To Visit the Queen Page 5

  She strolled down the sidewalk, glancing around her idly at the brownstones, the garbage, the trees, and the weeds growing up around them; more or less effortlessly she avoided the ehhif who came walking past her with shopping bags or briefcases or baby strollers. Halfway down was a browner brownstone than usual, with the usual stairway up to the front door and a side stairway to the basement apartment. On one of the squared-off tops of the stone balusters flanking the stairway sat a rather grungy-looking white-furred shape, washing. He was always washing, Rhiow thought, not that it mattered much to how he looked. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

  "Hunt's luck, Yafh!"

  He looked down at her and blinked for a moment. Green eyes in a face as round as a saucer full of cream, and almost as big; big shoulders, huge paws, and an overall scarred and beat-up look, as if he had had an abortive argument with a meat grinder: that was Yafh. However, you got the impression that the meat grinder had lost the argument. " 'Luck, Rhi," he said cheerfully. "I've had mine for today. Care for a rat?"

  "That's very kind of you," she said, "but I'm on my way to dinner, and if I spoil my appetite, my ehhif will notice. Bite its head off on my behalf, if you would...."

  "My pleasure." Yafh bent down and suited the action to the word.

  She trotted up the steps and sat down beside Yafh for a moment, looking down the street while he crunched. Yafh was one of those People who, while ostensibly denned with ehhif, was neglected totally by them. He subsisted on scraps scavenged from the neighborhood garbage bags, and on rats and mice and bugs— not difficult in this particular building, its landlord apparently not having had the exterminators in since early in the century.

  "You off for the day?" Yafh said when he finished crunching.

  "The day, yes," she said, "but tomorrow early we have to go to Hlon'hohn."

  "That's right across the East River, isn't it?"

  "Uh, yes, all the way across." Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a smile. So did Yafh.

  "They're making you work again, 'Rioh," Yafh said. The name was a pun on her name and an Ailurin word for "beast of burden," though you could also use it for a wheelbarrow or a grocery cart or anything else that ehhif pushed around. "It's all a plot. People shouldn't work. People should lie on cushions and be fed cream, and filleted fish, and ragout of free-range crunchy mouse in a rich gravy."

  "Oh," Rhiow said. "The way you are."

  Yafh laughed that rough, buttery laugh of his: he leaned back and hit the headless body of the rat a couple of times in a pleased and absent way. "Exactly. But at least I'm my own boss. Are you?"

  "This isn't slavery, if that's what you're asking," Rhiow said, bristling very slightly. "It's service. There is a difference."

  "Oh, I know," Yafh said. "What wizards do is important, regardless of what some People think." He picked up the rat one more time, dangled it from a razory claw, flipped it in the air and caught it expertly. "And at least from what you tell me you have it better than the poor ehhif wizards do: your own kind at least know about you. But Rhi, it's just that you never seem to have much time to yourself. When do you lie around and just be People?"

  "I get some time off, every now and then...."

  "Uh huh," Yafh said, and smiled slightly: that scarred, beat-up, amiable look that had fooled various of the other cats (and some dogs) in the neighborhood into thinking he was no particular threat. "Not enough, I think. And things have been tough for you lately."

  "Yes," Rhiow said, and sighed. "Well, we all have bad times occasionally: not even wizardry can stop that."

  "It stops other people's bad times, maybe," Yafh said, "but not your own.... It just seems hard, that's all."

  "It is," Rhiow said after a moment, gazing up toward her ehhif's apartment building near the corner. Sometimes lately she had dreaded going home to the familiar den that suddenly had gone unfamiliar without Hhuha in it. But Iaehh was still there, and he expected her to be there on a regular basis. As far as he knew, she was only able to get out onto the apartment's terrace and from there to the roof of the building next door, from which Iaehh supposed there was no way down... and if she didn't come in every day or so, he worried.

  "You sure you don't want the rest of this rat?" Yafh said quietly.

  Rhiow turned toward him, apologetic. "Oh, Yafh, I appreciate it, but food won't help. Work will... though I hate to admit it. You go ahead and have that, now. Look at the size of it! It's a meal by itself."

