He turned and snagged one of the anchor strands in his teeth, ready to feed power down it. "Go."
Saash recited a string of coordinates in the Speech, and then said the last word that knotted the spell closed and turned it loose. Urruah bit hard on the string, feeding power down it. The whole structure blazed: the "cone" of strings collapsed down on them, pushed them down and out through its bottom. A moment when the world was a tangle of lines of fire—
Then dimness reasserted itself. The four of them stood and sat and lay on a concrete shelf four feet wide and ten feet long, high up at the far end of a room much longer than it was wide. The shelf's edge was a sheer drop of twenty feet to a floor painted with white lines and covered with blocky machinery, in which ehhif's cars were stacked three high.
The string structure snapped away to nothing. "Au, I'm glad there are gates," Saash said, and flopped down on her side. "Who'd want to do that every time you wanted to go any distance? It's bad enough for ten blocks."
"That's why Iau gave us feet," Rhiow said. "Urruah? You okay?"
He sat down, blinking. "I will be after I eat something."
He's fine, Rhiow thought, amused. "Now let's see about this one—" She peered at the kitling. Under the grime, most of which Saash had gotten off, he was white with irregular black patches on back and flanks and face: one splotch sat on his upper lip, creating an effect like Carl's mustache. Ear-tips, tail-tips, and feet were black. Hu-rhiw was the Ailurin name for this kind of pattern: day-and-night. He lay there breathing hard, ears back, eyes squeezed shut.
Conscious, Rhiow thought, but unwilling to accept what's been happening to him. And why wouldn't he be? For not all People believed in wizards. Many who did believe were suspicious of them, thinking they somehow desired to dominate other People, or else they mocked wizards as unnecessary or ineffective, saying that they'd never seen a wizard do anything useful. Well, that's the whole point, Rhiow thought, to do as much good as possible, as quietly as possible. What the Lone One doesn't have brought to Its attention, It can't ruin. But the generally dismissive attitude of other People was something you got used to and learned to work around. After all, the situation could have been much worse… like that of the ehhif wizards. Rhiow often wondered how they got anything done, since hardly any of their kind knew they existed or believed in them at all, and preserving that status quo was part of their mandate.
That little body still lay curled tense; Rhiow caught a flicker of eyelid. Conscious, all right. We'll have some explaining to do, but it can wait. "Saash," she said, "would you feel inclined to give him a bit more of a wash? He'll wake."
"Certainly." Saash too had seen that betraying flicker. She curled closer to the youngster and began enthusiastically washing inside one ear. Only the most unconscious cat could resist that for long.
The youngster's eyes flew open, and he sneezed: possibly from the washing, or the smell that still lingered about him. He tried to get up, but Saash put a paw firmly over his midsection and held him down.
"Lemme go!"
"You've had a bad morning, kit," Rhiow said mildly. "I'd lie still awhile."
"Don't call me kit," he said in a yowl meant to be threatening. "I'm a tom!"
Urruah gave him an amused glance. "Oh. Then we can fight now, can we?"
"Uhh…" The kit looked up at Urruah— taking in the size of him, the brawny shoulders and huge paws, and, where the tips of the forefangs stuck out so undemurely, the massive teeth. "Uh, maybe I don't feel well enough."
"Well, then," Urruah said, "at your convenience." He sat down and began to wash. Rhiow ducked her head briefly to hide a smile. It was, of course, an excuse that the rituals of tom-combat permitted: most of those rituals were about allowing the other party to escape a fight and still save face.
"You have reason not to feel well," Saash said, pausing in her washing. "About fifty rats took bites out of you. You lie still, and we'll work on that."
"Why should you care?" the kit said bitterly.
"We have our reasons," Rhiow said. "What's your name, youngster?"
His eyes narrowed, a suspicious look, but after a moment he said, "Arhu."
"Where's your dam?" Saash said.
"I don't know." This by itself was nothing unusual. City-living cats might routinely live in-pride, even toms sometimes staying with their mother and littermates; or they might go their own way at adolescence to run with different prides, or stay completely unaligned.
"Are you in hhau'fih?" Saash used the word that meant any group relationship in general, rather than rrai'fih, a pride-relationship implying possible blood ties.
"No. I walk alone."
Rhiow and Saash exchanged glances. He was very young to be nonaligned, but that happened in the city, too, by accident or design.
"There'll be time for those details later," Rhiow said. "Arhu, how did you come to be down there where we found you, in the tunnel?"
"Someone said I should go there. They laughed at me. They said, I dare you…" Arhu yawned, both weariness and bravado. "You have to take dares…."
"What was the dare?"
"She said, Walk down here, and take the adventure that comes to you—"
Rhiow's eyes went wide. " 'She.' What did she say to you first?"
"When?"
"Before that."
A sudden coolness in Arhu's voice, in his eyes. "Nothing."
"Fwau," Rhiow said; a bit roughly, for her, but she thought it necessary. "Something else has to have been said first." She thought she knew what, but she didn't dare lead him….
