The four of them crossed with care in the lull between red lights, and Arhu stood looking up the big flight of steps, and from one side to the other, at the massive shapes of the two lions carved out of the pale pink Tennessee marble. Feral Arhu might have been, but no cat with brains enough to think could have failed to recognize the two huge, silent figures as images of relatives.
"Who are they?" Arhu said.
"Gods," Urruah said pointedly. "Some of ours."
Rhiow smiled. "They're Sef and Hhu'au," she said, "the lion-Powers of Yesterday and Today."
Arhu stared. "Are they real?"
Saash smiled slightly. "If you mean, do they exist? Yes. If you mean, do they walk around looking like that? No," Saash said. "But they're like that. Big, and powerful… and predatory, each in his or her own way. They stand for the barriers between what was, which we can't affect, and what will be— which we can, but only by what we do in the present moment."
"Except if you get access to a timeslide," Urruah said, "when you can go back in time and—"
"Urruah," Rhiow said, glaring at him, "go eat something, or do something useful with that mouth, all right?" To Arhu she said, "We do not tamper with time without authorization from Them, from the Powers That Be. And even They don't do it lightly. You can destroy a whole world if you're not careful or else you can wipe yourself out of existence, which tends to have the same effect at the personal level even if you're lucky enough not to have caused everyone else not to have existed as well. So don't even think about it. And you'll find," she added, as the smug we'll-see-about-that expression settled itself over Arhu's face, "when you ask the One Who Whispers for details on time travel anyway, that you won't be given that information, no matter how you wheedle. If you press Her on the subject, your ears will ring for days. But don't take my word for it. Go ahead and ask."
Arhu's face went a little less smug as he looked from Saash to Urruah and saw their knowing grins: especially Urruah's, which had a little too much anticipation in it. Rhiow looked sidewise at Saash. This "heavy-pawed dam" role isn't one I ever imagined myself in, Rhiow said silently. And I'm not sure I like it….
Saash glanced at her, a little amused. You're betraying a natural talent, though….
Thanks loads.
"If they're Yesterday and Today," Arhu said, "then where's Tomorrow?"
"Invisible," Urruah said. "Hard to make an image of something that hasn't happened yet. But he's there, Reh-t is, whether you see him or not. Like all the best predators, you never see him till it's much too late. Walk right through him, feel the chill: he's there."
Arhu stared at the empty space between the two statues, and shivered. It was a little odd. Rhiow looked at him in mild concern for a moment.
They went in, trotting up the stairs and weaving to avoid the ehhif. Arhu kept well over to the right side, skirting the pedestal of Sef's statue. You scared the child, Rhiow said to Urruah.
It's good for him, Urruah said, untroubled. He can use some scaring, if you ask me.
They came up to the top of the steps, and Rhiow took a moment to coach Arhu in how to handle the revolving door. Inside the polished brass doors, they stood for a moment, looking up at the great entrance hall, all resplendent in its white marble staircases. Then Rhiow said, "Come on, this way…" and led them off to the left, under the staircase and the second-floor gallery, and past the green travertine marble doorway that opened into the writers' room; then right, around the corner to a door adorned with a sign reading STAFF ONLY, and an arrow pointing down with the word CAFETERIA.
Arhu sniffed the air appreciatively. "Don't get any ideas," Urruah growled, "that's today's lunch you're smelling, and it's long eaten."
Rhiow heard his stomach growl, and carefully didn't chuckle out loud. She reared up and pushed the door open: outside of opening hours, it wasn't locked. It leaned inward with the usual squeak, and they trotted in and up the stairs to the central level of the stacks.
When they were out of the stairwell, Arhu loped over to the edge of the inner stack corridor and looked down through the railings. "Wow," he said, "what is all this stuff?"
"Knowledge," Rhiow said, stepping up beside him and looking up at the skylights and four stories of books, and down at three stories more: four and a half miles of shelving, here and in the tunneled-out space under Bryant Park, pierced here and there by the several staircases that allowed access between levels, and the selective retrieval system that moved between levels, its vertical conveyor arms picking up books that had been called for and dropping off books to be returned. It was the genius of this building, its arrangement in such a way as to hide this great mass of shelf space— so that even when you knew it was here, it was always a shock to see it, as much cubic space as would be in a good-sized apartment building, and not an inch of it wasted.
