Duane,Diane - Wizards - Feline Wizards 2 - Majesty's Wizardly Service

Diane Duane [Feline Wizards 02] On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service

ON HER MAJESTY'S WIZARDLY SERVICE

also published as To Visit the Queen

by Diane Duane

Feline Wizards: Volume 2

[03 oct 2002 -- scanned and proofed for #bookz]

Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been?

I've been to London to look at the Queen.

Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, what did you there?

I frightened a little mouse under her chair.

-- Children's rhyme

In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the

Art which 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

these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for

courage, and death for life, when it is fitting 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 ...

-- the Wizard's Oath, species-nonspecific recension

PROLOGUE

Patel went slowly up the gray concrete stairs to the elevated

Docklands Light Railway station at Island Gardens; he took them one

at a time, rather than two or three at once as he usually did.

Nothing was wrong with him: it was morning, he felt energetic enough

-- a good breakfast inside him, everything OK at home, the weather

steady enough, cool and gray but not raining. However, the package he

was carrying was heavy enough to pull a prizefighter's arms out of

their sockets.

He had made the mistake of putting the book in a plastic shopping bag

from the superstore down the street. Now the thing's sharp corners

were punching through the bag, and the bag's handles, such as they

were, were stretching thinner and thinner under the book's weight,

cutting into his hands like cheesewire and leaving red marks. He had

to stop and transfer the bag from right hand to left, left hand to

right, as he went up the stairs, hauling himself along by the chipped

blue-painted handrail. When he finally reached the platform, Patel

set the bag down gratefully on the concrete with a grunt, and rubbed

his hands, looking up at the red LEDs of the train status sign to see

when the next one would be along. I, the sign said, BANK, 2 minutes.

He leaned against the wall of the glass-sided station-platform

shelter, out of reach of the light chill east wind, and put the bag

down at his feet, sighing and gazing out over the bottom half of the

Isle of Dogs.

Mostly what Patel was looking at, under the morning's featureless

overcast sky, was a vast construction site: the new tunnels for the

extension of the Jubilee Line of the Underground were being driven

through here, amid a welter of orange-painted cranes, lifters and

mechanical digging machines with exotic foreign names, all of which

made it almost impossible to see Island Gardens on the far side of

the construction.

Patel sighed and thought about the morning's class schedule. This was

his second year of a putative three years at London Guildhall

University, up in the City. He was well on his way toward a degree in

mathematics with business applications, though what good that was

really going to do him, at the end of the day, he wasn't certain.

There would be time to start worrying about jobhunting, though, next

year. Right now, Patel was doing well enough, his student grant was

safe, and whatever attention he wasn't spending on his studies was

mostly directed toward making sure he had enough money to get by.

Though at least he didn't have to worry about rent as yet -- courtesy

of his folks -- there were other serious matters at hand. Clothes ...

textbooks ... partying.

From down the track came a demure hum and a thrum of rails as the

little three-car red-and-blue Docklands train slid toward the

station. Patel picked up the book in his arms -- he had had enough of

the bag's bloody handles -- satisfied that at least this would be the

last time he would have to carry the huge godawful thing anywhere.

One of the jewelry students, of all people, had seen the For Sale ad

on Patel's Web page, and had decided that the metallurgical

information in the book would make it more than worth the twenty quid

that Patel was asking for it. For his own part, Patel was glad enough

to let it go. He had bought the book originally for its mathematical

and statistical content, and found to his annoyance within about a

month of starting his second semester that it was more technical than

he needed for the courses he was taking, which by and large did not

involve metallurgy or engineering. He had put the book aside, and

after that, most of the use it had seen involved Patel's mother using

it to press flowers.

The train pulled up in front of him, stopped and chimed: the doors

opened, and people emptied out in a rush of briefcases and schoolbags

going by, and here and there a few white uniforms showing from under

jackets and coats -- people heading to the hospital in town. Patel

got on the last car, which would be the first one out, and sat in

what would have been the driver's seat, if there had been a driver:

there was none. These trains were handled by a trio of

straightforwardly-programmed PCs based somewhere in the Canary Wharf

complex. The innovation left the first seats in the front car open,

and gave the lucky passenger a beautiful view of the ride into town.

