The Book Of Night With Moon

Chapter One

They never turn the lights off in Grand Central; and they may lock the doors between 1 and 5:30 a.m., but the place never quite becomes still. If you stand outside those brass-and-glass doors on Forty-second Street and peer in, down the ramp leading into the Grand Concourse, you can see the station’s quiet nightlife—a couple of transit police officers strolling past, easygoing but alert; someone from the night cleaning crew heading toward the information island in the center of the floor with a bucket and a lot of polishing cloths for all that century-old brass. Faintly, the sound of rumblings under the ground will come to you—the Metro-North trains being moved through the upper- and lower-level loops, repositioned for their starts in the morning, or tucked over by the far-side tracks to be checked by the night maintenance crews. On the hour, the massive deep gong of the giant Accurist clock facing Forty-second strikes, and the echoes chase themselves around under the great blue sky-vault and slowly fade.

By five o’clock the previous day’s dust will have been laid, the locks checked, the glass on the stores in the Graybar and Hyatt passageways all cleaned: everything done, until it’s time to open again. The transit policemen, still in a pair because after all this is New York and you just can’t tell, will stroll past, heading up the stairs on the Vanderbilt Avenue side to sit down in the ticketed passenger waiting area and have their lunch break before the day officially starts. Anyone looking in through the still-locked Forty-second Street doors will see nothing but stillness, the shine of slick stone and bright brass.

But there are those for whom locked doors are no barrier. Were you one of them, this morning, you would slip sideways and through, padding gently down the incline toward the terrazzo flooring of the concourse. The place would smell green, the peculiar too-strong wintergreen smell of a commercial sweeping compound. Your nose would wrinkle as you passed a spot on the left, against the cream-colored wall, where blood was spilled yesterday—a disagreement, a knife and a gun pulled, everything finished in a matter of seconds: one life wounded, one life fled, the bodies taken away. But the disinfectants and the sweeping compound can’t hide the truth from you and the stone.

You would walk on, pause in the center of the room, and look upward, as many tunes before, at the starry, painted vault of the heavens—its dusk-blue rather faded, and half the bulbs in the Zodiac’s constellations burnt out. The Zodiac is backward. They’ll be renovating the ceiling this spring, but you doubt they’ll fix that problem. It doesn’t matter, anyway: after all, “backward” depends on which direction you’re looking from…

You would walk on again then, guided by senses other than the purely physical ones, and stroll silently over to the right of the motionless up-escalators, toward the gate to Track 25. Once through its archway, everything changes. The ambiance of the terminal—light, air, openness— abruptly shifts: the ceiling lowers, the darkness closes in. Lighting comes in the form of long lines of fluorescent fixtures, only one out of every three of them lit, this time of day. They shine down in bright dashed lines on the seven platforms to your right, the nine to your left, and straight ahead, on the gray concrete of the platform that serves Tracks 25 and 26. Behind you, a pool of warm light lies under the windows of the glass-walled room that is the Trainmaster’s Office. Little light, though, makes it past the platform’s edge to the tracks themselves. They are long trenches of shadow between pale gray plateaus of concrete that stretch, tapering, into the middle distance, vanishing into more darkness. The rails themselves gleam faintly only close to where you stand: they too reach off into the dark, converging, and swiftly disappear. Red and green track guidelights shine dully there. A few shine brighter: the track crew members are down there, walking the rails to check for obstructions and wiping the lights off as they come.

You walk quietly down the center platform, letting your eyes get used to the reduced light, until you come to where the platform ends, almost a quarter-mile from the arches of the gates.

You jump down from the tapered end of the platform, into shadow, and walk out of reach of the last fluorescent lights. The red and green lights marking the track switches are your only illumination now, and all you need. Seventy-five feet ahead of you, Tracks 25 and 26 converge. Just off to your right is the walkway to a low concrete building, Tower A, the master signaling center for the terminal. You are careful not to look directly at it: the bright lights inside it, the blinking of switch indicators and computer telltales, would ruin your night-sight. You pad softly on past, under its windows, past the little phone-exchange box at the tower’s end, on into the darkness. The still, close air smells of iron, rust, garbage, mildew, cinders, electricity—and something else.

Here you pause, warned by the senses that drew you here, and you wait. Trembling on your skin, and against your eyes, is a feeling like the tremor of air in the subway when, well down (he tunnel, a train is coming. But what’s coming isn’t a train. Everything around is silent, even the subway tunnel three levels below you. Two levels above you now is the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets: from there, no sound conies, either. Watching, you wait.

No eyes but yours, acclimated and looking in the right place, would see what slowly becomes visible. The air itself, somehow more dark than the air in front of it, is bending, showing contour, like a plate-glass window bowing outward in a hurricane wind—or inward, toward you. Yet the contour that you half-see, half-sense, is wrong. It bulges like a blown bubble—but a bubble blown backward, drawn in rather than pushed out. You half-expect to hear breath sucked inward to match what you almost-see.

The bubble gets bigger and bigger, spanning the tracks. The darkness in the air streaks, pulled past its tolerances. Not-light shows through the thin places; wincing, you glance away. The faintest possible shrilling sound fills your twitching ears, the sound of spacetime yielding to intolerable pressure, under protest: it scales up and up, piercing you like pins—

—and stops, as the bubble breaks, letting through whatever has been leaning on it from the other side. You look at it, blinking. Silence again: darkness. A false alarm—

Until, as you shake your head again at the shrilling, you realize that you shouldn’t still be hearing it. And out of the blackness in front of you, pattering, rustling, they come. First, just a few. Then ten of them, a hundred of them, more. Hurrying, scattering, humpily running, their little wicked eyes gleaming dull red in the light from far behind you, they flow at you like darkness come alive, darkness with teeth, darkness shrilling with hunger: the rats.

