The Big Meow

“I got bored and I left,” Arhu said, in the tone of voice of someone telling on himself so another party wouldn’t have the pleasure of doing it first. “And what I found!”

“What?” Urruah said. “Where’d you go?”

“Back to the house where all the ehhif were partying.”

“Why in the Queen’s name?”

“Because that’s where their meeting is tonight,” Siffha’h said. “They’re going somewhere more important after that, but he wouldn’t say where. Wouldn’t even think about it.”

“Really,” Hwaith said.

“And because Ray was thinking about that house all the time, even in the middle of the most physical stuff,” Arhu said. “And about the little guy.”

“Who,” Helen said, “Elwin Dagenham?”

“Him,” Arhu said. “As if he’s really important somehow.”

“Indeed,” Rhiow thought. Suddenly her thoughts about the party’s host were falling into many new shapes, some of them most unusual.

“But not important in the public relations sense,” said Aufwi.

“Absolutely not. In Ray’s mind, he’s this big dark shape. Dangerous.”

Rhiow’s tail twitched slowly. It was hard to imagine the inoffensive, almost shy figure she’d seen last night as any kind of dangerous. “And you couldn’t See why.”

Arhu sighed. “Not then,” he said. “He was way too full of ehhif sex-think for me to See anything else right then. Which is why I left.”

Rhiow caught the set of growing annoyance in Siffha’h’s ears. “It was wise of you to stay behind,” she said. “Thanks for that.”

Sif’s ears went forward. “So you went back to the house–” Rhiow said.

“They were plenty of them still partying,” Arhu said. “So I just got sidled and walked around poking my nose into things. I wanted to see if I could figure out where the group was going after they met.”

“Are you absolutely sure you weren’t noticed?”

“Of course I wasn’t,” Arhu said. “The ones that weren’t trying to get into each other’s clothes were mostly busy wrapping themselves around as much alcohol as they could find. And not just alcohol, either.”

Helen looked alert. “Drugs?”

“Just hhash,” Arhu said. “There was a little room back in the wing of the building that runs along the hillside. The inside was furnished sort of the same way as the library we saw: and it had a fireplace. Everyone was gathered around that and blowing their smoke into it.”

“Smart enough, I guess,” Urruah said. “That way any smell would vent out up the chimney rather than out into the hallway.”

“Not that one of us couldn’t smell it,” Arhu said. “That’s what brought me down there first. But then I thought, ‘Who knows, maybe the ehhif who owns this place has some other little secrets stashed down here as well.” And sure enough, down that hall a little way is a doorway that looks just like more wall paneling until you Look at it really hard.”

“Show us,” Rhiow said.

A blink later they were no longer in the Silent Man’s living room, but looking at the wall paneling in the hallway of Elwin Dagenham’s house. To the normal visual sense, there was no break in the expensive hardwood paneling at all. But Rhiow and the others now saw what Arhu had seen when he bent the Eye on the paneling. A faint fizz of power described a door-shape in the wood, hiding the actual razor-thin space between door and jamb.

“Wizardry,” Aufwi said, looking shocked.

“Too underpowered,” said Helen, peering at it through Arhu’s eyes. “It’s a charm.”

Auwfi looked confused. “You haven’t run into this kind of thing before?” Helen said. “Granted, you don’t see these a whole lot in urbanized societies. There are some Speech-words for simple things, like the states of visibility or cohesion, that are so powerful they don’t need to be built into a spell by a wizard to work: you can attach them to some physical object and get a fairly good result, though it’s usually pretty low-powered. Even nonwizardly humans can use charms – if they can find the word they need, and learn how to tether it to the right kind of object. People in rural cultures, or lifestyles with strong verbal transmission traditions – and a lot of superstition – tend to hang onto them longest.”

Rhiow’s fur stood up a little. That someone in that house would have the knowledge to use such a thing, combined with what they already knew about the place, disturbed her. “Anyway, as soon as I saw that,” Arhu said, “I went in – “

With him they slipped through the wood of the door as Rhiow had done with the Silent Man’s door that morning. Here was another room like the library and the smoking room, but this one was windowless. More wood paneling lined the walls, there was thick dark red carpeting, and two big comfortable chairs stood in the near corners of the room. The far end of it was dominated by a desk on which lay several very large manila folders.

The viewpoint changed abruptly as Arhu leapt up onto the desk to look more closely at what it held. “You didn’t open them, did you – “ Urruah said.

Arhu hissed in adolescent annoyance. “Why would I need to?” he said. He Looked down at the bigger of the two folders on the desk.