In the center of it all, on the level at which they had entered, was a large pitlike area filled with desks and carrels, with a wide wooden-arched opening off to one side. Right now this opening, where ehhif would come from the main reading room on the side to pick up books, was shuttered and locked, in case thieves should somehow get in through the great reading room windows by night and try to steal books for collectors. The rarest books were all now up in little wood-paneled, iron-grilled jails in the Special Collections, second-floor front, isolated from the main reference stacks by thick concrete walls and alarm systems. Ehef had told Rhiow once that you could hear the books whispering to each other in the dark through the trefoil-pierced gratings, in a tiny rustling of page chafing against page, prisoners waiting for release. Rhiow had come away wondering whether he had been teasing her. Wizards do not lie: words are their tool and currency, which they dare not devalue. But even wizardry, in which a word can shape a world, has room for humor, and there had been a whimsical glint in Ehef's eyes that night….
She smiled slightly. "This way," Rhiow said, and led the way over to the central core of carrels, where the computers sat two to a desk, or sometimes three. Several of the monitors were turned on, casting a soft blue-white glow over the desks; and on one desk, sprawled comfortably with one paw on the keyboard, and looking thoughtfully at the screen in front of him, lay Ehef.
He looked over at them with only mild interest as they came, though when his eyes came to rest on Arhu, the expression became more awake. Ehef's coloration was what People called vefessh, and ehhif called "blue"; his eyes, wide and round in a big round platter of a face, were a vivid green that set off the plush blue fur splendidly. Those eyes reflected the shifting images on the screen, pages scrolling by. "Useless," he said softly. "Not even wizardry can do anything about the overcrowding on these lines. Phone company's gotta do something.— Good evening, Rhiow, and hunt's luck to you."
"Hunt's luck, Senior," she said, sitting down.
"Wondered when you were going to get down to see me. Urruah? How they squealin'?"
"Loudly," Urruah said, and grinned.
"That's what I like to hear. Saash? Life treating you well?"
She sat down, threw a look at Arhu, and immediately began to scratch. "No complaints, Ehef," she said.
"So I see." He looked at Arhu again, got up, stretched fore and aft, and jumped down off the desk, crossing to them. "And I smell new wizardry. What's your name, youngster?"
"Arhu."
Ehef leaned close to breathe breaths with him: Arhu held still for it, just. "Huh. Pastrami," said Ehef. "Well, hunt's luck to you too, Arhu. You still hungry? Care for a mouse?"
"There are mice here?"
"Are there mice here, he asks." Ehef looked at the others as if asking for patience in the face of idiocy. "As if there's any building in this city that doesn't have either mice, rats, or cockroaches. Mice! There are hundreds of mice! Thousands!… Well, all right, some."
"I want to catch some! Where are they?"
Ehef gave Rhiow a look. "He's new at this, I take it."
Arhu was about to shoot off past Rhiow when he suddenly found Urruah standing in
front of him, with an attentive and entirely too interested expression. "When you're on someone else's hunting ground," Urruah said, "it's manners to ask permission first."
"If there are thousands, why should I? I wanna—"
"You should ask permission, young fastmouth," said Ehef, his voice scaling up into a hiss as he leaned in past Urruah's shoulder with a paw raised, "because if you don't, I personally will rip the fur off your tail and stuff it all right down your greedy face, are we clear about that? Young people these days, I ask you."
Arhu crouched down a little, wide-eyed, and Rhiow kept her face scrupulously straight. Ehef might look superficially well-fed and well-to-do, but to anyone who had spent much time in this city, the glint in his eyes and the muscles under his pelt spoke of a kittenhood spent on the West Side docks among the smugglers and the drug dealers, with rats the size of dogs, dogs the size of ponies, and ehhif who (unlike the tunnel-ehhif) counted one of the People good eating if they could catch one.
