Faint street sounds came to them through the walls as they went, but slowly another complex of sounds became more assertive: rushing, echoing sounds, and soft rumbles more felt than genuinely heard. At one point near the bottom of the stairs, Rhiow paused to look over her shoulder and saw Arhu standing still about hah7 a turn of the stairs above her, his ears twitching; bis tail lashed once, hard, an unsettled gesture.
“It’s like roaring,” he said quietly. “A long way down…”
He’s nervous about getting so close to where he almost came to grief,Rhiow thought.Well, if he’s going to be working with us, he’s just going to have to get used to it… “It does sound that way at first,” she said, “but you’d be surprised how fast you get used to it. And at how many things there are to distract you. Come on…”
He looked down at her, then experimentally jumped a couple of steps down, Urruah-style, caught up with her, and passed her by, bouncing downward from step to step with what looked like a little more confidence.
She followed him. In the dimness below them, she could see a wedge of light spilling across the floor: Urruah had already cracked open the bottom door. Through it, the echoes of the footfalls and voices of ehhifcame more strongly.
“Now get sidled,” Saash was saying, “and keep your wits about you: this isn’t like running around under the cars in the garage.Ehhifcan move pretty fast, especially when they’re late for a train, and you haven’t lived until you’ve tripped someone and had them drop a few loaded Bloomie’s bags on you.”
Arhu merely looked amused. He had sidled himself between one breath and the next.“I don’t see whyweshould hide,” he said. “If you take care of this place, like you say, then we have as much right to be here as all of them do.”
’The right, yes,” Rhiow said. “In our law. But not intheirs.And in wizardry, where one species is more vulnerable than the other to having its effectiveness damaged by the conflict of their two cultures, the more powerful or advanced culture gives way graciously. That’s us.”
“That’s not the way People should do it,” Arhu growled as they stepped cautiously out into the Graybar passage, one of the two hallways leading from Lexington Avenue to the concourse. “I don’t know a lot abouthauisshyet, but I do know you have to fight to get a good position, or take it, and keep it.”
“Sometimes,” Urruah said. “In the cruder forms of the game … yes. But when you start playinghauisshfor real someday, you’ll learn that some of the greatest players win by doing least. I know one master who dominates a whole square block in the West Eighties and never even so much as shows himself through a window: the other People there know his strength so well, they resign every day at the start of play.”
“What land ofhauisshis that?” Arhu said, disgusted. “No blood, no glory—”
“No scars,” Urruah said, with a broad smile, looking hard at Arhu.
Arhu looked away, his ears down.
“Last time they counted his descendants,” Urruah added, “there were two hundred prides of them scattered all over the Upper West Side. Don’t take subdued or elegant play as a sign that someone can’t attract the queens.”
They came out into the concourse and paused by the east gallery, looking across the great echoing space glinting with polished beige marble and limestone, and golden with the brass of rails and light fixtures and the great round information desk and clock in the middle. The sound ofehhif footstepswas muted at the moment; there were perhaps only a hundred of them in the Terminal at any given moment now, coming and going from the Sunday evening trains at a leisurely rate. Then even the footstep-clatter was briefly lost in the massive bass note of the Accurist clock.
Arhu looked up and around nervously.“Just a time-message,” Saash said. “Nine hours past high-Eye.”
“Oh. All right. What are all those metal tubes stuck all over everything? And why are all the walls covered with that cloth stuff?”
“They’re renovating,” said Saash. “Putting back old parts of the building that were built over, years ago … getting rid of things that weren’t in the original plans. It should look lovely when they’re done. Right now it just means that the place is going to be noisier than usual for the next couple of years…”
“The worldgates have occasionally gotten misaligned due to the construction work,” Rhiow said. “It means we’ve had to keep an extra close eye on them. Sometimes we have to move a gate’s ‘opening’ end, its portal locus, closer to one platform or away from another. It was the gate by Track Thirty-two, last time: they were installing some kind of air-conditioning equipment on Thirty-two, and we had to move the locus far enough away to keep theehhifworkmen from seeing wizards passing through it, but not so close to any of the other gates’ loci to interfere with them…”
“What would happen if theydidinterfere?” Arhu said, with just a little too much interest for Rhiow’s liking.
Urruah sped up his pace just enough for Arhu to suddenly look right next to him and see a tom two and a half times his size, and maybe three times his weight.“What would happen if I pushed those big ears of yours down their earholes, and then put my claws far enough down your throat to pull them out that way?” Urruah said in a conversational tone. “I mean, what would be your opinion of that?”
They all kept walking, and when Arhu finally spoke again, it was in a very small voice.“That would be bad,” he said.
“Yes. That would beverybad. Just like coincident portal loci would be bad. If you were anywhere nearby when such a thing happened, it would feel similar. But it would be your whole body … and it would beforever.So wouldn’t you agree that these are both events that, as responsible wizards, we should do all we can to forestall?”
“Yeah. Uh, yes.”
’Track Thirty, team,” said Rhiow. “Right this way, and we’ll check that the Thirty-two gate is where it belongs. Saash, you want to go down first and check the gate’s logs?”
“My pleasure, Rhi.”
They strolled down the platform, empty now under its long line of fluorescent lights. No trains were expected on 30 until the 10:30 from Dover Plains and Brewster North; off to one side, on 25, a Metro-North“push-pull” locomotive sat up against the end-of-track barrier, thundering idly to itself while waiting for the cars for the 11:10 to Stamford and Rye to be pushed down to it and coupled on. Arhu stopped and gave it a long look.
“Loud,” Urruah said, shouting a little.
Arhu flicked his tail“no.” “It’s not that—”
“What is it, exactly?” Rhiow said.
“It roars.”
“Yes. As I said, you get used to the roaring.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He sat down, right where he was, and kept staring at the loco. “It—itknowsit’s roaring.” He turned to Urruah, almost pleading. “It can’t—it can’t bealive?”
“You’d be surprised,” Urruah said.
“A lot of wizards can ‘hear’ what we normally consider inanimate things,” Rhiow said. “It’s not an uncommon talent. Talking to things and getting them to respond, the way you saw Urruah talk to the door upstairs, that takes more practice. You’ll find out quickly enough if you have theknack.”
Arhu got up as suddenly as he had sat down, and shook himself all over: it took a moment for Rhiow to realize that he was hiding a shudder.“This is all so strange…”
“The Downside is a strange place,” Urruah said, beginning again to stroll toward the end of the platform, where Saash had disappeared over the edge and down to track level. “Always has been. There are all kinds of odd stories about these tunnels, and the ‘underworld’ in this area. Lost colonies of web-footed mutantehhif…alligators in the sewers…”
“And are there?”
“Alligators? No,” Urruah said. “Dragons,though…” He smiled.
Arhu stopped again, looked at him oddly.“Dragons…” He turned to Rhiow. “He’s making it up. Isn’t he?”