The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter Two

Here Rhiow stayed by the wall with some care, for the place was slowly becoming busy. Great beams of dusty sunlight slanted down into the concourse from the tall east windows; the big Accurist clock’s deep-throated bell began tolling seven.

Rhiow gazed around, seeing very little stillness in the place. It was all ehhif moving, going, heading somewhere; except up the steps on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, where the ticketed waiting area was, and the coffee bar next to it. In the coffee bar, with the Sunday Times piled up on the glass table in front of him, and a cup of something hot to one side, sat a tall dark-haired ehhif in jeans and running shoes and a beige polo shirt. As Rhiow looked at him, the ehhif glanced up from the section he was reading, and then looked right down at her and raised his eyebrows: a good trick, since she was invisible.

Rhiow trotted across the concourse and up the stairs, pausing only a moment near the bottom of the staircase to enjoy the residual scent of fish floating up from the Oyster Bar downstairs. At the top of the steps, she wove and dodged to miss a couple of transit cops coming out of the Metro-North police offices off to the left, and slid among the tables, to where Carl Romeo sat.

He was handsome, as ehhif went, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with high cheekbones, clear gray eyes, and a face that looked friendly to her—though of course it was always dangerous to felidomorphize. How he had turned up so fast, even with a malfunctioning gate, wasn’t hard to imagine: an Area Advisory was not limited to public transit in the performance of his duties.

“Dai stiho, Har’lh,” she said, tucking herself up comfortably under the table. She did not speak Ailurin to him. To one of another species but in her own line of work, she could use the Speech, and preferred to: its detailed professional vocabulary made errors of understanding less likely.

“Dai,” Carl said, using the paper to cover his attention to her. “Rhiow, what was all this about?”

“The integration we did yesterday came undone,” Rhiow said. “Saash is working on the technical details for me; we’ll know more in a while. But we were able to reinstate before the North White Plains local came in.”

Carl rustled his Times aside and reached for his cappuccino. “You and your team don’t usually need to do things twice,” Carl said. “Is there something I should know about?”

“Nothing regarding team function,” Rhiow said. “But I’m disturbed about the condition we found the gate in, Har’lh. The symptoms were of someone using it without due care. However, the logs show no transit, not even any accesses … which is odd. Either the gate was not used, and this malfunction had some other cause”—and she shuddered: that was a nest of mice Rhiow was unwilling to start ripping open—“or someone out on errantry did access it, and then wiped the logs on purpose. Not very ethical.”

Carl smiled, a thin humorless look. “That’s putting it mildly.” For a few moments he said nothing, and Rhiow wished she could guess all of what was going on in the mind behind that face. Ehhif could be inscrutable even after you’d learned to understand their expressions; one of the Area Advisories, the two people ultimately responsible for all the wizards working in the greater metropolitan area, could be expected to know things and have concerns Rhiow could only guess at. About some of those concerns, though, Rhiow felt she could safely speculate.

She wondered if Carl was thinking what she was: that, though all wizards were supposed to be in service to the Powers That Be, sometimes … just sometimes … one or another of them will shift allegiances. There was, after all, one of those Powers that had had a profound disagreement with all the Others, very early on in the Universe. It had lost some of Its strength, as a result, but not all: and It was still around. Dealing with the Lone Power could seem very attractive to some, Rhiow knew; but she considered such dealings unacceptably hazardous. This was, after all, the same Power that had invented death and turned it loose on the worlds … a final nasty offhand gesture before turning Its back on the establishment that It felt had spurned It. The Lone One was as likely to turn on Its tools as on Its enemies.

Carl looked at her. “You’re thinking of rogues,” he said.

“I’d think you would be, too, Har’lh,” Rhiow said, “the evidence being what it is at the moment.”

He folded the first section of the paper, put it aside. “It’s circumstantial at best. Can you think of any way a gate’s logs might wipe accidentally on access or transit?”

“Not at first lick,” Rhiow said, “since gates are supposedly built not to be able to function that way. But I’ll take it up with Saash. If anyone can find a way to make a gate fail that way, she can. Meanwhile, I’ll go Downside myself later on and check the top-level spell emplacement, just to make sure one of the other gate structures isn’t interfering with the malfunctioning one.”

“If you like … but I’m not requiring it of you.”

“I know. I’d just like 10 be sure the trouble isn’t some kind of structural problem.”

