Arhu couldn’t take his eyes off the ehhif. “Why is he down here?” he whispered.
“Alalal neihuri mejhruieha lahei fenahawaha,” Rosie said, in a resigned tone of voice. Arhu looked at Rhiow, stuck about halfway between fear and complete confusion.
“Rosie speaks a lot of languages, sometimes mixed together,” Rhiow said, “and I have to confess that some of them don’t make any sense even when I listen to them with a wizard’s ear, in the Speech; so some of what he says may be nonsense. But not all. Rosie,” she said, “I missed that one, would you try it again?”
Rosie spent a moment’s concentration, his eyes narrowing with the effort, and then said, “Short den full hai’hauissh police clean up.”
“Ah,” Rhiow said. “There was a big meeting of important people in town, a ‘convention,’ ” she said to Arhu, “and the cops have stuffed all the shelters, the temporary dens, full of homeless people, so they won’t make the streets look bad. Rosie must have got to the shelter too late to get a place, huh Rosie?”
“Uh huh.”
“ ‘Homeless—’ ” Arhu said.
“We’d say ‘denless.’ It’s not like ‘nonaligned,’ though; most ehhif don’t like to wander, though there are exceptions. Rosie, what have you had to eat since you came down here? Have you had water?”
“Hot cloud lailihe ruhaith memeze pan airindagha.”
“He’s sshai-sau,” Arhu said.
“Maybe, but he can speak cat, too,” Rhiow said, “which makes him saner than most ehhif from the first pounce. You’ve got a pan down there in the steam tunnel, is that it, Rosie? You’re catching the condensation from the pipes?”
“Yeah.”
“What about food? Have you eaten today?”
Rosie looked at Rhiow sadly, then shook his head. “Shihh,” he said.
“Rats,” said Rhiow, and hissed very softly under her breath. “He knows the smell of food would bring them. Rosie, I’m going to bring you some food later. I can’t bring much: they’ll have to see me, upstairs, when I take it.”
There was a brief pause, and then Rosie said, with profound affection: “Nice kitty.”
Arhu turned away. “So this is one of the the People-eating ehhif I heard so much about,” he said. There was no deciphering his tone. Embarrassment? Loathing?
“He’s one of many who come and go through these tunnels,” Rhiow said. “Some of them are sick, or can’t get food, or don’t have anywhere to live, or else they’re running away, hiding from someone who hurt them. They come and stay awhile, until the transit police or the Terminal people make them go somewhere else. There are People too, who drift in and out of here … many fewer of them than there used to be. This place isn’t very safe for our kind anymore … partly because of the Terminal people being a lot tougher about who stays down here. But partly because of the rats. They’re bigger than they used to be, and meaner, and a lot smarter. Rosie,” Rhiow said, “how much have the rats been bothering you?”
Rosie shook his head, and cardboard rustled all around him. “Nicht nacht night I go up gotta friend rat dog, dog, dog, bit me good, no more, not at night…”
“Rats bad at night,” Arhu said suddenly.
Rhiow gave him an approving look, but also bent near him and said, too softly for an ehhif to hear, “Speak normally to him. You’re doing him no kindness by speaking kitten.”
“Yes bad, heard them bad, loud, not two nights ago, three,” Rosie said, his voice flat, but his face betrayed the alarm he had felt. “Smelled them, smelled the cold things—” There was a sudden, rather alarming sniffing noise from under the cardboard, and Rosie’s eyes abruptly vanished under the awning of cardboard, huddled against a sleeve that appeared to have about twenty more sleeves layered underneath it, alternately with layers of ancient newspaper. Rhiow caught a glimpse of a familiar movement under the bottom-most layer that made her itch as if she had suddenly inherited Saash’s skin.
The sniffing continued, and Arhu stared at Rosie and actually stepped a little closer, wide-eyed. The cardboard spasmed up and down, and a little sound, huh, huh, huh, came from inside it “Is he sick?” Arhu said.
“Of course he’s sick,” Rhiow muttered. “Ehhif aren’t supposed to live this way. He’s hungry, he’s got bugs, he keeps getting diseases. But mat’s not the problem. He’s sod. Or maybe afraid. That’s ‘crying,’ that’s what they do instead of yowl. Water comes out of their eyes. It makes them ashamed when they do that. Don’t ask me why.”
She turned away and started to wash, waiting for Rosie to master himself. When the sobbing stopped, Rhiow turned back to him and said, “Did you see them come through here? Did they hurt you? I can’t tell by smell, Rosie: it’s your clothes.”
The cardboard moved from side to side: underneath it, eyes gleamed. “They went by,” he said, very softly, after a little while.
“Did you see where they came from?” Rhiow said.
The head shook again.
“Which ‘cold things,’ Rosie?” Rhiow said.
“They roar … in the dark…”
Rhiow sighed. This was a familiar theme with Rosie: though he would keep coming down here to hide, trains frightened him badly, and he seemed to have a delusion that if they could, they would get off the tracks and come after him. When life occasionally seemed to ratify this belief—as when a train derailed near enough for him to see, on Track 110—Rosie vanished for weeks at a time, and Rhiow worried about him even more than she did usually.
“All right, Rosie,” she said. “You stay here a little while. I’ll come back with something for you, and I’ll have a word with the rats … they won’t come while you eat. Will you go back to the shelter after the convention’s done?”
Rosie muttered a little under his breath, and then said, “Airaha nuzusesei lazeira.”
“Once more, please?”
’Try to. No purr not long tired lie down not get up.”
Rhiow licked her nose; she caught all too clearly the ehhif’s sense of weariness and fear. “We have got to get you some more verbs,” she said, “or adjectives, or something. Never mind. I’ll be back soon, Rosie.”
She turned and hurried away, thinking hard about Rosie’s clothes, and putting together a familiar short description of them in her head, in the Speech, and of what she wanted to happen to them, and what was inside them. “Come on, Arhu. You don’t want to be too close to him in the next few seconds.”
“Why? What’s the matter? What’s he going to—”
Well down the hallway, Rhiow paused and looked back. In this lighting, it would have taken a cat’s eyes to see what she and Arhu could: the revolting little multiple-branched river of body lice making their way in haste out of Rosie’s clothes, and pouring themselves very hurriedly out every available opening, out from under the cardboard and out across the floor, where they pitched themselves down a drain and went looking for other prey.
“I wonder if they like rat?” Rhiow said, and smiled, showing her teeth.
She loped back out of the corridor, with Arhu coming close behind her, and together they made their way back to the fire exit.