The Big Meow Read online

  Rhiow paused for just a moment, assessing the personal gating: a securely anchored and flexible construction, a nice piece of work. She stepped through after Hwaith, glanced around.

  They were standing at the foot of a moderately steep hillside; its lower slope and the ground where they stood was covered with the pale oat grass that seemed to favor unwatered spots in this part of the world. Several other small hills came down to meet the ground around them, and rather to Rhiow’s surprise, none of them had houses built on them, or even roads.

  “We’re about three miles northwest of the Silent Man’s place,” Hwaith said, heading up the hill. “Greystone, the ehhif call it. Up here — ”

  As they climbed, the oat grass gave way to low shrubbery and ground cover, both somewhat overgrown. “This is only three miles away from where we were?” Rhiow said. “You’d think it was much further, out in the country somewhere – “

  “Well,” Hwaith said, “when these ehhif marked out their home territory, they did it with an eye to their privacy. You’ll see in a moment.”

  “I keep meaning to ask,” Rhiow said as they worked their way up through the underbrush. “Where’s home territory for you, Hwaith? Are you in-pride? Or have you got ehhif of your own?”

  “Oh, no,” Hwaith said. “I’ve got a den-place down in Union Station, and I’m friendly enough with the ehhif there, but I haven’t been closely affiliated for a long time now. Managing the gate even under normal circumstances is enough of a strain that I wouldn’t want to have to do that and have ehhif too. It wouldn’t be fair to them, really. And as for a pride…” Suddenly Hwaith sounded as if he was coming up against something he didn’t want to deal with too closely. “Work tends to get in the way of pride-life, doesn’t it? I mean, the gate-management end of things. If I start thinking about changing specialties, training a replacement, it might be another story.”

  She gave him a wry look as they came out between one band of shrubbery and another near the top of the hill. “Hwaith, if you’re telling me that wizardry’s impairing your tom-life, you’re doing something wrong! Better have a word with Urruah.”

  He put his whiskers forward, catching her amusement. “Oh, no, it’s not like that. I’ve hardly forsaken the queens for my Art! There were one or two when I was young, sure, but work got busy, nothing really came of it…” He shrugged his tail as they made their way through the second line of shrubbery. “And later on you learn not to expect it to be a Sehau-and-Aifheh thing every time. Might as well expect to have the sky rain fresh songbirds on you with their breasts ready plucked.”

  Rhiow chuckled. “Songbirds? I’d settle for chicken.” But the sudden romantic turn of phrase amused her. Sehau was a tom: Aifheh was his queen… At least that was the way the most famous of the many versions of their story went — a sung-verse variant composed by one of the greatest of the cat-bards, the one who anciently kept company with the ehhif-bard Hharo’lahn in the Isles of the West. The tale had already been old when the People first told it to the ehhif-wizards of Egypt, and thousands of subsequent generations of People retold it to any species that would listen, and to each other. Toms especially loved it, doting on its over-the-top romance and unavoidable tragedy – but then toms always tended a little toward the histrionic, as something that would increase the drama in any given song. This, though, was an opinion Rhiow knew perfectly well it was wiser to keep to herself.

  They came out of the shrubbery and stood at the hilltop, and Rhiow waved her tail in astonishment as she looked across the wide broad space to a huge frontage of house, built all in shadowy gray granite. The main building was two stories high, and at least a New York short block in length – a stately procession of arcades and porticoes, terraces and peaked roofs, railed stone terraces, archways, and doors of wood and glass. “This was an ehhif den?” Rhiow said. “The pride must have been huge!”

  “Not at all,” Hwaith said as they headed toward it. “Only two ehhif lived here.”

  “But not any more, I take it,” Rhiow said. The whole atmosphere of the place spoke strangely of abandonment: lightless windows, overgrown grass, ragged plantings hanging over leaf-scattered garden paths.

  “No, it’s still lived in,” Hwaith said, leading the way down along the frontage. “A wealthy ehhif built the place some decades ago. I mean, a really wealthy one: the founder of one of the great old industrial ehhif families that have lived here for more than a century. This was the biggest private home ever built in the city: still is.” Hwaith glanced at the building’s l long frontage of the building as they paced by it. “After the old tom-ehhif built it, he gave it to his only tom-kit. It was to be the place where the young tom and his queen would live their lives out together.”

