“Please,” Siff’hah said, and laid her whiskers back. “Don’t ‘Jath’ me! Yet another tom. Has it occurred to you how many of them seem to be around at the moment?”
Hwaith glanced around him as if this news came as a surprise, and Rhiow’s whiskers went even further forward. “Oh, you’re okay, Hwaith. But Rhi, did you hear him? ‘I’ll keep an eye on her?’” Siff’hah snorted. “No doubt using the one brain cell he keeps tucked away up his thath and only sticks in his head occasionally for fear he’ll wear it out. Andas for Urruah – “
“Now now,” Rhiow said.
“Oh, he’s all right,” Siff’hah said. “But he’s such a – he’s such a boy!”
“Boys have their uses,” Rhiow said, with a humorous glance at Hwaith. “As we will doubtless hear you saying over and over to anyone who’ll bother listening when you’re next in heat. Meanwhile, the single-brain-celled one is getting ahead of you.” She peered past Siff’hah. “Probably going to fall down that next ravine if someone doesn’t hurry up and keep him out of trouble…”
Siff’hah plunged downhill after her brother. “They’re good kits,” Rhiow said when Siff’hah was safely out of earshot, to judge by the sudden sounds of crunching and thrashing in the toyon and manzanita brush at the bottom of the hill. “A little rambunctious.”
“But extremely powerful,” Hwaith said. “The Whisperer told me their power ratings. You’ve got your hands full.”
Rhiow laughed under her breath.“It’s not just a question of power,” she said. “You should have seen Arhu when he first arrived: all claws and ego – he’d have shredded sa’Rraah’s own ears if he thought she was looking at him the wrong way. And Sif was apparently much the same. They’ve both had a busy time of it,this life: and a hard one. But they’re settling in.”
“It must be interesting working with a team,” Hwaith said, looking over his shoulder to where Urruah and Helen were walking together and chatting.
“It must be interesting working unaffiliated,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi’s been doing it for a long time. And – seventy moons, you said? That’s a good while. But this isn’t a busy gate.”
“No,” Hwaith said. “Historically, San Francisco’s always taken most of the strain – especially bearing in mind the willful way this gate’s always behaved. No one’s relied on it for much.” He glanced back upslope to where Aufwi was minding it. “To tell you the truth, I’d hoped, when I timeslid ahead, that I’d find it’d finally been clouted into some kind of stability.” The look he gave Rhiow as they came down onto the path was rueful. “And that you folks’d be able to tell me how to come back and straighten things out.”
“More likely,” Rhiow said, “what we do back here will enable us to go back ahead and get it straightened out. It’s we who’ll be thanking you.” She peered over the edge of the ground past the path, where the crashing noises of the twins heading downhill were continuing. “Looks like they’re taking a short cut,” Rhiow said, and glanced over her shoulder at Helen, who with Urruah had just come down onto the path behind them
Helen, too, was looking down that way with amusement.“It’s a good thing we weren’t trying to be sneaky or anything,” she said.
Rhiow laughed.“They’ve got the sense to sidle,” she said. “So should we, I suppose: no point in confusing any ehhif we might meet out early walking their dogs.”
“You won’t see much of that up here,” Hwaith said, as they both paused to go invisible, and Urruah came up with them. “Up here in the canyons, most of the dogs are kept in the ehhifs’ houses, or in their yards: they’d be nervous about taking them out, for fear of running into coyotes.”
Urruah chuckled, sidling himself.“Well, neither dogs or coyotes are likely to be a problem for us,” he said, pausing for just a moment to sidle. “But it’s as well to preserve a low profile. What can’t see you, can’t have its eyes looked through by…other interested parties.” He sounded a little disturbed as they made their way along down the path, which began to curve as the hillside did, under the outreaching branches of the gray ghost pines.
“You caught that scent too,” Hwaith said, “did you?”
Urruah’s nose wrinkled. “Something rank,” he said. “Yes. Never got that from a gate before, no matter how badly it was malfunctioning. You notice it, Rhi?”
