So it’s going to come down to her, Rhiow thought Why can I not surprised? “She’s angry,” Rhiow said. “She doesn’t want to go down there again, and she hasn’t made her mind up.”
He switched his tail indecisively. “She’ll be here in a little while,” Rhiow said. “You can ask her then. When you’ve decided, speak to me in your head, or ask Saash to. We can’t wait very long to go.”
“All right.” He turned his face to the wall.
Rhiow sighed, and stepped out onto the air, sidled again. “But you do have mostly the wrong spells,” Arhu said.
This is so reassuring. “Which ones should we have, then?” Rhiow said.
“The ones the Whisperer’s still working on…”
That made Rhiow blink.
“I’ll be at my den,” she said. “Go well.”
When she got in, Rhiow was surprised to find Hhuha still at home so far into the day. She was stalking around the apartment restlessly, dressed for work, but plainly not going there: paperwork was still lying scattered here and there, her briefcase sat open on the table. Something unusual was happening, and Hhuha was tense about it. Possibly that meeting she was planning has been rescheduled? Rhiow thought. In any case, she knew better than to interfere with Hhuha when she was in such a mood, though at the moment Rhiow’s stomach was growling nearly as loud as her purr could get under better conditions. She went and jumped on the sofa, and curled up there.
Hhuha stopped by the window, looked out, sighed, then went over to Rhiow and picked her up. “I hate calling in sick when I’m not,” Hhuha muttered into her fur. “It makes me feel duplicitous and foul. Come here, puss, and tell me I’m not duplicitous and foul.”
“You’re no more duplicitous than most cats are,” Rhiow said, purring as loudly as she could and bumping her head against Hhuha’s ear, “so why should you complain? As ehhif go, you’re a model of good behavior. And you’re not foul. The tuna is foul. —Oh, come on, my Hhuha, calm down.” She put her nose against Hhuha’s neck. “This is no good. You’re not calm, Iau knows I’m not calm, neither of us can do anything for each other.”
“My kitty,” Hhuha said, rubbing her behind the ears. “I wish I knew where you were half the time. You make me worry.”
“I wish I could just tell you! It would be so much easier. I swear, I’m going to start teaching you Ailurin when all this quiets down. If Rosie can learn it, so can you.”
“At least I know you’re not out getting knocked up.”
Rhiow had to laugh. “With the example of the Himalayans down the street before my eyes? I’d sooner pull out my own ovaries with my teeth. Fortunately that’s not a requirement.”
“Boy, you’re talky today. You hungry? Want some tuna? Sure.”
“I don’t want the gods’-damned tuna!” Rhiow practically shouted as Hhuha put her down and went to the ffrihh. “I want to lie on the rug and be a house pet! I want to sit on the sofa and have you rub my fur backward so I can grab you and pretend to bite! I want to sit on Iaehh’s chest and nuke him feed me pepperoni! I want… oh. You didn’t say you had sushi last night!”
“Here, it’s maguro. You like maguro. Come on. Would you stand up for it?”
Rhiow stood right up on her hind legs and snatched at the sushi with both paws. “You’d be surprised what I’d do for it, except I’m not allowed. Did you take the horseradish off it? I hate that stuff, it makes my nose run. Oh, good…”
Hhuha sat down, and together they ate tuna sushi, very companionably, on the sofa. “He made a big fuss about not liking maguro last night,” Hhuha said, “so he doesn’t get any. You and I will eat it all. No, you don’t want this one, it’s sea urchin.”
“Try me!”
“Hey, get your face out of there. You had three pieces, that’s enough.”
“There is no such thing as too much sushi.”
“Oh, gosh, it is awful the day after. Here, you have it.”
“I thought you’d see sense eventually. —Oh, gods, it’s disgusting!”
“Hey, don’t drop that on my rug! I thought you wanted it!”
“I changed my mind.”
The phone rang. Hhuha leapt up off the couch like a Person going up a tree with a houff after her, and answered the phone before the machine could pick up. “Hello—yes, this is she—yes, I’ll hold— Yes, good morning, Mr. Levenson. —Certainly. —No problem—when? That’s fine. I’ll see you there. Yes. Goodbye—”
She hung up and threw away the rejected piece of sushi, then dashed across the room to pick up the jacket that went with the business skirt she was wearing, shut the briefcase and snatched it from the table, and looked scornfully at the pile of papers near it. “May be the last day I have to mess with that stuff,” Hhuha said. “Wish me luck, puss!”
“Hunt’s luck, Hhuha mine,” Rhiow said. Hhuha headed out the door and closed it, starting to lock locks on the outside.
Rhiow sat there when the noise had finished, and listened to Hhuha’s steps going off down the hallway, then had a brief wash. She was in the middle of it when she heard the voice in her head.
Rhiow?
T’hom—
You’re needed. Hurry up: get the team together and get them all down here. We’ve got big trouble.
She had never heard such a tone from him before. She went out the door at a run.
It took about twenty minutes to get everyone together at the garage; after that it was a minute’s worth of work to do a small-scale “personal” transit of the kind that Rhiow and the team had first used to bring Arhu in. The garage staff mistook the slam of air into the space where they had been for something mechanical, as Rhiow had suspected they would; when they popped out into existence on the platform for Track 30, the bang! of hot, displaced air was drowned out there too by the diesel thunder of trains arriving on one track and leaving on another.
There were a lot of people waiting on the empty platform. They looked like commuters … those of them who were visible, anyway. But visible or not, they had business in the station other than catching trains. In a city the size of New York, with a population of as many as ten million, there may be (depending on local conditions) as many as a hundred thousand wizards in the area; and New York, packed as full as it is with insistent minds and lives, populated as it is by an extravagant number of worldgates, tends to run higher than that. Obviously many wizards would be based in boroughs other than Manhattan, or would be engaged in other errantry that wouldn’t leave them free to drop what they were doing. But many would be ready and able to answer an emergency call, and these were arriving and being briefed, either by other wizards or by their Manuals, on what was going to be required of them.
Tom saw Rhiow and the team immediately, and headed over to them through a crowd of other ehhif wizards. “I got you your override,” he said to Rhiow when they had moved a little over to one side, where they could talk. “I’m afraid it wasn’t cheap.”
She knew it wasn’t. The Whisperer had breathed a word in Rhiow’s ear while they were setting up the circle for their short transit—confirmation that her demand had been accepted, and the price set—and the news had made her lick her nose several times in rapid succession. A whole life— She could have backed out, of course. But Rhiow had put her tongue back in where it belonged, taken a deep breath, and agreed. Now it was done. If everything worked out for them, of course, the price would be more than fair. It was simply something of a shock to have spent the last four or five years thinking of yourself as still only a four-lifer, not yet in middle age—and suddenly, between one breath and the next, to realize that you were already into your fifth life, and now on the downhill side.