"Listen," Yafh said, "what's food, in the long run? Once you're full, you sleep, whether it's caviar you were eating, or rat. These ehhif let me out on my own business, at least: that's more than a lot of us hereabouts can say. And they may be careless about mealtimes, but they don't send me off to have my claws pulled out, either, the way they did with poor Ailh down the road. Did you hear about that?"
"You'll have to tell me later," Rhiow said, and shook herself all over to hide the shudder. Such horror stories had long ago convinced her to leave her ehhif 's furniture strictly alone, no matter how tempted she might be to groom her claws on its lovely seductive textures. "Yafh, I hate to wash and run, but it's business this morning."
"They work you too hard," he said, eyeing her sidewise. "As if the People were ever made to work in the first place! The whole thing's some ehhif plot, that's what it is."
Rhiow laughed as she jumped down from the baluster. Others might retreat into unease at her job, or envy of it: Yafh simply saw Rhiow's errantry as some kind of obscure scam perpetrated on her proper allotment of leisure time. It was one of the things she best liked about him. " 'Luck, Yafh," she said, starting down the sidewalk again. "See you later."
"Hunt's luck to you too," he said, "you poor rioh." It was a naughty punning nickname he had given her some time back— the Ailurin word for someone's beast of burden.
Rhiow went on her way, past the empty doorsteps, smiling crookedly to herself. At the corner she paused, looking down the length of Third. The light Sunday morning traffic was making her life a little easier, anyway: there was no need to wait. She trotted across Third, dashed down along the wall of the apartment building on the corner there, and ducked under the gate of the driveway behind it, making for the maze of little narrow alleys and walls on the inside of the block between Third and Lexington.
This was probably the most boring part of Rhiow's day: the commute down to the Terminal. She could have long-jumped it, of course. Considering her specialty, that kind of rapid transit was simple. But long-jumping took a lot of energy— too much to waste first thing in the morning, when she was just getting started, and when having enough energy to last out the day's work could mean the difference between being successful or being a total failure. So instead, Rhiow routinely went the long way: across to Lexington as quickly as she could manage, and then downtown, mostly by connecting walls and rooftops. The route was circuitous and constantly changing. Construction work might remove a long section of useful wall-walk or suddenly top the wall with sharp pieces of glass; streets might become easier to use because they were being dug up, or alternately because digging had stopped; scaffolding might provide new temporary routes; demolition work might mean a half-block's worth of barriers had suddenly, if temporarily, disappeared— at least, until construction work began. Typically, though, Rhiow would have at least a few weeks on any one route— long enough for it to become second nature, and for her to run it in about three-quarters of an hour, without having to think much about her path until she got down near Grand Central and met up with the others.
This morning, she spent most of the commute thinking about Ailh-down-the-road, the poor thing. Ailh was a nice enough person: well-bred, a little diffident— a handsome, close-coated little mauve-beige creature, with brown points and big lustrous green eyes. Not, Rhiow had to admit, the kind of cat one usually meets on the streets in the city; which made her unusual, memorable in her way. But apparently Ailh also couldn't control herself well enough to keep her scratching outside, though she had access to the few well-grown trees in their street. It was a shame. A shame, too, that ehhif were so peculiarly territorial about the things they kept in their dens. Being territorial about the den itself, that any cat could understand; but not about things. It was one of the great causes of friction between two species that had enough trouble understanding one another as it was. Rhiow wished heartily that ehhif could somehow come by enough sense to see that things simply didn't matter, but that was unlikely at best. Not in this life, she thought, and not in the next couple either, I'll bet.
Just west of Third on Fifty-sixth, Rhiow paused, looking down from an iron-spiked connecting wall between two brownstones, and caught a familiar glimpse of a blotched brown shape, skulking wide-eyed in the shadows of the driveway-tunnel leading into the parking garage near the corner. This was one of the more convenient parts of Rhiow's morning run: a handy meeting place fairly close to the Terminal, where the ehhif knew her and her team, and didn't mind them. Not for the first time, Rhiow considered Saash's luck in getting herself adopted by the ehhif who worked there. Luck, though, she thought, almost certainly has nothing to do with it, in our line of work….
