"So some took sa'Rráhh's offer—"
Arhu had that faraway look again: Rhiow had no idea what he might be seeing, and continued as she had been doing. "Most did, and their Choice ruled the others. The Hungry, those who made that Choice, grew great and terrible in body, killing for power and success, but like the carnivorous saurians, they hadn't paid enough attention to the wording and intention of the Lone One's offer. They had their time to rule, but it was short— soon enough the ice crept down from the poles and buried the forests where they hunted, killing their game, and then most of them as well. There was a second group of the Eldest Kindred who rejected power and rule over the Earth, and elected to kill what they needed, only. They were the Mindful. They stayed small, for the most part, but grew wise, enough so to survive the ice when it came."
She fell silent for a moment, wondering what to make of the look on Arhu's face. "But there were more—" he said.
Rhiow switched her tail "yes." "They weren't very many, that last group: the Failed. They recognized as potentially deadly the Choice the Lone Power was offering, and they attacked her and died. But they're reborn, again and again, in one or another of our sundered Kindreds."
"They're wizards," Arhu said suddenly, and looked up at Rhiow.
"Yes," she said. "Still we die: there's no escaping the fate of the rest of our kind. But we're set apart; and we alone of all felinity may come again to that time and place where cats' bodies are once again the size of their souls…. Other confusions between size and Kindred have come about over time. The Hungry are born among the smaller kindreds, and the Mindful among the great; the savage and the kindly mingle. You never know which sort you'll find yourself dealing with. Yet every feline, great or small, carries all of them within herself; we all have to make the Choice again and again, a hundred times in a life, or a thousand. Sum up all the choices, over nine lives, and your fate's decided, they say. If you fail, then there's nothing at the end of it all but silence, and the night. Pass through that last summing-up, though, under Iau's eye, and there's the last life, which doesn't end—"
"—the Tenth Life and the truest," Arhu said slowly, "of those whose spirits outwear and overmaster their bodies, untiring of the chase, the Choice, the battle, and go on in the world and beyond it; immortal, dangerous and fair, cats-become-Powers, who move in and out of physicality on the One's business—"
He looked at Rhiow, his eyes clearing. "They can't help us," Arhu said. "Something is breaking through: everything is bending, changing… so that there's nowhere solid for them to step. There isn't any help but what we already have."
Wonderful, Rhiow thought. "If you see anything that can be of use to us in what we're going to have to do," she said, "this would be a good time to let me know."
He looked at her with a kind of helpless expression. "You're carrying all the wrong spells," he said. "You don't want to open the gates. You need to shut them."
That perplexed her. "But they're shut already."
"Not for long," Arhu said, and very suddenly squeezed his eyes shut as if seeing something that frightened him badly.
"What?" Rhiow said.
"No…" He wouldn't look at her.
I wish I could push him. But I don't dare. "All right," she said. "Arhu, we have another problem. Whatever you may say about opening or shutting gates, we are going to have to go Downside again, very soon, to look for Har'lh. It's going to be much more dangerous than last time, and if our spells are to protect us so that we can do the job, we're going to have to link ourselves together in a particular way. It means we'll be stronger: each of us will have all our strengths to draw on. But it also means that, if one of us dies down there, all the others will be trapped; there'll be no return."
"I know," Arhu said, painfully. "I see that."
Rhiow shuddered. "I'm not going to tell you that you have to do that. You have to decide."
He didn't say anything for a long time. And then, abruptly, he looked up at Rhiow again. "…What does Saash say?"
Rhiow looked curiously at him. Arhu looked at the floor. "Well," he said, "she washed me. I must have tasted horrible. And she held me, even when I kicked, and called her names."
So it's going to come down to her, Rhiow thought. Why am I not surprised? "She's angry," Rhiow said. "She doesn't want to go down there again, and she hasn't made her mind up."
He switched his tail indecisively. "She'll be here in a little while," Rhiow said. "You can ask her then. When you've decided, speak to me in your head, or ask Saash to. We can't wait very long to go."