“All right. But watch yourself down there.”

“I will, Advisory.”

“Anything else I need to know about this?”

Rhiow sneezed, a residual effect from the foul rodent-smell down on the tracks, not to mention the way she smelled herself. “A lot of rats down there, Har’lh. A lot.”

Carl raised his eyebrows. “The early spring,” he said, “combined with this hot weather? That’s what the paper says. Some kind of screwup in the normal breeding season—”

Rhiow laid her whiskers back, a “no” gesture. “A lot of rats since yesterday. In fact, to judge from the quality of the smell, since this morning. —That’s the other thing: we found a hurt youngster back there.”

“Feline? Human?”

“Feline. About the same age for us as a human child of nine. I think he ran into those rats: he’s all bitten up. Urruah and Saash are seeing to him. He should be all right, after some care.”

“Very well.” Carl picked up the magazine section. “The other gates are behaving themselves?”

“No signs of trouble.”

“You don’t think I need to declare them off-limits till you can look into this in detail?”

Rhiow thought. There were three other worldgates associated with the Terminal. Taking them offline would throw the whole weight of the area’s extraspatial transit on the Penn Station gates. Penn was underequipped to handle such a load—its two gates normally handled only onplanet work, and one of them would have to be extensively restrung at very short notice if the Grand Central gates went down. Jam, Hwaa, and Fhi’ss, the technical team handling Penn, would not thank her at all.

But it wasn’t a question of their feelings: what mattered was safety. Still, the nodes and string structures around the other two track-level gates, seen at a distance, looked fine; and she had Saash’s report…

“I’ll double-check them shortly,” Rhiow said. “But Saash says the gates at Thirty-two and One-sixteen, and the Lexington Avenue local gate, are patent and functional, and their logs and access-transit structures answered properly when interrogated. Her snap assessment is likely to be as accurate as my more leisurely one. If I find anything when I go Downside, I’ll advise you. But on present data, I would advise you to leave the gates as they are.”

Carl nodded. “I’ll take One-sixteen home and check it,” he said.

“Don’t be seen,” Rhiow said. “Nothing runs on the lower levels on Sunday.”

Carl smiled slightly. “There are more ways to be invisible than to sidle,” he said. “Let’s talk tomorrow morning, then.” He sipped at his cappuccino, then squinted briefly at her. “Rhi, what is that all over you? You look awful.”

She smiled slightly at him. “Occupational hazard. I told you the rats were thick down there … about an eighth of an inch thick, at the moment. —You on call all alone this weekend?”

Carl nodded. “Tom’s in Geneva at the Continental-regionals meeting; he’ll be back Wednesday. I’m handling the whole East Coast, just now.”

“Not much fun for you,” Rhiow said, “having no one to split shifts with.”

Carl waved the cappuccino at her. “I drink a lot of this. I get jangled, but I survive.”

Rhiow got up and shook herself again, not that it helped. “Well, give T’hom my best when you hear from him,” she said. “Go well, Advisory … and watch out for that caffeine.”

“Dai stiho, Rhiow,” Carl said. “Stay in touch. And mind the rats.”

“You got that in one,” she said, and headed down the stairs.

When Rhiow got back down to the tracks, she found that Saash and Urruah had moved over to the far side, near the wall. Between them lay the killing, now curled into a tight ball. He was cleaner: Saash was washing him, and looked up from that now as Rhiow came over.

“How is he?” Rhiow said.

“He woke for a moment,” Saash said, “but went right out again—understandable. No bones broken, no internal injuries. He’s just bitten up and shocked to exhaustion. Sleep’s best for him, and a wizardry to kill the filth in the bites. But not here.”

“No, indeed not,” Rhiow said, glancing around. No ehhif terminal staff were out on the tracks as yet, but it wouldn’t do for any to come along and find this kitling. The ehhif’s relations with terminal cats had become somewhat difficult over the last few years. Every now and then the place was “swept,” and sick or indigent cats found there were taken away, along with sick or indigent ehhif who had also taken refuge in the tunnels for shelter rather than food. “Well, he’s got to have somewhere to rest. But I can’t help: the outside places near my den are too dangerous for a kit.”

“I live in a Dumpster,” Urruah said, with execrable pride. “There would be room… but I don’t think it’s the place for him if he’s sick.”

