“Upstairs ‘begging’ for pastrami from the deli guy.”
Rhiow sighed.“There’s one habit of his I wish you wouldn’t encourage.”
“Oh, indeed? I seem to remember where he got it. Someone took him upstairs and—”
“Oh, all right.” Rhiow grinned. “We all slip sometimes. Did you open this?”
“No, he did, while he was ‘waiting for us’.”
“For us? You weren’t here?”
“He was early. Got impatient, apparently.”
Rhiow put one ear back.“Not sure I like him doing this by himself, as yet …”
“How were you planning to stop him? Come on, Rhi, look at it. The synchronization’s exact. He would have stayed here to keep an eye on it,” Urruah added, forestalling her as she opened her mouth, “but I told him to go on upstairs and get himself a snack. The guy likes him: he won’t get introuble,”
Rhiow put her ear forward again, though she had a definite feeling of being“ganged up on by the toms”.It may be something I’m going to have to get used to … “All right,” she said, studying the gate. It was open on London, set for nonpatency and a nonvisible matrix on the far side: this side would have been invisible to her, too, except that she could see where Arhu had carefully laid in the “graphic” Speech-form of her name, and Urruah’s and his own, in the portion of the spell matrix which controlled selective visibility and patency configurations. Beyond the matrix, light glittered off the river that ran by the big old stone building on which the view was centered: a huge square building of massive stone walls, with what appeared to be more buildings inside it, like a little walled city.
“The Tower of London,” Urruah said.
“Doesn’t look like a tower …”
“There’s one inside it,” Urruah said, “the original. The gating complex proper is a little to the north: this is a quieter place for a meeting, the Whisperer suggested. Local time’s four hours or so after sunrise.”
“Ten thirty …” Rhiow said. “Is this a good time for the gating team there?”
“Don’t know howgoodit is,” Urruah said, “but it’s what She specified. She may have spoken to them already. Ah hah, here he comes.”
The small black-and-white form came trotting insouciantly down the platform, not even sidled.“Arhu,” Rhiow said as he came up to them, “come on. You know how they are about cats in here—”
“Not about cats they can’t find,” Arhu said, licking his chops, and sidled. Rhiow sighed, leaned over and breathed breaths with him: and she blinked. “Sweet Iau in a basket, what’sthat?”
“Chilli pickle.”
Rhiow turned to Urruah.“You have created amonster,”she said.
Urruah laughed out loud.“Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first.”
“Yes, butyouencourage him all the time, and—”
“Hey, come on, Rhi, it’s good,” Arhu said. “The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke.” Arhu grinned. “Now the joke’s on him: I like it. But he’s good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chillies for him the otherday. He thinks it’s cooclass="underline" he makes other people come and see me eat it.”
“Not the transit police, I hope,” Rhiow said.
“Naah. I wouldn’t go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they’re down on the tracks,” Arhu said.
Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary.“All right. Are you ready?”
“I was ready an hour before you got here.”
“So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: you did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let’s go.”
Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side-effect of the patency.
“Go ahead,” Arhu said. Urruah, already sidled, leapt through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.
The darkness stripped away behind her as she leapt through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, more busy, one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, andehhif were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate which led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on to another expanse of cobblestones which sloped down toward the river.
As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him, and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.
“That’s our tripwire,” Arhu said. “Pull it and it activates the gate to open again.”
“And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we’re gone?” Rhiow said.
Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself.“It won’t interfere … the gate proper’s back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string of the selective-memory ‘woof’.”
“Very good,” Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.
They looked around them for a few moments more in the sun. It was a breezy morning: clouds raced by, their shadows patterning the silver river with gray and adding new shades to the gray-brown-silver dazzle-painting of the battleship which was moored on the other side of the river. Arhu had no eyes for that, though, or for the traffic, or theehhifpassing them by. He was looking at the stone walls of the Tower, and his ears were back.
“It’soldhere,” Arhu said. His ears went forward, and then back again, and kept doing that, as if he was was trying to listen to a lot of things at once … things that made him nervous.
“It’s old in New York, too,” Urruah said.
“Yeah, but not like this …”
“It’s theehhif,”Rhiow said.“They’ve been here so long … first thousands, then hundreds of thousands of them, then millions, all denning on the two sides of this river. A thousand years now, and more …”
“There’s more to it than that,” Arhu said. He was staring at the Tower. “I smell blood …”
“Yes,” said a big deep voice behind them. “So do we …”
They turned in some surprise, for he had come up behind them very quietly, even for a Person. Rhiow, taking him in at first glance, decided that she should revise her ideas about bigger cats being needed in the world: they were already here. This was without any question one of the biggest cats she had ever seen, not to mention the fluffiest. His fur, mostly black on his back, shaded to a blended silver-brown and then to white on his underparts, with four white feet and a white bib making the dark colors more striking. He had a broad, slightly tabby-striped face with surprisingly delicate-looking slanted green eyes in it, and a nose with a smudge: the splendid plume of gray-black tail held up confidently behind him looked a third the thickness of his body, which was considerable. If this Person was lacking for anything, it wasn’t food.
“We are on errantry,” Rhiow said, “and we greet you.”
“Well met on the errand,” said the Person. “I’m Huff: I lead the London gating team. And you would be Rhiow?”