She jumped down from the wall, ran under a parked car, looked both ways from underneath it, and hurried across the street. Saash, now crouched down against the wall of the garage, saw her coming, got up, and stretched fore and aft.
She was a long-limbed, delicate-featured, skinny little thing. Rhiow wondered one more time whatever could be the matter with her that she didn't seem able to put on weight: Saash was hardly there. Her coloring supported the illusion. In coat she was a hlah'feihre, what ehhif called a tortoiseshell— but not one of the bold, splashy ones. Saash's coat was patched softly in many shades and shapes of brown, gray, and beige, all running into one another: in some lights, and most especially in shadow, you could look straight at her and hardly see her. It was probably something to do with her kittenhood, which she rarely discussed— but hiding had been a large part of it, and you got the feeling Saash wouldn't be done with that aspect of her life for a long time, if ever. She had never quite grown into her ears, and the size of them gave her a look of eternal kittenishness— while the restless way they swiveled made her look eternally wary and uneasy, despite the ironic humor in her big gold eyes.
" 'Luck," Rhiow said, and Saash immediately turned her back, sat down, put her left back leg over her left shoulder, and began to wash furiously. Rhiow sat down, too, and sighed. Another cat would probably have sniffed and walked off at the rudeness, but Rhiow had been working long enough with Saash to know it wasn't intentional.
"Is it bad this morning?" Rhiow said.
Saash kept washing. "Not like last week," she muttered. "Abha'h put that white stuff on me again, the powder." There was another second's satisfied pause. "I took a few strips off him while he was putting it on, anyway. Whether the junk does help or not, it still smells disgusting. And the taste—!"
Rhiow gazed off in the direction of the street, waiting for Saash to finish washing, and making faces at the flea powder, and scratching, and shaking herself. Rhiow privately doubted that the problem was fleas. Saash simply seemed to be allergic to her own skin, and itched all the time, no matter what anyone did: she couldn't make more than a move or two before stopping to put her fur back in order, even when it was perfectly smooth. When they had started working together, Rhiow had thought the constant grooming was vanity, and blows had been exchanged over it. Now she knew better.
Saash shook her coat out and sat down again properly. "There," she said. "I'm sorry, Rhi. 'Luck to you too."
"You heard?"
"They called me," Saash said in her little breathy voice, "right in the middle of breakfast. Typical."
"I was sleeping myself. Any sign of Urruah yet?"
Saash looked disdainful. "He's probably snoring at the bottom of that Dumpster he was describing in such ecstatic detail yesterday." She made an ironic breath-smelling face, one suggestive of a cat whiffing something better suited for a houff to roll in than for any kind of meal.
"Saash," Rhiow said, "for pity's sake, don't start in on him this morning: I can't cope.— Were They more specific with you than They were with me? I got a sense that something was wrong with the north-side gate again, but that was all."
Saash looked over her shoulder and washed briefly down her back. "Au, it's the north one, all right," she said, straightening up again. "It looks like someone did an out-of-hours access
and forgot that the north gate's diurnicity timings change when it's accessed. So it's sitting there still patent."
"And after we just got the hihhhh thing fixed…!" Rhiow lashed her tail in irritation.
"My thought exactly."
"But who in the worlds would be accessing it out-hours without checking the rates first? That's pretty basic stuff. Even ehhif know enough to check the di-timings before they transit, and they can't even see the strings."
"Well, whoever came through didn't bother," Saash said. "Until we close it down again, the gate won't be able to slide back where it belongs for the day shift. And to get it shut, we'll have to reweave the whole vhai'd portal substrate until the egress stringing matches the access web again."
Rhiow sighed. "After we spent all of yesterday doing just that. Urruah's going to love this."
"Whenever he wakes up," Saash said dryly, sitting down to scratch again; but whatever else she might have said was lost as her ehhif came bustling up from down the ramp.