  "They're getting bigger all the time," Yafh said, lifting the headless rat delicately on one claw again and examining it with a more clinical look. "Saw one the other night that was half your size."

  Rhiow's jaw chattered in relish and disgust at the thought of dancing in the moonlight with such a partner. The dance would be brief: Rhiow prided herself on her skill in the hunt. At the same time, it was disturbing, for the rats did keep getting bigger. "The rate they're going," she said as she got up, "we're going to start needing bigger People."

  Yafh gave her an amused look. "I've done my part," he said, and Rhiow put her whiskers forward, knowing he had sired at least fifty kittens in this area alone before he was untommed.

  "You've done more than that," she said. "Hunt's luck, Yafh.... I'll see you in a few days. Can I bring you something from Hlon'hohn?"

  "How are the rats?" he said.

  "Oh please," Rhiow said, laughing, and trotted down the steps toward home.

  For the last part of the run, she sidled, since the building next to her ehhif's apartment house had windows that were not blind. Down by the locked steel door that separated the alley beside the building from the street, Rhiow looked up and down to make sure no one was looking directly at her, and then stepped sideways without moving. Whiskers and ear-tips and Rhiow's tail-tip sizzled slightly as she sidled, making the shift into the alternate universe where the hyperstrings that stitched empty space and solid matter together were clearly visible, even in the afternoon light. They surrounded her now, a jangle and jumble of hair-thin harp strings of multicolored light, running up toward vanishing points up in space and down to other vanishing points in the Earth's core or beyond it. Rhiow threaded her way among them, and slipped under the gate and into the alleyway.

  The garbage was piling up again. She paused to listen for any telltale rustling among the black plastic bags: nothing. No rats today. But then for all I know, Yafh's been here already. Rhiow stalked past the bags, looked up toward the roof of the building whose left-paw wall partly defined the alleyway, and said several words under her breath in the Speech.

  Everything living understands the Speech in which wizards work, as well as many things that are not living now, or once were, or that someday might be. Air was malleable stuff, and could be reminded that it had once been trapped in oxides and nitrates in the ancient stone. It had been in and out of so many lungs since its release that there was controversy among wizards whether air should any longer simply be considered an element, but also something once alive. Either way, it was easy to work with. A few words more and the hyperstrings in the empty air of the alley knotted themselves together into the outline of an invisible stairway: the air, obliging, went solid within the outlines.

  Invisible herself, Rhiow trotted up eight stories to the roof of the building on the left, and leaped up over the parapet to the gray gravel on top. Wincing a little as always at the way it hurt her feet, she glanced over her shoulder and said the word of release: the strings unknotted, and the air went back to being no more solid than the smog made it. Rhiow made her way along to the back left-paw corner where the next building along, her ehhif 's building, abutted this one's roof.

  When the ehhif who built her building had done its brickwork, they had left a repeating diamond pattern down its side of bricks that jutted out an inch or so. The bottom of one of these diamonds made a neat stairstep way straight up to where her ehhif's apartment's terrace jutted out.

  Rhiow jumped up onto the parapet of the building she had just ascended, and the
n stepped carefully onto the first of the bricks. Slowly she made her way up, sure of the way but in no rush: a fall would be embarrassing. Just before coming up to the last few bricks, she unsidled herself and then jumped to the terrace: slipped under the table and chairs there, nosed through the clear plastic cat door, and went in.

  "Hey, there you are."

  He was sitting halfway across the room, in the leather chair under the reading lamp. The apartment was a nice enough one, as far as Rhiow understood the denning requirements of ehhif: a "one-bedroom" apartment with a living room full of leather furniture and bookshelves, a big, soft comfortable rug on the polished wood floor of the main room. It was clean and airy, but still had places where a Person could curl up and sleep undisturbed by too much sun or noise: a place not too crowded, not too empty.

  Well, Rhiow thought, until recently not too empty. She went over to Iaehh and jumped up into his lap before he had time to get up. It was always hard to get him to sit still, more so now than it had been even a month ago.