“No,” Rhiow said, “but it’s good of you to offer.” She didn’t say what she was thinking: that attempting to keep a young tom barely out of kittenhood in close company with a tom of siring age was a recipe for disaster, whether the tom lived in a Dumpster or a palace, and whether he was a wizard or not. Mature toms couldn’t help their attitude toward kittens in general, and male ones in particular, no matter how they tried.

“I think I can put him up,” Saash said. “There are a lot of places way down and back in the garage where the ehhif never go. One big high ledge that I use sometimes will serve: it’s four levels down. None of the ehhif go down there except to fetch cars out, and not often—it’s long-term storage space. This kitling won’t be heard, even if he cries, and if I have to, I can lay a barrier to hold either him or the sound in till he’s well enough to go.”

“You’ll have to spend some time there to be sure he’s settled,” Rhiow said, “and if he catches you, Abha’h will powder you again—”

Saash hissed softly, but the sound was resigned. “I suppose it’s in a good cause,” she said. “And I have to eat sometime; he’d catch me then anyway. Will you two lend a hand with the jump? I don’t propose to carry him all the way home in my mouth.”

“No problem. Urruah?”

“As long as she does the circle,” Urruah said, emitting a cavernous yawn. The morning’s exertions were beginning to catch up with him.

Rhiow yawned, too, then laughed. “Quick,” she said, “before we all fall asleep where we stand…”

Saash glanced around her, eyeing the area, and with a quick practiced flick of her tail laid out the boundaries of the spell, sweeping the area clean of random string influences and defining the area where she wanted the new ones to anchor. When the anchors were in place, looking like a cage of vertical bright lines around the edges of the circle, Saash added the only ingredient needed: the words. She said one word in the Speech, and the anchors leaned inward above them, knotting into the tip of a cone. Then three more words—the medium-precision versions of Saash’s and Rhiow’s and Urruah’s names, and a fourth generic medium-precision term for their “passenger,” with only the physical characteristics of his size and color added in, since they didn’t know his name or anything about his personality. With the details completed, the dirt and cinders under their feet went webbed with more bright lines, the anchors that would hold the four of them inside the spell. “Location’s coming,” Saash said to Urruah. “Ready?”

He turned and snagged one of the anchor strands in his teeth, ready to feed power down it. “Go.”

Saash recited a string of coordinates in the Speech, and then said the last word that knotted the spell closed and turned it loose. Urruah bit hard on the string, feeding power down it. The whole structure blazed: the “cone” of strings collapsed down on them, pushed them down and out through its bottom. A moment when the world was a tangle of lines of fire—

Then dimness reasserted itself. The four of them stood and sat and lay on a concrete shelf four feet wide and ten feet long, high up at the far end of a room much longer than it was wide. The shelf’s edge was a sheer drop of twenty feet to a floor painted with white lines and covered with blocky machinery, in which ehhif’s cars were stacked three high.

The string structure snapped away to nothing. “Au, I’m glad there are gates,” Saash said, and flopped down on her side. “Who’d want to do that every time you wanted to go any distance? It’s bad enough for ten blocks.”

“That’s why Iau gave us feet,” Rhiow said. “Urruah? You okay?”

He sat down, blinking. “I will be after I eat something.”

He’s fine, Rhiow thought, amused. “Now let’s see about this one—” She peered at the kitling. Under the grime, most of which Saash had gotten off, he was white with irregular black patches on back and flanks and face: one splotch sat on his upper lip, creating an effect like Carl’s mustache. Ear-tips, tail-tips, and feet were black. Hu-rhiw was the Ailurin name for this kind of pattern: day-and-night. He lay there breathing hard, ears back, eyes squeezed shut.

Conscious, Rhiow thought, but unwilling to accept what’s been happening to him. And why wouldn’t he be? For not all People believed in wizards. Many who did believe were suspicious of them, thinking they somehow desired to dominate other People, or else they mocked wizards as unnecessary or ineffective, saying that they’d never seen a wizard do anything useful. Well, that’s the whole point, Rhiow thought, to do as much good as possible, as quietly as possible. What the Lone One doesn’t have brought to Its attention. It can’t ruin. But the generally dismissive attitude of other People was something you got used to and learned to work around. After all, the situation could have been much worse … like that of the ehhif wizards. Rhiow often wondered how they got anything done, since hardly any of their kind knew they existed or believed in them at all, and preserving that status quo was part of their mandate.

