He put her aside suddenly, got up. Rhiow, climbing up to stand on the arm of the chair where he had set her down, looked after Iaehh, not at all reassured.
If he keeps hurting this way—then you may have to let him think that something has “happened to you’. Regardless of how well you like this warm, snug place.
“Look at that, it’s half an hour past your dinnertime,” Iaehh said, fumbling at the kitchen cabinet where the cat food was, as if he was having trouble seeing it: and he sounded stuffed up. “Come on, let’s get you fed. Oh, jeez, look at this bowl, I keep forgetting to wash it, no wonder you didn’t want to eat out of it—”
Rhiow jumped down from the chair and went to him. If this doesn’t get better…
Sweet Queen about us, what will become of me … ?
TWO
She was out early the next morning, as (to her relief) Iaehh was: on mornings when the weather was fair, he did his jogging around dawn, to take advantage of the City’s quietest time. Rhiow had already been awake for a couple of hours and was doing her morning’s washing in the reading chair when he bent over her and scratched her head.
“See you later, plumptious—”
She gave him a rub and a purr, then went back to her washing as he went out, shut the door behind him and locked all the locks. Iaehh was pleased with those locks—their apartment had never been broken into, even though others in the building had. Rhiow smiled to herself as she finished scrubbing behind her ears, for she had heard attempts being made on all those locks at one time or another during the day when she happened to be home. Some of those attempts would have succeeded, had there not been a wizard on the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the low-maintenance spell which made access to the apartment impossible. Should anyone try to get in, the wizardry simply convinced the wall and the door that they were one unit for the duration: and various frustrated thieves had occasionally left strangely ineffectual sledgehammer marks on the outside, the whole door structure having possessed, for the duration of the attack, a non-gravitic density similar to that of lead. Rhiow was pleased with that particular piece of spelling: it required only a recharge once a week, and kept her ehhif’s routine, and hers, from being upset.
Rhiow finished washing, stretched fore and aft, and headed out the cat-door to the hiouh-box on the terrace. There she went briefly unfocused in the cool darkness as she did her business, thinking about other things. She had reviewed the basic structures and relationships of the London gates in the Knowledge, the body of wizardly information which the Whisperer held ready for routine reference: she had looked at the specs for the gates under normal circumstances. Being rooted in the Old Downside’s gates, the London “bundle” had similarities to them … but being a continent away and subject to much different spatial stresses, there were also significant differences. She would assess those more accurately when she was right down in the gating complex with their hosts.
Rhiow finished with the box, shook herself, and stepped out onto the terrace and then down onto the brick “stairway”, making her way down to the roof of the next building. There she made her way across the gravel again, this time to leap up on the Seventieth Street side of the roof’s parapet and balance there for a moment, breathing the predawn air. For once it was very quiet, no car alarms going off, even the traffic over on First muted, as yet. The low soft hhhhhhhhhh of the City all around her was there: the breathing of all the air-conditioning systems, the omni-directional soft sound of traffic. Only during a significant snowstorm did that low breathing hiss fade reluctantly to silence … and even then you imagined you heard it, though softer, as the breathing in and out of ten million pairs of lungs. It was the sound of life: it was what Rhiow worked for.
She looked eastward toward the River. Her view was partially blocked by the buildings of Cornell Medical Center and New York Hospitaclass="underline" but she could smell the water, and faintly she could even hear it flowing, a different soft rushing noise than that of the traffic. Past the East River and the hazy sodium lights of Brooklyn on the far side, she could smell the dawn, though she couldn’t yet see it. Another job, Rhiow thought, another day…
She closed her eyes most of the way, in order to clearly see more and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, Rhiow thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: they will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always. I shall walk through Their worlds as do the Powers that Be, seeing and knowing with Them and for Them, tending Their worlds as if they were mine: for so indeed they are. Silently shall I strive to go my way, as They do, doing my work unseen; the light needs no reminding by me of good deeds done by night. And in this long progress through all that is, though I will know doubt and fear in the strange places where I must walk, I will put these both aside, as the Oath requires, and hold myself to my work … for if They and I together cannot mend what is marred, who can—? And having done my work aright, though I may know weariness at day’s end, come awakening I shall rise up and say again, with Them, as if surprised, “behold, the world is made new … !”
There was more to the Meditation, of course; it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case … a reminder of priorities, a “mission statement’. It was perhaps also, just slightly, what ehhif might term “a call to arms”: there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.
Rhiow got up, shook herself and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down. The joke is, she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air, that knowing the Powers are there, and listening, doesn’t really solve that many problems. It seemed to her that ehhif had the same problem, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their Gods existed, or not very sure at alclass="underline" and those who were most certain seemed to be no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The City was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in which ehhif gathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers that Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious—as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).
She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than most ehhif works he heard live in concert in town. He’d gone to one service in the great “cathedral’ in midtown to do some translation of the music’s verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by the ehhif there to the Powers that Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery which even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors—but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers’ countenance—even, amazingly, the One’s—and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings which did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things some ehhif did…