"Please don't rip him up, Ehef," Rhiow said mildly. "He's a little short on the social graces. We're working on it."
"Huh," Ehef said. "He better work fast, otherwise somebody with less patience is going to tear his ears off for him. Right, Mr. Wisemouth?" He moved so fast that even Rhiow, who was half-expecting it, only caught sight of Ehef's paw as it was just missing Arhu's right ear; the ear went flat, which was just as well, for Ehef's claws were out, and Arhu crouched farther down.
"Right," said Ehef. "Well, because Rhiow suggests it, I'll cut you a little slack. You can't help it if you were raised in a sewer, a lot of us were. So what you say is, 'Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?' And then I say, 'Hunt, but not to the last life, for even prey have Gods.' So come on, let's hear it."
Only a little sullenly— for there was a faint, tantalizing rustling and squeaking to be heard down at the bottom of the stacks— Arhu said, "Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground."
"Was that a question? Who were you asking, the floor? One more time."
Arhu started to make a face, then controlled it as one of Ehef's paws twitched. "Of your courtesy, may I hunt on your ground?"
"Sure, go on, you, catch yourself some mice, there's a steady supply, I make sure of that. But don't eat them all or I'll skin you before anybody's gods get a chance. Go on, what are you waiting for, don't you hear them messing around down there? Screwing each other, that's what that noise is, mouse sex, disgusting."
Hurriedly, Arhu got up and scurried off. Rhiow and the others looked after him, then sat down with Ehef.
"Thanks, Ehef," Rhiow said. "I'm sorry he's so rude."
"Aah, don't worry about it, we all need a little knocking around in this life before we're fit to wash each other's ears. I was like that once. He'll learn better; or get dead trying."
"That's what we're hoping to avoid…."
Saash blinked, one ear swiveling backward to follow the rustling going on above. " 'I make sure there's a steady supply'? I wouldn't think that's a very professional attitude for a mouser."
"I got more than one profession, you know that. But the day I eat every mouse in the place, that's the day they decide they don't need a cat anymore."
"And, besides," Saash said dryly, " 'even prey have gods.' "
"Sure they do." Ehef settled himself, stretched out a paw. "But ethics aside, look, it's not like the old times anymore, no more 'jobs for life.' With the budget cuts, if these people want to give me cat food, they have to pay for it themselves. Bad situation, nothing I can do about it. So I make sure they think I'm useful, and I make sure I don't have to go out of my way to do it. Why should I go hunting out when I can eat in? I bring the librarians dead mice every day, they bring me cat food, everybody's happy. Leaves me free for other work. Such as consultation, which reminds me, why didn't you call to make sure I was available first?"
Rhiow smiled. "You're always available."
"The disrespect of youth."
"When have I ever been disrespectful to you? But it's true, you know it is. And I usually do call first, but I had a problem."
Ehef's ears swiveled as he heard the scampering downstairs. "So I see. Not the one I thought, though." His whiskers went forward in a dry smile. "Thought you finally figured out what to do with that spell."
"What? Oh, that." Rhiow laughed. "No, I'm still doing analysis on it, when I have the time. Not much, lately. The gates seem to take up most of it… and that's the problem now."
"All right." He blinked and looked vague for a moment, then said, "I keep a sound-damper spell emplaced around the desks: it's active now, he won't hear. Tell me your troubles."
She told him about their earlier failure with the gate. Ehef settled down into a pose that Rhiow had become very familiar with over the years: paws tucked in and folded together at the wrists, eyes half-closed as he listened. Only once or twice did he speak, to ask a technical question about the structure of the gate. Finally he opened one eye, then the second, and looked up.
So did Rhiow. It was very quiet downstairs.
"He couldn't get out of here, could he?" she said.
"Not without help. Or not without turning himself into a mouse," said Ehef, "which fortunately he can't do yet, though I bet that won't last long. But never mind. Pretty unsettling, Rhi, but you have to see where this line of reasoning is going to take you."
