The Book of Night With Moon (14 page)

"Then this wizardry isn't any use," Arhu muttered, scowling. "You say you can do all this stuff, and then you say you're not
allowed
to do it! What's the point?"

Rhiow felt herself starting to fluff up. Urruah, though, said mildly, "It's not quite like that. Are you
allowed
to fight with me, kitling?"

Arhu glared at Urruah, then he too began to bristle. Finally he burst out: "Yes, I am! But if I did, you'd
shred
me!"

"Then you understand the principle," Urruah said. "We're
allowed
to do all kinds of things. But we don't do them, because the result in the long term would be unfortunate." He smiled at Arhu. "For us or someone else. Till you come to know better, just assume that the results would be unfortunate for
you.
And in either the long term or the short… they would be."

Rhiow noticed that his claws were showing more than usual.
Wonderful,
she thought, remembering the saying:
Old tom, young tom, trouble coming!
"You'll find in the next few days," Rhiow said, "that there are a fair number of things you can do… and they'll be useful enough. You'll like them, too. Keep your ears open: when you hear the whisper… listen. She doesn't repeat herself much, the One Who Whispers."

Arhu looked up at that. "We're not working
for
anyone, are we?" he said, suspicious. "The People are
free."

Rhiow wanted to roll her eyes but didn't quite dare: Arhu was a little too sensitive to such things. "She'll suggest something you might do," Rhiow said, "but whether you do it or not is your choice."

"That's not exactly an answer."

Urruah stood up. "He makes my head hurt," Urruah said. "Give him the power to change the world and he complains about it. But then, if he's not willing to cooperate with the Powers Who're the source of the power, why should he learn anything more about it? Not that he
will."
He looked amused.

"All right, all right," Arhu said hastily, "so I want to learn. So when do I start?"

They looked at one another. "Right away," Rhiow said. "We have to go inspect the place we take care of, make sure things are going right there. You should come with us and see what we do."

Arhu looked at them a little suspiciously. "You mean your den? You're a pride?"

"Not the way you mean it. But yes, we are. The place we take care of— you remember it: the place where we found you.
Ehhif
living here use it as a beginning and ending to their journeys. So do
ehhif
wizards, and other wizards too, though the journeys are to stranger places than the trains go…."

"There are
ehhif
wizards?" Arhu laughed out loud at the idea. "No way! They're too dumb!"

"Now who's being 'stuck up'?" Urruah said. "There are plenty of
ehhif
wizards. Very nice people. And from other species too, just on this planet. Wizards who're other primates, who're whales… even wizards who're
houiff."

Arhu snickered even harder. "I wouldn't pay any attention to them.
Houiff
don't impress
me.
"

"You may yet meet Rraah-yarh," said Urruah, looking slightly amused, "who's Senior among the
houiff
here: and if you're wise, you'll pay attention to her.
I
wouldn't cross her… and not because she's a
houff,
either. She may look like half an ad for some brand of
ehhif
Scotch, but she's got more power in one dewclaw than you've got in your whole body, and she could skin you with a glance and wear you for a doggie-jacket on cold days."

Rhiow kept quiet and tried to keep her face straight over the thought that
everything
toms discussed seemed to come down to physical violence sooner or later. Saash, though, leaned close to Arhu and said, "You are now on the brink of joining a great community of people from many sentient species… a fellowship reaching from here to the stars, and farther. Some of your fellow-wizards are so strange or awful to look at that your first sight of them could nearly turn your wits right around in your head. But they've all taken the same Oath you have. They've sworn to slow down the heat-death of the Universe, to keep the worlds going as best they can, for as long as they can… so that the rest of Life can get on with its job. You want great adventure? It's here. Scary things, amazing things? You'll never run out of them… there are any nine lives' worth, and more. But if you don't pass your Ordeal,
this
life, none of it's ever going to happen."

"You willing to find out how hot you
really
are?" Urruah said. "That's why the Whisperer has spoken to you. Take her up on her offer… and the Universe gets very busy trying to kill you. Live through it, though… and there'll be good reason for the queens to listen to you when you sing."

Once more Rhiow kept her smile under control, for this kind of precisely applied power play was exactly what she had needed Urruah for. Tom-wizards tended to equate management of their power with management of their maleness: no surprise, since for toms in general
all
of life was about power and procreation. But it was language Arhu wouldn't understand until he grew old enough to understand wizardry, and life in general, in terms of
hauissh,
the power-and-placement game that ran through all feline culture. Rhiow almost smiled at the memory of Har'lh once equating
hauissh
with an old human strategy-game and referring to it as "cat chess," but the metaphor was close enough. All cat life was intrinsically
ha'hauissheh,
or "political" as Har'lh had translated it; and as the saying went, those who did not play
hauissh
had
hauissh
played on them, usually to their detriment. As a team manager, Rhiow had long since made her peace with this aspect of the job, and always made sure her own placement in the game was very secure, then directed her attention to placing her team members where they would do the most good, and felt guilty about the manipulation only later, if ever.

"So," Rhiow said. "Let's get on with it, young wizard. We usually walk, and you'll need to learn the various routes before we teach you the faster ways to go." She stood up. "First route, then: the hardest one, but the one that exposes us least to notice. Can you climb?"

Arhu positively hissed with indignation. Rhiow turned away, for fear the smile would slip right out, and as she passed, Saash lowered her head so that (without seeming to do so on purpose) it bumped against Rhiow's in passing, their whiskers brushing through one another's and trembling with shared and secretive hilarity.
Oh, Rhi,
Saash said silently,
were we ever this unbearable?