  "Well, hello," Iaehh said, scratching her behind the ears, "aren't we friendly today?" He sighed: he sounded tired. Rhiow looked up into his face, wondering whether the crinkles around the eyes were a sign of age or of strain. He was good-looking, she supposed, as ehhif went: regular features, short dark hair, slim for his height and in good shape— Iaehh ran every morning. His eyes sometimes had the kind of glint of humor she caught in Urruah's, a suppression of what would have been uproarious laughter at some wildly inappropriate thing he was about to do. All such looks, though, had been muted in Iaehh's eyes for the last month.

  "I'm always friendly with you," Rhiow said, stepping up onto the arm of the chair to bump her head against his upper arm. "You know that. Except when you hold me upside down and play Swing the Cat."

  "Oooh," Iaehh said, "big purr..." He scratched her under the chin.

  "Yes, well, you look like you can use it— you've got that busy-day look. I hope yours wasn't anything like mine." It was folly to talk to ehhif in normal Ailurin, Rhiow knew: Iaehh couldn't hear the near-subsonics People used for most of the verbal part of their speech. But like many People who denned with ehhif, Rhiow refused to treat him like some kind of dumb animal. At least her work meant she could clearly understand what he said to her— an advantage over most People, who had to guess from tone of voice and body language what was going on with their ehhif.

  "You hungry? You didn't eat much of what I left you this morning."

  "You forgot to wash the bowl again," Rhiow said, starting to step down into his lap, then pausing while Iaehh resettled himself. "With all the dried stuff from yesterday and the day before yesterday stuck to it, it wasn't exactly conducive to gourmet dining. I'll get some of the dry food in a while."

  She settled down in his lap and made herself comfortable while he stroked her. "You're a nice kitty," Iaehh said. "Aren't you?"

  "Under the throat," Rhiow said, "yes, right there, that's the spot...." She stretched out her neck and purred, and for a while they just sat there together while bright squares of the late afternoon sun worked their way slowly across the apartment.

  "Now why can't the people at work be as laid back as you," Iaehh said after a while. "You just take everything as it comes.... You never get stressed out."

  She stretched out her forepaws and closed her eyes. "If you only knew," Rhiow said.

  "You don't have any worries. You have a nice bed to sleep on, nice food whenever you want it...."

  "As regards the food, 'nice' is relative," Rhiow said with some amusement, kneading with her paws on Iaehh's knee. "That 'choice parts' thing you gave me the day before yesterday was parts, all right, but as for 'choice'? Please. I'd be tempted to go out and kill my own cows, except that getting them in the cat door would be a nuisance."

  "Ow, ow, don't do that! You go in and out whenever you like, you don't have a job, you don't have to worry about anyone depending on you...."

  Rhiow's tail twitched ironically. "Wouldn't it be nice if it were so," she said softly, and sighed. Any wizard had daily concerns over whether or not she was doing her job well: you pushed past those doubts and fears as best you could, secure in the knowledge that the Powers That Be would not long allow you to go on uncorrected if you were messing up. Yet that routine, negative sort of approval sometimes fell short of one's emotional needs; it left you wondering, Am I giving enough? The Powers that made the Universe have poured Their virtue into me for the purpose of saving that Universe, piece by piece, day by day. Am I giving enough of it back? And— more to the point— is it working?

  "What a life," Iaehh said.

  "You're not kidding," Rhiow said.

  "But I still wonder... is it good enough...."

  She opened an eye and looked up at him.

  "I don't know sometimes," Iaehh said, stroking her steadily, "if it's fair for me to keep you. Just because... you're all that's left of her. I don't know, is that a fair reason to keep a pet?"

  Rhiow sighed again. His tone was reflective, his face was still, but the intensity of Iaehh's grief for Hhuha was no less obvious for lacking tears. For one thing, Rhiow could hear the echoes of his emotions: even nonwizardly People could manage that much with the ehhif with whom they spent most of their time. For another thing, Rhiow was an experienced wizard, fluent in the Speech. Understanding it, you could thereby understand anything that spoke. You could also speak to anything that spoke, and make yourself understood: but this was strictly forbidden to wizards except when engaged in errantry, on wizardly business that required it. Rhiow had sometimes been tempted to break her silence, but she had never done it— not even when Iaehh had clutched her and wept into her fur, moaning the name that Rhiow herself also would have moaned aloud in shared grief, if only it had been allowed: Susan, Susan...

  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.