"All right." He turned his face to the wall.
Rhiow sighed, and stepped out onto the air, sidled again. "But you do have mostly the wrong spells," Arhu said.
This is so reassuring. "Which ones should we have, then?" Rhiow said.
"The ones the Whisperer's still working on…"
That made Rhiow blink.
"I'll be at my den," she said. "Go well."
* * *
When she got in, Rhiow was surprised to find Hhuha still at home so far into the day. She was stalking around the apartment restlessly, dressed for work, but plainly not going there: paperwork was still lying scattered here and there, her briefcase sat open on the table. Something unusual was happening, and Hhuha was tense about it. Possibly that meeting she was planning has been rescheduled? Rhiow thought. In any case, she knew better than to interfere with Hhuha when she was in such a mood, though at the moment Rhiow's stomach was growling nearly as loud as her purr could get under better conditions. She went and jumped on the sofa, and curled up there.
Hhuha stopped by the window, looked out, sighed, then went over to Rhiow and picked her up. "I hate calling in sick when I'm not," Hhuha muttered into her fur. "It makes me feel duplicitous and foul. Come here, puss, and tell me I'm not duplicitous and foul."
"You're no more duplicitous than most cats are," Rhiow said, purring as loudly as she could and bumping her head against Hhuha's ear, "so why should you complain? As ehhif go, you're a model of good behavior. And you're not foul. The tuna is foul.— Oh, come on, my Hhuha, calm down." She put her nose against Hhuha's neck. "This is no good. You're not calm, Iau knows I'm not calm, neither of us can do anything for each other."
"My kitty," Hhuha said, rubbing her behind the ears. "I wish I knew where you were half the time. You make me worry."
"I wish I could just tell you! It would be so much easier. I swear, I'm going to start teaching you Ailurin when all this quiets down. If Rosie can learn it, so can you."
"At least I know you're not out getting knocked up."
Rhiow had to laugh. "With the example of the Himalayans down the street before my eyes? I'd sooner pull out my own ovaries with my teeth. Fortunately that's not a requirement."
"Boy, you're talky today. You hungry? Want some tuna? Sure."
"I don't want the gods'-damned tuna!" Rhiow practically shouted as Hhuha put her down and went to the ffrihh. "I want to lie on the rug and be a house pet! I want to sit on the sofa and have you rub my fur backward so I can grab you and pretend to bite! I want to sit on Iaehh's chest and make him feed me pepperoni! I want… oh. You didn't say you had sushi last night!"
"Here, it's maguro. You like maguro. Come on. Would you stand up for it?"
Rhiow stood right up on her hind legs and snatched at the sushi with both paws. "You'd be surprised what I'd do for it, except I'm not allowed. Did you take the horseradish off it? I hate that stuff, it makes my nose run. Oh, good…"
Hhuha sat down, and together they ate tuna sushi, very companionably, on the sofa. "He made a big fuss about not liking maguro last night," Hhuha said, "so he doesn't get any. You and I will eat it all. No, you don't want this one, it's sea urchin."
"Try me!"
"Hey, get your face out of there. You had three pieces, that's enough."
"There is no such thing as too much sushi."
"Oh, gosh, it is awful the day after. Here, you have it."
"I thought you'd see
sense eventually.— Oh, gods, it's disgusting!"
"Hey, don't drop that on my rug! I thought you wanted it!"
"I changed my mind."
The phone rang. Hhuha leapt up off the couch like a Person going up a tree with a houff after her, and answered the phone before the machine could pick up. "Hello— yes, this is she— yes, I'll hold— Yes, good morning, Mr. Levenson.— Certainly.— No problem— when? That's fine. I'll see you there. Yes. Goodbye—"
She hung up and threw away the rejected piece of sushi, then dashed across the room to pick up the jacket that went with the business skirt she was wearing, shut the briefcase and snatched it from the table, and looked scornfully at the pile of papers near it. "May be the last day I have to mess with that stuff," Hhuha said. "Wish me luck, puss!"