Patel, though, had seen it all a hundred times, and paid little

attention until the train swung round the big curve near South Quay

and headed across the water. There was something about the quality of

the rail sound that changed there, probably to do with the way the

water reflected it, and the increased noise level caught his

attention. He gazed up briefly at the massive blue-sheened glass-clad

tower of One Canada Place, what most people called "the Canary Wharf

tower", with its distinctive pyramidal top and the brilliant white

double strobe flashing at the peak of the pyramid, then glanced down

again at the building site just across the water from the tower and

underneath the train, the new buildings rising on Heron Quays. Even

though he knew a little about the place's history, Patel found it

hard to imagine this landscape, not full of construction gear and

scaffolding, but jostling with the hulls of close-berthed ships, the

air black with smoke from a thousand smokestacks, cranes loading and

unloading goods: the shipping of an empire filling these man-made

harbors and lagoons that had been dredged out of oxbows of the

Thames. It had all vanished a long time ago, when Britain stopped

being an empire and the mistress of the seas. This whole area had

undergone a terrible decline after the war, during which it had been

bombed nearly flat, and whatever was left had fallen into decrepitude

or ruin. Now it was growing again, office space abruptly mushrooming

on the waterside sites where the ships had docked to disgorge their

cargoes. Only the street names, and the names of the Docklands

stations, preserved the nautical memories: some of the old loading

cranes still stood ... but the warehouses behind them had been

converted to expensive loft apartments. Slim black cormorants fished

off Heron Quays, though the quays themselves were gone, slowly being

replaced by more apartments and office space: and shining hotels and

still more office buildings looked down on waters which were no

longer so polluted that it would catch fire if you dropped a match in

them.

The train pulled out of Canary Wharf station and headed northwestward

away from the towers toward humbler real estate, the "less

fortunate" parts of East London which had yet to benefit from the

real estate boom in the Docklands. The names of the DLR stations grew

less nautical, older: Limehouse, Shadwell ... Patel got out at

Shadwell to change for the little spur line to Tower Gateway, and

stood there waiting for a few minutes. All around were four- or five-

story brick buildings, their brick all leached and streaked with many

years' weather, tired-looking: scattered among them were council

housing, ten-story blocks of flats done in pebble-dash and painted

concrete, looking just as weary. These were not slums any more: not

quite ... though his father never tired of telling Patel and his

mother how lucky they were to be able to afford someplace better. It

was true enough, though it meant Patel had a three-quarter-hour

commute to school every morning instead of a fifteen-minute walk.

No matter: today he was grateful enough not to have to walk more than

a few minutes carrying the Book From Hell. The train for Tower

Gateway came rumbling along, stopped and opened its doors. It was

crowded, and Patel slipped in through the door and put the book down

on the floor, bracing it between his shins lest it fall on someone's

foot and get him involved in what would probably be a completely

justified lawsuit for grievous bodily harm.

The train swung south the few blocks to Tower Gateway. There Patel

got out with his burden, walked along the platform and took the

escalator up through the tubelike corridor that led to the overpass

which avoided the mainline BR tracks: then down the other side again,

and out across the open concrete plaza from which jutted several

large slabs of ancient wall, not much more than fieldstones mortared

together -- a remnant of the old days when the City of London was all

the London there was, and that tiny square mileage had a proper

defensive wall of its own. Nothing to do, of course, with the other

walled edifice just this side of the river ...

As he went down the stairs to the underpass tunnel which dove under

the traffic stream of Minories Street, Patel glanced up and caught a

glimpse of crenellated tower against the clouds: one of the metal

windvane-banners mounted on a pinnacle of the Tower's outer wall

stood frozen in mid-swing against the wind, then spun suddenly to

point west in a gust off the Thames. Sky's getting nasty, Patel

thought. Might rain. Hope it stops by the time I'm above ground again

...

He headed through the underpass, breathing a little harder now from

the weight he was carrying: am I getting out of shape? I can't wait

to get rid of this thing ... and up the stairs on the far side: past

some more "islands" of old preserved City wall, and then down again

into the Tower Hill Underground station.

