Yafh would fight anything that moved, and had done so for years: he had enough scar tissue to make a new cat from, and was as ugly as a houff—broken-nosed, ragged-eared, one eye gone white-blind from some old injury. Where there were no scars, Yafh’s coat was white; but his fondness for dust-bathing and for hunting in the piled-up rubbish behind his ehhif’s building kept him a more or less constant dingy gray. His manner was generally as blunt and bluff as his looks, but he had few illusions and no pretensions, and his good humor hardly ever failed, whether he was using it on others or on himself.

“Listen,” Yafh said, “what’s food, in the long run? Once you’re full, you sleep, whether it’s caviar you were eating, or rat. These ehhif let me out on my own business, at least: that’s more than a lot of us hereabouts can say. And they may be careless about mealtimes, but they don’t send me off to have my claws pulled out, either, the way they did with poor Ailh down the road. Did you hear about that?”

“You’ll have to tell me later,” Rhiow said, and shook herself all over to hide the shudder. Such horror stories had long ago convinced her to leave her ehhif’s furniture strictly alone, no matter how tempted she might be to groom her claws on its lovely seductive textures. “Yafh, I hate to wash and run, but it’s business this morning.”

“They work you too hard,” he said, eyeing her sidewise. “As if the People were ever made to work in the first place! The whole thing’s some ehhif plot, that’s what it is.”

Rhiow laughed as she jumped down from the baluster. Others might retreat into unease at her job, or envy of it: Yafh simply saw Rhiow’s errantry as some kind of obscure scam perpetrated on her proper allotment of leisure time. It was one of the things she best liked about him. “ ’Luck, Yafh,” she said, starting down the sidewalk again. “See you later.”