He looked at her, and away again, toward the sunset: the sun was gone now, the darkness falling fast.
“Yes,” he said, in a voice of complete despair. “So do I.”
Chapter Eight
What with the report for Har’lh, and seeing Saash and Arhu safely back to the garage—for Arhu still seemed very disturbed, though his litany of fear had stopped—it was late before she got home. At the sound of the kitty door going, Hhuha looked up from where she was sitting, reading in the big chair. From inside, in thebedroom, a man’s voice was saying, “And now tonight’s list of Top Ten Reasons to call the Board of Health—”
“Mike,” Hhuha said, “she’s back.”
Rhiow ran across to her and jumped in her lap, purring, before Hhuha could rise.“Oh, you rotten little thing,” Hhuha said, picking her up and nuzzling the side of her face, “I’ve been worried stiff, where the heck have you been all evening?”
Once again Rhiow wondered, as she had before, whichehhifdemigod Heck was.“Don’t ask,” she muttered. “But I’m glad to be back, oh, believe me I am. Mmm, you had pizza again. Any leftovers?”
Hhuha held her away a little, leaving Rhiow’s hind legs dangling. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Rhiow added, with a rueful glance down at her legs. “It’s hardly dignified.”
“I wonder,” Hhuha said, “are you getting out somehow?”
From the bedroom, a snort could be clearly heard over the laughter coming from the picturebox.“There’s nowhere for her to get out but twenty stories down, Sue,” the answer came. “And if she’s doing that, how’s she gettingback?”
“I hate it when he’s sensible,” Hhuha muttered, holding Rhiow close again. “Well, you’re okay. I’m so glad. I’ll give you some of that nice tuna.”
“I’lleatit,” Rhiow said, “though I must be out of my mind.”
But neither of them moved for a few minutes: Hhuha just held Rhiow more or less draped over her shoulder, and Rhiow just let her, and they purred at each other.Moments like this make it all worthwhile,Rhiow thought.Even the almost-getting-eaten-by-dinosaurs part.For the work she did was as much about keeping Manhattan safe forehhifas for People, and about making it easier for wizards of all kinds to keep the planet going as it should. Wizards had kept various small and large disasters from befalling the city in the past and would do so often again; on the smallest scale, they did it every day. And the purpose, finally, was so that normal life could go on doing what it did—just trying to manage the best it could and finding what joy there was to be found along the way. Entropy was running: the heat was slowly bleeding out of the worlds, and nothing could be done to actually stop the process. But wizards could slow it down, however slightly, and make a little more time for everyone else to purr at each other in…
“You must be hungry,” Hhuha said, and didn’t move.
“Starving,” Rhiow said, and didn’t move, either.
She glanced around, her head resting on Hhuha’s shoulder. Papers were all over the place again, on the living-room table and in a heap by the chair. “I’m going to shred some of those if I get a chance,” Rhiow said lazily, her tail twitching a bit with the pleasant image. “I wish you’d find something else to do with your days; you so dislike what you have to do now.”
’Talk talk talk,” Hhuha said, having just caught the last few sounds of the sentence as a soft trill. “Youarehungry, I bet. Come on.”
She finally put Rhiow carefully down on the rug and went to open another can of cat food. Rhiow sat, watching it with some resignation, since her nose told her plainly that the leftover pizza was in the microwave, and there was pepperoni on it.
They always leave it there and sneak slices in the middle of the night. Would they ever notice ifIjust opened it one night, took a slice out, and closed it again? If I timed it right, each of them might think the other one did it…
“How much of that pizza is left?” Iaehh’s voice came from the bedroom.
“About half.”
“Bring me some?”
“How much?”
“About hah0.”
“Pig.”
“Controlling personality.”
“Pizzainbed. Disgusting.”
“Call it a lifestyle choice.”
“You can damn well choose abouthalf ofabout half. I get the rest.”
“Forget it,” Rhiow said then, with amusement and resignation, as Hhuha filled her bowl again. “It would never work… you two talk to each other too much. If this relationship were a little more dysfunctional, I’d eat a lot better, you know that?”
“There you go,” Hhuha said, straightening up from the food bowl. “What a good kitty.”
Rhiow set about eating the awful tuna at her best possible speed, so that she could get into the bedroom before the pizza was all gone. *
Much later, both of them were snoring, and Rhiow lay at the end of the bed, looking at the yellow Venetian-blind light and thinking. In particular, she was looking at a chance group of wrinkles in the blanket at the end of the bed: they looked a little like two curves and a slash across them.
The Eye.
We’ve got a visionary on our hands,Rhiow thought.
Seers turned up occasionally among wizards, just as among nonwizards—though there would always be those who would argue that any seer was probably actually some kind of wizard anyway. The talent was not widespread. Wizards as a class might be more liable, by the nature of their work, to the sudden flash of insight that could be mistaken for genuine future-seeing:and to a lesser extent, they were sensitive to dreams and visions—perhaps the Whisperer, in her most benevolent mode, trying to hint at where danger might lie, since she was not allowed to warn you directly. But some few wizards sidestepped evenherboundaries and saw clearly what might happen if things kept going the way they were going at present. Some did so with dreadful clarity. They tended not to last long: they were usually claws in the One’s paw and (as the myth had it) usually personified the Claw That Breaks, the razor-sharp but brittle weapon that inflicts a fatal wound on the enemy, but itself does not survive the battle. Having a seer in the vicinity meant that the Lone Power would start noticing you back with unusual persistence … not a happy scenario. Ihad a lot of plans for this life yet,Rhiow thought.This is not good.
She thought once more of Arhu’s voice crying,That’s what it was. That’s what it was— “ ‘It’ what?” she said softly. And she sighed. She was going to have to press him on that point, and it was going to be painful. Rhiow was sure it had something to do with the condition in which they had first found him: she had her suspicions, but she needed confirmation from him, to tie up that particular loose string.
And there were others. One was a very small thing, but it was still bothering her.
Why did my light go out?
Rhiow went back in thought, suddenly, to her first diagnostic on the malfunctioning gate, the other day. The gate had as much as told her that it had been interfered with, somehow, during its function.
But nothing should be able to produce such interference except more wizardry.
Another wizard…
She shied away from that thought. Therewererogues, though they weren’t much discussed. The common knowledge was that wizardry did not live in the unwilling heart: a wizard uncomfortable with his power, unable to bear the ethical and practical choices it implied, soon lost the power, and any sense of ever having had it. But a wizard who was quite comfortable with the Art, and then started to find ways to use it that weren’t quite ethical…
Normally such wizards didn’t last long. The universe, to which wizardry was integral, had a way of twisting itself into unexpected shapes that would interfere with a rogue’s function. Equally, there was no particular safety in assuming that a rogue was willingly cooperating with the Lone One— or with what It stood for. Like many another ill-tempered craftsman, sa’Rrahh the Destroyer was careless with her tools, as likely to throw them away or break them in spite as to reward them for services done. So when rogues appeared, they tended to be a temporary phenomenon.