Arhu stared at her. Rhiow thought she had never seen such a cold and suspicious look from a kit so young. Pity rose up in her; she wanted to cry, Who hurt you so badly that you've lost your kittenhood entire? What's been done to you? But Rhiow held her peace. She thought Arhu was going to give her no answer at all: he laid his head down sideways on the concrete again. But he did not close his eyes, staring out instead into the dimness of the garage.
Come on, Rhiow thought. Tell me.
"I was in the alley," Arhu said. "The food's good there: they throw stuff out of that grocery store on the other side of it, the Gristede's. But the pride there, Hrau and Eiff and Ihwin and them, they caught me and beat me again. They said they'd kill me, next time; and I couldn't move afterward, so I just lay where they left me. No one else came for a good while…. Then she must have come along while I was hurting. I couldn't see her: I didn't look, it hurt to move. She said, You could be powerful. The day could come when you could do all kinds of good things, when you could do anything, almost, with the strength I can give you… if you lived through the… test, the… hard time…" Arhu made an uncertain face, as if not sure how to render what had been said to him. "She said, If you take what I give you, and live through the trouble that follows— and it will follow— then you'll be strong forever. Strong for all your lives." His voice was going matter-of-fact now, like someone repeating a milk-story heard long ago against his dam's belly. "I wanted that. To be strong. I said, What could happen to me that would be worse than what's already happened? Do it. Give it to me. She said, Are you sure? Really sure? I said, Yes, hurry up, I want it now. She said, Then listen to what I'm going to say to you now, and if you believe in it, then say it yourself, out loud. And I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid. And it was quiet then."
"Hmm. Where was this alley, exactly?" said Urruah.
" 'Ru, shut up. You can check the Gristede's later. Arhu," Rhiow said, "say what she told you to."
A little silence, and then he began to speak, and a shiver went down Rhiow from nose to tail: for the voice was his, but the tone, the meaning and knowledge held in it, was another's. "In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art that is Its gift in Life's service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To thes
e ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so— looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded…."
No hesitation, no uncertainty; as if it had been burned into his bones. Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another.
"Then what happened?"
He stirred. "After a while, I felt better, and I saw I could get away— none of them were there. I walked out into the street. It was quiet. It was late, just the steam coming up out of the street, you know how it does. I walked a long time until I saw inside there, inside those doors. It was all bright and warm, but the doors were shut. I thought, It's no use, there's no way to get in. But then—" Now he sounded dreamily mystified, though at a remove. "Then someone— then I heard how to get in, if I wanted to. I knew more than I knew a minute before: a way to move, and words to say. And she said, Do that, and then go in and see what happens. I dare you. So I did. I said the words, and I walked in through the doors… through them!… and then on under the sky-roof, and on down through those littler doors, down into the dark…"
Arhu trailed off, and shivered. "I'm tired," he said, and closed his eyes.
Saash, lying beside him, looked at Rhiow thoughtfully, then started to wash the top of Arhu's head.
Rhiow sat down and let out a breath. Well, she said silently to the others, in the form of the Speech that goes privately from mind to mind, it would appear that the Powers That Be have sent us a brand-new wizard.
Not a wizard yet, Urruah said, his eyes narrowing. An overgrown kitten on Ordeal. And since when do the Powers dump a probationer on already-established wizards? The whole point of Ordeal is that you have to survive it alone.
None of us, Saash said, ever does it completely alone. There's always advice, at first: from Them, or other wizards. That's most likely why he's been sent to us. Who else has he got?
That's the problem, Rhiow said. You know there are no accidents in our line of work. This kit was sent to us. He's going to have to stay with us, at least until he's started to take this seriously.
No way! Urruah hissed.
Rhiow stared at him. You heard him, she said. "I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid." He's not clear yet about the meaning of the Oath he's taken. If he hadn't met us, that would be his problem, and the Powers': he'd live or die according to the conditions of his Ordeal and his use of the wizardry bestowed on him. But we found him— you found him!— and under the conditions of our own Oaths, we can't let him go until he understands what he's brought on himself. After he does, he's the Powers' business: he and They will decide whether he lives and becomes a wizard, or dies. But for the time being, we're a pride in the nurturing sense as well as the professional one… and that's how it will be. You have any problems with that?
She stared until Urruah dropped his eyes, though he growled in his throat as he did it. Rhiow cared not a dropped whisker for his noise. Urruah was still young in his wizardry but also profoundly committed to it, and though he could be lazy, tempery, and self-indulgent, he wouldn't attempt to deny responsibilities he knew were incumbent on him.
"So," Rhiow said aloud. "Saash, you seem to have become queen for the day…."
Saash made a small ironic smile, suggestive of someone enjoying a job more than she had expected. "It's all right, I can manage him. He'll sleep sound for a while…. I made one of the small healing wizardries to start the wounds cleaning themselves out."
"Make sure you sleep, too. I'll make rounds in the Terminal in a while; Har'lh wanted the gates double-checked. Urruah, it would help if you held yourself ready while Saash is awake, in case she needs anything."