"Hunt's luck, Hhuha mine," Rhiow said. Hhuha headed out the door and closed it, starting to lock locks on the outside.
Rhiow sat there when the noise had finished, and listened to Hhuha's steps going off down the hallway, then had a brief wash. She was in the middle of it when she heard the voice in her head.
Rhiow?
T'hom—
You're needed. Hurry up: get the team together and get them all down here. We've got big trouble.
She had never heard such a tone from him before. She went out the door at a run.
* * *
It took about twenty minutes to get everyone together at the garage; after that it was a minute's worth of work to do a small-scale "personal" transit of the kind that Rhiow and the team had first used to bring Arhu in. The garage staff mistook the slam of air into the space where they had been for something mechanical, as Rhiow had suspected they would; when they popped out into existence on the platform for Track 30, the bang! of hot, displaced air was drowned out there too by the diesel thunder of trains arriving on one track and leaving on another.
There were a lot of people waiting on the empty platform. They looked like commuters… those of them who were visible, anyway. But visible or not, they had business in the station other than catching trains. In a city the size of New York, with a population of as many as ten million, there may be (depending on local conditions) as many as a hundred thousand wizards in the area; and New York, packed as full as it is with insistent minds and lives, populated as it is by an extravagant number of worldgates, tends to run higher than that. Obviously many wizards would be based in boroughs other than Manhattan, or would be engaged in other errantry that wouldn't leave them free to drop what they were doing. But many would be ready and able to answer an emergency call, and these were arriving and being briefed, either by other wizards or by their Manuals, on what was going to be required of them.
Tom saw Rhiow and the team immediately, and headed over to them through a crowd of other ehhif wizards. "I got you your override," he said to Rhiow when they had moved a little over to one side, where they could talk. "I'm afraid it wasn't cheap."
She knew it wasn't. The Whisperer had breathed a word in Rhiow's ear while they were setting up the circle for their short transit— confirmation that her demand had been accepted, and the price set— and the news had made her lick her nose several times in rapid succession. A whole life— She could have backed out, of course. But Rhiow had put her tongue back in where it belonged, taken a deep breath, and agreed. Now it was done. If everything worked out for them, of course, the price would be more than fair. It was simply something of a shock to have spent the last four or five years thinking of yourself as still only a four-lifer, not yet in middle age— and suddenly, between one breath and the next, to realize that you were already into your fifth life, and now on the downhill side.
"We do what we have to," Rhiow said. "Har'lh has been doing so, and the Queen only knows where he is at the moment. Should I do less? But never mind that. What's going on?" She glanced over by Track 30, where she could see the weft of the gate showing as usual. "I thought you shut the catenaries down."
"They were shut down at the source." Rhiow looked up at him, slightly awestruck, for the source of the gates was the Powers That Be: Aaurh herself, in fact. "However… something has brought them up again."
"The gates are active," Urruah said carefully, "but not under your— under 'our'— control?"
"Yes," Tom said. Rhiow thought she had never heard anything quite so grim. "We've tried to shut the gates down again. They don't answer."
Saash's tail was lashing. "Once it's shut down, an emplaced wizardry shouldn't be able to be reactivated except by the one who emplaced it."
"Shouldn't. But we've seen the rules changing around us, all week. Apparently the earlier malfunctions were a symptom of this one— or else this one is just the biggest symptom yet. Someone has reactivated the gates from the other side."
"That would take—"
"Wizardry? Yes. And of a very high order."
Rhiow remembered the gate "saying" to her, "Someone" interfered… She licked her nose. And my light went out, Rhiow thought, and started feeling extremely grim herself.
"It couldn't be Har'lh, could it?" Urruah said. "Trying to get out?"
