ravens. “We’ve always been here. It doesn’t know how to be here without us.”
“How long is always?” Arhu said.
“How long does it have to be?” Hardy said. He was a little thinner than the others, a little smaller, which might have been deceptive: but the eye, that black, wise eye, seemed to say that this was the eldest of them. “Since there were buildings. And before that: since there were humans, what you call ehhif. We saw your People come, too: we saw them go, when the city first was burned … We stayed, and the dead … no others.”