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

could smell the water, and faintly she could even hear it flowing, a different soft rushing noise than that of the traffic. Past the East River and the hazy sodium lights of Queens on the far side, she could smell the dawn, though she couldn't yet see it. Another job, Rhiow thought, another day.
    She closed her eyes most of the way, in order to more clearly see, and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, Rhiow thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: They will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always. I shall walk through Their worlds as do the Powers That Be, seeing and knowing with Them and for Them, tending Their worlds as if they were mine, for so indeed they are. Silently shall I strive to go my way, as They do, doing my work unseen; the light needs no reminding by me of good deeds done by night. And in this long progress through all that is, though I will know doubt and fear in the strange places where I must walk, I will put these both aside, as the Oath requires, and hold myself to my work... for if They and I together cannot mend what is marred, who can? And having done my work aright, though I may know weariness at day's end, come awakening I shall rise up and say again, with Them, as if surprised, "Behold, the world is made new!"
    There was more to the Meditation, of course: it was more a set of guidelines than a ritual in any case, a reminder of priorities, a "mission statement." It was perhaps also, just slightly, what ehhif might term a call to arms: there was always a feeling after you finished it that Someone was listening, alert to your problems, ready to make helpful suggestions.
    Rhiow got up, shook herself, and headed over to the side of the building to make her stairway down. The joke is, she thought, getting sidled and heading down the briefly hardened air, that knowing the Powers are there and listening doesn't really solve that many problems. It seemed to her that ehhif had the same difficulty, though differing in degree. They were either absolutely sure their gods existed or not very sure at all: and those who were most certain seemed no more at peace with the fact than those who doubted. The city was full of numerous grand buildings, some of them admittedly gloriously made, in which ehhif gathered at regular intervals, apparently to remind their versions of the Powers That Be that They existed (which struck Rhiow as rather unnecessary) and to tell Them how wonderful they thought They were (which struck her as hilarious— as if the Powers Who created this and all other universes, under the One, would be either terribly concerned about being acknowledged or praised, or particularly susceptible to flattery).
    She thanked the air and released it as she came down to the alley level and made for the gate onto the sidewalk, thinking of how Urruah had accidentally confirmed her analysis some months back. He had some interest in the vocal music made in the bigger versions of these buildings, some of it being of more ancient provenance than most ehhif works he heard live in concert in town. He'd gone to one service in the great "cathedral" in Midtown to do some translation of the music's verbal content, and had come back bemused. Half the verses addressed by the ehhif there to the Powers That Be had involved the kind of self-abasement and abject flattery that even a queen in heat would have found embarrassing from her suitors, but this material had alternated with some expressing a surprisingly bleak worldview, one filled with a terror of the loss of the Powers' countenance—even, amazingly, the One's— and a tale of the approaching end of the Worlds in which any beings who did not come up to standard would be discarded like so much waste, or