Read Online To Visit the Queen by Diane Duane - Free Book Online Page A

that something has "happened" to you. Regardless of how well you like this warm, snug place.
    "Look at that, it's half an hour past your dinnertime," Iaehh said, fumbling at the kitchen cabinet where the cat food was, as if he were having trouble seeing it: and he sounded stuffed up. "Come on, let's get you fed. Oh, jeez, look at this bowl, I keep forgetting to wash it— no wonder you didn't want to eat out of it."
    Rhiow jumped down from the chair and went to him.
    If this doesn't get better...
    Sweet Queen about us, what will become of me?

    Note

    *A glossary of words used by the People appears at the back of this book.

Two

    She was out early the next morning, as (to her relief) Iaehh was: on mornings when the weather was fair, he did his jogging around dawn, to take advantage of the city's quietest time. Rhiow had already been awake for a couple of hours and was doing her morning's washing in the reading chair when he bent over her and scratched her head. "See you later, plumptious— "
    She gave him a rub and a purr, then went back to her washing as he went out, shut the door behind him, and locked all the locks. Iaehh was pleased with those locks— their apartment had never been broken into, even though others in the building had. Rhiow smiled to herself as she finished scrubbing behind her ears, for she had heard attempts being made on all those locks at one time or another during the day when she happened to be home. Some of those attempts might have succeeded, had there not been a wizard on the other side of the door, keeping an eye on the low-maintenance spell that made access to the apartment impossible. Should anyone try to get in, the wizardry simply convinced the wall and the door that they were one unit for the duration: and various frustrated thieves had occasionally left strangely ineffectual sledgehammer marks on the outside— the whole door structure having possessed, for the duration of the attack, a nongravitic density similar to that of lead. Rhiow was pleased with that particular piece of spelling: it required only a recharge once a week, and kept her ehhif 's routine, and hers, from being upset.
    Rhiow finished washing, stretched fore and aft, and headed out the cat door to the hiouh -box on the terrace. There she went briefly unfocused in the cool darkness as she did her business, thinking about other things. She had reviewed the basic structures and relationships of the London gates in the Knowledge, the body of wizardly information the Whisperer held ready for routine reference: she had looked at the specs for the gates' operation under normal circumstances. Being rooted in the Old Downside's gates, the London "bundle" had similarities to them, but being sited a continent away and subject to much different spatial stresses, there were also significant differences. She would assess those more accurately when she was right down in the gating complex with their hosts.
    Rhiow finished with the box, shook herself, and stepped out onto the terrace and then down onto the brick "stairway," making her way down to the roof of the next building. There she made her way across the gravel again, this time to leap up on the Seventieth Street side of the roof's parapet and balance there for a moment, breathing the predawn air. For once it was very quiet, no car alarms going off, even the traffic over on First muted, as yet. The low, soft hhhhhhhhhh of the city all around her was there: the breathing of all the air-conditioning systems, the omnidirectional soft sound of traffic that almost never went away. Only during a significant snowstorm did that low, breathing hiss fade reluctantly to silence— and even then you imagined you heard it, though softer, as the breathing in and out of ten million pairs of lungs. It was the sound of life: it was what Rhiow worked for.
    She looked eastward toward the river. Her view was partially blocked by the buildings of New York Hospital and Cornell Medical Center, but she