“So,” Rhiow said, “what will they do now?”
“They’ll keep building that big structure down at the end of the Great Lawn; that wasn’t going to be finished until tonight anyway. Tomorrow they’ll do the sound tests and the rest of the rehearsal. The other two toms are fine, so there shouldn’t be any more delays.”
Rhiow washed an ear briefly. “All right,” she said. “We’re going to have to take Arhu out and show him our beat… not that I particularly care to be doing that so soon, but he already knows how to sidle—”
“Whose good idea was that?” Urruah said, narrowing his eyes in annoyance.
“Mine,” Rhiow said, “since you ask. Come on, Urruah! He would have had to learn eventually anyway … and it turns out he’s a quick study. That may save his life, or, if he dies on Ordeal, who knows, it may make the difference between him getting his job done and not getting it done. Which is what counts, isn’t it?”
“Humf,” Urruah said, and looked across the street again at the restaurant. “Chicken…”
“Never mind the chicken. I want you on-site with him for this first evening at least, and as many of the next few evenings as possible. He needs a good male role model so that we can start getting him in shape for whatever’s going to happen to him.” She gave him an approving look. “I just want you to know that I think you’re handling all this very well.”
“I am a professional,” Urruah said, “even if he does make my teeth itch… But something else is on my mind, not just o’hra, as you doubtless believe. That oil spill intervention you mentioned? I heard that they got the authorization for the timeslide they wanted.”
Rhiow bunked at that. “Really? Then why is the spill still on the news? That whole timeline should have ‘healed over’… excised itself. We’re well past the ‘uncertainty period’ for such small change.”
“Something went wrong with it.”
Rhiow put her whiskers back in concern. Timeslides were expensive wizardries, but also fairly simple and straightforward ones: hearing that something had “gone wrong” with a timeslide was like hearing that something had gone wrong with gravity. “Where did you hear about that?”
“Rahiw told me; he heard it from Ehef—he saw him this morning.”
The source was certainly reliable. “Well, the situation’s not a total loss anyway,” Rhiow said. “That tropical storm sure ‘changed course.’ You could tell that was an intervention with your whiskers cut off.”
“Well, of course. But not the intended one. And a failed timeslide…” Urruah’s tail lashed. “Pretty weird, if you ask me.”
“Probably some local problem,” Rhiow said. “Sunspots, for all I know: we’re near the eleven-year maximum. If I talk to Har’lh again this week, I’ll ask him about it.”
“Sunspots,” Urruah said, as if not at all convinced. But he got up, stretched, and the two of them headed back down East Sixty-eighth together.
They wove their way along the sidewalk, taking care to avoid the hurrying pedestrians. As they paused at the corner of Sixty-eighth and Lex, Urruah said, “There he is.”
“Where?”
“The billboard.”
Rhiow tucked herself well in from the corner, right against the wall of the dry cleaner’s there, to look at the billboard on the building across the street. There was a picture on it—one of those flat representations that ehhif used—and some words. Rhiow looked at those first, deciphering them; though the Speech gave her understanding of the words, sometimes the letterings that ehhif used could slow you down. ‘The—three—’ What’s a ‘tenor’?”
“It’s a kind of voice. Fvais, we would say; a little on the high side, but not the highest.”
Rhiow turned her attention to the picture and squinted at it for a good while; there was a trick to seeing these flat representations that ehhif used—you had to look at them just right. When she finally thought she had grasped the meaning of what she saw, she said to Urruah, “So after they sing, are they going to fight?” The word she used was sth’hruiss, suggesting the kind of physical altercation that often broke out when territory or multiple females were at issue.
“No, it’s just hrui’t: voices only, no claws. They do it everywhere they go.”
That made Rhiow stare, and then shake her head till her ears rattled. “Are they a pride? A pride of males? What a weird idea.”
Urruah shook his head. “I don’t know if I understand it myself,” he said. “I think ehhif manage that kind of thing differently … but don’t ask me for details.”
Rhiow was determined not to. “Which one’s your fellow, then? The one who went off voice.”
“The one in the middle.”
“He’s awfully big for an ehhif, isn’t he?”
“Very,” Urruah had said with satisfaction and (Rhiow thought) a touch of envy. “He must have won hundreds of fights. Probably a tremendous success with the shes.”
Rhiow thought that it didn’t look like the kind of “big” that won fights. She had seen pictures of the ehhif-toms who fought for audiences over at Madison Square Garden, and they seemed to carry a lot less weight than this ehhif. However, she supposed you couldn’t always judge by sight. This one might be better with the claws and teeth than he looked.
“So all these ehhif are coming to listen to him in, what is it, three nights from now? Is he that good?”
“He is magnificently loud,” said Urruah, his voice nearly reverent. “You can hear him for miles on a still night, even without artificial aids.”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward, impressed almost against her will. “If I’m free tomorrow,” she said, “maybe I’ll go with you to have a look at this rehearsal.”
“Oh, Rhiow, you’ll love it!” They crossed the street and walked back toward the garage where Saash stayed, and Urruah started telling Rhiow all about ah’rias and ssoh’phraohs and endless other specialized terms and details, and Dam knew what all else, until Rhiow simply began saying “Yes,” and “Isn’t that interesting,” and anything else she could think of, so as not to let on how wildly boring all this was. For me, anyway, she thought. Occasionally, thinking he’d been invited to, or that someone nearby was in the slightest bit interested, Urruah went off on one of these tangents. If you didn’t want to hurt his feelings—and mostly his partners didn’t, knowing how it felt to have a personal passion used as a scratching-post by the uncaring—there was nothing much you could do but nod and listen as politely as you could for as long as you could, then escape: the suddenly discovered need to do houih was usually a good excuse. Rhiow couldn’t do that just now, but once more she found herself thinking that Urruah was a wonderful example of one of a wizard’s most useful traits: the ability to carry around large amounts of potentially useless information for prolonged periods. That, she thought, he’s got in abundance.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said at last, almost grateful to have something else to talk about. “Did you talk to the canine Senior about that houff?”
“Yes,” Urruah said. “Rraah’s going to arrange some kind of accident for him—have him ‘accidentally’ cut loose from the building site, late one night. Apparently he’s got a home waiting for him already.”