“Hunt’s luck, Senior,” she said, sitting down.
“Wondered when you were going to get down to see me. Urruah? How they squealin’?”
“Loudly,” Urruah said, and grinned.
“That’s what I like to hear. Saash? Life treating you well?”
She sat down, threw a look at Arhu, and immediately began to scratch. “No complaints, Ehef,” she said.
“So I see.” He looked at Arhu again, got up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down off the desk, crossing to them. “And I smell new wizardry. What’s your name, youngster?”
“Arhu.”
Ehef leaned close to breathe breaths with him: Arhu held still for it, just. “Huh. Pastrami,” said Ehef. “Well, hunt’s luck to you too, Arhu. You still hungry? Care for a mouse?”
“There are mice here?”
“Are there mice here, he asks.” Ehef looked at the others as if asking for patience in the face of idiocy. “As if there’s any building in this city that doesn’t have either mice, rats, or cockroaches. Mice! There are hundreds of mice! Thousands! … Well, all right, some.”
“I want to catch some! Where are they?”
Ehef gave Rhiow a look. “He’s new at this, I take it.”
Arhu was about to shoot off past Rhiow when he suddenly found Urruah standing in front of him, with an attentive and entirely too interested expression. “When you’re on someone else’s hunting ground,” Urruah said, “it’s manners to ask permission first.”
“If there are thousands, why should I? I wanna—”
“You should ask permission, young fastmouth,” said Ehef, his voice scaling up into a hiss as he leaned in past Urruah’s shoulder with a paw raised, “because if you don’t, I personally will rip the fur off your tail and stuff it all right down your greedy face, are we clear about that? Young people these days, I ask you.”
Arhu crouched down a little, wide-eyed, and Rhiow kept her face scrupulously straight. Ehef might look superficially well-fed and well-to-do, but to anyone who had spent much time in this city, the glint in his eyes and the muscles under his pelt spoke of a kittenhood spent on the West Side docks among the smugglers and the drug dealers, with rats the size of dogs, dogs the size of ponies, and ehhif who (unlike the tunnel-ehhif) counted one of the People good eating if they could catch one.
“Please don’t rip him up, Ehef,” Rhiow said mildly. “He’s a little short on the social graces. We’re working on it.”
“Huh,” Ehef said. “He better work fast, otherwise somebody with less patience is going to tear his ears off for him. Right, Mr. Wisemouth?” He moved so fast that even Rhiow, who was half-expecting it, only caught sight of Ehef’s paw as it was just missing Arhu’s right ear; the ear went flat, which was just as well, for Ehef’s claws were out, and Arhu crouched farther down.
“Right,” said Ehef. “Well, because Rhiow suggests it, I’ll cut you a little slack. You can’t help it if you were raised in a sewer, a lot of us were. So what you say is, ‘Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?’ And then I say, ‘Hunt, but not to the last life, for even prey have Gods.’ So come on, let’s hear it.”
Only a little sullenly—for there was a faint, tantalizing rustling and squeaking to be heard down at the bottom of the stacks—Arhu said, “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground.”
“Was that a question? Who were you asking, the floor? One more time.”
Arhu started to make a face, then controlled it as one of Ehef’s paws twitched. “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?”
“Sure, go on, you, catch yourself some mice, there’s a steady supply, I make sure of that. But don’t eat them all or I’ll skin you before anybody’s gods get a chance. Go on, what are you waiting for, don’t you hear them messing around down there? Screwing each other, that’s what that noise is, mouse sex, disgusting.”
Hurriedly, Arhu got up and scurried off. Rhiow and the others looked after him, then sat down with Ehef.
“Thanks, Ehef,” Rhiow said. “I’m sorry he’s so rude.”
“Aah, don’t worry about it, we all need a little knocking around in this life before we’re fit to wash each other’s ears. I was like that once. He’ll learn better; or get dead trying.”
“That’s what we’re hoping to avoid…”
Saash blinked, one ear swiveling backward to follow the rustling going on above. “ ‘I make sure there’s a steady supply’? I wouldn’t think that’s a very professional attitude for a mouser.”
“I got more than one profession, you know that. But the day I eat every mouse in the place, that’s the day they decide they don’t need a cat anymore.”
“And, besides,” Saash said dryly, “ ‘even prey have gods.’ ”
“Sure they do.” Ehef settled himself, stretched out a paw. “But ethics aside, look, it’s not like the old times anymore, no more ‘jobs for life.’ With the budget cuts, if these people want to give me cat food, they have to pay for it themselves. Bad situation, nothing I can do about it. So I make sure they think I’m useful, and I make sure I don’t have to go out of my way to do it. Why should I go hunting out when I can eat in? I bring the librarians dead mice every day, they bring me cat food, everybody’s happy. Leaves me free for other work. Such as consultation, which reminds me, why didn’t you call to make sure I was available first?”
Rhiow smiled. “You’re always available.”
“The disrespect of youth.”
“When have I ever been disrespectful to you? But it’s true, you know it is. And I usually do call first, but I had a problem.”
Ehef’s ears swiveled as he heard the scampering downstairs. “So I see. Not the one I thought, though.” His whiskers went forward in a dry smile. “Thought you finally figured out what to do with that spell.”
“What? Oh, that.” Rhiow laughed. “No, I’m still doing analysis on it, when I have the time. Not much, lately. The gates seem to take up most of it… and that’s the problem now.”
“All right.” He blinked and looked vague for a moment, then said, “I keep a sound-damper spell emplaced around the desks: it’s active now, he won’t hear. Tell me your troubles.”
She told him about their earlier failure with the gate. Ehef settled down into a pose that Rhiow had become very familiar with over the years: paws tucked in and folded together at the wrists, eyes half-closed as he listened. Only once or twice did he speak, to ask a technical question about the structure of the gate. Finally he opened one eye, then the second, and looked up.
So did Rhiow. It was very quiet downstairs.
“He couldn’t get out of here, could he?” she said.
“Not without help. Or not without turning himself into a mouse,” said Ehef, “which fortunately he can’t do yet, though I bet that won’t last long. But never mind. Pretty unsettling, Rhi, but you have to see where this line of reasoning is going to take you.”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I thought a second opinion—”
“You hoped I would get you off the hook somehow,” Ehef said with that slightly cockeyed grin that showed off the broken upper canine. “You’ve already talked this through with Saash, I know—otherwise you wouldn’t waste my time—and she couldn’t suggest anything at our level of reality that could cause such a malfunction.” He glanced up at Saash: she lashed her tail “no.” “So the problem has to be farther in, at a more central, more senior level. Somewhere in the Old Downside.”
This agreed with Rhiow’s opinion, and it was not at all reassuring. Wizards most frequently tend to rank universes in terms of their distance to or from the most central reality known—the one that all universes mirror, to greater degree or lesser, and about which all worlds and dimensions are arranged. That most senior reality had many names, across existence. Wizards of the People called it Auhw-t, the Hearth: ehhif wizards called it Timeheart. It was the core-reality of the universes: some said it was the seed-reality, parent of all others. Whether this was the case or not, worlds situated closer to the Hearth had an increased power to affect worlds farther out in life’s structure. The Old Downside was certainly much more central than the universe in which Earth moved, so that what happened there was bound to happen here, sooner or later. And a failure in the effect of the laws of wizardry in a universe so central to the scheme of things had bad implications for the effectiveness of wizardry here and now, on Earth, in the long term.