  “But it didn’t turn out that way,” Rhiow said.

  At the far edge of the huge graveled space to one side of the great house, they paused, and Hwaith flirted his tail “no”. “In this town,” Hwaith said, “so many things don’t necessarily go as planned…”

  Rhiow put her nose up into the air, sniffed. The scents of old growth, damp bark, shed conifer needles and peppertree leaves, mingled in the still air with scents of stale water and baked stone. But there was something else as well. “Am I crazy,” Rhiow said, “or is that – oil?”

  “Not crazy at all,” Hwaith said. “Not actually on the grounds, here. But it’s close by: there’s a well down the other side of the hill. Ironic, really, since you could say this whole place was built on oil.”

  Rhiow stood still and listened. Muted by the way the ground fell away, she could hear a faint, repetitive creaking noise. “Is that the well I’m hearing?” she said.

  “That’s it.” Hwaith started off in the opposite direction, and Rhiow padded after him. “Anyway, down over here is where that root was trying to sink itself – “

  Along the ridge of the hill, a terrace reached away from one side of the main house, stretching perhaps a hundred yards. At the terrace’s end a formal box garden began, or what remained of one. Once it had been an interlocking maze of carefully trimmed lines of shrubbery. Now it was looking ragged around the edges, even dusty. “If these ehhif are so wealthy,” Rhiow said as they paced through the maze, “it’s surprising they don’t take better care of the place.”

  “It is a little strange,” Hwaith said, “but they don’t seem to be here much. Watch out for these steps – a couple of the slabs are loose.”

  They made their way down a shallow stairway at the far edge of the maze, heading for a small, flat area further down the hillside, hemmed in by an incomplete circle of trees. “This is where my gate was trying to root,” Hwaith said, “at least briefly.” He stopped, his nose wrinkling. “Wait a minute. Do you smell – “

  To a Person’s senses, ehhif blood had a metallic reek, instantly identifiable. Even if there had been rain to wash it away, which there had not, the scent would still have lingered in the soil for weeks, unmistakable. Now Rhiow walked slowly into the center of the ring of trees, sniffing carefully.

  The scent was very old. Rhiow spent a while working her way over toward one spot in particular, near the encircling ring of trees, where once upon a time, the blood had soaked deep. But that had been a long time ago. Hwaith came up by her, put his nose down, inhaled. His tail lashed.

  “Years old,” he said. “But I’d have trouble saying how many. Forensics hasn’t been my field.”

  “Could this be a murder the police here missed?” Rhiow said. “Is this anything you’ve heard about before?”

  “No,” Hwaith said, sounding upset.

  Rhiow’s tail was lashing too, now. “We’re going to have to get Arhu up here,” she said. “I can’t believe this. Another – maybe not a murder, but something. And no way to tell if it’s germane to what we’re doing.” She put her nose down to the ground again, took another long breath –

  — froze. A sour stink, faint, damp, acrid, teased her nose. Her mind went back to the stink she’d scented when she had had her teeth sunk
into the diagnostic webbing of Hwaith’s gate, just after they’d arrived. “Do you smell that?” she said.

  He put his nose down by the ground, breathed, then opened his mouth to rebreathe the scent. “Yes.”

  Rhiow shook her head, sneezed. Then she sat down, licked a paw and scrubbed at her nose briefly, it itched so with the warring scents. “I wonder,” she said. “Hwaith, do earthquakes have a scent?”

  He gave her an odd look. “That’s a thought that never would have occurred to me.”

  “These earthquakes, anyway,” Rhiow said. “Your gate’s hyperstrings — at least, the diagnostic strings tied to the other places where the gate was trying to put down roots — they were full of this smell.”

  “You’re right,” Hwaith said. “But, Rhiow, we haven’t had a quake here.” He paused. “At least, not recently. Certainly not in the last six weeks. Maybe not for much longer.”

  “I wonder if we’re about to have one here.”

  He looked thoughtful. “That could be. Are you suggesting we should try to prevent it?”