He pushed his train ticket into the turnstile before him, waited for

the machine to spit it out again. The turnstile's oblong vertical

pads snapped open before him as he plucked the ticket out of the

machine's steel mouth, and Patel pushed through, along with about a

hundred other people, making his way toward the stairs leading to the

Circle Line and District Line platforms. There he would catch the

last leg of his trip, the Tube train to Monument, and meet Sasha at

the coffee shop at Eastcheap and Gracechurch Street: and she would

take this thing off his hands ... And arms, and shoulders, but

particularly the hands, Patel thought, and headed down the stairs,

stepping a little to one side so as not to be trampled by the people

behind him. A direction sign just ahead of him said, Platforms 2 and

3, District and Circle Lines, west.

He headed for the sign, changing the bag again from left hand to

right hand with a slight grimace as he went, and turned the left

corner, toward the Tube platform --

Dark. Why was it dark all of a sudden? Power failure, Patel thought.

Though where's the light behind me? He turned --

The smell was what hit him first. My God, what is that ? Did the

sewer break through in here or something -- But there was no way to

tell. He couldn't see. Patel turned again, took a few hesitant steps

forward. There was something wrong with the ground. It felt mushy --

-- and then suddenly light broke through again, the watery gray

light of the morning he had just left: a few spits and spatters of

rain reached him even here in the tunnel, blown in on that chilly

wind. Some part of Patel's mind had now begun to go round and round

with thoughts like How the heck is there daylight down here, I must

be fifty feet underground and The smell, what is that smell?? -- but

that part of him felt strangely far away, like a mind belonging to

someone else, in the face of what he saw before him. A street, and

the gray day above it, those made sense: buildings pressing close on

either side, yes, and the enamelled metal sign set high in the brick

wall of the building opposite him, saying Coopers' Row, that was fine

too: the math/business building of the University was up past the end

of the Row, in Jewry Street, and he would have been heading there

after meeting Sasha. But there was no pavement to be seen. There was

hardly any road visible, either: it was covered ankle deep in thick

brown mud, the source of the godawful smell. Must have been a sewer

break, said some hopeful part of his mind, steadfastly ignoring the

basic issue of how he was suddenly standing at ground level.

Patel walked forward slowly, trying not to sink into the mud, and

failing -- it came up over the tops of his shoes: boy, these trainers

are going to be a loss after this, and they were only three weeks

old, how am I going to explain this to Mum ... ? Squelch, squelch, he

walked forward, and came to the corner of Cooper's Row and George

Street, looked down toward Great Tower Street in the direction of the

Monument Tube station --

It was not there. The road was lined with old buildings, three- or

four-story brick edifices all crowded together where multi-story

office buildings should have been. The traffic was gone, too. Or

rather, it was all replaced by carriages, carriages pulled by horses,

their hooves making a strangled wet clopping noise as they pounded

through the mud, up and down Great Tower Street. Patel staggered,

changed the bag mechanically from the right hand to the left, and

took a few more steps forward, looking away from the traffic, don't

want to see that, doesn't make sense, and across to the Tower.

It at least was still there: the great square outer walls defining

the contours of Tower Hill stood up unchanged, the lesser corner

towers reached upward as always, "the windvanes on them wheeling and

whirling in the gusts of wind off the river -- the wind that bore the

stink forcefully into Patel's nostrils and the rain, now falling a

little harder, into his face, cold and insistent. That wind got into

his hair and tried to find its way under his jacket collar; and

around him, the few trees sprouting from the unseen pavement rocked

in the wind, their bare branches rubbing and ratcheting together.

