“Sleeping,” Saash said, washing one paw calmly.
“He could probably use it.”
“Don’t know, Rhi,” Saash said, standing up and arching her back to stretch, then lying down again. “I wonder if he might not be better awake.”
“You saw the Eye, then.”
“I did. Risky business this, Rhi. He’s likely to attract high-profile attention.”
“Believe me,” Rhiow said, “it’s on my mind. How did you sleep?”
“After the jitters went away … well enough. But, Rhi, I’m not going down there again for a good long while, not if Iau Dam of Everything walks right in here and offers me Her job.”
“Don’t see why we should,” Rhiow said. “Even Ffairh went only three or four times in his career, and only once down deep.”
“May She agree with you,” Saash said, and stood up— looked around carefully for any sign of Abad, and then scratched, and afterward sat down and began washing the fur into place again. “Meanwhile, are you going to let him sleep?”
“No,” Rhiow said. “And I have an excuse. Where’s Urruah this morning?”
“Off again. Something about his o’hra.”
“Spare me,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. “Look, you get some more sleep if you can. I’ll take him off your hands for the day: he can go with me to check the track-level gates out again this afternoon—I want to see if they’ve replaced that switching track yet. Maybe help them a little if I can, now that the problem with Thirty’s solved. If you want me, call.”
“Thanks, Rhi,” Saash said, and let out a cavernous yawn. “Don’t wait for the call, though.”
Rhiow sidled herself and made her way up to the ledge where Saash slept. There was Arhu, curled up small and tight, as if trying to pass for a rock. His breathing was so shallow, it could hardly be seen.
She hunkered down near him, and purred in his ear. There was no response.
Right, she thought, and extended a claw, and sank it carefully into the ear closest to the ground.
He whipped upright, eyes wide, and stared at her; then slumped back down again, the eyes relaxing again to a dozy look, with more than a touch of sullenness to it. “What?”
“It’s time you were awake,” Rhiow said.
“After yesterday? Come on.” He put his head down again, closed his eyes.
Rhiow put her claw into the other ear this time, and somewhat more forcefully. Arhu sat up, and hissed. “What?”
“Trying not to see,” Rhiow said, “won’t help.”
He stared at her.
“That’s not what I’m here about,” she said, “not mostly, anyway. I promised to teach you to walk on air. The sooner we get this lesson handled, the better… since you’re going to be going on rounds with us for a while yet, I think, and we can’t slow ourselves down all the time by using non-climbing routes. Get up, have a wash, you’ll have your first lesson, and then we’ll get you something to eat Some more of that pastrami, maybe?”
Arhu looked at Rhiow with a little more interest. But the look suddenly went cooler. “I’m not going back down there,” he said.
“Good,” Rhiow said, a little wearily, “then you and Saash are in complete agreement. It’s not high on my list, either. Come on, Arhu, let’s get a move on…”
The lesson went quickly: faster than Rhiow would have thought possible. It reinforced a feeling she had been having, that Arhu could learn with blinding speed when he wanted to… and right now he wanted to, in order to get rid of Rhiow.
Purposely, therefore, Rhiow spun the lesson out. An hour and a half later, they were standing on the air directly above the roof of Grand Central, maybe thirty stories up, sidled, and fairly close to the windows of the Grand Hyatt. Rhiow had to smile, for many of those windows did not have their curtains pulled, and inside them, one could see (as one almost always could) the occasional pair of ehhif doing what Hhuha sometimes facetiously called “the cat-scaring thing.” Rhiow could not remember when she had last been scared by it, even by some of the noises Hhuha and Iaehh made in their throes. Arhu, however, had been betrayed by his prurient curiosity, and was watching one pair of ehhif with complete and disgusted fascination.
“Don’t skywalk where you can easily be seen,” Rhiow was saying, while wondering how much of what she told him was sinking in. “If you do it between buildings, make sure the walls are blind … or that you’re sidled. Which has its dangers, too. Birds won’t see you…”
“That could be nice,” Arhu said, briefly distracted; he glanced around and licked his chops.
“ ‘Nice’? It could be fatal. There are more kinds of birds in this city than pigeons and sparrows and starlings. If one of the Princes of the Air hits you at eighty miles an hour, you’d better pray you’re high enough up for a long-enough fall to reconstruct the wizardry.”
“The Princes—”
“And a couple of ‘princesses,’ ” Rhiow said. “There’s a falcon-breeding program based on top of a building down near Central Park South. One of the hatchlings, about ten clutches ago, was a wizard: he’s been promoted since, to Lord of the Birds of the East—a Senior for his kind. The rest of them are stuck-up as anything, think they’re royalty, and kill more pigeons in a given day than they need to. They’re a menace. Especially if they hit you with one of those little claw-fists of theirs, at high velocity, while you’re invisible. The impact alone might kill you, for all I know. It sure kills the pigeons.”
She sighed then as the two ehhif fell together, exhausted, at the end of their bout. “Come on,” she said. “Enough looking for one day…”
Arhu’s tail lashed. “If I stop looking at this,” he said, almost absently, “I’ll just see something else…”
Yes, Rhiow thought, that’s the problem, isn’t it… “Come on,” she said, “and we’ll go down to the concourse and see about that pastrami. You can’t see things while you’re eating, I don’t think. The chewing is supposed to interfere.”
He looked at her with a glitter of hope in his eyes. “AD right,” he said.
They walked down the air together, Arhu still doing it very slowly and carefully, as if it were a normal stairway; went right down to ground level, nearest the wall, and slipped inside the brass doors. Arhu looked around them as they walked together past the main waiting room toward the concourse.
Suddenly Arhu stopped and stared. “What are those?” he whispered.
Rhiow looked over into the waiting room. It had been one of the first areas to have its refurbishment completed, and was now routinely used for art exhibitions and receptions, and sometimes even parties. At the moment, though, the big airy space looked oddly empty, even though there were things in it… rather large things. In the center of the room, on a large black pedestal with velvet crowd-control ropes around it, caught in midstride—almost up on its toes, its tail stretched out horizontally and whipping out gracefully behind it—a dinosaur skeleton was mounted. Its huge head, empty-eyed, jaws open, seemed to glare down at the few casual observers who were strolling around it or pausing to read the informational plaque mounted nearby.
Rhiow gazed up at it and smiled sardonically. “Yes,” she said, “I guess it doesn’t look much like what we were dealing with last night. A lot bigger. These are part of the Museum of Natural History’s new exhibition … and the ehhif are all excited about it because now they think they know, from these new models, how the saurians really held themselves and moved.”