That little body still lay curled tense; Rhiow caught a flicker of eyelid. Conscious, all right. We’ll have some explaining to do, but it can wait. “Saash,” she said, “would you feel inclined to give him a bit more of a wash? He’ll wake.”

“Certainly.” Saash too had seen that betraying flicker. She curled closer to the youngster and began enthusiastically washing inside one ear. Only the most unconscious cat could resist that for long.

The youngster’s eyes flew open, and he sneezed: possibly from the washing, or the smell that still lingered about him. He tried to get up, but Saash put a paw firmly over his midsection and held him down.

“Lemme go!”

“You’ve had a bad morning, kit,” Rhiow said mildly. “I’d lie still awhile.”

“Don’t call me kit,” he said in a yowl meant to be threatening. “I’m a tom!”

Urruah gave him an amused glance. “Oh. Then we can fight now, can we?”

“Uhh…” The kit looked up at Urruah—taking in the size of him, the brawny shoulders and huge paws, and, where the tips of the forefangs stuck out so undemurely, the massive teeth. “Uh, maybe I don’t feel well enough.”

“Well, then,” Urruah said, “at your convenience.” He sat down and began to wash. Rhiow ducked her head briefly to hide a smile. It was, of course, an excuse that the rituals of tom-combat permitted: most of those rituals were about allowing the other party to escape a fight and still save face.

“You have reason not to feel well,” Saash said, pausing in her washing. “About fifty rats took bites out of you. You lie still, and we’ll work on that.”

“Why should you care?” the kit said bitterly.

“We have our reasons,” Rhiow said. “What’s your name, youngster?”

His eyes narrowed, a suspicious look, but after a moment he said, “Arhu.”

“Where’s your dam?” Saash said.

“I don’t know.” This by itself was nothing unusual. City-living cats might routinely live in-pride, even toms sometimes staying with their mother and littermates; or they might go their own way at adolescence to run with different prides, or stay completely unaligned.

“Are you in hhau’fih?” Saash used the word that meant any group relationship in general, rather than rrai’fih, a pride-relationship implying possible blood ties.

“No. I walk alone.”

Rhiow and Saash exchanged glances. He was very young to be nonaligned, but that happened in the city, too, by accident or design.

“There’ll be time for those details later,” Rhiow said. “Arhu, how did you come to be down there where we found you, in the tunnel?”

“Someone said I should go there. They laughed at me. They said, I dare you…” Arhu yawned, both weariness and bravado. “You have to take dares…”

“What was the dare?”

“She said, Walk down here, and take the adventure that comes to you—”

Rhiow’s eyes went wide. “ ‘She.’ What did she say to you first?”

“When?”

“Before that.”

A sudden coolness in Arhu’s voice, in his eyes. “Nothing.”

“Fwau,” Rhiow said; a bit roughly, for her, but she thought it necessary. “Something else has to have been said first.” She thought she knew what, but she didn’t dare lead him…

Arhu stared at her. Rhiow thought she had never seen such a cold and suspicious look from a kit so young. Pity rose up in her; she wanted to cry, Who hurt you so badly that you’ve lost your kittenhood entire? What’s been done to you? But Rhiow held her peace. She thought Arhu was going to give her no answer at all: he laid his head down sideways on the concrete again. But he did not close his eyes, staring out instead into the dimness of the garage.

Come on, Rhiow thought. Tell me.

“I was in the alley,” Arhu said. “The food’s good there: they throw stuff out of that grocery store on the other side of it, the Gristede’s. But the pride there, Hrau and Eiff and Ihwin and them, they caught me and beat me again. They said they’d kill me, next time; and I couldn’t move afterward, so I just lay where they left me. No one else came for a good while… Then she must have come along while I was hurting. I couldn’t see her: I didn’t look, it hurt to move. She said, You could be powerful. The day could come when you could do all kinds of good things, when you could do anything, almost, with the strength I can give you… if you lived through the… test, the… hard time…” Arhu made an uncertain face, as if not sure how to render what had been said to him. “She said, If you take what I give you, and live through the trouble that follows—and it will follow—then you’ll be strong forever. Strong for all your lives.” His voice was going matter-of-fact now, like someone repeating a milk-story heard long ago against his dam’s belly wanted that. To be strong. I said, What could happen to me that would be worse than what’s already happened? Do it. Give it to me. She said, Are you sure? Really sure? I said, Yes, hurry up, I want it now. She said, Then listen to what I’m going to say to you now, and if you believe in it, then say it yourself, out loud. And I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid. And it was quiet then.”

