To Visit the Queen (8 page)

Iaehh stroked her, and Rhiow could hear and feel his pain, a little blunted from that first terrible night, but no less easy to bear. She knew the way it came to him in sudden stabs, without warning, at the sound of a telephone ringing or a
ra'hio
commercial that had always made Hhuha laugh. "I worry that you're lonely," Iaehh said slowly. "I worry that I don't take care of you right. I worry..."

"Don't worry," she said, snuggling a little closer to him.

"And this place is expensive," he said. "Too big for one, really. I think I ought to move, but finding another building that allows pets is going to be such a hassle. I wonder if I shouldn't find you somewhere else to live."

Rhiow's heart leaped in instant reaction: fear.
He's going to try to rehome me,
she thought. Someone would adopt her whom she hated, and she wouldn't be able to get out and go about her business. Or there were
ehhif
who, meaning nothing but the best, would not give away a pet if they could no longer keep it. They would take their cat to the vet and have it—

Ridiculous,
another part of her mind snapped.
You're a wizard. If he seriously starts thinking about giving you away, then one day you can just vanish.

Yes,
said another part of her mind,
and to where? To live with whom?
Wizard Rhiow might be, but she was also a Person, and the one thing People hate above all is to have their routine disrupted. To lose the comfortable den, the sympathetic tone of mind of Iaehh, the food at regular intervals, and find herself... where? Living in a Dumpster, like Urruah? Rhiow shuddered. "Iaehh," she said, "this is a
bad
idea, I'd really rather you didn't follow this line of thought any farther."

But what about him?
said still another part of her mind, and Rhiow much disliked its tone, for it was like the voice that often spoke of wizardry and its responsibilities.
What about
his
needs? How much pain do you cause him by being here, reminding him of Hhuha every time he sees you?

And what about
my
needs?
Rhiow retorted, fluffing up slightly.
Don't you think
I
miss her? Damn it, what about
my
pain? Haven't I done enough in service to the Queen and the worlds to be allowed a little comfort, to think of myself first, just this once?

No reply came. Rhiow disliked the silence as much as she had the voice when it spoke. It sounded entirely too much like the Whisperer, like Hrau'f the Silent, that daughter of Iau's who imparted knowledge of wizardry and the worlds to feline wizards, and who often seemed to have left a kind of goddaughter to herself inside you, stern as a goddess, inflexible as one, asking the questions you would rather not answer.

What then?
Rhiow said silently.
Do I have to let him do this? Do I have to let him get rid of me?

Silence: and Iaehh's stroking, all wound up with his pain and the way he missed Hhuha. Rhiow licked her nose in fear. She could practically feel his anguish through her fur.

The Oath was clear enough on the matter, the Oath that every wizard of whatever species took in one form or another.
I will guard growth and ease pain....
And you kept the Oath, or soon enough you began to slip away from the practice of your wizardry into something that did not bear consideration: into the service of the Lone Power, Who had invented death and pain. Entropy was running, the energy bleeding slowly away out of the universe: the Lone One would widen the wound, hurry the bleeding in any way It could. Tricking or manipulating wizards so that they used their power to Its ends was one of the Lone One's preferred techniques.

I will not be Its claw, to rip the wound wider,
Rhiow thought. Brave words, the right words for a wizard. But it was inside her that she felt the claw, already beginning to set in deep. She looked away from Iaehh.

If this situation doesn't improve...

... then leaving may be something I have to consider.

"No," Iaehh said, "of course not, stupid idea, it's a stupid idea...." He stroked her. "If I have to move, it'll be to somewhere with pets, of course it will. Sue would be furious if I ever let anything happen to you."

He put her aside suddenly, got up. Rhiow, climbing up to stand on the arm of the chair where he had set her down, looked after Iaehh, not at all reassured.

If he keeps hurting this way— then you may have to let him think that something has "happened" to you. Regardless of how well you like this warm, snug place.

"Look at that, it's half an hour past your dinnertime," Iaehh said, fumbling at the kitchen cabinet where the cat food was, as if he were having trouble seeing it: and he sounded stuffed up. "Come on, let's get you fed. Oh, jeez, look at this bowl, I keep forgetting to wash it— no wonder you didn't want to eat out of it."

Rhiow jumped down from the chair and went to him.

If this doesn't get better...

Sweet Queen about us, what will become of me?

*A glossary of words used by the People appears at the back of this book.

