The stone Queen, however, looked thoughtfully out into the dim blue space of the Egyptian Collection, apparently thinking her own thoughts. It was an expression that suggested to the viewer, What are you looking at Me for? Go work out your own salvation.
It was, of course, the only kind of look most People would accept from their Maker. But Rhiow, at this moment, found herself thinking:
Maybe I’ve been with ehhif too long…
She went after the other three.
Did you get what you came for? Saash said.
Rhiow shivered. I think a little bit more, she said.
Chapter Seven
The lunch rush was just beginning out in the streets, but there wasn’t much the team could do about that except hug the building side of the sidewalk, all the way down, and try to keep from being trampled. It was a relief to get into Grand Central, where few people hugged the walls: the crush was in the middle, a river of legs and briefcases and shopping bags, flowing faster in the center of the stream than by the banks.
Rhiow and her team made their way down to Track 30. She was relieved, on passing the Italian deli, to find it so completely thronged with ehhif that not even the most reckless lading could have gotten near it without doing violence to the crowd. Even so, Arhu threw a longing glance at it as they passed, then looked guiltily at Rhiow.
“Maybe later,” she said, “if you’re good.” And we’re all still in one piece…
A train from Rye had just come in, and the last of its passengers were filtering off. Far down the platform, off to one side, stood two ehhif watching the others get off the train: a boy and a girl. They were young; Rhiow was no expert on ages, but she thought perhaps the young queen-ehhif was fourteenish, the tom a year or so younger. They looked like anyone else who might have come off the train—both wearing shorts and oversized T-shirts and beat-up running shoes, the queen wearing a fanny pack: a couple of suburban kids, apparently fresh in from up Westchester for a good day’s hanging out. But these two had something none of the other commuters had—the shift and tangle of hyperstrings about them, which meant that they too were sidled.
“Prompt,” Saash said, as they walked down the platform toward the two.
“Har’lh’s plainly been keeping an eye on things,” Rhiow said. Good. Because if we need help, I’d prefer it to be the kind that an Advisory would send…
As the team came up to them, the two young ehhif hunkered down to a level more comfortable for conversation. “We’re on errantry,” said the young queen, “and we greet you.”
“You’re well met on the errand,” Rhiow said. “We can definitely use some help on this one.”
“Yeah, that’s what Carl said. I’m Nita; this is Kit.”
“Rhiow; and Urruah there, and Saash; and Arhu—”
The young queen-ehhif looked at Arhu with interest. “You’re new to this, aren’t you,” she said.
He gave her a look. “So what?”
“Hey, take it easy,” she said. “You just reminded me a little of my sister, that’s all.”
“The day I look like any ehhif’s sister—”
Nita smiled, a little crookedly. “Sounds like her, too,” she said, under her breath, to her partner.
“She meant only,” said the young tom-ehhif, “that her sister just passed Ordeal a little while ago.”
Arhu blinked at that. Rhiow said to him, “It happens sometimes that you get littermates who’re wizards. Not so often as it used to: the tendency is for the trait to skip a couple of generations between occurrences in a family.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “My dad says he thinks it’s so your parents won’t be too scared to have more kids… and so that you won’t, either.”
“I thought ehhif wizards usually kept their business secret from nonwizards,” Saash said, curious. “Supposedly humans don’t believe in wizardry … is that right?”
“Mostly they don’t. Oh, we keep it private from everybody but family. It’s the wizard’s choice, in our species. Hide it or spill it, you can get in nearly as much trouble either way. But I guess we’re lucky … our parents coped pretty well after the initial shock, though we still have a little trouble with them every now and then.” Kit looked around him. “It’s been pretty noisy down here this mom-ing—they were pulling up a piece of track down there. Had to have jackhammers used on it: the guys said it had been melted right into the concrete. I take it that means this gate is the busted one.”
Rhiow flirted her tail in agreement. “Yes. We’ll be using a different one for our access, though: the Lexington Avenue local gate—it’s had the least use lately. Har’lh tells me you’ve worked with it before?”
“Yeah,” Nita said, “when its locus was still anchored upstairs. We used it for a rapid-transit jump when it was dislocated, some years ago. It was the usual thing—someone was digging up the potholes on Forty-second and messing with the high-tension power cables during a sunspot maximum. The combined structural and electromagnetic disruptions made the gate’s stabilizer strings pop out of the anchor stratum, and the portal locus came loose and jumped sixty stories straight up.” She smiled a small, dry smile. “Tom and Carl said that getting it back where it belonged, afterward, was interesting. That was you, was it?”
“Not me,” Rhiow said, “my predecessor, Ffairh. He told me about it, though.”
“And then after all that, you had to move it over to Lex, didn’t you? But they’d moved the deli it was in back of when the construction started here.”
“That’s right, when they started renovating the Hyatt passageway. Everything’s been pretty ripped up lately…” Rhiow looked around bet. “Well, your expertise will be welcome … we’re going a long way down on this run, and keeping the gate anchored and patent is going to be important.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Kit said. “Carl says you took a lot of care last time to fasten the gate down good and tight. We’ll make sure it stays stuck open for you while you’re down there. There shouldn’t be any way a patent gate can be dislocated or interfered with.”
Rhiow had her doubts this week. “That’s what conventional wisdom would say,” she said, “but the gates’ behavior lately hasn’t been conventional.”
Nita shook her head. “We’ll do the best we can for you,” she said. “If we need help, we’ll yell for Carl.”
“Right. Let’s get started,” Saash said, and headed over for the gate.
It was as they had left it the other day: hanging there, the warp and weft of the hyperstrings glowing a slightly duller red than before, token of a lack of extension in the last day. Once more Saash sat up on her haunches, reached in, and plucked at the gate’s diagnostic strings: they followed her claw outward, and light sheened down them, violet in the darkness. “Same as yesterday,” she said to the two young wizards.
“Looks perfectly normal,” Kit said.
“Yes, well, watch.” Saash reached in again for the activation strings, pulled, and again came out with a double pawful of nothing.
Nita whistled softly. “Weird.”
“Yes. I was kind of hoping it might have corrected itself,” Saash said, sounding wry and slightly amused, “but fat chance.”