Bare. That was wrong. It was September. And other things were moving,

rocking too --

Momentarily distracted by the motion, he looked past the Tower, down

toward Lower Thames Street and the great bend of the river which

began there. A forest, he thought at first, and then rejected the

thought as idiotic. No trees would be so straight and bare, with no

branches but one or two sets each, wide crosspieces set well up the

trunk: nor would trees be crowded so close together, or rock together

so unnervingly, practically from the root. The "trees" were masts ...

masts of ships, fifty or seventy or a hundred of them all anchored

there together, the wind and the water pushing at the ships from

which the masts grew; and the bare shapes silhouetted against the

morning gray were all rocking, rocking slightly out of phase, making

faint uneasy groaning noises that he could hear even at this

distance, for they were perhaps a quarter of a mile down the river

from where he stood. From that direction too came a mutter of human

voices, people shouting, going about their business, the sound muted

by the wind that rose around him and rocked the groaning masts

together --

That groan got down inside Patel, went up in pitch and began to shake

him until he rocked like the masts, staggering, falling, the world

receding from him. The bag fell from Patel's hand, unnoticed.

A man came round the corner right in front of Patel and looked at

him, then opened his mouth to say something.

Patel jumped, meaning to run away: but his raw nerves misfired and

sent him blundering straight into the man. As Patel came at him, the

strangely dressed man staggered hurriedly backward, panic-stricken,

tripped and fell -- then scrambled himself up out of the mud with an

unintelligible shout and ran crazily away. Patel, too, turned to

flee, this time getting it right and going back the way he had come.

He ran splashing through the stinking mud, and, for all the screaming

in his head, ran mute: ran pell-mell back toward sanity, toward the

light, and (without knowing how he did it) finally out into the bare-

bulb brilliance of the Underground station, where he collapsed, still

silent, but with the screaming ringing unending in his mind,

insistently expressing what the shocked and gasping lungs could not.

Later those screams would burst out at odd times: in the middle of

the night, or in the gray hour before dawn when dreams are true,

startling his mother and father awake and leaving Patel sitting

frozen, bolt upright in bed, sweating and shaking, mute again. After

several years, some cursory-psychotherapy which did nothing to reveal

the promptly and thoroughly buried memory causing the distress, and a

course of a somewhat overprescribed mood elevator, the screaming

stopped. But when he and his wife and new family moved to the

country, later in his life, Patel was never easy about being in any

wooded place in the wintertime, at dusk. The naked limbs of the

trees, all held out stiff against the falling night and moving,

moving slightly, would speak to some buried memory which would leave

him silent and shaking for hours. Nor was he ever able to explain, to

Sasha, or to his parents, or anyone else, exactly what had happened

to his copy of Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. Mostly his

family and friends thought he had been robbed and assaulted, perhaps

indecently: they left the matter alone. They were right: though as

regarded the nature of the indecency, they could not have been more

wrong.

Patel fled too soon ever to see the men who came down along Cooper's

Row after a little while, talking among themselves: men who paused

curiously at the sight of the dropped book, then stooped to pick it

up. One of them produced a kerchief and wiped the worst of the mud

away from the strange material which covered the contents. Another

reached out and slowly, carefully peeled the slick, thin white stuff

away, revealing the big heavy book. A third took the book from the

second man and turned the pages, marveling at the paper, the quality

of the printing, the embossing on the cover. They moved a little down

the street to where it met Great Tower Street, where the light was

better: as they paused there, a ray of sun suddenly pierced down

through the bleak sky above them, that atypical winter's sky here at

the thin end of summer. One of the men looked up at this in surprise,

for sun had been a rare sight of late. In that brief bright light the

other two men leaned over the pages, read the words there, and became

increasingly excited. Shortly the three of them hurried away with the

book, unsure whether they held in their hands an elaborate fraud or

some kind of miracle. Behind and above them, the clouds shut again,

and a gloom like premature night once more fell over the Thames

estuary ... a darkness in which those who had ears to hear could

detect, at the very fringes of comprehension, the sound of a slowly

stirring laughter.

