To Visit the Queen by Diane Duane Page A

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 then 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