He let out a breath: they both sat for a few seconds in the quiet. Off in the trees down the hill, a California jay produced its rusty call from a throat that sounded like it really needed to be greased.“You must be thinking that ehhif here don’t do anything but kill each other,” Hwaith said.
“Oh, no,” Rhiow said. She looked down the length of the house. “But you say the ehhif who den here won’t stay… You think they feel the place is th’haimenh?” It was the Speech-cognate of the Ailurin word sseih’huuh, “haunted,” though the word in the Speech was more precise about the cause of the associated apparitions – more a kind of lingering, self-repeating spectral recording than any real local persistence of soul, for which there was another set of words.
“I don’t know,” Hwaith said. “I’m not clear about how ehhif think of such things. You live with them full time: maybe you know better than I would.”
Rhiow thought briefly about Iaehh, sitting some nights in the silence of the apartment that was only his now, his eyes still and sad, his head held in a way that suggested he was listening in mind to a voice he would never hear in life again.
“I’m not always sure, either,” she said, and got up. “Hwaith, let’s get back to the Silent Man’s. They’ll be thinking about getting ready to go. …And maybe,” she said, glancing over her shoulder and flirting her tail, “you’ll show me just how you diffuse that air.”
In utter silence, Hwaith vanished. Rhiow followed.
When the Silent Man’s car rolled up the broad, curving cypress-lined drive to the front door of Elwin Dagenham’s house in the hills, the pre-intervention conference in the back seat was still in full swing.
“My back fur looks terrible.”
“Sheba, it’s just fine.”
“No it’s not, it won’t lie down.”
“I could help you with that.”
Whack!“Ow!”
“I told you, I’m not interested! Come back in three months.”
“Will there be food? I’m starving.”
“I told you to eat before you left.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“There’s always plenty of food. Just make sure you get it before the houiff do.”
“Houiff? Nobody said anything about houiff!”
“I must have mentioned them at least once or twice. Oh, it won’t stay down!”
“All you need is for someone to lick it a little – “
Whack!“Oww!!”
“I told you, three months!”
“There must be something in the food here. Hwaith, do they put hormones in the cat food here? Normally he’d have heard her the first ten times she told him.”
“Could just be excitement. Or memory loss. I hear you can start to incur memory loss if you have really big – “
“And don’t worry, they’re usually only little houiff. Oh, you do get the occasional houff at one of these who’s a film star. That nice big German shepherd, now, he’s a creampuff. Oh, and there’s a collie now too. Actually, there are about nine of them. All idiots, just hit them in the head if they so much as look at you and they’ll run off crying.”
“Memory loss? Who says that?”
The car rolled slowly across gravel, stopped with a crunch of tires: the driver turned around, looked into the shadowy back seat. Awful quiet back there, he said to Helen. Are they all right? Anybody get carsick?
“They’re fine,” Helen said. “Cousins, somebody use the Speech and put our host’s mind at rest.”
“Pre-event arrangements,” Rhiow said, “nothing more. Everybody, it’s wise that the Silent Man should know we’re clear on what the plan is. We go in together as his entourage, and let the PR people have their joke and take their pictures. Afterwards, we scatter. Amuse the guests, try not to damage the dogs any more than necessary for good order and discipline, have the occasional hors d’oeuvre. Occasional,” she said, eyeing Urruah. “No getting up on the tables, no matter how the guests invite you to. Arrange for food to fall on the floor when necessary. Shouldn’t be hard, as from what Sheba says, this group is likely to be so awash in alcohol pretty soon that they wouldn’t recognize an, uh, intervention if it climbed up their clothes with all its claws out singing ‘Great Queen Iau Had A Cow.’ Otherwise… just keep your ears and noses open for any sign of the kindof thing that Helen noticed in Anya Harte today. If there are any other People there who’re kindly disposed, chat with them, hear what they might have to say, don’t bring up what we are or do unless you must. If they recognize you for what you are by the look of you, downplay your role, don’tget into long explanations: you’re just here with the Silent Man. Which is true enough. When it’s time to go, he’ll let Helen know and she’ll call us all silently. Any questions?”
“About the hors d’oeuvres…”
“Yes?”
“How many is ‘occasional?’”
Whack!“Oww!!”
“Thank you, Sheba. I owe you one.”
“My pleasure.”
The Silent Man chuckled inaudibly in his throat, reached back for Sheba: she climbed up to her usual place on his shoulder. We ready? he said.
“I believe so,” Helen said.
The Silent Man got out, opened the back door for the People, then went around to Helen’s door, opened it. But she didn’t move.
Problem?
“Not at all. You go ahead,” Helen said. “I need a moment to powder my nose.”
The Silent Man smiled, closed her door carefully, and headed for the big front door of the Dagenham place with Rhiow and her People in tow.
The house was another of those structures that seemed to be having some kind of identity crisis as regarded its architecture. It had a broad curved front with columns right along the curve, but these sorted very strangely, to Rhiow’s eye, with the multiple peaked roofs behind the fa?ade. “Italian revival,” Urruah said as they strolled up to it.
“Great,” Rhiow said. “Another building that’s going to need CPR.” Through the tall windows running under the colonnade, Rhiow could see rooms brilliantly lit, and in them crowds of ehhif, the queens almost all in bright colors, the toms all in somber shades. Even through the glass, a subdued hubbub of voices could be heard.
Outside the tall carved wooden front door, the Silent Man paused, looked down at the group around his feet. Rhiow looked up at him.“Unless something comes up,” she said, “I won’t be too far from you. If you need something done, just speak to me as you’ve been doing. I’ll answer in a way that no one will hear, either your people or mine.”
He gave her a quizzical look.‘Something done?’
Like the production of an excuse to leave early, Rhiow said privately.
He smiled— the expression more than usually edged, since he was its target. Does it show that much? And he reached up and pressed the button to ring the doorbell.
The door swung open, managed by a dark tom-ehhif in black with touches of white. The Silent Man stepped in, took off the overcoat he was wearing over his own black-and-white regalia, and handed the coat and his hat to the ehhif who’d opened the door.
The tom vanished. Rhiow glanced around, glad of the excuse to hold still for a moment, as the sudden assault on the senses took a few moments to manage. Besides the echoing noise of music, voices, laughter, clinking glassware– for the huge circular front hall was floored in a checkerboard of polished marble – the scents hit any incomer in a rush of outflowing warmer air, and had to be dealt with. Food, drink, perfume, ehhif sweat and ehhif pheromone, the traces of several different varieties of houiff and various People, most of them strangers to the house, at least one a resident.
“Whew,” Urruah said from behind Rhiow. “How many do you make it?”