ONE

At just before 5:00 p.m. on a weekday, the upper track level of Grand

Central Terminal looks much as it does at any other time of day: a

striped gray landscape of long concrete islands stretching away from

you into a dry, iron-smelling night, under the relentless fluorescent

glow of the long lines of overhead lighting. Much of the view across

the landscape will be occluded by the nine Metro-North trains whose

business it is to be there at that time, and by the rush and flow of

commuters through the many doors leading from the echoing Main

Concourse to the twelve accessible platforms' near ends. The

commuters' thousands of voices on the platforms and out in the

Concourse mingle into a restless undecipherable roar, above which the

amplified voice of the station announcer desperately attempts to

rise, reciting the cyclic poetry of the hour: " ... now boarding, the

five oh two departure of Metro-North train number nine five three,

stopping at One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street, Scarsdale,

Hartsdale, White Plains, North White Plains, Valhalla, Hawthorne,

Pleasantville, Giappaqua ... " And over it all, effortlessly drowning

everything out, comes the massive basso B-flat bong of the Accurist

clock, echoing out there under the blue-painted backwards heaven, two

hundred feet above the terrazzo floor.

Down on the tracks, even that huge note falls somewhat muted, having

as it does to fight with the more immediate roar and thunder of the

electric diesel locomotives, clearing their throats and getting ready

to go. By now Rhiow knew them all better than any trainspotter, knew

every engine by name and voice and (in a few specialized cases) by

temperament ... for she saw them every day in the line of work. Right

now they were all behaving themselves, which was just as well: she

had other work in hand. It was no work that any of the other users of

the Terminal would have noticed -- not that the rushing commuters

would in any case have paid much attention to a small black cat, a

patchy-black-and-white one, and a big gray tabby sitting down in the

relative dimness at the near end of Adams Platform ... even if the

cats hadn't been invisible.

Bong, said the clock again. Rhiow sighed and looked up at the

elliptical multicolored shimmer of the worldgate matrix which hung in

the air before them, the colors that presently ran through its warp

and woof indicating a waiting state, no patency, no pending transits.

Normally this particular gate resided between tracks Twenty-Three and

Twenty-Four at the end of Platform K; but for today's session they

had untied the hyperstrings holding it in that spot, and relocated

the gate temporarily on Adams Platform. This lay between the Waldorf

Yard and the Back Yard, away off to the right of Tower C, the engine

inspection pit, and the power substation: it was the easternmost

platform on the upper level, and well away from the routine trains

and the commuters ... though not from their noise. Rhiow glanced over

at big gray tabby Urruah, her colleague of several years now, who was

flicking his ears in irritation every few seconds at the racket.

Rhiow felt like doing the same: this was her least favorite time to

be here. Nevertheless, work sometimes made it necessary. Bong, said

the clock: and clearly audible through it, through the voices and the

diesel thunder and the sound of the slightly desperate-sounding train

announcer, a small clear voice spoke. "These endless dumb drills," it

said, "lick butt."

WHAM! -- and Arhu fell over on the platform, while above him Urruah

leaned down, one paw still raised, wearing an expression that was

surprisingly mild -- for the moment. "Language," he said.

"Whaddaya mean?! There's no one here but you and Rhiow, and you use

worse stuff than that all the -- "

WHAM! Arhu fell over again. "Courtesy," Urruah said, "is an important

commodity among wizards, especially wizards working together as a

team. Not to mention mere ordinary people working as teams or in-

pride, as you'll find if you survive that long. Which seems unlikely

at the moment. My language isn't at question here, and even if it

were, I don't use it on my fellow team members, or to them, even by

implication."

"But I only said -- " Arhu suddenly fell silent again at the sight of

that upraised paw.

Dumb drills, Rhiow thought, and breathed out, resigned. This is not a

drill, life is not a drill, when will he get the message? Lives ...

She sighed again. Sometimes I think the One made a mistake telling

our people that we're going to get nine of them. Some of us get

complacent ...

"Let's be clear about this," Urruah said. "Our job is to keep the

worldgates down here functioning. Human wizards can't do this kind of

work, or not nearly as well as we can, anyway, since we can see

hyperstrings, and ehhif can't without really working at it. That

being the case, the Powers That Be asked us very politely if we would

do this job, and we said yes. You said yes, too, when They offered

you wizardry and you took it, and you said "yes" again when we took

you in-pride and you agreed to stay with us. That means you're stuck

with the job. So you may as well learn how to do it right, and part

of that involves working smoothly with your teammates. Another part

of it is practicing managing these gates until you can do it quickly,

in crisis situations, without having to stop to think and worry and

"figure out" what you're doing. And this is what we are teaching you

to do, and will continue teaching you to do, until you can exhibit at

least a modicum of effectiveness, which may be several lives on, not

that it matters to me. You got that?"