  Rhiow sneezed again – once without trying, and then once on purpose to try to clear her nose of the warring scents. “I don’t know if we could. Even if we could, I don’t know if it would be wise. But I think we should make sure one of us is keeping an eye on this site, because if we can investigate the quake while it’s active, we might be able to run a trace back to the cause.”

  Hwaith’s tail waved slowly from side to side as he thought. “It’s worth a try,” he said. “I’ll take a moment to jump back over to where Aufwi’s watching the gate…see how he’s doing, and ask him to add a tracer to the diagnostic that’s looking at this attempted root.”

  “If you would,” Rhiow said.

  With barely a breath of displaced air and only the softest pop, Hwaith vanished. Rhiow blinked – the departure had been unusually slick – and got up to walk out of the circle of trees, over to where the plantings parted to allow the southward vista to open up. Below, past the nearer, barren hills, the city view was beginning to glitter through the dusk — that softer, yellower, fainter light that had so struck Helen the first time she saw it. “Quite a view…” she said.

  “It is,” Hwaith said from right behind her.

  Rhiow jumped – not exactly off the ground, but she started violently enough that all her fur stood up in response. She came around to face Hwaith, still bristling. “How do you do that?”

  His eyes were wide with shock. “What?”

  “You transited in and I didn’t even hear you come back!”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you!” “Well, would you please do it louder after this, because I am disturbed!”

  Then Rhiow took a long breath. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. I’m on edge, it’s wrong of me to take it out on you. But sweet Iau up a tree, Hwaith, I’ve never heard anyone self-gate that quietly!”

  He ducked himself down and twisted his head to her, and Rhiow’s annoyance dissolved instantly into amused embarrassment, for it was the kind of gesture a young Person, half-apologetic, half-playful, would have used with a playmate. “Sorry,” Hwaith said, giving her so upside-down a look from those brassy eyes that for a second or so he was practically standing on his head. Then he righted himself. “I don’t think about it often. I told you, I have the Ear sometimes – the ulterior-hearing gift. A lot of the time I can hear the air about to move, or what direction it’s going to move in, and nudge it out of moving explosively.”

  “Selective matter displacement,” Rhiow said, less upset now and much more impressed.

  “More like diffusion,” Hwaith said. “I spread the kinetic energy of the air’s motion around, that’s all. It’s a gimmick.”

  “A useful one, I bet,” Rhiow said, and sat down to recover herself a little.

  Hwaith sat beside her, looking down the hill at the glitter of the city. “Not usually,” he said. “Mostly my gate doesn’t care whether I sneak up on it or not: it misbehaves anyway.”

  They sat quietly for a few moments while Rhiow finished calming herself down. “As I was saying before you sneaked up on me…it really is a fine view. You can see all the way to the ocean from here.”

  “True enough,” Hwaith said, and glanced over his shoulder at the huge dark old house behind them, its windows blank and empty. “Not often anyone here to see it, though, since the murder.”

  She stared at him. “Wait. Since the murder? What murder?”

  “Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know.” He got up, shook himself. “Come on. It’s back here it happened.”

  They walked back through the garden maze to the house. “The young tom-ehhif who lived here with his queen,” Hwaith said, “had a personal assistant who worked closely with him. Something went wrong with this other young tom-ehhif – no one’s sure what. One story was that he was jealous of the relationship between the tom and queen – though which of them he might have desired, no one’s sure. Another was that he’d become ill in his mind, and couldn’t tell friend from enemy any longer.”

  They came to a halt in front of a set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors set in behind a little terrace. “Right there,” Hwaith said, “something more than twenty years ago now, the tom-ehhif who lived here was shot by his assistant: and soon after, when someone came to the house, the assistant shot himself as well. At first there were few questions about it. Afterwards the questions just wouldn’t stop. Why didn’t the queen-ehhif hear the first shot? Did she perhaps fire it herself? What was the assistant doing there that night, when he’d been told not to come? And there were a hundred other issues about it that couldn’t be settled to anyone’s satisfaction…” Hwaith waved his tail. “Finally the young tom’s father sold the house to someone else: another pair of wealthy ehhif. They own it still. But they’re not here much. I think the place troubles them.”