“Hmm. Where was this alley, exactly?” said Urruah.

“Ru, shut up. You can check the Gristede’s later. Arhu,” Rhiow said, “say what she told you to.”

A little silence, and then he began to speak, and a shiver went down Rhiow from nose to tail: for the voice was his, but the tone, the meaning and knowledge held in it, was another’s. “In Life’s name, and for Life’s sake, I assert that I will employ the Art that is Its gift in Life’s service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fit to do so—looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded…”

No hesitation, no uncertainty; as if it had been burned into his bones. Rhiow and Urruah and Saash all looked at one another.

“Then what happened?”

He stirred. “After a while, I felt better, and I saw I could get away—none of them were there. I walked out into the street. It was quiet. It was late, just the steam coming up out of the street, you know how it does. I walked a long time until I saw inside there, inside those doors. It was all bright and warm, but the doors were shut. I thought, It’s no use, there’s no way to get in. But then—” Now he sounded dreamily mystified, though at a remove. “Then someone— men I heard how to get in, if I wanted to. I knew more than I knew a minute before: a way to move, and words to say. And she said, Do that, and then go in and see what happens. I dare you. So I did. I said the words, and I walked in through the doors … through them!… and then on under the sky-roof, and on down through those littler doors, down into the dark…”

Arhu trailed off, and shivered. “I’m tired,” he said, and closed his eyes.

Saash, lying beside him, looked at Rhiow thoughtfully, then started to wash the top of Arhu’s head.

Rhiow sat down and let out a breath. Well, she said silently to the others, in the form of the Speech that goes privately from mind to mind, it would appear that the Powers That Be have sent us a brand-new wizard.

Not a wizard yet, Urruah said, his eyes narrowing. An overgrown kitten on Ordeal. And since when do the Powers dump a probationer on already-established wizards? The whole point of Ordeal is that you have to survive it alone.

None of us, Saash said, ever does it completely alone. There’s always advice, at first: from Them, or other wizards. That’s most likely why he’s been sent to us. Who else has he got?

That’s the problem, Rhiow said. You know there are no accidents in our line of work. This kit was sent to us. He’s going to have to stay with us, at least until he’s started to take this seriously.

No way! Urruah hissed.

Rhiow stared at him. You heard him, she said. “I said it, though some of it was pretty stupid.” He’s not clear yet about the meaning of the Oath he’s taken. If he hadn’t met us, that would be his problem, and the Powers’: he’d live or die according to the conditions of his Ordeal and his use of the wizardry bestowed on him. But we found him—you found him!—and under the conditions of our own Oaths, we can’t let him go until he understands what he’s brought on himself. After he does, he’s the Powers’ business: he and They will decide whether he lives and becomes a wizard, or dies. But for the time being, we’re a pride in the nurturing sense as well as the professional one… and that’s how it will be. You have any problems with that?

She stared until Urruah dropped his eyes, though he growled in his throat as he did it. Rhiow cared not a dropped whisker for his noise. Urruah was still young in his wizardry but also profoundly committed to it, and though he could be lazy, tempery, and self-indulgent, he wouldn’t attempt to deny responsibilities he knew were incumbent on him.

“So,” Rhiow said aloud. “Saash, you seem to have become queen for the day…”

Saash made a small ironic smile, suggestive of someone enjoying a job more than she had expected. “It’s all right, I can manage him. He’ll sleep sound for a while… I made one of the small healing wizardries to start the wounds cleaning themselves out.”

“Make sure you sleep, too. I’ll make rounds in the Terminal in a while; Har’lh wanted the gates double-checked. Urruah, it would help if you held yourself ready while Saash is awake, in case she needs anything.”

“All right,” he said, and he brightened. “It’ll be ehhif lunchtime soon, and they’ll be throwing lots of nice leftovers in that Dumpster around the corner. Then there’s this alley, with the Gristede’s. Thirty-eighth, you think, Saash?…”

Rhiow’s whiskers went forward in amusement as she turned to jump down. For the moment, she wasn’t sure which was motivating Urruah more: the desire for food or the prospect of a good scrap with a tough pride. “Eat hearty,” she said, “and keep your ears unshredded. Call if you need anything: you’ll know where to find me.”

“Working,” Urruah said, in a voice of good-natured pity.