Yet a personally maintained wizardry, once done and set in motion, shouldn’t be able to be interfered with.
Except by the wizard who created it…
Rhiow bunked once or twice as that thought intruded.
Did something affect me down there?
She thought hard. The recurring difficulties she had been having with threatening imagery…
Surely not.
But when had she ever had anything like that happen before? Certainly she had been scared to the ends of her guard-hairs the last couple of times she’d been Downside. But nothing had gone wrong inside her head.
There were ways, though, to get inside another being’s mind against its will. Wizards knew about them… but did not use such “back doors” except in emergencies: they were highly unethical.
But if one of my team—
She put the thought aside. It was ridiculous. Saash would never do any such thing: her commitment to the Powers, and to Rhiow personally, was total. She was incorruptible, Rhiow would swear. Urruah was, too: he was just too stubborn and opinionated, once he had his mind made up about which side he was on, to change without signs as readable as an earthquake.
But Arhu…
Rhiow found herself thinking, once more, about the weak link, the new link, the new“member” of the team.
That was something she was going to have to deal with, of course, and the sooner the better… how much she disliked the idea of having a team member simply thrust on them, even if itwasby the Powers That Be. Teams of wizards came together willingly, for reasons of work and affinity … otherwise they fell apart under the strain of frequent exposures to life-or-death situations. Feline teams, made up of members of the most independent-minded species on the planet,hadto have close personal relationships and had to be absolutely convinced of each other’s reliability.
One came by such certainty only slowly. She and Saash had started working together a while after they met, about a year after Rhiow had passed her Ordeal, maybe two years after Saash’s. It had been a casual thing at first—pulling together to do an assigned job, then drifting apart again. But the “apart” periods had become fewer and fewer as they realized they had a specialization in common. This was a commonplace phenomenon among wizards. After the first blaze of powerassociated with your Ordeal, the power begins to fade somewhat with age: but you soon find something to specialize in, and make up by concentration and narrowing of focus what you lose in sheer brute force, becoming, in a phrase Rhiow had heard Har’lh use once, “a rifle instead of a fire hose.” After a while she and Saash started to be “listed” together in the Whispering as “associated talents,” the Manual’s delicate way of suggesting that they were beginning to become a team. Some time after that, Urruah turned up in their professional Me as a “suggested adjunct” for a couple of missions, and simply became part of the team over time.
There were still a lot of things they all didn’t know about each other, but wizardry by no means required total disclosure, any more than relationships in the rest of life did. How many lives along you were, what you had gone through in this one … how much personal information came out, and when, was all a matter of trust and inclination,and the need for privacy that was inextricably part of feline life and which balanced them both.
Rhiow would swear to the Queen’s own face, though, that she knew Urruah and Saash well enough to say that neither of them would ever go rogue or sabotage a wizardry in process. If therehadbeen sabotage today, its source was elsewhere.
And as for Arhu…
She sighed. She would have to deal with him tomorrow. But not before noontime, anyway. They would all need a good night’s sleep tonight, odd as it was to be asleepnow.Over the next few days, they could all get back to their normal schedules.
She stretched out on the bed, rolled over so that her feet were in the air in what Hhuha described as the somebody-shot-my-cat position, and let herself drift off to sleep, but not before burping once, gently, as the pepperoni settled itself. *
By noon the next day she was at the garage and was surprised to meet Saash by the door, lying sprawled well out of the way of the cars, but there was no sign of Arhu.
“Sleeping,” Saash said, washing one paw calmly.
“He could probably use it.”
“Don’t know, Rhi,” Saash said, standing up and arching her back to stretch, then lying down again. “I wonder if he might not be better awake.”
“You saw the Eye, then.”
“I did. Risky business this, Rhi. He’s likely to attract high-profile attention.”
“Believe me,” Rhiow said, “it’s on my mind. How did you sleep?”
“After the jitters went away … well enough. But, Rhi, I’m not going down there again for a good long while, not if Iau Dam of Everything walks right in here and offers me Her job.”
“Don’t see why we should,” Rhiow said. “Even Ffairh went only three or four times in his career, and only once down deep.”
“May She agree with you,” Saash said, and stood up— looked around carefully for any sign of Abad, and then scratched, and afterward sat down and began washing the fur into place again. “Meanwhile, are you going to let him sleep?”
“No,” Rhiow said. “And I have an excuse. Where’s Urruah this morning?”
“Off again. Something about hiso’hra.”
“Spare me,” Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. “Look, you get some more sleep if you can. I’ll take him off your hands for the day: he can go with me to check the track-level gates out again this afternoon—I want to see if they’ve replaced that switching track yet. Maybe help them a little if I can, now that the problem with Thirty’s solved. If you want me, call.”
“Thanks, Rhi,” Saash said, and let out a cavernous yawn. “Don’t wait for the call, though.”
Rhiow sidled herself and made her way up to the ledge where Saash slept. There was Arhu, curled up small and tight, as if trying to pass for a rock. His breathing was so shallow, it could hardly be seen.
She hunkered down near him, and purred in his ear. There was no response.
Right,she thought, and extended a claw, and sank it carefully into the ear closest to the ground.
He whipped upright, eyes wide, and stared at her; then slumped back down again, the eyes relaxing again to a dozy look, with more than a touch of sullenness to it.“What?”
“It’s time you were awake,” Rhiow said.
“After yesterday? Come on.” He put his head down again, closed his eyes.
Rhiow put her claw into the other ear this time, and somewhat more forcefully. Arhu sat up, and hissed.“What?”
“Tryingnotto see,” Rhiow said, “won’t help.”
He stared at her.
“That’s not what I’m here about,” she said, “not mostly, anyway. I promised to teach you to walk on air. The sooner we get this lesson handled, the better… since you’re going to be going on rounds with us for a while yet, I think, and we can’t slow ourselves down all the time by using non-climbing routes. Get up, have a wash, you’ll have your first lesson, and then we’ll get you something to eat Some more of that pastrami, maybe?”
Arhu looked at Rhiow with a little more interest. But the look suddenly went cooler.“I’m not going back down there,” he said.
“Good,” Rhiow said, a little wearily, “then you and Saash are in complete agreement. It’s not high on my list, either. Come on, Arhu, let’s get a move on…” *
The lesson went quickly: faster than Rhiow would have thought possible. It reinforced a feeling she had been having, that Arhu could learn with blinding speed when he wanted to… and right now he wanted to, in order to get rid of Rhiow.