She was out early the next morning, as (to her relief) Iaehh was: on mornings when the weather was fair, he did his jogging around dawn, to take advantage of the city's quietest time. Rhiow had already been awake for a couple of hours and was doing her morning's washing in the reading chair when he bent over her and scratched her head. "See you later, plumptious— "

She gave him a rub and a purr, then went back to her washing as he went out, shut the door behind him, and locked all the locks. Iaehh was pleased with those locks— their apartment had never been broken into, even though others in the building had. Rhiow smiled to herself as she finished scrubbing behind her ears, for she had heard attempts being made on all those locks at one time or another during the day when she happened to be home. Some of those attempts might have succeeded, had there not been a wizard on the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the low-maintenance spell that made access to the apartment impossible. Should anyone try to get in, the wizardry simply convinced the wall and the door that they were one unit for the duration: and various frustrated thieves had occasionally left strangely ineffectual sledgehammer marks on the outside— the whole door structure having possessed, for the duration of the attack, a nongravitic density similar to that of lead. Rhiow was pleased with that particular piece of spelling: it required only a recharge once a week, and kept her
ehhif
's routine, and hers, from being upset.

Rhiow finished washing, stretched fore and aft, and headed out the cat door to the
hiouh
-box on the terrace. There she went briefly unfocused in the cool darkness as she did her business, thinking about other things. She had reviewed the basic structures and relationships of the London gates in the Knowledge, the body of wizardly information the Whisperer held ready for routine reference: she had looked at the specs for the gates' operation under normal circumstances. Being rooted in the Old Downside's gates, the London "bundle" had similarities to them, but being sited a continent away and subject to much different spatial stresses, there were also significant differences. She would assess those more accurately when she was right down in the gating complex with their hosts.

Rhiow finished with the box, shook herself, and stepped out onto the terrace and then down onto the brick "stairway," making her way down to the roof of the next building. There she made her way across the gravel again, this time to leap up on the Seventieth Street side of the roof's parapet and balance there for a moment, breathing the predawn air. For once it was very quiet, no car alarms going off, even the traffic over on First muted, as yet. The low, soft
hhhhhhhhhh
of the city all around her was there: the breathing of all the air-conditioning systems, the omnidirectional soft sound of traffic that almost never went away. Only during a significant snowstorm did that low, breathing hiss fade reluctantly to silence— and even then you imagined you heard it, though softer, as the breathing in and out of ten million pairs of lungs. It was the sound of life: it was what Rhiow worked for.

She looked eastward toward the river. Her view was partially blocked by the buildings of New York Hospital and Cornell Medical Center, but she could smell the water, and faintly she could even hear it flowing, a different soft rushing noise than that of the traffic. Past the East River and the hazy sodium lights of Queens on the far side, she could smell the dawn, though she couldn't yet see it.
Another job,
Rhiow thought,
another day.

She closed her eyes most of the way, in order to more clearly see, and be seen by, the less physical side of things.
I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today,
Rhiow thought,
liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: They will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who
Are.
My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always. I shall walk through Their worlds as do the Powers That Be, seeing and knowing with Them and for Them, tending Their worlds as if they were mine, for so indeed they are. Silently shall I strive to go my way, as They do, doing my work unseen; the light needs no reminding by me of good deeds done by night. And in this long progress through all that is, though I will know doubt and fear in the strange places where I must walk, I will put these both aside, as the Oath requires, and hold myself to my work... for if They and I together cannot mend what is marred, who can? And having done my work aright, though I may know weariness at day's end, come awakening I shall rise up and say again, with Them, as if surprised, "Behold, the world is made new!"

There was more to the Meditation, of course: it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case, a reminder of priorities, a "mission statement." It was perhaps also, just slightly, what
ehhif
might term a call to arms: there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.

Rhiow got up, shook herself, and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down.
The joke is,
she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air,
that knowing the Powers are there and listening doesn't really solve that many problems.
It seemed to her that
ehhif
had the same difficulty, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their gods existed or not very sure at all: and those who were most certain seemed no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The city was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in which
ehhif
gathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers That Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious— as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).

She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than most
ehhif
works he heard live in concert in town. He'd gone to one service in the great "cathedral" in Midtown to do some translation of the music's verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by the
ehhif
there to the Powers That Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery that even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors, but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers' countenance—even, amazingly, the One's— and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings who did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or tortured for an eternity out of time. Rhiow wondered how the Lone Power had managed to give them such ideas about the One without being stopped somehow. Such ideas would explain a lot of the things some
ehhif
did.