She ducked into the bay and to the left, pausing to let her eyes adjust—it was much darker down here than out in the cavernous underground of the main lower track area, with all its lines of fluorescents and the occasional light shining out the windows of workshops and locker rooms. Behind her, Arhu stared into the long dark passage. Huge wheels wrapped full of firehose, and mated to more low, blocky-looking machines, were bolted into the walls, from which also protruded big brass nozzles of the kind to which fire equipment would be fastened. A faint smell of steam came drifting from the end of the corridor, where it could be seen to meet another passage, darker still.
“What is this? And what’s that?” Arhu whispered, staring down the dark hallway. For, hunched far down the length of it, against one of the low dark machines, something moved … shifted, and looked at them out of eyes that eerily caught the light coming from behind them.
“It’s a storage area,” Rhiow said. “We’re under Forty-eighth Street here; this is where they keep the fire pumps. As for what it is—”
She walked down into the darkness. Very slowly, she could hear Arhu coming up behind, his pads making little noise on the damp concrete. The steam smell got stronger. Finally she paused by the spot from which those strange eyes had looked down the hallway at them. It seemed at first to be a heap of crazily folded cardboard, and under that a pile of old, stained clothing. But then you saw, under another piece of folded cardboard from a liquor store box, the grimy, hairy face, and the eyes, bizarrely blue. From under the cardboard, a hand reached out and stroked Rhiow’s head.
“Hunt’s luck, Rosie,” Rhiow said, and sat down beside him.
“Luck Reeoow you, got no luck today,” Rosie said. Except that he didn’t say it inehhif.He said,“Aihhah ueeur Rieeeow hanh ur-t hah hah’iih eeiaie.…”
Arhu, who had slowly come up beside her, stared in complete astonishment.“He speaks our language!”
“Yes,” Rhiow said, taking a moment to scrub a bit of fallen soot out of her eye: solid particulates from the train exhausts tended to cling to the ceiling over here because of the steam. “And his accent’s pretty fair, if you give him a little credit for the mangled vowels, the way he shortens the aspirants, and the ‘shouting.’ The syntax needs work, though. Rosie, excuse me for talking about you to your face. This is Arhu.”
“Hunt’s luck, Arhu,” Rosie said, and reached out a grubby hand.
Arhu sat down just out of range, looking even more shocked than he had when the Children of the Serpent burst through into the catenary cavern the night before.
“I don’t know if Arhu is much for being petted, Rosie,” Rhiow said, and tucked herself down into a comfortable meatloaf shape. “He’s new around here. Say hello, Arhu.”
“Uh, hunt’s luck, Rosie,” Arhu said, still staring.
“Luck food not great stomach noise scary,” Rosie said sadly, settling back into his nest of cardboard and old clothes. All around him, under the cardboard, were piled plastic shopping bags stuffed full of more clothes, and rags, and empty fast food containers; he nestled among them, arms wrapped around his knees, sitting content, if a little mournful-looking, against the purring warmth of the compressor-pump that would service the fire hose coiled above him.
Arhu couldn’t take his eyes off theehhif.“Why is hedownhere?” he whispered.
“Alalal neihuri mejhruieha lahei fenahawaha,”Rosie said, in a resigned tone of voice. Arhu looked at Rhiow, stuck about halfway between fear and complete confusion.
“Rosie speaks a lot of languages, sometimes mixed together,” Rhiow said, “and I have to confess that some of them don’t make any sense even when I listen to them with a wizard’s ear, in the Speech; so some of what he says may be nonsense. But not all. Rosie,” she said, “I missed that one, would you try it again?”
Rosie spent a moment’s concentration, his eyes narrowing with the effort, and then said, “Short den fullhai’hauisshpolice clean up.”
“Ah,” Rhiow said. “There was a big meeting of important people in town, a ‘convention,’ ” she said to Arhu, “and the cops have stuffed all the shelters, the temporary dens, full of homeless people, so they won’t make the streets look bad. Rosie must have got to the shelter too lateto get a place, huh Rosie?”
“Uh huh.”
“ ‘Homeless—’ ” Arhu said.
“We’d say ‘denless.’ It’s not like ‘nonaligned,’ though; mostehhif don’tlike to wander, though there are exceptions. Rosie, what have you had to eat since you came down here? Have you had water?”
“Hot cloudlailihe ruhaith memezepanairindagha.”
“He’ssshai-sau,”Arhu said.
“Maybe, but he can speak cat, too,” Rhiow said, “which makes him saner than mostehhiffrom the first pounce. You’ve got a pan down there in the steam tunnel, is that it, Rosie? You’re catching the condensation from the pipes?”
“Yeah.”
“What about food? Have you eaten today?”
Rosie looked at Rhiow sadly, then shook his head.“Shihh,”he said.
“Rats,” said Rhiow, and hissed very softly under her breath. “He knows the smell of food would bring them. Rosie, I’m going to bring you some food later. I can’t bring much: they’ll have to see me, upstairs, when I take it.”
There was a brief pause, and then Rosie said, with profound affection:“Nice kitty.”
Arhu turned away.“So this is one of the the People-eatingehhifI heard so much about,” he said. There was no deciphering his tone. Embarrassment? Loathing?
“He’s one of many who come and go through these tunnels,” Rhiow said. “Some of them are sick, or can’t get food, or don’t have anywhere to live, or else they’re running away, hiding from someone who hurt them. They come and stay awhile, until the transit police or the Terminal people make them go somewhere else. There are People too, who drift in and out of here … many fewer of them than there used to be. This place isn’t very safe for our kind anymore … partly because of the Terminal people being a lot tougher about who stays down here. But partly because of the rats. They’re bigger than they used to be, and meaner, and a lot smarter. Rosie,” Rhiow said, “how much have the rats been bothering you?”
Rosie shook his head, and cardboard rustled all around him.“Nicht nacht night I go up gotta friend rat dog, dog, dog, bit me good, no more, not at night…”
“Rats bad at night,” Arhu said suddenly.
Rhiow gave him an approving look, but also bent near him and said, too softly for anehhifto hear,“Speak normally to him. You’re doing him no kindness by speaking kitten.”
“Yes bad, heard them bad, loud, not two nights ago, three,” Rosie said, his voice flat, but his face betrayed the alarm he had felt. “Smelled them, smelled the cold things—” There was a sudden, rather alarming sniffing noise from under the cardboard, and Rosie’s eyes abruptly vanished under the awning of cardboard, huddled against a sleeve that appeared to have about twenty more sleeves layered underneath it, alternately with layers of ancient newspaper. Rhiow caught a glimpse of a familiar movement under the bottom-most layer that made her itch as if she had suddenly inherited Saash’s skin.
The sniffing continued, and Arhu stared at Rosie and actually stepped a little closer, wide-eyed. The cardboard spasmed up and down, and a little sound,huh, huh, huh,came from inside it“Is he sick?” Arhu said.
“Of coursehe’s sick,” Rhiow muttered. “Ehhif aren’tsupposed to live this way. He’s hungry, he’s got bugs, he keeps getting diseases. But mat’s not the problem. He’ssod.Or maybe afraid. That’s ‘crying,’ that’s what they do instead of yowl. Water comes out of their eyes. It makes them ashamed when they do that. Don’t ask me why.”