Rhiow looked over her shoulder, and Urruah came through after her. From the far side of the door, there were a couple of soft bumping noises.
Urruah put his whiskers forward and looked ahead of them at Huff, who had paused to see where they were. “He has a little trouble with this one sometimes,” Urruah said. Bump, and Arhu abruptly came blooming through the metal, spitting and growling softly to himself. “Vhai’d stuff, why doesn’t it get out of the way when I tell it—”
“Language,” Rhiow said, rather hopelessly: but for the moment, Urruah just laughed. “Telling it won’t help,” he said: “you’ve got to ask nicely. Most things in the Universe react positively to that. Sass them, and they get stubborn.”
Arhu threw Urruah an unconvinced look as he padded by him in Huff’s wake. Old wooden doors opened into side rooms off this hallway: storerooms, Rhiow thought—a smell of electrical equipment and tools hung about the place. “There are workshops down here,” Huff said: “and there’s an access to the tunnel junction where the Tower Hill station’s tracks run near the access stairs to the Fenchurch Street railway station. That’s where the number-four gate is—”
He led them down one more stairway, a spiral one this time. It let out onto a small, dimly-lit platform which ran for maybe ten yards along a double line of track, the track stretching away into darkness on both sides. Above the platform hung the faintly glimmering oval of an active gate matrix. In front of it sat three People, one of them up on his haunches and working with the gate’s control strings: a youngish tabby torn who, except that his tabbying was marmalade rather than silver and gray, would have reminded Rhiow somewhat of Urruah.
One of the other two turned their heads to look at the new arrivals. She was a slender gray shorthair queen, about Rhiow’s own size but slimmer, with the most beautiful eyes Rhiow thought she had ever seen: they were a blue as deep as the skies on one of those perfect autumn days you sometimes got in the City, and the set of them was both indolent and kind. As she looked at Huff, the expression got kinder, and Rhiow knew immediately that the two of them were mates. The fourth Person, apparently concentrating on what the young tabby was doing, didn’t move.
“Has it failed again?” Huff said, as they walked toward the others.
“It tiling well has not,” said the tabby, sounding very annoyed. “But that’s what you’d expect, isn’t it, since People are coming to look at it?”
Well, so much for any concerns about Arhu’s language, Rhiow thought with resignation.
The handsome queen chuckled. “Huff, you weren’t really expecting this gate to oblige you, were you? The cranky thing.”
“No, I suppose not … Rhiow,” Huff said over his shoulder, “come meet Auhlae, my mate.”
“You’re very welcome,” Auhlae said, touching noses delicately with Rhiow, “and well met on the errand. And this is—”
“My older partner Urruah,” Rhiow said: “my younger partner Arhu.”
Noses were bumped all round: Rhiow was privately amused to note how shyly Arhu did it. He was apparently not immune to physical beauty in a queen. “And this is Fhrio—” Auhlae said.
“Rrrrh,” Fhrio said, a sound of general disgust, and dropped back down to all fours again, turning to the others. “Yeah, hunt’s luck to you, hello there, well met.” He bumped noses peremptorily, then sat down and started in on a serious bout of composure-washing, the action of a Person so annoyed that he didn’t trust his reactions with others for the moment.
“And Siffha’h,” said Auhlae.
The smallest of the London team got up, turned away from her single-minded concentration on the gate, and looked at Rhiow and the others. This little queen was maybe a couple of months younger than Arhu, Rhiow thought, and like him, was a huw-rhiw, though a paler one: her coat had much more white than black, and two black “eyebrow’ marks over her eyes gave her a humorous look. Her eyes were large, golden and thoughtful, and the look she gave Rhiow was surprisingly mature and measuring for someone who still had most of her milk teeth.
“I greet you,” Rhiow said, “and hunt’s luck to you.”
“You too,” said Siffha’h, and stepped over to touch noses, first with Rhiow, then with Urruah. Arhu, coming back from nosing Fhrio, met her last: they bumped noses cordially enough, and then, slightly to Rhiow’s surprise, Siffha’h repeated the touch. She looked up at Arhu and said, “What’s that?”
“Uh, chilli pickle,” Arhu said.
“Hhehhh,” Siffha’h said scornfully, nose wrinkled and lips pulled back—the feline equivalent of an ehhif of tender years saying Euuuu. She turned away, leaving Arhu looking rather stricken.
“I had wondered,” Huff said genially to Arhu. “Remind me to take you along some night when I do Indian.”
“Huff has been telling us about your problem,” Rhiow said to Auhlae. “I take it there’s been no improvement.”
Fhrio looked up from his he’ihh. “I’ve been trying to get it to fail all morning,” he said, “and I might as well have saved my time. The logs don’t give us enough data about what the strictly physical conditions were doing when the last failures occurred. I’m going to have to sit down with the Whisperer and get Her to make me a list.”
“That won’t stop the problem, though,” Siffha’h said. “You’re going to have to shut the gate.”
“I would rather not do that,” Fhrio said, and began washing furiously again.
Auhlae looked over at Rhiow and Urruah with a sympathetic expression. “Fhrio is our gating specialist,” she said softly. “He tends to take these things rather personally.”
“I know the feeling,” Urruah said. “Well, do you have any specific recommendations for us? Or should we just start running some diagnostics and see if there’s any data we can add to what you’ve got already?”
“The only recommendation we have on which we’re all in agreement,” said Huff, “is that the gate has to stop functioning as a timeslide: and probably the simplest way to make it do that is to shut it down. But since we don’t know how the gate’s failing in the first place, we can’t guarantee that this will work. It might make our problem worse, by forcing the malfunction to “migrate” to another gate in the cluster … you know how they get “sympathetic” malfunctions, like organs in a body … That would be pretty serious, if it happened. We’re having enough trouble with just one of these gates presently out of use for transit: a lot of the Northern European wizards depend on transfers through our cluster for access to the big long-range facilities in Rome and Tokyo. If the difficulty should spread by contagion to one of the others—”
Rhiow nodded. “I see your problem. Well, probably diagnostics are the way to go at the moment. Any help you might want to give us would be welcome: or if you prefer to leave us to get on with it—”
Fhrio looked up from his washing. “No one messes with my gates unless I’m here,” he said, and there was a touch of growl in his voice.
“I would hope you’d stay and clue us in on the fine points,” Urruah said. “Gates have a lot more personality than a lot of wizards would give them credit for … and no one knows a gate like its own technician.”
“You sound just like Fhrio,” Siffha’h said, sounding amused. “Are you the best in the business, too?”