Rhiow sagged with relief.“So it’s just all been moved across town –?!”
“Only five miles or so,” Aufwi said. “Just tell your friend–”
Rhiow sat down again, reached down into her mind and poured everything she’d just heard down the until-now dormant link to Ith’s mind uptime. “I’ve told him,” Rhiow said. “Aufwi, I don’t know whether to pull your ears right off because you didn’t think to tell us this earlier, or to thank you and beg to have your kittens.” She caught Urruah giving her aslightly peculiar sideways look, and laughed. “Though in my present state that would take a lot of work. Never mind! Ith — ?”
I will go there straightaway, Ith said. As soon as I’ve seen the tablets, I will speak to you.
Rhiow stood up and shook herself.“Let’s get ourselves ready, then,” she said. “Last snacks and other personal business…”
All the People in the group dispersed and left Rhiow standing all by herself in the middle of the living room, feeling suddenly very alone and frightened, and wishing she could show it to someone, anyone. The Silent Man and Helen were talking quietly together, but Rhiow could see from their body language that it was something intimate in the ehhif mode, and interrupting them seemed rude. This is all so strange, Rhiow thought, and shivered. I want a lap to curl up on. Why do I feel so insufficient, all of a sudden?What’s the matter with me?
Slowly she turned toward the French doors and walked out into the back yard. What‘Ruah said may have something to it, she thought. Some meditation time is what I need. Let’s get on with it.
She just wished she could make herself believe it would make a difference….
The sound of the motor of the Silent Man’s big car purring away down the empty, narrow hillside road where he left them seemed very loud to Rhiow as she watched her People and Helen melt into the underbrush at the roadside. She stood there watching the big gleaming thing cruise slowly round the curve and pass out of sight. I wonder if he really understands what he’s gotten into… she thought.
Siffha’h, pausing beside Rhiow for a moment, looked past her at the vanishing car. “Rhi,” she said, “you have no idea how much energy I pumped into the wizardry around his house. It’d take a nuke to get through it.” As Rhiow opened her mouth, Siffha’h added, “And it’s not a conditional,either, so don’t give me that look. Whether we’re dead or alive after midnight, he’ll be as safe as anything can make him while he stays on this planet. Or in this continuum.”
Rhiow immediately felt guilty for treating Sif like a kitten.“I wasn’t –”
“You were,” Sif said. “You can’t see what your ears are doing.” Her tail was lashing, but it didn’t seem to be annoyance with Rhiow: rather with the whole situation they were stuck in. “Let it go.”
Rhiow put her tail over Sif’s back as the two of them stood for a last moment looking out at the strengthening glitter of the LA city lights, all a-tremble as the day’s heat rose into a sky gone dark umber with twilight. “I just want you to know,” she said, “that you’ve proven yourself a wizard to be reckoned with a hundred times over in the last year.”
Further down the hillside, the lights of the Silent Man’s car rounded another curve, briefly gold on the dark road, and vanished again. “Well, you’ve been a pretty good team leader, too,” Siffha’h said. “I’d say I can speak for us both on that, though getting my dimwit brother to say as much…”
“He has his ways of saying it,” Rhiow said. “Don’t worry on his part. Meanwhile, the others are waiting…”
The two of them slipped into the hillside brush after the others. There were no houses along here: the hillside was too steep even for the most ambitious ehhif builders to risk putting houses on it. Up at the top of the hill, though, where Dagenham’s house was perched, was another story.
Rhiow caught up with the rest of the team where they waited in the brush. Helen, now wearing dark sweats and sneakers and with her hair tied back tight, was crouching down under a gnarled Manzanita bush and digging her hands into the dry crumblyleaf-mould mulch. Under it the ground still had a touch of dampness left over from the soaked-in morning dewfalclass="underline" Helen rubbed her hands in it an then rubbed her face to get rid of any shine and go darker and more patchy.
“You could just sidle,” Arhu said.
“Sooner not,” Helen said. “Right now I have this feeling that something up there is watching, watching… The less wizardry, the better.” She looked over at Rhiow.
“We’re thinking inside the same skin, cousin,” Rhiow said. “I’d sooner get in there without sidling if I could…”
“There might be a way,” said a voice from the shadows.
Hwaith came slipping out from under another of the manzanitas, half-invisible in the deepening twilight to even a Person’s eye until he moved. “Would you believe,” he said, “that this place has a wine cellar?”
“Not sure how it could avoid having one,” Urruah said, “having seen how the party crowds here soak the stuff up.”
“So right,” Hwaith said. “Natural cooling from the hillside. Locked on the inside, obviously. A nice iron gate to let the visitors see down the length of the tunnel. But you know…” He waved his tail. “There must be a lot of condensation when the temperatures on the hillside get really hot.”
“Which in this climate would be mostly…” Aufwi said.
“Because there’s a drain channel down the middle of the tunnel, and the condensation runs down it into a little pipe that lets out, oh…” He turned and wandered over to another bush a few yards away. “Right about here.”
And of course once you were looking for it, or right at it, it was impossible not to see the terra-cotta drainpipe all covered with detritus from the brush all around, and dully moss-colored from the parched moss that was growing in the only place it could manage to. The runoff hadn’t managed to dig too deep a gully on its way down the road: mostly it soaked into the ground and fed an unusually green and well-grown patch of brush.
Rhiow slipped over to the pipe and looked at it, then bent down to measure the width with her whiskers.“Kind of a tight fit…”
“Not for those of us who’ve been watching our intake,” Hwaith said, glancing in an idle manner toward Urruah.
Arhu and Siffha’h collapsed briefly into muffled adolescent snickering. Aufwi hunted more or less desperately for some other direction to look in. Urruah gave Hwaith a glance that might have been avuncular if fewer of his claws had been retracted at that moment. “Child,” he said, “watch and learn.”
Urruah bent down and gradually vanished into the pipe, though it was educational to watch what he had to do with his hindquarters to manage it. Rhiow slipped up beside Hwaith and said under her breath,“How can you joke at a time like this?”
“Now or never,” Hwaith said, giving her one of those sidewise looks. “I’d say this is the time for making use of last chances.” And in he went after Urruah.
Rhiow stood there feeling for a moment as if a claw had been very purposefully stuck into some previously unidentified tender spot on her hide. No one else had a look for her; Arhu slipped into the pipe after Urruah, and Sif and Aufwi after him.
Helen simply vanished… though not completely. Rhiow looked around her and saw nothing but a little shiny green beetle sitting on the ground where an ehhif surely no shorter than five foot eleven had been squatting. Where have you put your mass?? she said silently. And that wasn’t even a wizardry. How did you —
Elsewhere, Helen said. It’s a bit of a talent. She scurried up Rhiow’s tail onto her back. Quickly now, cousin, I’m compressed down pretty tight here –
Shortly, so was Rhiow. The kits had made light work of the pipe, and even Urruah had maneuvered himself in here somehow, but Rhiow found herself wondering whether Iaehh’s description of her as “plumptious” might actually have some foundation in fact. If anything’s left of the fabric of reality after I get back, she thought, I’ll have to look into it… She crawled along paw over paw, her back scraping the top of the pipe, though she was trying to keep it flat for Helen’s sake. Where the aueh are you?