I was,
Rhiow said,
and you would have been if you'd had the nerve. Let's dull his claws a little, shall we?…

The run to Grand Central along the High Road, which normally would have taken the three of them perhaps twenty minutes, took nearly an hour and a half; and the dulling of Arhu's claws, which Rhiow had intended in strictly the metaphorical sense, happened for real— so that when they finally sat down on the copper-flashed upper cornice of the great peaked roof, looking down at Forty-second, Arhu was bedraggled, shaking, and furious, and Rhiow was heartily sorry she had ever asked him whether he could climb.

He
couldn't.
He was one of those cats who seem to have been asleep in the sun somewhere when Queen Iau was giving out the skill, grace, and dexterity: he couldn't seem to put a paw right. He fell off walls, missed jumps that he should have been able to make with his eyes closed, and clutched and clung to angled walks that he should have been confident to run straight up and down without trouble. It was a good thing he was so talented at sidling, since (if this performance was anything to judge by) he was the cat Rhiow would choose as most likely to spend the rest of his life using surface streets to get around: a horrible fate.
It may change,
she thought.
This could be something he'll grow out of. Dear gods, I hope so…
Finally she'd said to the others, out loud, "I could use a few minutes to get my breath back," and she'd sat down on the crest of the terminal roof. It was not
her
breath Rhiow was concerned about, while Arhu sat there gasping and glaring at the traffic below.

Why
is
he so clumsy?
Urruah said silently as they sat there, letting Arhu calm himself down again.
There's nothing wrong with him physically, nothing wrong with his nerves… they're the right "age" for the way his body is developing.
He was the one of them best talented at feeling the insides of others' bodies, so Rhiow was inclined to trust his judgment in this regard.

It's like he can't see the jump ahead of him,
Saash said.
There's nothing wrong with his eyes, is there?

No.
Urruah washed one paw idly.
Might just be shock left over from last night, and the healing, and everything else that's happening.

He didn't look shocky to me in the garage,
Rhiow said.

Believe me,
Saash said,
especially before you got there, shock was the last thing he was exhibiting. This is something of a revelation.

After a few moments, Rhiow got up and walked along the rounded copper plaques of the roof's peak to where Arhu sat staring down at the traffic. "That last part of the climb," she said as conversationally as she could, "can be a little on the rough side. Thanks for letting me rest."

He gave her a sidelong look, then stared down again at the traffic and the
ehhif
going about their business on the far side of Forty-second Street, walking through the glare of orange sodium-vapor light. "How far down is it?" he said softly.

It was the first thing Rhiow had heard him say that hadn't sounded either angry or overly bold. "About fifty lengths, I'd say. Not a fall you'd want…" She looked across the street, watching the cabs on Vanderbilt being released by the change of lights to flow through the intersection into Forty-second. A thought struck her. "Arhu," she said, "you don't have trouble with heights, do you?"

He flicked his tail sideways in negation, not taking his eyes off the traffic below. "Only with getting to them," he said, again so quietly as to be almost inaudible.

"I think the sooner we teach you to walk on air, the better," Rhiow said. "We'll start you on that tomorrow."

He stared at her. "Can you do that? I mean, can I—"

"Yes."

She sat still a moment, looking down. After a few breaths Saash came up behind, stepping as delicately and effortlessly as usual, and looked over Rhiow's shoulder at the traffic and at the dark, graceful, sculpted silhouettes that came between them and the orange glow from beneath. "A closer view than you get from the street," she said to Arhu. "Though you do miss some of the fine detail from this angle."

"What are they?"

" 'Who,' actually," Saash said. "
Ehhif
gods."

"What's a god?"

Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another.
My,
Urruah said silently,
we
are
going to have to start from scratch with this one, aren't we?… Hope he doesn't survive to breed. I wouldn't hold out much hope for the next generation.

"Very powerful beings," said Saash, giving Urruah a look. "Cousins to the Whisperer: they're all littermates under the One, or so we think. Each species has its own, even
ehhif."

Arhu sniffed at the idea and squinted at the carved figures. "One of them looks like he's falling asleep."

"She," Rhiow said.

"How do you tell?"

Urruah opened his mouth, but Rhiow said, "Some other time. That one's a queen, Arhu: the other two're toms."

"What's that one got on his head?"

"It's something
ehhif
wear," Saash said; "it's called a
hha't.
But don't ask me why it's got wings on it."

"Symbolic of something," Rhiow said. "All these carvings are. That middle one is a messenger-god, I believe. The 'sleepy' one, she's got a book; that's a way
ehhif
communicate. The other one, he's probably something to do with the trains. See the wheel?"

"There has to be more to it than just that, though," Urruah said. "Someone involved in the construction has to have known what this was going to be, besides just a place where the trains come and go. It can't just be coincidence that the Lord of Birds is shown there at the center of it all; they've always been the symbols of speed in getting around, especially of nonphysical travel. And then that one there, the queen, has the Manual, and the one in the middle has the stick with the Wise Ones wound around it: the emblem of what's below, in the Downside, under the roots of the worldgates. There have to have been wizards on the building's design team."

"I'll leave it to you to conduct some research on the subject," Rhiow said. "But there was wizardry enough about the place's building, even at the merely physical level: it never shut down, even when the construction was heaviest. Eight hundred trains came and went each day, and some of them may have been late, but they never stopped… and neither did other kinds of transit. Speaking of which, let's get on with our own business. We're running late."

She walked on down the roof-cornice, taking her time. "All very scenic," she said casually to Urruah, "but tomorrow we'll take the Low Road, all right?"

"The Queen's voice purrs from your throat, oh most senior of us all," Urruah said, following her at a respectable distance. She didn't look at him, but she twitched one ear back and thought,
I'm going to take this out of your hide eventually, O smart-mouthed one. Don't give him ideas. And don't make fun of his ignorance. It's not his fault he has no education, and it's our job to see that he gets one.