In the center of it all, on the level at which they had entered, was a large pitlike area filled with desks and carrels, with a wide wooden-arched opening off to one side. Right now this opening, whereehhifwould come from the main reading room on the side to pick up books, was shuttered and locked, in case thieves should somehow get in through the great reading room windows by night and try to steal books for collectors. The rarest books were all now up in little wood-paneled, iron-grilled jails in the Special Collections, second-floor front, isolated from the main reference stacks by thick concrete walls and alarm systems. Ehef had told Rhiow once that you could hear the books whispering to each other in the dark through the trefoil-pierced gratings, in a tiny rustling of page chafing against page, prisoners waiting for release. Rhiow had come away wondering whether he had been teasing her. Wizards do not lie: words are their tool and currency, which they dare not devalue. But even wizardry, in which a word can shape a world, has room for humor, and there had been a whimsical glint in Ehef’s eyes that night…
She smiled slightly.“This way,” Rhiow said, and led the way over to the central core of carrels, where the computers sat two to a desk, or sometimes three. Several of the monitors were turned on, casting a soft blue-white glow over the desks; and on one desk, sprawled comfortably with one paw on the keyboard, and looking thoughtfully at the screen in front of him, lay Ehef.
He looked over at them with only mild interest as they came, though when his eyes came to rest on Arhu, the expression became more awake. Ehef’s coloration was what People calledvefessh,andehhifcalled“blue”; his eyes, wide and round in a big round platter of a face, were a vivid green that set off the plush blue fur splendidly. Those eyes reflected the shifting images on the screen, pages scrolling by. “Useless,” he said softly. “Not even wizardry can do anything about the overcrowding on these lines. Phone company’s gotta do something. —Good evening, Rhiow, and hunt’s luck to you.”
“Hunt’s luck, Senior,” she said, sitting down.
“Wondered when you were going to get down to see me. Urruah? How they squealin’?”
“Loudly,” Urruah said, and grinned.
“That’s what I like to hear. Saash? Life treating you well?”
She sat down, threw a look at Arhu, and immediately began to scratch.“No complaints, Ehef,” she said.
“So I see.” He looked at Arhu again, got up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down off the desk, crossing to them. “And I smell new wizardry. What’s your name, youngster?”
“Arhu.”
Ehef leaned close to breathe breaths with him: Arhu held still for it, just.“Huh. Pastrami,” said Ehef. “Well, hunt’s luck to you too, Arhu. You still hungry? Care for a mouse?”
“There aremicehere?”
“Are there mice here, he asks.” Ehef looked at the others as if asking for patience in the face of idiocy. “As if there’s any building in this city thatdoesn’thave either mice, rats, or cockroaches. Mice! There are hundreds of mice! Thousands! … Well, all right,some.”
“I want to catch some! Where are they?”
Ehef gave Rhiow a look.“He’s new at this, I take it.”
Arhu was about to shoot off past Rhiow when he suddenly found Urruah standing in front of him, with an attentive and entirely too interested expression.“When you’re on someone else’s hunting ground,” Urruah said, “it’s manners to ask permission first.”
“If there are thousands, why should I? I wanna—”
“You should ask permission, young fastmouth,” said Ehef, his voice scaling up into a hiss as he leaned in past Urruah’s shoulder with a paw raised, “because if you don’t, I personally will rip the fur off your tail and stuff it all right down your greedy face, are we clear about that? Young people these days, I ask you.”
Arhu crouched down a little, wide-eyed, and Rhiow kept her face scrupulously straight. Ehef might look superficially well-fed and well-to-do, but to anyone who had spent much time in this city, the glint in his eyes and the muscles under his pelt spoke of a kittenhood spent on the West Side docks among the smugglers and the drug dealers, with rats the size of dogs, dogs the size of ponies, andehhifwho (unlike the tunnel-ehhif)counted one of the People good eating if they could catch one.
“Please don’t rip him up, Ehef,” Rhiow said mildly. “He’s a little short on the social graces. We’re working on it.”
“Huh,” Ehef said. “He better work fast, otherwise somebody with less patience is going to tear his ears off for him. Right, Mr. Wisemouth?” He moved so fast that even Rhiow, who was half-expecting it, only caught sight of Ehef’s paw as it was just missing Arhu’s right ear; the ear went flat, which was just as well, for Ehef’s claws were out, and Arhu crouched farther down.
“Right,” said Ehef. “Well, because Rhiow suggests it, I’ll cut you a little slack. You can’t help it if you were raised in a sewer, a lot of us were. So what you say is, ‘Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?’ And then I say, ‘Hunt, but not to the last life, for even prey have Gods.’ So come on, let’s hear it.”
Only a little sullenly—for there was a faint, tantalizing rustling and squeaking to be heard down at the bottom of the stacks—Arhu said, “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground.”
“Was that a question? Who were you asking, the floor? One more time.”
Arhu started to make a face, then controlled it as one of Ehef’s paws twitched. “Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?”
“Sure, go on, you, catch yourself some mice, there’s a steady supply, I make sure of that. But don’t eat them all or I’ll skin you before anybody’s gods get a chance. Go on, what are you waiting for, don’t you hear them messing around down there? Screwing each other, that’s what that noise is, mouse sex, disgusting.”
Hurriedly, Arhu got up and scurried off. Rhiow and the others looked after him, then sat down with Ehef.
“Thanks, Ehef,” Rhiow said. “I’m sorry he’s so rude.”
“Aah, don’t worry about it, we all need a little knocking around in this life before we’re fit to wash each other’s ears.Iwas like that once. He’ll learn better; or get dead trying.”
“That’s what we’re hoping to avoid…”
Saash blinked, one ear swiveling backward to follow the rustling going on above.“ ‘I make sure there’s a steady supply’? I wouldn’t think that’s a very professional attitude for a mouser.”
“I got more than one profession, you know that. But the day I eat every mouse in the place, that’s the day they decide they don’t need a cat anymore.”
“And, besides,” Saash said dryly, “ ‘even prey have gods.’ ”
“Sure they do.” Ehef settled himself, stretched out a paw. “But ethics aside, look, it’s not like the old times anymore, no more ‘jobs for life.’ With the budget cuts, if these people want to give me cat food, they have to pay for it themselves. Bad situation, nothing I can do about it.So I make sure they think I’m useful, and I make sure I don’t have to go out of my way to do it. Why should I go hunting out when I can eat in? I bring the librarians dead mice every day, they bring me cat food, everybody’s happy. Leaves me free for other work. Such as consultation, which reminds me, why didn’t you call to make sure I was available first?”
Rhiow smiled.“You’re always available.”
“The disrespect of youth.”
“When have I ever been disrespectful to you? But it’s true, you know it is. And I usually do call first, but I had a problem.”
Ehef’s ears swiveled as he heard the scampering downstairs. “So I see. Not the one I thought, though.” His whiskers went forward in a dry smile. “Thought you finally figured out what to do with that spell.”