"Uh huh."

"Uh huh what?"

"Uh huh, I got it."

"Right. So let's start in again from the top."

Rhiow sighed and licked her nose as the small black-and-white cat sat

up on his haunches again and thrust his forepaws into the faintly

glowing warp and woof of the worldgate's control matrix, and muttered

under his breath, very softly, "It still licks butt."

WHAM!

Rhiow closed her eyes and wondered where she and Urruah would ever

find enough patience for this job. Inside her, some annoyed part of

her mind was mocking the Meditation. I will meet the terminally

clueless today, it said piously: idiots, and those with hairballs for

brains, and those whose ears need a good shredding before you can

even get their attention. I do not have to be like them, even though

I would dearly love to hit them hard enough to make the empty places

in their heads echo ...

She turned away from that line of thought in mild annoyance at

herself as Arhu picked himself up off the platform one more time.

This late on in this life, Rhiow had not anticipated being thrust

into the role of nursing-dam for a youngster barely finished losing

his milk teeth ... and certainly not into the role of the trainer of

a new-made wizard. She had gained her own wizardry in a different

paradigm -- acquiring it solo, and not becoming part of a team until

she had proven herself expert enough to survive past the first flush

of power. Arhu, though, had broken the rules, coming to them halfway

through his Ordeal and dragging them all through it with him. He was

still breaking every rule he could find, having apparently decided

that since the tactic worked once, it would probably keep on working.

Urruah, however, was slowly breaking him of this idea ... though

getting anything through that resilient young skull was plainly going

to take a while. Urruah, too, was playing out of role. Here he was,

the very emblem of hardy individuality and independence, a big

muscular broad-striped torn, all balls and swagger, wearing the

cachet of his few well-placed scars with an insouciant, good-natured

air -- but now he leaned over the kitten-becoming-cat which the

Powers had wished upon them, and acted very much the hard-pawed

pride-father. It was a job to which Urruah had taken with entirely

too much relish, Rhiow thought privately, and she was at pains never

to mention to him how much he seemed to be enjoying the

responsibility. Does he see himself in this youngster, Rhiow thought,

... does he see the wizard he might have been if he'd had this kind

of supervision? But then, who among us wouldn't see ourselves in him?

The way you feel your way along among the uncertainties -- and the

way you try to push your paw just a little further through the hole,

trying to get at what's squeaking on the other side. Even if it bites

you ...

Arhu had picked himself up one more time, with no further mutters,

and was putting his paws into the glowing weave again. You have to

give him that, Rhiow thought: he always gets back up. "I've given the

gate some parameters to work with already, though I'm not going to

tell you what they are," Urruah said. "I want you to find locations

that match the parameters, and open the gate for visual patency, not

physical."

"Why not? If I can -- "

"Visual-only is harder," Rhiow said. "Physical patency is easy, when

you're using a pre-established gate: anyway, in a lot of them, the

physical opening mechanism has become automated over time.

Restricting the patency, refining control ... that's what we're

after, here."

Arhu started hooking the control strings with his claws, slowly

pulling each one out with care -- which was as well: the gates were

nearly alive, in some ways, and if misused or maltreated, they could

bite. "I wish Saash was here," Arhu muttered. "She was better at

explaining this ... "

"Than we are? Almost certainly," Rhiow said. "And I wish she was here

too, but she's not." Their friend and fellow team-member Saash had

passed through and beyond her ninth life within the past couple of

months, under unusual circumstances: though none of our circumstances

have actually been terribly usual lately, Rhiow thought with some

resignation. They all missed Saash in her role as gating technician,

where her expertise at handling the matrices had come shining through

her various mild neuroses with unusual brilliance. But Rhiow found

herself just as lonely for her old partner's rather acerbic tongue,

and even for her endless scratching, the often-misread symptom of a

soul long grown too large for the body that held it.