"Oh, poor kitty, you still scratchin', I gotta do you again!" Abad cried as he came toward them, feeling around for something in the deep pockets of his stained blue coverall. Abad was a living example of the old saying that an ehhif either looks like its cat to begin with or gets that way after a while— a tall, thin tom, fine-boned, brown-complected, with what looked like an eternal expression of concern. As Abad finally came up with the canister of flea powder, Saash took one wide-eyed look, said "Oh no!" and took off around the corner of the garage door and down the sidewalk toward Lexington. By the time he got into the open doorway and started looking for her, Saash had already done a quick sidle. Rhiow got up and strolled out onto the sidewalk after them. Abad stood there looking first one way, then the other, seeing nothing. But Rhiow, as she came up beside him, saw Saash slow down by the corner of the apartment building and look over her shoulder at Abad, then sit down again and start washing behind one ear.
"Aah, she hidin' now," Abad said sadly, and bent down to scratch Rhiow, whom he at least could still see. "Hey, nice to see you, Miss Black Cat, but my little friend, she gone now, I don' know where. You come back later and she be back then, she play with you then, eh?"
"Sure," Rhiow said, and purred at the ehhif for kindness' sake; "sure, I'll come back later." She stood up on her hind legs and rubbed hard against Abad's leg as he stroked her. Then she went after Saash, who glanced up at her a little guiltily as she stood again.
"You do that to him often?" Rhiow said. "I'd be ashamed."
"We all sidle when we have to," Saash said. "And if your fur tasted like mine does right now, so would you. Come on, you may as well… we're close, and enough people are out now that they'll slow us down if we're seen."
Rhiow sighed. "I suppose. It's getting late, isn't it?"
Saash squinted in the general direction of the sun. "I make it ten of six, ehhif-time."
Rhiow frowned. "That first train from North White Plains is due at twenty-three after, and we can't let it run through a patent gate. Which Dumpster did he say it was?"
"Fifty-third and Lex," Saash said. "By that new office building that's going up. There's a MhHonalh's right next to it, and the workmen keep throwing their uneaten food in there."
At the thought, Rhiow grimaced slightly, and looked over her shoulder to see what Abad was doing. He was still gazing straight toward them, looking for Saash: seeing nothing but Rhiow, he sighed, put the flea powder away, and went back into the garage.
Rhiow stood up and sidled, feeling the familiar slight fizz at ear-tips, whisker-tips, and claws as she stepped sideways into the subset of concrete reality where visible light would no longer bounce off her. Then she and Saash headed south on Lex toward Fifty-third, taking due care and not hurrying. The main problem with being invisible was that other pedestrians, ehhif and houiff particularly, had a tendency to run into or over you; and since they and other concrete things were still fully in the world of visible light, in daytime they hurt to look at. In the "sidled" state, though, you were already well into the realm of strings and other nonconcrete structures, and so your view was littered with them too. The world became a confusing tableau of glaringly bright ehhif and buildings, all tangled about with the more subdued light-strings of matter substrates, weft lines, and the other indicators of forces and structures that held the normally unseen world together. It was not a condition that one stayed in for long if one could help it— certainly not in bright daylight. At night it was easier, but then so was everything else: that was when the People had been made, after all.
Rhiow and Saash trotted hurriedly down Lexington, being narrowly missed by ehhif pedestrians, other ehhif making early deliveries from trucks and vans, houiff out being walked, and (when crossing streets) by cabs and cars driving at idiotic speed even at this time of morning. There was simply no hour, even on a Sunday, when these streets were completely empty; solitude was something for which you had to go elsewhere. One had to weave and dodge, or hug the walls, trying not to fall through gratings or be walked into by ehhif coming unexpectedly around corners.
They made fairly good time, only once having to pause when an under-sidewalk freight elevator started clanging away while Saash was walking directly over its metal doors. She jumped nearly out of her skin at the sudden sound and the lurch of the opening doors, and skittered curbward— straight into a houff on the leash. There was no danger: the houff was one of those tiny ones, a bundle of silky golden fur and yap and not much else. Saash, however, still panicked by the dreadful clanging of the elevator alarm and the racket of the rising machinery, hauled off and smacked the houff hard in the face, as much from embarrassment as from fright at jostling into it, and galloped off down the street, bristling all over. The houff, having been hit claws-out and hard by something invisible, plunged off down the sidewalk in a panic, half-choking on its collar and shrieking about murder and ghosts, while its bewildered ehhif was towed along behind.
