The Big Meow

“What’s sad about this, though,” Urruah said, “is that though they’re pretending to be fascinated by her, it’s not what Helen is that’s attracting them: it’s what she represents. A prize, a way to get one up on the other ehhif. In fact, almost none of these people are enjoying themselves. Maybe the Silent Man and his friends. But the rest of this isn’t about enjoyment, or seeing people you like. It’s just one big game of hauissh. Everybody jockeying for position, for advantage, while trying not to be seen to be doing that. Talk to the right person, and make sure everybody sees you talking to them…or not talking to them. Or else let everyone see how obviously you’re not talking to the people who don’t have anything to offer you. Hide what won’t get you something, reveal what will.” His tail jerked to one side, a gesture of distaste.

Rhiow gave him an odd look. “That caviar sour your stomach?”

“No,” Urruah said, and shook himself. “Something else. I was about to come looking for you.”

“Oh? Why? What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” Urruah said.

Rhiow flicked an ear in mild surprise. Except in the professional arena, where precision was an absolute requirement, Urruah was rarely afraid to theorize in the absence of facts. “Why? What have you got?”

“I don’t want to prejudice your first impression,” he said. “Just come see.”

They made their way down a hallway, turned a corner and passed down between some closed doors: turned again and found two ehhif kissing passionately in a love-seat set into an embrasure in the wall on one side. Quietly they all passed by on the far side of the hall, Urruah flicking an amused glance at the very preoccupied and already partially disrobed ehhif as they went. “A lot of that going on down some of these back hallways,” he said. “You’d think they wanted to be found.”

“In this crowd,” Rhiow said, “why would this surprise you? Assuming your theory of movie-ehhif behavior is right, which I’m assuming it is.” She looked down the hallway, which stretched for quite a way in front of them, the right-hand of the two wings that reached toward the hillside.

They passed a broad stairway on the left that led up to the second floor, and then more doors. At the very end of the hallway, straight ahead of them, was a door, partly open. They slipped in through it. The room was a library, a large and handsome one done in dark wood paneling, with thin brass rails keeping the books in their shelves. Thick dark-brown carpeting kept noise to a minimum: during the day, the russet-curtained windows would have views of the pool and terrace on one side, the driveway on the other. Now, though, the curtains were drawn.

At the end of the room was a large, luxurious-looking leather sofa, the kind of thing that made your claws itch just to look at it; above it hung a framed landscape, a watercolor of some distant misty lake set about with trees, the dusk coming on. Sitting in front of the sofa, staring into the middle of the room, was Arhu. Sitting by him, her eyes closed, was Siff’hah.

Rhiow just stood there for a moment, keeping quiet, as there was no mistaking the feeling of wizardly power building in the room. But suddenly it evaporated, as quickly and anticlimactically as the air going out of a balloon that an ehhif had let go of. Arhu opened his eyes and swore.

The Ailurin word was so vile that Rhiow was tempted to go straight over and clout him one, except that there might have actually been a good reason for the anger. “What?” she said.

He glared at her, then at Urruah. “Nothing,” he said. “I can’t see a thing.”

Urruah looked over at Rhiow. “It should be easier to feel now that he’s let that go,” he said to Rhiow. “Rhi, can you feel it? It’s as if there had been a gate here once. But not now. And no way to tell when.”

Rhiow sat down on the carpet, and half-closed her eyes to see better. All around her, the hyperstrings that ran through the structure of everything became clearer to her view – an insubstantial weft and weave of light, like interwoven harp strings, piercing through the room from ceiling to floor and crisscrossing it from windows to walls. Normally, except for local gravitational disturbances or other strictly natural perturbations, hyperstrings ran straight. But here the straightness of many of the strings was interrupted by slight curves, places where the strings’ supracolors shifted unreasonably. As if local space remembers how a gate was here once…

Hwaith? she said silently.

Yes?

I need you to have a look at something.

In absolute silence, Hwaith appeared. Urruah and Arhu and Siffha’h all started.

Rhiow flicked an ear. “He does that,” she said. “Hwaith, take a look at the strings in here.”

He got that unfocused look, then glanced over at Rhiow, confused. “A characteristic perturbation,” he said. “But here?”

“is there the slightest possibility that your gate’s ever made its way over this far in its travels?”