"All right," he said, and he brightened. "It'll be ehhif lunchtime soon, and they'll be throwing lots of nice leftovers in that Dumpster around the corner. Then there's this alley, with the Gristede's. Thirty-eighth, you think, Saash?…"
Rhiow's whiskers went forward in amusement as she turned to jump down. For the moment, she wasn't sure which was motivating Urruah more: the desire for food or the prospect of a good scrap with a tough pride. "Eat hearty," she said, "and keep your ears unshredded. Call if you need anything: you'll know where to find me."
"Working," Urruah said, in a voice of good-natured pity.
Three
An hour later Rhiow strolled across the concourse again, under a "sky" glowing blue with reflection from brilliant sunshine glancing blindingly from the polished acreage of floor. She had checked the main tunnel gates first, and finished with the Lexington Avenue local gate, near the left-hand end of the platform. All their logs were reporting as they should have, including the malfunctioning gate's log, which now showed eight accesses since its repair. Things were back to normal.
For the time being, Rhiow thought, as she headed one last time toward the upper-level track gates. The problem with worldgates was that they were inherently unstable. Space didn't like to be broached, however briefly: it strove to reseal itself by any means. Standing worldgates needed constant adjustment and maintenance to compensate for changes in local string structure caused by everything from seasonal changes in the Earth's orbit to anomalies in local conditions— solar wind, sunspots, shifts in the ionosphere or the planet's magnetic field. After a while you learned to anticipate the gates' quirks, and you routinely prepared for trouble before the full and new of the Moon, at the solstices, during close cometary passes. And every now and then, like today, the gates would find a new and totally unexpected way to make your life interesting.
Part of Rhiow's mind kept worrying at the problem of the malfunctioning gate's lost logs while she made her way over to the gate that was best for long-range accesses, the one near Track 32. Besides that, though, she was thinking about Arhu and about all those rats. There'd been no reason for so many of them to be down there. What had attracted them? Where had they gotten in from?… Probably some passageway to the outside needed to be blocked up. Somewhere under these streets, in the tangle of tunnels and conduits too complex for even one of the People to know, the rats must have found entirely too suitable a breeding-place. As she passed through the door to the platform, Rhiow's mouth quirked with distaste at the taint of dead rat that still lingered in the tunnel air. To her, rats were a symbol of the entropy that wizards spent their lives slowing: a persistent, hungry force, implacable, that might be fought to a standstill, but rarely more, and which would quickly grow past control if ignored….
Halfway down the platform, a slender blond-haired she-ehhif in dark skirt and jacket stood waiting, a briefcase under one arm. Rhiow smiled at the sight of her, knowing immediately that she was not waiting for the train— though she would claim to be, should anyone question her. The odds of her being noticed at all in so busy a place were minimal. If she were noticed, her manner of leaving wouldn't surprise anyone. She would simply be there one moment, and gone the next, and anyone watching would assume that they'd simply somehow missed seeing her walk away. Even if someone looked at that wizard right at the moment she passed the gate, the nature of wizardry itself would protect her. Almost no nonwizardly creature is willing to see the "impossible," even right under its nose, and shortly it finds all kinds of explanations for the strange thing it saw. This useful tendency meant that many short-duration wizardries didn't have to be concealed at all. Other kinds were simply invisible to most species, like the glowing, shimmering webwork of the gate where it hung face-on to the platform, the surface of the web slowly beginning to pucker inward in the beginning of patency.
Rhiow strolled on down to the she-ehhif. At the flicker of motion, seen out the corner of an eye, the woman turned and saw Rhiow coming, and raised her eyebrows. "Dai stihó," the woman said. "Was this one down this morning?"
"For a change, no," Rhiow said. "This will come in phase in about thirty seconds. Got far to go?"
"Not too far, but Penn's a mess right now, and I'm on deadline," the woman said
. "Vancouver, and then Kamchatka."
"Oh, the oil spill."
"If we can get authorization from the Powers That Be for the timeslide," the woman said, and smiled slyly, "it'll be, 'What oil spill?' But we won't know until we check with the A.A. in Vancouver."
"Well, dai," Rhiow said, as the woman turned toward the gate, "and good luck with the Advisory. And with Them…"
"Thanks. You go well, too," the woman said, stepping forward as the center of the gate's string structure puckered fully inward into metaextension. A human wizard couldn't see the strings without help, but she certainly could see the metaextension's sudden result. Hanging in the air before them was a round (or actually, spherical) window into deep gray shadow with the beginnings of dawn outside it, a sky paling above close-planted pine trees. A park, perhaps, or someone's backyard, there was no telling— a given wizard set the coordinates to suit his mission's needs. Had Rhiow been curious about the location, she could check the gate's log later. For the moment, she watched the young woman step into the predawn dimness, and heard her speak the word that completed the wizardry, releasing the hyperextended strings to pop back out of phase.
The gate-weft persisted in metaextension just a second or so— a safety feature— and then the curvature snapped back flat as if woven of rubber bands, light rippling up and down the resonating strings as the structure collapsed into a configuration with lower energy levels. The spherical intersection with otherwhere vanished: the tapestry of light lay flat against the air again, waiting.