Arhu flirted his tail in amusement and went on. “Here’s our way down,” Rhiow said as they came to the far side of the floor. “It’s all easy from here.”
A small doorway stood before them, let into the bare bricks of the walclass="underline" the door was shut. Urruah had leaped down beside it and was leaning against it, head to one side as if listening.
“Locked?” Rhiow said.
“Not this time, for a change. I think the new office staff are finally learning.” He looked thoughtfully at the doorknob.
The doorknob turned: the door clicked and swung open, inward. Beyond it was a curtain: Urruah peered through it “Clear,” he said a moment later, and slipped through.
Rhiow and Saash went after him, Arhu followed them. The little office had several desks in it, very standard-issue, banged-up gray metal desks, all littered with paperwork and manuals and computer terminals and piles of computer-printed documentation. More golden light came in from larger windows set at the same height as those out in the roof space.
“Some ehhif who help run the station work here during the ‘weekdays,’ ” Rhiow said to Arhu as they headed for the office’s outer door, “but this is a ‘weekend,’ so there’s no fear we’ll run into them now. We’re seven ‘stories,’ or ehhif-levels, over the main concourse; there’s a stepping-tree, a ‘stairway’ they call it, down to that level. That’s where we’re headed.”
Urruah reared up to touch the outer door with one paw, spoke in a low yowl to the workings in its lock: the door obligingly clicked open with a soft squeal of hinges, letting them out into the top of a narrow cylindrical stairwell lit from above by a single bare bulb set in the white-painted ceiling. The staircase before them was a spiral one, of openwork cast iron, and the spiral was tight. While Saash pushed the door shut again and spoke it locked, Urruah ran on down the stairs two or three at a time, as he usually did, and Rhiow found herself half-hoping (for Arhu’s benefit) that he would take at least one spill down the stairs, as he also usually did. But the Tom was apparently watching over Urruah this evening. Urruah vanished into the dimness below them without incident, leaving Rhiow and Saash pacing behind at a more sedate speed, while behind them came Arhu, cautiously picking his way.
Faint street sounds came to them through the walls as they went, but slowly another complex of sounds became more assertive: rushing, echoing sounds, and soft rumbles more felt than genuinely heard. At one point near the bottom of the stairs, Rhiow paused to look over her shoulder and saw Arhu standing still about hah7 a turn of the stairs above her, his ears twitching; bis tail lashed once, hard, an unsettled gesture.
“It’s like roaring,” he said quietly. “A long way down…”
He’s nervous about getting so close to where he almost came to grief, Rhiow thought. Well, if he’s going to be working with us, he’s just going to have to get used to it… “It does sound that way at first,” she said, “but you’d be surprised how fast you get used to it. And at how many things there are to distract you. Come on…”
He looked down at her, then experimentally jumped a couple of steps down, Urruah-style, caught up with her, and passed her by, bouncing downward from step to step with what looked like a little more confidence.
She followed him. In the dimness below them, she could see a wedge of light spilling across the floor: Urruah had already cracked open the bottom door. Through it, the echoes of the footfalls and voices of ehhif came more strongly.
“Now get sidled,” Saash was saying, “and keep your wits about you: this isn’t like running around under the cars in the garage. Ehhif can move pretty fast, especially when they’re late for a train, and you haven’t lived until you’ve tripped someone and had them drop a few loaded Bloomie’s bags on you.”
Arhu merely looked amused. He had sidled himself between one breath and the next. “I don’t see why we should hide,” he said. “If you take care of this place, like you say, then we have as much right to be here as all of them do.”
’The right, yes,” Rhiow said. “In our law. But not in theirs. And in wizardry, where one species is more vulnerable than the other to having its effectiveness damaged by the conflict of their two cultures, the more powerful or advanced culture gives way graciously. That’s us.”
“That’s not the way People should do it,” Arhu growled as they stepped cautiously out into the Graybar passage, one of the two hallways leading from Lexington Avenue to the concourse. “I don’t know a lot about hauissh yet, but I do know you have to fight to get a good position, or take it, and keep it.”
“Sometimes,” Urruah said. “In the cruder forms of the game … yes. But when you start playing hauissh for real someday, you’ll learn that some of the greatest players win by doing least. I know one master who dominates a whole square block in the West Eighties and never even so much as shows himself through a window: the other People there know his strength so well, they resign every day at the start of play.”
“What land of hauissh is that?” Arhu said, disgusted. “No blood, no glory—”
“No scars,” Urruah said, with a broad smile, looking hard at Arhu.
Arhu looked away, his ears down.
“Last time they counted his descendants,” Urruah added, “there were two hundred prides of them scattered all over the Upper West Side. Don’t take subdued or elegant play as a sign that someone can’t attract the queens.”
They came out into the concourse and paused by the east gallery, looking across the great echoing space glinting with polished beige marble and limestone, and golden with the brass of rails and light fixtures and the great round information desk and clock in the middle. The sound of ehhif footsteps was muted at the moment; there were perhaps only a hundred of them in the Terminal at any given moment now, coming and going from the Sunday evening trains at a leisurely rate. Then even the footstep-clatter was briefly lost in the massive bass note of the Accurist clock.
Arhu looked up and around nervously. “Just a time-message,” Saash said. “Nine hours past high-Eye.”
“Oh. All right. What are all those metal tubes stuck all over everything? And why are all the walls covered with that cloth stuff?”
“They’re renovating,” said Saash. “Putting back old parts of the building that were built over, years ago … getting rid of things that weren’t in the original plans. It should look lovely when they’re done. Right now it just means that the place is going to be noisier than usual for the next couple of years…”
“The worldgates have occasionally gotten misaligned due to the construction work,” Rhiow said. “It means we’ve had to keep an extra close eye on them. Sometimes we have to move a gate’s ‘opening’ end, its portal locus, closer to one platform or away from another. It was the gate by Track Thirty-two, last time: they were installing some kind of air-conditioning equipment on Thirty-two, and we had to move the locus far enough away to keep the ehhif workmen from seeing wizards passing through it, but not so close to any of the other gates’ loci to interfere with them…”
“What would happen if they did interfere?” Arhu said, with just a little too much interest for Rhiow’s liking.
Urruah sped up his pace just enough for Arhu to suddenly look right next to him and see a tom two and a half times his size, and maybe three times his weight. “What would happen if I pushed those big ears of yours down their earholes, and then put my claws far enough down your throat to pull them out that way?” Urruah said in a conversational tone. “I mean, what would be your opinion of that?”