“I did,” she said. “And it seems to me that it had something to do with what I felt while we were in transit, in the timeslide. That cold feeling…”
“And different from the Lone Power,” Hwaith said, sounding almost upset by this. “You know how it is – how you can almost always hear her laughing, that angry, nasty edge – “
Rhiow had to agree with him. She’d sensed that before, too, and it had been completely missing in whatever had been lurking just beyond the walls of the timespace corridor through which they’d been traveling. As they came to a spot further down the hill where their path met a broader one, graveled, and coming from the right, Rhiow looked over her shoulder and said, “Helen, did you – “
Then her eyes went wide. Helen was not there.
Urruah and Hwaith looked behind them, too, and were surprised.“Where’d she go?” Urruah said. “Did she sidle?”
“We’d have felt it,” Hwaith said. He was right: you usually could feel someone else sidling in the immediate vicinity. But none of them had felt anything – nor, as they looked around, did it seem that she’d used any of the other methods for invisibility available to wizards.
“Boy,” Urruah said, “she really does walk softly. One of those tribal talents, I guess.”
“Well, she knows where to meet us,” Rhiow said. “Come on, let’s get where we’re going…”
The track below them abruptly ceased to be gravel and pine needles and bark chippings, and turned into the place where, on both sides of the sudden, capped-off road, the sidewalk began. To a city Person, this was a strange contrast, eloquent of the difference between city and country. But overhead the live oaks and the peppertrees leaned in over the path, along with the occasional ragged escapee palm up the hillside; and from their quiet predawn murmurings, Rhiow could tell that the road that started where the sidewalk did meant nothing in particular to them. As far as the trees were concerned, these were the hills eternal, as they had been since the Ice retreated, and a little concrete more or less on the ground hardly mattered at all. The Ice had broken it before, and would again: and afterwards, in the fullness of time, the Trees would still be there.
Once the road began, no wider than a Manhattan side street, the houses started too. They were relatively small at first, widely separated bungalows and two-storey houses mostly done in white stucco and tiled roofs. Some of their gardens looked a little ragged, overgrown with wiry-looking ground cover, pachysandra and pinched-looking ice plant. Here and there the ground under the hundred-foot royal palms was untidy with spiky, frayed heaps of their long shed olive-green frond; and scattered palm-fruits, like fat fluorescent-orange marbles, lay squashed on the sidewalks and in the road. Rhiow paused by one palm tree, sniffing.“Rats?” she said. “Up in the trees?”
“Palm rats.” Hwaith cocked an eye up toward the crown of one of the king palms. From up there Rhiow could hear a strange scratchy noise, like her ehhif’s old mechanical alarm clock trying to ring when it wasn’t properly wound up.
“Any sport in those?” Urruah said.
“When they come down, sure,” Hwaith said. “Unless you feel like going up after them. They have a little bit of an advantage up there…”
“But if you skywalked…”
“Yeah, but is that sport?”
Rhiow smiled to herself as they headed further down the canyon, and the sidewalk became wider and cleaner, and the houses bigger, and the driveways broader. It was as if the further down you got from the clear air and the hills’ height, the more important it became to let other ehhif know how important you were – mostly by the size of what you “owned”. This was a behavior Rhiow knew all too well from Manhattan – knowing also how the Earth itself laughed at the concept of ownership, as hilarious to the semi-sentience indwelling in the ancient bedrock as the idea of ehhif selling each other virtual artifacts and “unreal estate” in computer games. In New York, anyway, the Earth had not for many centuries done what it might so easily do – just shrug, and then bear the brief glass-splinter itch as thingsfell down and smashed. Here, though, that’s just what it’s been doing. And indeed she could see, as they walked downhill through wisps of morning mist, the occasional upthrust slabs in the sidewalk and cracks in the stucco and plaster of the houses they passed: the shed tiles that no one had noticed or picked up, the slow rilling trickle from someone’s ultramodern lawn-watering system where a pipe had cracked, and the trickling leak was spinning palm pollen and pine needles down into the gutter. Worse could happen. Worse will happen. Iau, Whisperer, be with us, let us know what we need to know to keep it from happening: in the here and now, and our now and then…