“There has to be more to it than just that, though,” Urruah said. “Someone involved in the construction has to have known what this was going to be, besides just a place where the trains come and go. It can’t just be coincidence that the Lord of Birds is shown there at the center of it all; they’ve always been the symbols of speed in getting around, especially of nonphysical travel. And then that one there, the queen, has the Manual, and the one in the middle has the stick with the Wise Ones wound around it: the emblem of what’s below, in the Downside, under the roots of the worldgates. There have to have been wizards on the building’s design team.”
“I’ll leave it to you to conduct some research on the subject,” Rhiow said “But there was wizardry enough about the place’s building, even at the merely physical leveclass="underline" it never shut down, even when the construction was heaviest. Eight hundred trains came and went each day, and some of them may have been late, but they never stopped… and neither did other kinds of transit. Speaking of which, let’s get on with our own business. We’re running late.”
She walked on down the roof-cornice, taking her time. “All very scenic,” she said casually to Urruah, “but tomorrow we’ll take the Low Road, all right?”
“The Queen’s voice purrs from your throat, oh most senior of us all,” Urruah said, following her at a respectable distance. She didn’t look at him, but she twitched one ear back and thought, I’m going to take this out of your hide eventually, O smart-mouthed one. Don’t give him ideas. And don’t make fun of his ignorance. It’s not his fault he has no education, and it’s our job to see that he gets one.
I would say, Urruah said with a silent wrinkling of his whiskers, that we have our job cut out for us.
Rhiow kept walking toward the end of the roof. “There’s an opening down here,” she said to Arhu as they went. “It’s a little tricky to get through, but once in, everything else is easy. How much other experience have you had with buildings?”
He shrugged. “Today.”
She nodded. He was young and inexperienced enough not even to have the usual cat-reference, which likened buildings to dens, or in the case of the taller ones, to trees hollowed out inside. Rhiow had always been a little amused by this, knowing what trees the city buildings were echoes of. She’d occasionally heard humans refer to the city as a jungle: that made her laugh, too, for she knew the real “jungle,” ancient and perilous, of which the shadowy streets were only a reflection.
“Well, you’re going to start picking up more experience fast,” she said. “This is one of the biggest buildings in this city, though not the tallest. If you laid the almost-tallest building on the island—see that one, the great spike with the colored lights around the top?—yes, that one—laid it down on its side and half-buried it as the Terminal’s buried, then this would still be larger than that. There are a hundred thousand dens in it, from the roof to the deepest-dug den under the streets, at the track levels. But we’ll start at the top, tonight. The path we’ll take leads under this roof-crest where we’re walking, to the substructure over the building’s inner roof. You said you came through the main concourse … did you look up and see blue, a blue like the sky, high up?”
Arhu stopped well clear of the edge of the roof, which they were nearing, and thought a moment. “Yes. There were lights in it. They were backwards…”
His eyes looked oddly unfocused. The height bothers him, Rhiow thought, no matter what he says… And then she changed her mind, for his eyes snapped back to what seemed normalcy. Well, never mind. A trick of the light…
“Backwards,” though. “Saw that, did you?” she said, which was another slight cause for surprise. “Very perceptive of you. Well, we’ll be walking above that: it’s all a built thing, and you’ll see the bones of it. Come here to the edge now and look down. See the hole?”
He saw it: she saw his tongue go in and out, touching his nose in fright, and heard him swallow.
“Right. That’s what I thought the first time. It’s easier than it looks. There’s just a tiny step under it, where the brick juts out. Stretch down, put your right forepaw down on that, turn around hard, and put yourself straight in through the hole. Urruah?”
“Like this,” Urruah said, slipping between them, and poured himself straight over the edge into the dark. Arhu watched him find the foothold, twist, and vanish into the little square hole among the bricks.
“Do that,” Rhiow said. “I’ll spot for you. You won’t falclass="underline" I promise.”
Arhu stared at her. “How can you be sure?”
Rhiow didn’t answer him, just gazed back. Sooner or later there was always a test of trust among team-working wizards—the sooner, the better. Demonstrations that the trust was well-founded never helped at this stage: start giving such proofs and you would soon find yourself handicapped by the need to provide them all the time. She kept her silence and spoke inwardly to the air under the little “step” of outward-jutting brick, naming the square footage of air that she needed to be solid for this little while—just in case. Arhu looked away, after a moment, and gingerly, foot by foot, started draping himself over the edge of the cornice, stretching and feeling with his forefeet for the step.
He found it, fumbled, staggered— Rhiow caught her breath and got ready to say the word that would harden the air below. But somehow Arhu managed to recover himself, and turned and writhed or fell through the hole. A scrabbling noise followed, and a thump.
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other, waiting, but mercifully there was no sound of laughter from Urruah. They went down after Arhu.
Inside the hole, they found Arhu sitting on the rough plank flooring that ran to the roofs edge underneath the peak, and washing his face in a very sincere bout of composure-grooming. A line of narrow horizontal windows, faintly orange-yellow with upward-reflected light from the street, ran down both sides of the roof, about six feet below its peak, and northward toward Lexington. From below those windows, thick metal supporting beams ran up to the peak and across the width of the room, and a long plank-floored gallery ran along one side, made for ehhif to walk on.
Cats needed no such conveniences. Urruah was already strolling away down the long supporting beam at just below window-level, the golden light turning his silver-gray markings to an unaccustomed marmalade shade.
Arhu finished his he’ihh and looked down the length of the huge attic. “See the planks under the beams and joists there?” Rhiow said. “On the other side of them is the sky-painting that the ehhif artist did all those years ago, to look like the summer sky above a sea a long way from here. The painting’s trapped, though: when they renovated the station some years back, they glued another surface all over the original painting, bored new holes for the stars, and did the whole thing over again.”
Arhu looked at Rhiow oddly. “But they had one there already!”
“It faded,” Saash said, shrugging her tail. “Seems like that bothered them, even though the real sky fades every day. Ehhif… go figure them.”
“Come on,” Rhiow said. They walked along the planks, ducking under the metal joists and beams every now and then, and Arhu looked with interest at the corded wires and cables reaching across the inside of the roof. “For the light bulbs,” Saash said. “The walking-gallery is so that, when one of the brighter stars burns out, the ehhif can come up here and replace it.”