Having said hello in passing, she went on her way down the block, not bothering to sidle even this close to home. Iaehh rarely came down the block this way anyhow, preferring for some reason to approach from the First Avenue side, possibly because of the deli down on that corner. She strolled down the sidewalk, glancing around her idly at the brownstones, the garbage, the trees and the weeds growing up around them; more or less effortlessly she avoided theehhifwho came walking past her with shopping bags or briefcases or baby strollers. Halfway down was a browner brownstone than usual, with the usual stairway up to the front door and a side stairway to the basement apartment. On one of the squared-off tops of the stone balusters flanking the stairway sat a rather grungy looking white-furred shape, washing. He was always washing,Rhiow thought, not that it did him any good. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hunt’s luck, Yafh!”
He looked down at her and blinked for a moment. Green eyes in a face as round as a saucer full of cream, and almost as big: big shoulders, huge paws, and an overall scarred and beat-up look, as if he had had an abortive argument with a meat grinder: that was Yafh. However, you got the impression that the meat grinder had lost the argument.“Luck, Rhi,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve had mine for today. Care for a rat?”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but I’m on my way to dinner, and if I spoil my appetite, myehhifwill notice. Bite its head off on my behalf, if you would …”
“My pleasure.” Yafh bent down and suited the action to the word.
She trotted up the steps and sat down beside Yafh for a moment, looking down the street while he crunched. Yafh was one of those People who, while ostensibly denned withehhif,was neglected totally by them. He subsisted on stolen scraps scavenged from the neighborhood garbage bags, and on rats and mice and bugs—not difficult in this particular building, its landlord apparently not having had the exterminators in since early in the century.
“You off for the day?” Yafh said, when he finished crunching.
“The day, yes,” she said, “but tomorrow early we have to go to Hlon’hohn.”
“That’s right across the East River, isn’t it?”
“Uh, yes, all the way across.” Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. So did Yafh.
“They’re making you work again, ’Rioh,” Yafh said. The name was a pun on her name and on an Ailurin word for “beast of burden’, though you could also use it for a wheelbarrow or a grocery cart or anything else thatehhifpushed around.“It’s all a plot. People shouldn’twork.People should lie on cushions and be fed cream, and filleted fish, and ragout of free-range crunchy mouse in a rich gravy.”
“Oh,” Rhiow said. “The wayyouare …”
Yafh laughed that rough, buttery laugh of his: he leaned back and hit the headless body of the rat a couple of times in a pleased and absent way.“Exactly. But at least I’m my own boss. Are you?”
“This isn’t slavery, if that’s what you’re asking,” Rhiow said, bristling very slightly. “It’s service. Thereisa difference.”
“Oh, I know,” Yafh said. “What wizards do is important, regardless of what some People think.” He picked the rat up one more time, dangled it from a razory claw, flipped it in the air and caught it expertly. “And at least from what you tell me you have it better than the poorehhifwizards do: your own kind at least know about you … But Rhi, it’s just that you never seem to have much time to yourself. When do you lie around and just bePeople?”
“I get some time off, every now and then …”
“Uh huh,” Yafh said, and smiled slightly: that scarred, beat-up, amiable look that had fooled various of the other cats (and some dogs) in the neighborhood into thinking that he was no particular threat. “Not enough, I think. And things have been tough for you lately …”
“Yes,” Rhiow said, and sighed. “Well, we all have bad times occasionally: not even wizardry can stop that.”
“It stops other People’s bad times, maybe,” Yafh said, “but not your own … It just seems hard, that’s all.”
“It is,” Rhiow said after a moment, gazing up toward herehhif’s apartment building near the corner. Sometimes lately she had dreaded going home to the familiar den that suddenly had gone unfamiliar without Hhuha in it. But Iaehh was still there, and he expected her to be there on a regular basis. As far as he knew, she was only able to get out onto the apartment’s terrace and from there to the roof of the building next door, from which Iaehh supposed there was no way down … and if she didn’t come in every day or so, he worried.
“You sure you don’t want the rest of this rat?” Yafh said quietly.
Rhiow turned toward him, apologetic.“Oh, Yafh, I appreciate it, but food won’t help. Work will … though I hate to admit it. You go ahead and have that, now. Look at the size of it! It’s a meal by itself.”
“They’re getting bigger all the time,” Yafh said, lifting the headless rat delicately on one claw again and examining it with a more clinical look. “Saw one the other night that was half your size.”
Rhiow’s jaw chattered in relish and disgust at the thought of dancing in the moonlight with such a partner. The dance would be brief: Rhiow prided herself on her skill in the hunt. At the same time, it was disturbing … for the rats did keep getting bigger. “The rate they’re going,” she said as she got up, “we’re going to start needing bigger People.”
Yafh gave her an amused look.“I’m doing my part,” he said, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward, knowing he had sired at least fifty kittens in this area alone over the past year.
“You do more than that,” she said. “Hunt’s luck, Yafh … I’ll see you in a few days. Can I bring you something from Hlon’hohn?”
“How are the rats?” he said.
“Oh please,” Rhiow said, laughing, and trotted down the steps toward home.
For the last part of the run, she sidled, since the building next to herehhif’sapartment house had windows that were not blind. Down by the locked steel door that separated the alley beside the building from the street, Rhiow looked up and down to make surenoone was looking directly at her, and then stepped sideways without moving. Whiskers and ear-tips and Rhiow’s tail-tip sizzled slightly as she sidled, making the shift into the alternate universe where the hyperstrings that stitched empty space and solid matter together were clearly visible, even in the afternoon light. They surrounded her now, a jangle and jumble of hair-thin harpstrings of multicolored light, running up toward vanishing-points up in space and down to other vanishing-points in the Earth’s core or beyond it. Rhiow threaded her way among them, and slipped under the gate and into the alleyway.
The garbage was piling up again. She paused to listen for any telltale rustling among the black plastic bags: nothing.No rats today. But then for all I know, Yafh’s been here already …Rhiow stalked past the bags, looked up toward the roof of the building whose left-paw wall partly defined the alleyway, and said several words under her breath in the Speech.
Everything living understands the Speech in which wizards work, as well as many things that are not living now, or once were, or which someday might be. Air was malleable stuff, and could be reminded that it had once been trapped in oxides and nitrates in the archeaean stone. It had been in and out of so many lungs since its release that there was controversy among wizards whether air should any longer simply be considered as an element, but also as something once alive. Either way, it was easy to work with. A few words more, and the hyperstrings in the empty air of the alley knotted themselves together into the outline of an invisible stairway: the air, obliging, went solid within the outlines.
Invisible herself, Rhiow trotted up eight stories to the roof of the building on the left, and leapt up over the parapet to the gray gravel on top. Wincing a little as always at the way it hurt her feet, she glanced over her shoulder and said the word of release: the strings unknotted and the air went back to being no more solid than the smog made it. Rhiow made her way along to the back left-paw corner where the next building along, herehhif’sbuilding, abutted this one’s roof.