Rhiow looked at her and was silently impressed, not for the first time, at the way Saash could hold such a casual tone when she was shivering inside. But that was her way, at work. Later, after this was done—assuming everything went all right—she would complain neurotically about her terror for days. But at the moment, she sounded like she was going for a nice sleep in the sun, followed by cream. I wish I could sound that confident…
Saash let go of the strings, settled back to all fours again, and glanced around. “So here’s what we’ll do,” she said. “I’m going to pull the Lexington Avenue local gate’s locus out of its present location and tether it over here temporarily so that you can keep an eye on both the bum gate and the one we’ve used. Theoretically we should be able to use the broken one to come back after we’ve fixed it; then the Lex gate can have the temporary tethers broken and it’ll just snap back into place.”
“Sounds sensible,” Nita said. “One of us can stay over by Lex and redirect any wizards who turn up there to use it before the change in the gate’s location shows up in then: manuals.”
“Fine,” Saash said, “let’s go, then.” She trotted off, and the young queen-ehhif went after her, looking carefully down-track as she followed.
Arhu looked after the two of them, while the young tom-ehhif sat down on the edge of the platform, looking at the gate. “It must be an interesting line of work,” Kit said. “I bet you get to travel a lot.”
Rhiow laughed softly. “I wish! No, we’re here mostly. The New York gates get nearly as much use as the ones at Tower Bridge or Alexandria. Not as much usage as the complex at Tokyo, maybe … but those would be the only ones to beat us. As a result, we’re always having to fix something that’s busted.” She put her whiskers forward, slightly amused at a memory. “Last time I was scheduled for a weekend off, I got all the way to the big Crossings worldgating facility on Rirhath B before one of their gates broke, and I found myself helping them service it…” She made the extra-large smile that an ehhif would understand. “ ‘Wizard’s holiday.’ ”
The young tom chuckled. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve had a couple of those myself—”
The darkness in front of them suddenly had another gate hanging in it: more oval than the first one, hanging closer to the cinders and concrete of the floor, almost in contact with the rails. It hyperextended as they watched, the bright lines of its curvature pulling inward and apparently away to vanishing-point eternity before disappearing altogether, replaced by the oval image of the end of the Lexington Avenue local platform, and Nita standing there, looking through the aperture with an interested expression. Saash leaped neatly through, and the image vanished in lines of bright fire as the curvature snapped back flat again behind her. Numerous unnaturally bright “tether” lines could be seen stretching from equidistant points around the edges of the gate-weave, up into “empty” air or down into the ground, radiating outward in an array corresponding roughly (as it would have to, in a space with one dimension too few) to the vertices of a tesseract.
“Everything’s set,” Saash said. “Khi-t, I would strongly recommend that you put a general-warding circle around both of these when we’re out of your way and down there working. I don’t know that anything from that side might try to come through a patent gate, if it should stumble across one; but there are creatures in that part of Downside that, though they’re just animals by both our standards, could cause a lot of trouble if they got loose in here.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the young ehhif-tom said. He opened the book he was carrying, leafed through it for a moment and ran his finger down one page. “These personal-description parameters look right to you?”
Saash and Rhiow both looked down at the wizard’s manual, which obligingly shifted the color of its printing so that they could more easily read the graceful curves of the printed version of the Speech; and Rhiow cocked her head to one side, hearing at the same time the Whisperer’s translation of the printed material. “That’s fine,” she said. “Just one thing—” She put a paw out to the small block of print containing the symbols that, in wizardly shorthand, described Arhu. There were a lot of blank spaces in the equation that summed him up for spelling purposes. “That configuration,” she said, “is changing rapidly. And in unexpected ways. Keep an eye on it…”
“Will do,” Kit said.
“Let’s go,” said Saash. She reared up, slipped her paws into the weave of the second gate, and pulled the lines of light outward, wove them together—
The gate hyperextended again, this time the lines of its intraspatial contours seeming to be pulled to a much farther-out infinity than last time—impossible, but so it seemed, regardless. The lines stretched and stretched outward, and there was almost a feeling of the watcher being pulled outward as well, drawn thin, almost to nonexistence. Odd, Rhiow thought. Possibly something to do with this locus being so close to one that’s malfunctioning—
—then snap, the feeling was gone: and through the gate came the golden light of somewhere else’s summer afternoon…
Urruah leapt through without apparent hesitation, though Rhiow knew he had gone first so that no one should know how nervous he had been. “Just jump through,” Rhiow said to Arhu. “At all costs, stay clear of the edges: even though there are safeties on the locus boundaries, if one of them goes wrong somehow, you could lose a tail, or leg, or something you’d miss more. You’ll feel heavy on the other side. Be prepared for it…”
She purposely hadn’t told him what else he was going to need to be prepared for, as Ffairh hadn’t told her, all that time ago. Better not to create impressions about the desirability of one’s state Downside … there would be enough temptations later. Arhu swallowed, crouched and tensed, and jumped through, almost as neatly as Urruah had.
There was a thump on the other side, and a yowl… but much deeper than a cat’s yowl would have been. Kit craned his neck to see through, looking slightly concerned. “He okay?”
Rhiow laughed softly. “That’s the question of the week. He’s not hurt, anyway.”
More yowling, this time tinged with surprise, was coming through the open gate. “Rhi,” Saash said, “let’s go, shall we, before our wonder child restarts those legends about giant demon cats in the tunnels … ?”
Rhiow chuckled. “You’ve got a point.”
“Dai stiho,” Kit said, the wizard’s casual greeting and goodbye in the Speech to another one: go well.
“Thanks,” Rhiow said. She jumped through the gate: Saash let go the control strings, took aim, and followed her.
There was the usual moment’s worth of disorientation as Rhiow felt her body adjust to its new status; then her vision cleared, and everything was fine again. Rhiow shook herself all over, settling the pelt—it was so close and short, compared to her usual fur, that she always felt slightly naked for the first few seconds. Saash, true to form, was sitting down and having a good scratch, watching Arhu with amusement.
“—Look at me! Look at me! I’m huge!” Arhu was going around and around in a circle, trying to get a good look at himself, but mostly looking as if he were chasing his tail. It was an amusing sight: the white patch at the tail’s end was now nearly as long by itself as the whole tail had been. Rhiow thought privately that, if he survived to come here to hunt later, he was going to have to do it by speed, for camouflage wasn’t going to be one of his strong points, not splashed all over with black and white the way he was. Though, then again, she thought, on moonlit nights, in broken country, it might work… “And look at you!” Arhu said, staring at Saash. She smiled a little crookedly, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward in amusement. Saash was certainly worth looking at: a tortoiseshell lioness, almost a ton of muscle. “And you!” Arhu said to Rhiow. “And, oh wow,” he said, seeing Urruah, whose tabby patterning had kept its color but gone much more tigerish, to suit his shape and size; he was nearly a taxicab high at the shoulder.