Ten steps. He takes them. He listens for the sound of breathing…
…then reaches for the left side.
One muffled cry of surprise, under his hand … and no more. He holds her until she stops struggling, for fear an arm or leg should flail and knock something down. He wipes the wetness off on the bedclothes, unseen, and pauses by the end of the massive bed to tie the slim silken rope around one leg. Then he makes for the windows.
Quietly he slips behind the drapes: softly he pushes the window up in its sash, wider than need be—no need to give anyone the idea that he is a small man. He goes down the rope like a spider, rotating gently as he goes. Without a sound he comes down on the North Terrace again and makes straight off across the Home Park in the direction of the Datchet Road. Where the little road crosses the Broad Water, a brougham is waiting for him. He will be in it in five minutes, and in Calais by morning.
A quiet night’s work … and the pay is good. He will never need to see the inside of a potting shed again … or a merchant bank or a high-class jeweler’s after dark. That part is over. The new part of his life begins.
And at least she’s happy now. She’s with Albert…
—and then the vision snapped back. A moment’s confusion—
—and the vision was centering, bizarrely, on Siffha’h. Herself, she moaned and sank down, covering her eyes with her paws, and Rhiow could understand why: the mirroring must be disorienting in the extreme, self seeming to look at self seeming to look at self, infinitely reflected—
Except that it was not Siffha’h moaning that Rhiow heard. It was Arhu. Crying in a small frightened voice: crying like a kitten. “Oh, no,” he moaned. “It’s you. I didn’t know … I couldn’t help it … How could I help it?”
—an image of blackness. The rustling of a plastic bag as small frightened bodies thrashed and scrabbled for purchase, for any way to stay above what inexorably rose around them. Cold water, black as death. Underneath him, all around him, the sound of water bubbling in … of breath bubbling out…
Arhu fled from the platform, up the hallway: he was gone.
Both the teams and Artie looked after him in astonishment—all but Siffha’h. In her eyes was nothing but implacable hatred.
“I won’t have anything further to do with him,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. I will kill him if he touches my mind again. And why shouldn’t I?” she said. “Since he killed me first …”
SEVEN
Rhiow went out after Arhu at a run, and found him gone. He had done a private transit, not bothering to take long enough to get to one of the gates: she could smell the spell of it in the air of the hallway, and she thought she knew where Arhu had gone, within about ten feet.
Rhiow turned once, quickly, where she stood, and drew the circle with her tail, tying the wizard’s knot with one last flirt of it. Then she instructed the wizardry to lay in identical coordinates to the last transit from this spot, and to execute them. And don’t forget the air! she added hurriedly.
There was a loud clap as she displaced a considerable cubic volume of air from the tunnel, taking it with her. The sound of the clap had barely faded from her ears before she was standing on the cold white pumice-dust of the Moon, looking around.
He was no more than ten feet away.
Arhu looked at Rhiow and opened his mouth to speak the words of another spell, ready to run again.
“Don’t do it,” she said.
Arhu sagged and let the breath go out of him, standing there looking cold and scared and very alone. It was an expression Rhiow had not seen on him since he first came to her and the other members of the team: and she had forgotten how much it hurt to see it.
Tell me what’s happening,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, please.”
“I can’t.”
“You can,” Rhiow said, “or I’ll pull your ears off and wear them as collar jinglies.”
Arhu stared at her in complete misery. “Who needs ears?”
“Arhu,” Rhiow said, “this isn’t the time for self-indulgence. If you’ve seen something that threatens the team, or you—”
“The team?” he said, and laughed bitterly. “It’s a little more personal this time.”
“It’s not—you didn’t see anything like your own death, did you?”
“Oh, no, not mine. Someone else’s.”
“Well, for Iau’s sake, tell me! Maybe we can do something to stop it—”
“You don’t understand,” Arhu said. “It’s already happened,” He laughed again, that bitter sound. “Listen to me, I’m sounding like the ravens already.”
Rhiow shook her head in frustration. “What in Iau’s name are you talking about?”
Arhu flopped down on the powdery moondust. “Rhiow,” he said very softly, “Siffha’h is my sister.”
“What?”
“I saw her,” he said. “I saw her in the bag … with me and the others, when the ehhif threw us in to drown. And she saw it too, through me, just now. She saw it all … But dying didn’t stop her, then. She came straight back. She must have been reincarnated within days of when she died. Maybe hours. And it took me this long to see it. She was my twin, Rhiow, she had my same spots! And she was the one I climbed on top of to keep breathing …”
He was utterly devastated. For her own part, Rhiow could only stand there and look at him in complete astonishment. There always had been that resemblance between Siffha’h and Arhu … it really had been fairly striking. And the way Arhu had been drawn to Siffha’h. And then, Rhiow thought, with the suddenness of a blow, there was the simple matter of her name. Why didn’t I ever think to take it apart, Rhiow thought. But then, who thinks to take “Rhiow” apart for “dark-as-night” … ? For in Ailurin, Siffha’h simply meant “Sif-again”, or, by a pun in Ailurin, “one more time …” the end of a feline phrase similar to the ehhif “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
“What do I do now?” Arhu said hopelessly. “How can I go back? And … I thought it was an accident. Did I maybe kill her on purpose? My own twin? And more importantly … does she think I killed her on purpose?” He laughed again bitterly. “I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t like me. Now it makes perfect sense. How else would you treat the brother who climbed on top of your body, possibly even pushed you further down into the water, to keep on breathing?”
His despair and grief was awful to hear: the sound of it made it difficult for her to think how best to help him. Rhiow was also acutely aware that, to some extent, Arhu’s was the most unusual talent of the team, and the one which the Lone Power was most likely to attempt to directly undermine. In some ways, she and Urruah were simply support for Arhu … the youngest of them, and therefore the most powerful.
But Siffha’h was even younger, and her power might potentially be greater still. Was the Lone One working to impair her effectiveness as well? And why did she reincarnate so quickly? Was it specifically for this job, to do something that had to be done for wizardry’s sake … or was it for revenge?
She had no answers … and she didn’t think she was going to get them by sitting here. Certainly Arhu wasn’t. “Well,” Rhiow said, “what will you do about all this? Are you going to stay here on the Moon? You won’t be making your team responsibilities any easier to fulfill.”