“Sit down, Arhu,” Rhiow said, and went over to him, leaning to wash behind his ear briefly. He sat, but he was still staring out into the dimness, his eyes flickering wildly from side to side as he watched what Rhiow couldn’t see.
’This one’s scary,” Arhu said softly, his breathing beginning to slow a little; but his eyes were still wide, fixed on some spot out of Rhiow’s vision, or anyone else’s. “This one really wants to be real, this choice. It’s going to do it soon.” He quieted a little more, but a few seconds later, he said, “They can’t use the gates.”
“I know,” Rhiow said. “Tom has had them shut down.”
“That’s not the problem,” Arhu said. He looked at her, with some confusion, Rhiow thought, and said, “All these choices …How did we choose?”
Her first temptation was to tell him to look himself at the ancient memories the Whisperer would show him; but then it occurred to Rhiow that he was already seeing enough at the moment—he seemed to be caught in some kind of visionary fugue—and adding more imagery on top of it might make him even more confused or cloud some perception that might be of more importance.
Rhiow nudged Arhu down into the “sphinx” position he had been lying in earlier, and hunched next to him, tucking her forepaws in. “I suppose all the Choices are odd,” she said, “but ours, well, it had its own quirks. We were made before the ehhif, supposedly, but well after the cetaceans and the saurians, of course. The saurians had passed by then; their failed Choice had killed all of them. There were a very few saurians, you know,” she said, settling her front paws more comfortably, “who had rejected that image of world-ruling power than the Lone Power offered them. They took the vegetarian option to use less life, more sparingly—but there were not enough of them in the Choice to turn it aside, and they died under the fangs of the others. The Lone One’s long black winter killed the rest.
“Then, much later, after the winter was gone and the world was warm and green again, our foremothers came. There wasn’t any differentiation among the various kinds of feline families yet: just one kind, who didn’t look so much different from us, although they were bigger, more houff-sized. They all ran in prides, and so when they grew into mind, the First Queens made the Choice for them, as queens decide what their prides will do today.”
“What did It—what did she say?”
“Well, sa’Rrahh came and said to them that the way of life that Iau had held out to them—to kill responsibly, to take only what they needed—was just Her plot to keep them small and weak, living on subsistence, on sufferance, and eventually to make slaves of them. The Destroyer held out to them the promise of rule over the world, the land the saurians had wielded: power and terror, domination, all other life fleeing before them. And the Queen-mothers of the First Prides, wizards and nonwizards both—because there are always wizards in a Choice, at least a few—considered the Choice; but, being People after all, they disagreed on what to do, just as the saurians had.”
“So some took sa’Rrahh’s offer—”
Arhu had that faraway look again: Rhiow had no idea what he might be seeing, and continued as she had been doing. “Most did, and their Choice ruled the others. The Hungry, those who made that Choice, grew great and terrible in body, killing for power and success, but like the carnivorous saurians, they hadn’t paid enough attention to the wording and intention of the Lone One’s offer. They had their time to rule, but it was short—soon enough the ice crept down from the poles and buried the forests where they hunted, killing their game, and then most of them as well. There was a second group of the Eldest Kindred who rejected power and rule over the Earth, and elected to kill what they needed, only. They were the Mindful. They stayed small, for the most part, but grew wise, enough so to survive the ice when it came.”
She fell silent for a moment, wondering what to make of the look on Arhu’s face. “But there were more—” he said.
Rhiow switched her tail “yes.” “They weren’t very many, that last group: the Failed. They recognized as potentially deadly the Choice the Lone Power was offering, and they attacked her and died. But they’re reborn, again and again, in one or another of our sundered Kindreds.”
“They’re wizards,” Arhu said suddenly, and looked up at Rhiow.
“Yes,” she said. “Still we die: there’s no escaping the fate of the rest of our kind. But we’re set apart; and we alone of all felinity may come again to that time and place where cats’ bodies are once again the size of their souls… Other confusions between size and Kindred have come about over time. The Hungry are born among the smaller kindreds, and the Mindful among the great; the savage and the kindly mingle. You never know which sort you’ll find yourself dealing with. Yet every feline, great or small, carries all of them within herself; we all have to make the Choice again and again, a hundred times in a life, or a thousand. Sum up all the choices, over nine lives, and your fate’s decided, they say. If you fail, then there’s nothing at the end of it all but silence, and the night. Pass through that last summing-up, though, under Iau’s eye, and there’s the last life, which doesn’t end—”
“—the Tenth Life and the truest,” Arhu said slowly, “of those whose spirits outwear and overmaster their bodies, untiring of the chase, the Choice, the battle, and go on in the world and beyond it; immortal, dangerous and fair, cats-become-Powers, who move in and out of physicality on the One’s business—”
He looked at Rhiow, his eyes clearing. “They can’t help us,” Arhu said. “Something is breaking through: everything is bending, changing … so that there’s nowhere solid for them to step. There isn’t any help but what we already have.”
Wonderful, Rhiow thought. “If you see anything that can be of use to us in what we’re going to have to do,” she said, “this would be a good time to let me know.”
He looked at her with a kind of helpless expression. “You’re carrying all the wrong spells,” he said. “You don’t want to open the gates. You need to shut them.”
That perplexed her. “But they’re shut already.”
“Not for long,” Arhu said, and very suddenly squeezed his eyes shut as if seeing something that frightened him badly.
“What?” Rhiow said.
“No…” He wouldn’t look at her.
I wish I could push him. But I don’t dare. “All right,” she said. “Arhu, we have another problem. Whatever you may say about opening or shutting gates, we are going to have to go Downside again, very soon, to look for Har’lh. It’s going to be much more dangerous than last time, and if our spells are to protect us so that we can do the job, we’re going to have to link ourselves together in a particular way. It means we’ll be stronger: each of us will have all our strengths to draw on. But it also means that, if one of us dies down there, all the others will be trapped; there’ll be no return.”
“I know,” Arhu said, painfully. “I see that.”
Rhiow shuddered. “I’m not going to tell you that you have to do that. You have to decide.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then, abruptly, he looked up at Rhiow again. “… What does Saash say?”
Rhiow looked curiously at him. Arhu looked at the floor. “Well,” he said, “she washed me. I must have tasted horrible. And she held me, even when I kicked, and called her names.”