"I wasn't sure," she said. "I thought a second opinion—"
"You hoped I would get you off the hook somehow," Ehef said with that slightly cockeyed grin that showed off the broken upper canine. "You've already talked this through with Saash, I know— otherwise you wouldn't waste my time— and she couldn't suggest anything at our level of reality that could cause such a malfunction." He glanced up at Saash: she lashed her tail "no." "So the problem has to be farther in, at a more central, more senior level. Somewhere in the Old Downside."
This agreed with Rhiow's opinion, and it was not at all reassuring. Wizards most frequently tend to rank universes in terms of their distance to or from the most central reality known— the one that all universes mirror, to greater degree or lesser, and about which all worlds and dimensions are arranged. That most senior reality had many names, across existence. Wizards of the People called it Auhw-t, the Hearth: ehhif wizards called it Timeheart. It was the core-reality of the universes: some said it was the seed-reality, parent of all others. Whether this was the case or not, worlds situated closer to the Hearth had an increased power to affect worlds farther out in life's structure. The Old Downside was certainly much more central than the universe in which Earth moved, so that what happened there was bound to happen here, sooner or later. And a failure in the effect of the laws of wizardry in a universe so central to the scheme of things had bad implications for the effectiveness of wizardry here and now, on Earth, in the long term.
"You mean," Rhiow said, "that something is changing the way the Downside gating structures behave?"
Ehef shrugged his tail. "Possible."
"Or else something's changing the locks on the gates," Saash said suddenly, with a peculiar and disturbed look on her face.
"That would probably be the lesser of the two evils," Ehef said, "but neither one's any good. Worldgating's one of the things that keeps this planet running… not that the world at large notices, or ought to. If wizards in high-population areas like this have to start diverting energy from specialized wizardries just to handle 'rapid transit,' they're not going to be able to do their jobs at peak effectiveness… and the results are going to start to show in a hurry. Someone's going to have to find out what's going wrong, and fast." Ehef looked up at Rhiow. "And you found the problem… so you know what that means. You get to fix it."
Rhiow hissed very softly. "Which means a trip Downside. Hiouh. Well, you can tell the Powers from me that they're going to have to find someone else to mind the baby while we do what we're doing. He's on Ordeal, but he doesn't understand the ramifications of the Oath as yet, and we're not going to have time to teach him and
do this at the same time. Nor can we take the chance that he might sabotage something we're doing in a moment of high spirits—"
"Sorry, Rhi," Ehef said. "You're stuck with him. The 'you found the problem, you fix it' rule applies to Arhu as well. Your team must have something to offer him that no other wizards now working have; otherwise he wouldn't be here with you."
"Maybe they do," Rhiow said, starting to get angry, "but what about my team, then? How're they supposed to cope, having to do their jobs— and particularly nasty ones, now— while playing milk-dam to a half-feral kitten? He's an unknown quantity, Ehef: he sounds odd sometimes. And I have no idea what he's going to do from one moment to the next, even when he's not sounding odd. Why should my team be endangered, having to look out for him? They're past their own Ordeals, trained, experienced, and necessary— who's looking out for their needs?"
"The same Ones who look after them usually," Ehef said. "No wizard is sent a problem that is inappropriate to him or to his needs. Problems sent to a team are always appropriate to the whole team… whether it looks that way, at this end of causality, or not. Right now, you can question that appropriateness… what wizard doesn't, occasionally? But afterward, things always look different."
"They'll look a lot more different if we're dead," Urruah said softly.
"Yeah, well, we all take that chance, don't we? But even crossing the street's not safe around here, you know that. At least if you die on errantry, you know it was for a purpose. More assurance than most People get. Or most other sentient beings of whatever kind." He glanced up at the stairway to the next level of the stacks, where scampering sounds could be heard again. "As for him, he's almost certainly part of the solution to this problem. Look at him: almost too young to be doing this kind of thing… and all the more powerful for it. You know how it is with the youngest wizards: they don't know what's impossible, so they have less trouble doing it. And just as well. We learn our limits too soon as it is…."