  He let out a breath: they both sat for a few seconds in the quiet. Off in the trees down the hill, a California jay produced its rusty call from a throat that sounded like it really needed to be greased. “You must be thinking that ehhif here don’t do anything but kill each other,” Hwaith said.

  “Oh, no,” Rhiow said. She looked down the length of the house. “But you say the ehhif who den here won’t stay… You think they feel the place is th’haimenh?” It was the Speech-cognate of the Ailurin word sseih’huuh, “haunted,” though the word in the Speech was more precise about the cause of the associated apparitions – more a kind of lingering, self-repeating spectral recording than any real local persistence of soul, for which there was another set of words.

  “I don’t know,” Hwaith said. “I’m not clear about how ehhif think of such things. You live with them full time: maybe you know better than I would.”

  Rhiow thought briefly about Iaehh, sitting some nights in the silence of the apartment that was only his now, his eyes still and sad, his head held in a way that suggested he was listening in mind to a voice he would never hear in life again.

  “I’m not always sure, either,” she said, and got up. “Hwaith, let’s get back to the Silent Man’s. They’ll be thinking about getting ready to go. …And maybe,” she said, glancing over her shoulder and flirting her tail, “you’ll show me just how you diffuse that air.”

  In utter silence, Hwaith vanished. Rhiow followed.

  When the Silent Man’s car rolled up the broad, curving cypress-lined drive to the front door of Elwin Dagenham’s house in the hills, the pre-intervention conference in the back seat was still in full swing.

  “My back fur looks terrible.”

  “Sheba, it’s just fine.”

  “No it’s not, it won’t lie down.”

  “I could help you with that.”

  Whack! “Ow!”

  “I told you, I’m not interested! Come back in three months.”

  “Will there be food? I’m starving.”

  “I told you to eat before you left.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “There
’s always plenty of food. Just make sure you get it before the houiff do.”

  “Houiff? Nobody said anything about houiff!”

  “I must have mentioned them at least once or twice. Oh, it won’t stay down!”

  “All you need is for someone to lick it a little – “

  Whack! “Oww!!”

  “I told you, three months!”

  “There must be something in the food here. Hwaith, do they put hormones in the cat food here? Normally he’d have heard her the first ten times she told him.”

  “Could just be excitement. Or memory loss. I hear you can start to incur memory loss if you have really big – “

  “And don’t worry, they’re usually only little houiff. Oh, you do get the occasional houff at one of these who’s a film star. That nice big German shepherd, now, he’s a creampuff. Oh, and there’s a collie now too. Actually, there are about nine of them. All idiots, just hit them in the head if they so much as look at you and they’ll run off crying.”

  “Memory loss? Who says that?”

  The car rolled slowly across gravel, stopped with a crunch of tires: the driver turned around, looked into the shadowy back seat. Awful quiet back there, he said to Helen. Are they all right? Anybody get carsick?

  “They’re fine,” Helen said. “Cousins, somebody use the Speech and put our host’s mind at rest.”

  “Pre-event arrangements,” Rhiow said, “nothing more. Everybody, it’s wise that the Silent Man should know we’re clear on what the plan is. We go in together as his entourage, and let the PR people have their joke and take their pictures. Afterwards, we scatter. Amuse the guests, try not to damage the dogs any more than necessary for good order and discipline, have the occasional hors d’oeuvre. Occasional,” she said, eyeing Urruah. “No getting up on the tables, no matter how the guests invite you to. Arrange for food to fall on the floor when necessary. Shouldn’t be hard, as from what Sheba says, this group is likely to be so awash in alcohol pretty soon that they wouldn’t recognize an, uh, intervention if it climbed up their clothes with all its claws out singing ‘Great Queen Iau Had A Cow.’ Otherwise… just keep your ears and noses open for any sign of the kind of thing that Helen noticed in Anya Harte today. If there are any other People there who’re kindly disposed, chat with them, hear what they might have to say, don’t bring up what we are or do unless you must. If they recognize you for what you are by the look of you, downplay your role, don’t get into long explanations: you’re just here with the Silent Man. Which is true enough. When it’s time to go, he’ll let Helen know and she’ll call us all silently. Any questions?”