The four of them crossed with care in the lull between red lights, and Arhu stood looking up the big flight of steps, and from one side to the other, at the massive shapes of the two lions carved out of the pale pink Tennessee marble. Feral Arhu might have been, but no cat with brains enough to think could have failed to recognize the two huge, silent figures as images of relatives.
“Who are they?” Arhu said.
“Gods,” Urruah said pointedly. “Some of ours.”
Rhiow smiled. “They’re Sef and Hhu’au,” she said, “the lion-Powers of Yesterday and Today.”
Arhu stared. “Are they real?”
Saash smiled slightly. “If you mean, do they exist? Yes. If you mean, do they walk around looking like that? No,” Saash said. “But they’re like that. Big, and powerful… and predatory, each in his or her own way. They stand for the barriers between what was, which we can’t affect, and what will be—which we can, but only by what we do in the present moment.”
“Except if you get access to a timeslide,” Urruah said, “when you can go back in time and—”
“Urruah,” Rhiow said, glaring at him, “go eat something, or do something useful with that mouth, all right?” To Arhu she said, “We do not tamper with time without authorization from Them, from the Powers That Be. And even They don’t do it lightly. You can destroy a whole world if you’re not careful or else you can wipe yourself out of existence, which tends to have the same effect at the personal level even if you’re lucky enough not to have caused everyone else not to have existed as well. So don’t even think about it. And you’ll find,” she added, as the smug we’ll-see-about-that expression settled itself over Arhu’s face, “when you ask the One Who Whispers for details on time travel anyway, that you won’t be given that information, no matter how you wheedle. If you press Her on the subject, your ears will ring for days. But don’t take my word for it. Go ahead and ask.”
Arhu’s face went a little less smug as he looked from Saash to Urruah and saw their knowing grins: especially Urruah’s, which had a little too much anticipation in it. Rhiow looked sidewise at Saash. This “heavy-pawed dam” role isn’t one I ever imagined myself in, Rhiow said silently. And I’m not sure I like it…
Saash glanced at her, a little amused. You’re betraying a natural talent, though…
Thanks loads.
“If they’re Yesterday and Today,” Arhu said, “then where’s Tomorrow?”
“Invisible,” Urruah said. “Hard to make an image of something that hasn’t happened yet. But he’s there, Reh-t is, whether you see him or not. Like all the best predators, you never see him till it’s much too late. Walk right through him, feel the chilclass="underline" he’s there.”
Arhu stared at the empty space between the two statues, and shivered. It was a little odd. Rhiow looked at him in mild concern for a moment.
They went in, trotting up the stairs and weaving to avoid the ehhif. Arhu kept well over to the right side, skirting the pedestal of Sef’s statue. You scared the child, Rhiow said to Urruah.
It’s good for him, Urruah said, untroubled. He can use some scaring, if you ask me.
They came up to the top of the steps, and Rhiow took a moment to coach Arhu in how to handle the revolving door. Inside the polished brass doors, they stood for a moment, looking up at the great entrance hall, all resplendent in its white marble staircases. Then Rhiow said, “Come on, this way…” and led them off to the left, under the staircase and the second-floor gallery, and past the green travertine marble doorway that opened into the writers’ room; then right, around the corner to a door adorned with a sign reading staff only, and an arrow pointing down with the word
Arhu sniffed the air appreciatively. “Don’t get any ideas,” Urruah growled, “that’s today’s lunch you’re smelling, and it’s long eaten.”
Rhiow heard his stomach growl, and carefully didn’t chuckle out loud. She reared up and pushed the door open: outside of opening hours, it wasn’t locked. It leaned inward with the usual squeak, and they trotted in and up the stairs to the central level of the stacks.
When they were out of the stairwell, Arhu loped over to the edge of the inner stack corridor and looked down through the railings. “Wow,” he said, “what is all this stuff?”
“Knowledge,” Rhiow said, stepping up beside him and looking up at the skylights and four stories of books, and down at three stories more: four and a half miles of shelving, here and in the tunneled-out space under Bryant Park, pierced here and there by the several staircases that allowed access between levels, and the selective retrieval system that moved between levels, its vertical conveyor arms picking up books that had been called for and dropping off books to be returned. It was the genius of this building, its arrangement in such a way as to hide this great mass of shelf space—so that even when you knew it was here, it was always a shock to see it, as much cubic space as would be in a good-sized apartment building, and not an inch of it wasted.
In the center of it all, on the level at which they had entered, was a large pitlike area filled with desks and carrels, with a wide wooden-arched opening off to one side. Right now this opening, where ehhif would come from the main reading room on the side to pick up books, was shuttered and locked, in case thieves should somehow get in through the great reading room windows by night and try to steal books for collectors. The rarest books were all now up in little wood-paneled, iron-grilled jails in the Special Collections, second-floor front, isolated from the main reference stacks by thick concrete walls and alarm systems. Ehef had told Rhiow once that you could hear the books whispering to each other in the dark through the trefoil-pierced gratings, in a tiny rustling of page chafing against page, prisoners waiting for release. Rhiow had come away wondering whether he had been teasing her. Wizards do not lie: words are their tool and currency, which they dare not devalue. But even wizardry, in which a word can shape a world, has room for humor, and there had been a whimsical glint in Ehef’s eyes that night…
She smiled slightly. “This way,” Rhiow said, and led the way over to the central core of carrels, where the computers sat two to a desk, or sometimes three. Several of the monitors were turned on, casting a soft blue-white glow over the desks; and on one desk, sprawled comfortably with one paw on the keyboard, and looking thoughtfully at the screen in front of him, lay Ehef.
He looked over at them with only mild interest as they came, though when his eyes came to rest on Arhu, the expression became more awake. Ehef’s coloration was what People called vefessh, and ehhif called “blue”; his eyes, wide and round in a big round platter of a face, were a vivid green that set off the plush blue fur splendidly. Those eyes reflected the shifting images on the screen, pages scrolling by. “Useless,” he said softly. “Not even wizardry can do anything about the overcrowding on these lines. Phone company’s gotta do something. —Good evening, Rhiow, and hunt’s luck to you.”