Free To Visit the Queen by Diane Duane Page B

"Your fault. You showed him how to do the food-catching trick for the deli guy first."
    "Yes, but you encourage him all the time, and— "
    "Hey, come on, Rhi, it's good," Arhu said. "The guy in there likes hot stuff. He gave me some on a piece of roast beef last week as a joke." Arhu grinned. "Now the joke's on him: I like it. But he's good about it. I ate a whole one of those green Hungarian chilies for him the other day. He thinks it's cool: he makes other people come and see me eat it."
    "Not the transit police, I hope," Rhiow said.
    "Naah. I wouldn't go if I knew they were up there. I always know when they're down on the tracks," Arhu said.
    Rhiow flicked one ear resignedly: there were plainly advantages to being a fledgling visionary. "All right. Are you ready?"
    "I was ready an hour before you got here."
    "So I hear. Well, the parameters are all set: You did a good job. Turn the gate patent, and let's go."
    Arhu sat up in front of the great oval matrix, reached in, and pulled out a pawful of strings. The clarity of the image in the matrix suddenly increased greatly, a side effect of the patency.
    "Go ahead," Arhu said. Urruah, already sidled, leaped through into the day on the far side of the gate: Rhiow sidled and followed him.
    The darkness stripped away behind her as she leaped through the gate matrix. She came down on cobblestones, found her footing, and looked around her in the morning of a bright day, blinding after the darkness of the Grand Central tunnels. Off to her right, just southward, was the wide river, which she had earlier seen glinting in the distance: in the other direction, up the cobbled slope, was a small street running into a much larger, busier one. Traffic driving on the left charged past on it. She turned, looking behind her at where the smaller street curved away, running parallel to the river. Black taxicabs of a tall, blocky style were stopping in the curve of the street, and ehhif were getting out of them and making their way in one of two directions: either toward where she and Urruah stood, looking toward an arched gate that led into the Tower, or toward a lesser gate giving on another expanse of cobblestones, which sloped down toward the river.
    As Rhiow looked around, Arhu stepped through the worldgate, with one particular hyperstring still held in his teeth. He pulled it through after him and grounded it on the cobbles. Gate matrix and string vanished together, or seemed to; but Rhiow could see a little parasitic light from the anchor string still dancing around one particular cobble.
    "That's our tripwire," Arhu said. "Pull it and it activates the gate to open again."
    "And what about the other wizards who might need the gate while we're gone?" Rhiow said.
    Arhu put his whiskers forward, pleased with himself. "It won't interfere— the gate proper's back in neutral again. I only coded these timespace coordinates into one string."
    "Very good," Rhiow said: and it was. He was already inventing his own management techniques, a good sign that he was beginning genuinely to understand the basics of gating.
    They looked around them for a few moments more in the sun. It was a breezy morning: clouds raced by, their shadows patterning the silver river with gray and adding new shades to the gray-brown-silver dazzle-painting of the battleship that was moored on the other side of the river. Arhu had no eyes for that, though, or for the traffic, or for the ehhif passing them by. He was looking at the stone walls of the Tower, and his ears were back.
    "It's old here," Arhu said. His ears went forward, and then back again, and kept doing that, as if he were trying to listen to a lot of things at once... things that made him nervous.
    "It's old in New York, too," Urruah said.
    "Yeah, but not like this...."
    "It's the ehhif," Rhiow said. "They've been here so long— first thousands, then hundreds of thousands of them, then millions, all denning on the two sides of this river. A thousand years now, and