Rhiow was half-choked herself, holding in her merriment. She went after Saash as fast as she could, and didn't catch up with her until she ran out of steam just before the corner of Fifty-fourth. There Saash sat down close to the corner of the building and began furiously washing her fluffed-up back fur. Rhiow knew better than to say anything, for this was not Saash's eternal itch: this was he'ihh, composure-grooming, and except under extraordinary circumstances, one didn't comment on it. Rhiow sat down back to back, keeping watch in the other direction, and waited.
To Saash's credit, she cut the he'ihh short, then breathed out one annoyed breath and got up. "I really hate them," she said as they went together to the curb, "those little ones. Their voices—"
"I know," Rhiow said. They waited for the light to change, then trotted across, weaving to avoid a pair of ehhif mothers with strollers. "They grate on my nerves, too. But would you rather have had one of the big ones?"
"Don't tease," Saash muttered as they trotted on toward the next corner. "I feel foolish now for hitting the poor thing like that. It wasn't its fault. And I was sidled too. Those little ones aren't always very resilient thinkers; if I've unhinged it somehow…"
"I doubt that." But Rhiow smiled. "All the same, you should have seen the look on its face. It—"
She stopped, ears pricked. From nearby, sounds of barking and snarling and yowling were rising over the muted early-morning traffic noise, becoming louder and louder. The two of them paused and looked at each other, eyes widening— for one of the two lifted voices, they knew.
"Sweet Queen around us," Saash said, "what's he doing?!"
They took off at a run, dodging among ehhif going in and out of the early-opening bakery at the end of the block, and tore around the corner. A dusty car with one tire flat and another booted was parked on their side of Fifty-third: Rhiow jumped up on its trunk and then leaped to its roof to get a better view. Saash came after, skidding a little on the roof and staring down the street. At the second impact, the car's alarm went off. Rhiow and Saash ignored it, knowing everyone e
lse would, too.
Fifty-third was a mess of construction in this block: several beat-up yellow Dumpsters were lined head to tail on the north side, and scaffolding towered several stories above them, against the front of two brownstones being renovated. Near the middle Dumpster, which sat with its lid open, a group of men in T-shirts and hard hats, and two others in security guards' uniforms, stood staring in astonishment at something between them and the Dumpster. At the sound of the car alarm, the men gave one glance toward the end of the street, saw nothing, and turned their attention back to what they had been watching.
The barks and growls scaled up into a yipping howl of sheer terror, and the men scattered, some toward the scaffolding, some toward the street. From among them burst a huge German shepherd, tawny and black. Its ears were plastered against its skull, its tail was clamped between its hind legs, and it leapt four-footed into the air and came down howling, and spun in circles, and shook itself all over. But it could do nothing to dislodge the gray-striped shape that clung to its neck, yowling at the top of his voice… not in fear or pain, either. Urruah was having a good time.
"Oh, not today," Rhiow muttered. "Come on, Saash, we've got to do something, that gate won't wait—!"
"Tell him," Saash said, dry-voiced, as the unfortunate houff and its rider came plunging toward them. Urruah's eyes were wide, his mouth was wide as he yowled, and he had both front pawfuls of claws anchored in the houff 's collar, or maybe in its upper neck behind its ears; his back claws kicked and scrabbled as if he thought he'd caught a rabbit, and was trying to remove its insides in the traditional manner. The dog continued to howl, jump, and turn in circles, and still couldn't rid himself of his tormentor: the howls were more of pain than fear, now. Urruah grinned like an idiot, yowling some wordless nonsense for sheer effect.
Rhiow saw one of the security guards pull out his gun. He wouldn't be so stupid—! she thought. But some ehhif were profoundly stupid by feline standards, and one might take what he thought was a safe shot at the cat tormenting his guard dog, even if he stood an even chance of hitting the dog instead.