The Eye.
We’ve got a visionary on our hands, Rhiow thought.
Seers turned up occasionally among wizards, just as among non-wizards—though there would always be those who would argue that any seer was probably actually some kind of wizard anyway. The talent was not widespread. Wizards as a class might be more liable, by the nature of their work, to the sudden flash of insight that could be mistaken for genuine future-seeing: and to a lesser extent, they were sensitive to dreams and visions—perhaps the Whisperer, in her most benevolent mode, trying to hint at where danger might lie, since she was not allowed to warn you directly. But some few wizards sidestepped even her boundaries and saw clearly what might happen if things kept going the way they were going at present. Some did so with dreadful clarity. They tended not to last long: they were usually claws in the One’s paw and (as the myth had it) usually personified the Claw That Breaks, the razor-sharp but brittle weapon that inflicts a fatal wound on the enemy, but itself does not survive the battle. Having a seer in the vicinity meant that the Lone Power would start noticing you back with unusual persistence … not a happy scenario. I had a lot of plans for this life yet, Rhiow thought. This is not good.
She thought once more of Arhu’s voice crying, That’s what it was. That’s what it was— “ ‘It’ what?” she said softly. And she sighed. She was going to have to press him on that point, and it was going to be painful. Rhiow was sure it had something to do with the condition in which they had first found him: she had her suspicions, but she needed confirmation from him, to tie up that particular loose string.
And there were others. One was a very small thing, but it was still bothering her.
Why did my light go out?
Rhiow went back in thought, suddenly, to her first diagnostic on the malfunctioning gate, the other day. The gate had as much as told her that it had been interfered with, somehow, during its function.
But nothing should be able to produce such interference except more wizardry.
Another wizard…
She shied away from that thought. There were rogues, though they weren’t much discussed. The common knowledge was that wizardry did not live in the unwilling heart: a wizard uncomfortable with his power, unable to bear the ethical and practical choices it implied, soon lost the power, and any sense of ever having had it. But a wizard who was quite comfortable with the Art, and then started to find ways to use it that weren’t quite ethical…
Normally such wizards didn’t last long. The universe, to which wizardry was integral, had a way of twisting itself into unexpected shapes that would interfere with a rogue’s function. Equally, there was no particular safety in assuming that a rogue was willingly cooperating with the Lone One— or with what It stood for. Like many another ill-tempered craftsman, sa’Rrahh the Destroyer was careless with her tools, as likely to throw them away or break them in spite as to reward them for services done. So when rogues appeared, they tended to be a temporary phenomenon.
Yet a personally maintained wizardry, once done and set in motion, shouldn’t be able to be interfered with.
Except by the wizard who created it…
Rhiow bunked once or twice as that thought intruded.
Did something affect me down there?
She thought hard. The recurring difficulties she had been having with threatening imagery…
Surely not.
But when had she ever had anything like that happen before? Certainly she had been scared to the ends of her guard-hairs the last couple of times she’d been Downside. But nothing had gone wrong inside her head.
There were ways, though, to get inside another being’s mind against its will. Wizards knew about them… but did not use such “back doors” except in emergencies: they were highly unethical.
But if one of my team—
She put the thought aside. It was ridiculous. Saash would never do any such thing: her commitment to the Powers, and to Rhiow personally, was total. She was incorruptible, Rhiow would swear. Urruah was, too: he was just too stubborn and opinionated, once he had his mind made up about which side he was on, to change without signs as readable as an earthquake.
But Arhu…
Rhiow found herself thinking, once more, about the weak link, the new link, the new “member” of the team.
That was something she was going to have to deal with, of course, and the sooner the better… how much she disliked the idea of having a team member simply thrust on them, even if it was by the Powers That Be. Teams of wizards came together willingly, for reasons of work and affinity … otherwise they fell apart under the strain of frequent exposures to life-or-death situations. Feline teams, made up of members of the most independent-minded species on the planet, had to have close personal relationships and had to be absolutely convinced of each other’s reliability.
One came by such certainty only slowly. She and Saash had started working together a while after they met, about a year after Rhiow had passed her Ordeal, maybe two years after Saash’s. It had been a casual thing at first—pulling together to do an assigned job, then drifting apart again. But the “apart” periods had become fewer and fewer as they realized they had a specialization in common. This was a commonplace phenomenon among wizards. After the first blaze of power associated with your Ordeal, the power begins to fade somewhat with age: but you soon find something to specialize in, and make up by concentration and narrowing of focus what you lose in sheer brute force, becoming, in a phrase Rhiow had heard Har’lh use once, “a rifle instead of a fire hose.” After a while she and Saash started to be “listed” together in the Whispering as “associated talents,” the Manual’s delicate way of suggesting that they were beginning to become a team. Some time after that, Urruah turned up in their professional Me as a “suggested adjunct” for a couple of missions, and simply became part of the team over time.
There were still a lot of things they all didn’t know about each other, but wizardry by no means required total disclosure, any more than relationships in the rest of life did. How many lives along you were, what you had gone through in this one … how much personal information came out, and when, was all a matter of trust and inclination, and the need for privacy that was inextricably part of feline life and which balanced them both.
Rhiow would swear to the Queen’s own face, though, that she knew Urruah and Saash well enough to say that neither of them would ever go rogue or sabotage a wizardry in process. If there had been sabotage today, its source was elsewhere.
And as for Arhu…
She sighed. She would have to deal with him tomorrow. But not before noontime, anyway. They would all need a good night’s sleep tonight, odd as it was to be asleep now. Over the next few days, they could all get back to their normal schedules.
She stretched out on the bed, rolled over so that her feet were in the air in what Hhuha described as the somebody-shot-my-cat position, and let herself drift off to sleep, but not before burping once, gently, as the pepperoni settled itself.
By noon the next day she was at the garage and was surprised to meet Saash by the door, lying sprawled well out of the way of the cars, but there was no sign of Arhu.