"Saash," Urruah said to Arhu, "knowing her, is probably explaining to

Queen Iau that she thinks the entire structure of physical reality

needs a serious reweave: so you'd better get on with this before she

talks the One into it, and the Universe dissolves out from under us.

Quit your complaining and pick up where you left off."

"I can't figure out where that is! It's not the way I left it, now."

"That's because it's returned to its default configuration," Urruah

said, "while you were recovering from sassing me."

"Start from the beginning," Rhiow said. "And just thank the Queen

that gate structures are as robust as they are, and as forgiving:

because those qualities are likely to save your pelt more than once,

in this business."

Arhu sat there, narrow-eyed, with his ears back. "Two choices,"

Urruah said, after a moment. "You can sulk and I can hit you, or you

can get on with your work with your ears unshredded. Look at you,

sitting here wasting all this perfectly good gating time."

Arhu glanced back down the station at the other platforms, which were

boiling with ehhif commuters rushing up and down and in some cases

nearly pushing one another onto the tracks. "Doesn't look perfect to

me. I know we're sidled, but what if one of them sees what we're

doing?"

There won't be much for them to see at the rate you're going," Urruah

said.

"Ehhif don't see wizardry half the time, even when it's hanging right

in front of their weak little noses," Rhiow said. "The odds against

having anyone notice anything, down here in the dark and the noise,

are well in your favor -- if you ever get on with it. If you're

really all that concerned, rotate the gate matrix a hundred and

eighty degrees and specify one-side-only visual patency. But I don't

think you need to bother. These are New Yorkers, and no trains of

interest to them are due on these side tracks, so for all that it

matters, we and the gate and this whole side of the station might as

well be on the Moon."

"Not a bad idea," Arhu muttered, putting his whiskers forward in the

slightest smile, and reached more deeply into the weft of the gate

matrix.

He fell over backwards as Urruah clouted him upside the head. "No

gatings into vacuum," he said. "Or under water, or below ground

level, or into any other environment which would be bad if mixed

freely with this one."

Arhu got to his feet, shook himself and glared at Urruah. "Aw, I was

just thinking ... " ,

"Yes, and I heard you. No off-planet work for you until you're better

with handling the structural spells for these gates."

"But other wizards can just get the spell from their manuals, or the

Whispering, or whatever way they access wizardry, and go -- "

"You're not 'other wizards'," Rhiow said, pacing over to sit down

beside Urruah as a more obvious gesture of support. "You are part of

a gating team. You have to understand the theory and nature of these

structures from the bottom up. And as regards the established gates

like this one, you've got to be able to fix them when they break --

take them apart and put them back together again -- not just use them

for rapid transit like "other wizards". Yes, it's specialized work,

and the details are a nuisance to learn. And yes, the structure is

incredibly complex: Aaurh Herself made the gates, Iau only knows how

long ago -what do you expect? But you've got to know this information

from the inside, without having to consult the Whisperer every thirty

seconds for advice. What if She's busy?"

"How busy can gods get?" Arhu muttered, turning his attention back to

the gate.

"You'd be surprised," Urruah said. "Queen Iau's daughters have their

own lives to lead. You think the Silent One has all day to sit around

waiting to see if you need help? Get off those little thaith of yours

and do something."

"They're not little," Arhu said, and then fell silent for a moment.

" ... All right, should I just collapse this and start over?"

"Sure, go ahead," Rhiow said.

Arhu reached out a paw and hooked one claw into one of the glowing

control strings of the gate. The visible gate-locus vanished, leaving

nothing behind it but the intricate, faint traces of hyperstring

structure in the air.

And he's right about them not being little, Rhiow said privately,

from her mind to Urruah's.

When even you notice that, oh spayed one, Urruah said, it suggests

that we may shortly have a problem on our hands.

Rhiow stifled a laugh, keeping her eye on Arhu as he studied the gate

matrix, then sat up again and started slowly hooking strings out of

the air to "reweave' the visible matrix. It surprises me that you

Duane, Diane - Wizards - Feline Wizards 2 - Majesty's Wizardly Service

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