“It won’t be tonight, I don’t mink,” Rhiow said.
He looked at her narrow-eyed for a moment. “You think it’s wise to put this off?”
“I’m only feline, Ehef,” Rhiow said, and yawned; there was no point in hiding it “Give me a break. It’s been a lively couple of days, and it’s going to get worse. We’ll get it taken care of… but my team and I need some sleep first, and I need a good long talk with the Whisperer tonight before we go Downside. I want to make sure I have the right spells ready to protect us. You know why.”
“Yes,” Ehef said. “Look, I’ll ask the Perm team to keep an eye on your open gate. But that’s going to have to be your main concern when you’ve had a little rest. You did a nice interim solution, but you know it won’t last. They’ll be cutting that piece of bad track out even as we speak. Tomorrow night—morning after next, tops—they’ll replace it, and if that gate’s not behaving right, then where are we? Go home, get your sleep. Meanwhile, we’ll get some help to watch the top side of the gate for you, act as liaison if you need anything from Above when you’re ready to get working down there.”
“Thanks, Ehef,” Rhiow said. Til appreciate that.”
Arhu yawned, too, and looked somewhat surprised as he did so. “I’m tired,” he said. “Can we go back to that little den now?”
“Not a bad idea,” Saash said. “Rhi, when should we meet tomorrow?”
“A little after noon, I guess,” she said. “Sound all right? Urruah?”
“I’ll be up earlier,” he said. “That rehearsal. I’ll walk you three home first, though.”
“The Tom’s own chivalry. Senior… thanks again for the help.”
“We’re all in this together,” Ehef said, settling down on the desk again. “Go well on the errand, wizards.”
They purred their thanks, all but Arhu, and headed out. As they made their way toward the door to the main front hall, Arhu whispered, none too quietly, “What do you want more spells for? Are we going to have a fight? Is something going to happen?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Saash said, “when your Ordeal really gets started.”
“This looks pretty much like an ordeal already,” Arhu muttered, glancing from Rhiow to Saash. He did not look at Urruah.
Urruah smiled, and they went out.
As it turned out, they got slightly sidetracked on the way home. Rhiow wanted Arhu to know the way to her own neighborhood, so they went there first. There was no rush to get anywhere, so Rhiow and the others strolled down Seventy-first at their ease: Rhiow, in particular, with the intense pleasure of someone who is off shift for the moment and has the luxury of enough time to stop and smell the roses. Or, more accurately, time to smell and appreciate, each in its proper way, the trees, air, cars, gutters, weeds, flowers, garbage cans, and other endemic wildlife of the city: the squirrels, sparrows, starlings, passing ehhif and houiff, the rustlings above and below ground, the echoes and the whispers; steam hissing, tires and footsteps on concrete, voices indoors and outdoors: and above and around it all, the soft rush of water, the breeze pouring past the buildings— now that there was enough temperature differential for there to be a breeze—and very occasionally, from high up, the cry of one of the Princes of the Air about his business, which in this part of the world mostly amounted to killing and eating pigeons. Her Oath aside, Rhiow’s personal opinion was that the city was oversupplied with pigeons, and as part of their position in the natural order of things, the Princes were welcome to as many of them as they could eat. They reminded her too much of rats, with the unwelcome and unnecessary addition of wings.
There were no pigeons in the street at the moment, though, because hauissh was in progress … and any pigeon careless or foolish enough to drop itself into the middle of a bout of hauissh rapidly became an aspect of play, and shortly thereafter an object of digestion. Cars, ehhif, and houiff did pass through, and took part in play, without knowing they did.
Indeed there was nothing overt that would have led any ehhif to suspect that a game as old as felinity was going on up and down the length of the block of Seventy-first between First and Second; reputations were on the line, and from many windows eyes watched, hindered from game-play, perhaps, but not from intelligent and passionate interest.
Rhiow sidled through it all with her tail up, as did the rest of the team. So close to home, it wouldn’t have done to be visible on the street: if one of the neighbors should mention her presence there to Iaehh or Hhuha, there would be endless trouble. As it was, she needed to be sidled anyway, to avoid the many ehhif who were on the street this time of the evening.
“Hey, ffeih-wizard!” came a comment from one of the streetside terraces above. “Had a good roll on your back lately?”
Rhiow put her whiskers forward and strolled on by, not even bothering to look up, though Arhu did. Urraah and Saash wore expressions suggesting calm tolerance of idiocy. “… If she’s so terrific and powerful and all,” said the predictable second voice, “why can’t she make the kittening part grow back, and do something really useful with herself?”
Rhiow kept walking, showing no reaction to the others and schooling herself to be slightly amused. There were People in her neighborhood, as in every neighborhood where a feline wizard worked, who knew about her and found her either funny or repugnant; and who found the concept of wizardry laughable or even hateful. These People in particular—the two extremely spoiled and opinionated pedigreed Himalayans six stories up, in one of the penthouse apartments of the new building near the corner—were sure that Rhiow was living evidence of some kind of convoluted plot against their well-being: a parasite, possibly a traitor, and certainly not proper breeding material. Rhiow, for her own part, was sure that they were pitifully bored and ignorant, had nothing to do with their days but culture their spite, and had almost certainly never done a useful thing since their eyes came open. “… can’t really be much of a Person,” one of them said spitefully, meaning to be heard, “if you haven’t even made kittens once…”
“Not much point in making them if you’re not going to be able to tell what they are, my dear.”
“Ooh, meow,” Rhiow muttered, and kept walking.
“They need a nice little plague of fleas to take their minds off their ‘troubles,’ ” Urruah said under his breath, coming up alongside her.
“Please. That would be so unethical.”
“But satisfying. Just think of them scratching…”
“… and give them the satisfaction of thinking the universe really is after them? Please.” All the same…
The team paused about a third of the way down the street; Rhiow ducked into the entranceway of an apartment building and sat for a moment, peering down the sidewalk.There was a row of five brownstones across the street, their front steps still largely identical despite the renovations of the past few decades; they faced across to a large modem apartment building and two other brownstones, one on each side of it. On the first floor, far left windowsill of the left-hand brownstone, a small milk-chocolate-colored cat sat hunched up, round-backed, golden eyes half-shut, as if looking at nothing. Across the street, sitting upright, was a large, dirty white tom; he was looking intently at the top of a wall between the two brownstones directly across from him. Shadows fell across that wall, cast by a thick raggy carpet of some kind of climbing vine that scaled up the nearest wall of the adjoining building.