"His spells have their own signature, like any wizard's," Tom said. "Whoever or whatever is producing this effect… it's not Carl. But more to the point, if it were him, the gates wouldn't be resisting what's happening on the other side: it's a kind of power that's alien to them. Something wizardly, but not in the usual sense, appears to be trying to push through."
"I see it," Arhu said. "I told Rhiow that I was seeing it, just a little while ago."
Tom looked at him thoughtfully. "What exactly do you see?"
Arhu's tail was lashing. "It's dark… but I can hear something: it's scratching."
"Could be Saash," Urruah muttered.
Rhiow hit him right on the ear, hard. Urruah ducked down a little, but not nearly far enough to please her. "It's carrying the darkness with it on purpose," Arhu said, looking down into the darkness where the silver glint of the tracks under the fluorescents faded away, "and it wants to let it out into the sun… but until now the way has always been too small. Now, though, the opening can be made large enough; and there's reason to make it so. The darkness will run out across the ground under the sun and stain it forever."
Tom hunkered down by Arhu. "Arhu… who is it?"
Arhu squinted into the dark. "The father," he said. "The son…"
"He said that before," Rhiow said. "I couldn't make much of it then."
"The problem with this kind of vision," Tom said, looking over at her, "is that sometimes it makes most sense in retrospect. It's hardest on the visionary, though, who usually can't make any sense of it at all." He ruffled the fur on top of Arhu's head, which Arhu was too distracted to take much notice of. "One last thing. If we cannot prevent this breakthrough, by whatever force it is which is pushing against the gates from the other side… what else should we do to keep the world as it should be?"
Arhu looked up, but it was not on Tom that his eyes rested at last. The fur fluffed all up and down Rhiow's back as Arhu's eyes met hers; there was someone else behind those eyes. "You must claw your way to the heart," he said, "to the root. I hear the gnawing; too long have I heard it, and the Tree totters…"
In his eyes was the cool look of the stone statue of Iau in the Met. Rhiow wanted to look away but could not: she bent her head down before Arhu, before the One Who looked through him, until the look was gone again, and Arhu was glancing up and around him in mild confusion at everyone's shocked expressions— for Urruah had his ears flat back in unmistakable fear, and Saash was visibly trembling.
Tom let out a long and unnerved breath. "Okay," Tom said, getting up. He looked around him at the ever-increasing crowd of wizards. "You four have other business," he said: "so you should hold yourselves in reserve. There should be enough of us to hold these gates closed… I hope. When the pressure eases up on the other side or drops off entirely, that'll be your time to run through. Meantime… we'll do what we can."
* * *
&
nbsp; The hours that followed were given over to weary waiting for something that might not happen… if everyone was lucky. Urruah slept through it all. Arhu dozed or stared down at the ehhif down in the main concourse from the vantage point they had chosen, up on the gallery level. Saash sat nearby and scratched, and washed, and scratched again, until Rhiow was amazed that she had any skin left at all. But she could hardly blame her if Saash felt what she felt, the sensation of intolerable and increasing pressure below: something straining, straining to give, like a tire intent on blowing out; and something else leaning hard and steadily against it, trying to prevent the "blowout"— the many wizards who kept coming and going, new ones always arriving to relieve those who had come earlier and used up all their energy pushing back against the dark force at the other side of the gates. The ones who left looked as worn as if they had been out all night courting, or fighting, or both; and there was no look of satisfaction on any face— everyone looked as if the job itself wasn't done, even though individual parts of the job might be.
Rush hour started, and astonishing numbers of ehhif poured into the terminal and out of it again; the floor went dark with them, an incessant mindless-looking stir of motion, like bugs overrunning a picnic. There were minor flows and eddies in it— periods when the floor was almost empty, then when it filled almost too full for anyone to move; the patterns had a slightly hypnotic fascination. Rhiow wished they were a lot more than just slightly hypnotic; not for the first time, she envied Urruah's ability to sleep through anything that didn't require his personal intervention. She could never manage such a performance herself— her own imagination was far too active.