Once more Rhiow kept her smile under control, for this kind of precisely applied power play was exactly what she had needed Urruah for. Tom-wizards tended to equate management of their power with management of their maleness: no surprise, since for toms in general all of life was about power and procreation. But it was language Arhu wouldn’t understand until he grew old enough to understand wizardry, and life in general, in terms of hauissh, the power-and-placement game that ran through all feline culture. Rhiow almost smiled at the memory of Har’lh once equating hauissh with an old human strategy-game and referring to it as “cat chess,” but the metaphor was close enough. All cat life was intrinsically ha’hauissheh, or “political” as Har’lh had translated it; and as the saying went, those who did not play hauissh had hauissh played on them, usually to their detriment. As a team manager, Rhiow had long since made her peace with this aspect of the job, and always made sure her own placement in the game was very secure, then directed her attention to placing her team members where they would do the most good, and felt guilty about the manipulation only later, if ever.
“So,” Rhiow said. “Let’s get on with it, young wizard. We usually walk, and you’ll need to learn the various routes before we teach you the faster ways to go.” She stood up. “First route, then: the hardest one, but the one that exposes us least to notice. Can you climb?”
Arhu positively hissed with indignation. Rhiow turned away, for fear the smile would slip right out, and as she passed, Saash lowered her head so that (without seeming to do so on purpose) it bumped against Rhiow’s in passing, their whiskers brushing through one another’s and trembling with shared and secretive hilarity. Oh, Rhi, Saash said silently, were we ever this unbearable?
I was, Rhiow said, and you would have been if you’d had the nerve. Let’s dull his claws a little, shall we?…
The run to Grand Central along the High Road, which normally would have taken the three of them perhaps twenty minutes, took nearly an hour and a half; and the dulling of Arhu’s claws, which Rhiow had intended in strictly the metaphorical sense, happened for real—so that when they finally sat down on the copper-flashed upper cornice of the great peaked roof, looking down at Forty-second, Arhu was bedraggled, shaking, and furious, and Rhiow was heartily sorry she had ever asked him whether he could climb.
He couldn’t. He was one of those cats who seem to have been asleep in the sun somewhere when Queen Iau was giving out the skill, grace, and dexterity: he couldn’t seem to put a paw right. He fell off walls, missed jumps that he should have been able to make with bis eyes closed, and clutched and clung to angled walks that he should have been confident to run straight up and down without trouble. It was a good thing he was so talented at sidling, since (if this performance was anything to judge by) he was the cat Rhiow would choose as most likely to spend the rest of his life using surface streets to get around: a horrible fate. It may change, she thought. This could be something he’ll grow out of. Dear gods, I hope so… Finally she’d said to the others, out loud, “I could use a few minutes to get my breath back,” and she’d sat down on the crest of the terminal roof. It was not her breath Rhiow was concerned about, while Arhu sat there gasping and glaring at the traffic below.
Why is he so clumsy? Urruah said silently as they sat there, letting Arhu calm himself down again. There’s nothing wrong with him physically, nothing wrong with his nerves… they’re the right “age” for the way his body is developing. He was the one of them best talented at feeling the insides of others’ bodies, so Rhiow was inclined to trust his judgment in this regard.
It’s like he can’t see the jump ahead of him, Saash said. There’s nothing wrong with his eyes, is there?
No. Urruah washed one paw idly. Might just be shock left over from last night, and the healing, and everything else that’s happening.
He didn’t look shocky to me in the garage, Rhiow said.
Believe me, Saash said, especially before you got there, shock was the last thing he was exhibiting. This is something of a revelation.
After a few moments, Rhiow got up and walked along the rounded copper plaques of the roofs peak to where Arhu sat staring down at the traffic. “That last part of the climb,” she said as conversationally as she could, “can be a little on the rough side. Thanks for letting me rest”
He gave her a sidelong look, then stared down again at the traffic and the ehhif going about their business on the far side of Forty-second Street, walking through the glare of orange sodium-vapor light. “How far down is it?” he said softly.
It was the first thing Rhiow had heard him say that hadn’t sounded either angry or overly bold. “About fifty lengths, I’d say. Not a fall you’d want…” She looked across the street, watching the cabs on Vanderbilt being released by the change of lights to flow through the intersection into Forty-second. A thought struck her. “Arhu,” she said, “you don’t have trouble with heights, do you?”
He flicked his tail sideways in negation, not taking his eyes off the traffic below. “Only with getting to them,” he said, again so quietly as to be almost inaudible.
“I think the sooner we teach you to walk on air, the better,” Rhiow said. “We’ll start you on that tomorrow.”
He stared at her. “Can you do that? I mean, can I—”
“Yes.”
She sat still a moment, looking down. After a few breaths Saash came up behind, stepping as delicately and effortlessly as usual, and looked over Rhiow’s shoulder at the traffic and at the dark, graceful, sculpted silhouettes that came between them and the orange glow from beneath. “A closer view than you get from the street,” she said to Arhu. “Though you do miss some of the fine detail from this angle.”
“What are they?”
“ ‘Who,’ actually,” Saash said. “Ehhif gods.”
“What’s a god?”
Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another. My, Urruah said silently, we are going to have to start from scratch with this one, aren’t we? … Hope he doesn’t survive to breed. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the next generation.
“Very powerful beings,” said Saash, giving Urruah a look. “Cousins to the Whisperer: they’re all littermates under the One, or so we think. Each species has its own, even ehhif.”
Arhu sniffed at the idea and squinted at the carved figures. “One of them looks like he’s falling asleep.”
“She,” Rhiow said.
“How do you tell?”
Urruah opened his mouth, but Rhiow said, “Some other time. That one’s a queen, Arhu: the other two’re toms.”
“What’s that one got on his head?”
“It’s something ehhif wear,” Saash said; “it’s called a hha’t. But don’t ask me why it’s got wings on it.”
“Symbolic of something,” Rhiow said. “All these carvings are. That middle one is a messenger-god, I believe. The ‘sleepy’ one, she’s got a book; that’s a way ehhif communicate. The other one, he’s probably something to do with the trains. See the wheel?”