There is more than hunger in those voices, though, more than just malice in those eyes. Their screams have terror in them. They will destroy anything that gets between them and their flight from what comes behind them, driving them; they’ll strip the flesh from your bones and never even stop to enjoy it. Backing away, hissing, you see the huge dark shape that comes behind them—walking two-legged, claws like knives lashing out in amusement at the shrieking tats, the long lashing tail balancing out behind: high above, the blunt and massive head, jaws working compulsively, huge razory fangs gleaming even in this dim light: and gazing down at you through the darkness, the eyes—the small, gemlike, cruelly smiling eyes, with your death in them: everything’s death.

Seeing this, you do the only thing you can. You run.

But it’s not enough…

She was sound asleep when the voice breathed in her ear. There was nothing unusual about that: They always took the method of least resistance.

Oh, fwau, why right this minute?

Rhiow refused to hurry about opening her eyes, but rolled over and stretched first, a good long stretch, and yawned hard. Opening her eyes at last, she saw the main room still dark: her ehhif hadn’t come out to open the window-coverings yet. No surprise there, for the noisemaker by the bed hadn’t gone off yet, either. Rhiow rolled over and stretched one more time, for the call hadn’t been desperately urgent, though urgent enough. Please don’t let it be the north-side gate again. Not after all the hours we spent on the miserable thing yesterday. Au, it’s going to take forever to get things going this morning…

She stood up, stretched fore and aft, then sat down on the patterned carpet in the middle of the room and started washing, making a face as she began; her fur still tasted a little like the room smelled, of cheese and mouth-smoke and other people from the eating party last night. Rhiow’s mouth watered a little at the memory of the cheese, to which she was most partial. She had managed to wheedle a fair amount of it out of the guests. Normally this would have left her with a somewhat abated appetite in the morning, but getting a call always sharpened her stomach, and more so if she was asleep when the call came: it was as if the urgency transmitted straight to her gut and there turned into hunger.

Probably some kind of sublimation, Rhiow thought, scrubbing her ears. And a vhai’d nuisance, in any case. She leaned back, bracing herself on one paw, and started washing the inside right rear leg.

Well, at least the timing isn’t too abysmal. The others will be up shortly, or else they won’t have gone to bed at all: just fine either way.

Rhiow finished up, putting her tail in order, and then stood and trotted through the landscape of disordered furniture, noting drinking-vessels left under chairs, a couple of them knocked over and spilled, and she paused to pick up half a dropped cracker with some of that pink fish stuff on it. Salmon paid, she thought as she munched. Not bad, even a night old. She gulped the last bit down, licked a couple of errant specks of it off her whiskers, and looked around. I wonder if they left the container out on the counter, like those others?

But there wasn’t time for that: she was on call. The bedroom door was shut. Rhiow started to rear up and scratch on it, then sat back down, having second thoughts: if she wanted both breakfast and an early start, it was smarter not to annoy them. She looked thoughtfully at the doorknob, squinting slightly.

It took only a second or so to clearly perceive the mechanism: friction-dependent, as she knew from previous experience, but not engaged. The door was merely pushed shut and was sticking a little tighter at the top than the bottom, that being all that held it in place.

Rhiow gazed at that spot for a moment, closed her eyes a bit further, and presently came to see the two patches of dim sparkle that represented the material forces at work in the two adjoining surfaces of the stuck spot. Under her breath she said the word that temporarily reduced the coefficient of friction in that spot, then stood on her hind legs and leaned against the door.

It fell open. Rhiow trotted in, feeling the normal forces reassert themselves behind her. One jump took her onto the bed, which sloshed up and down as she padded up the length of it, to a spot beside Iaehh’s head. He was facedown in the pillow, a position she had come to recognize over time as meaning he didn’t want to get up any time soon. Rhiow blinked, sympathetic if nothing else, and walked over his back to get to Hhuha.

She was on her back, snoring gently. Rhiow put her head down by Hhuha’s ear and purred.

No response.

It would have been nice to do this the easy way, Rhiow thought reluctantly, but… She bumped Hhu’s head with her own, purring harder.

“Rrrrgh,” said Hhuha, and rolled over, and squinted her eyes tighter shut, and after a moment looked at Rhiow out of them with some disbelief.

She sat up groggily in the bed and looked at the door. “Now how the heck did you get in here? I know he shut that last night.”

“Yes, I know, 7 opened it, never mind,” Rhiow said, “come on, will you? I have to get an early start. Business, unfortunately.” She rubbed against Hhuha’s side and purred some more.

“Wow, you’re noisy this morning, aren’t you? What on earth do you want? Not breakfast already, you pig! You had two whole slices of pizza just a few hours ago.”

Don’t remind me, Rhiow thought, for her stomach was growling so hard, she was amazed Hhuha couldn’t hear it. “Look, it would really help if you would just get up and give me my morning feed so I can get on with things—”

“Mike? Mike, get up. I think maybe your kitty wants her breakfast.”

“Nnnggghhhh,” said Iaehh, and didn’t move.

“Oh, will you come on already?” Rhiow said, desperately hoping Hhuha didn’t notice that her purr was becoming a little forced. “And as for pigs, who ate half a salami last night? And never gave me any? Even when I asked. Now please get up before it gets so late that I have to leave!”

“Gosh, you really must be hungry. I guess cats digest faster than people or something,” Hhuha said, her voice going soft, and she reached out to scratch Rhiow’s eyebrows. The tone of voice was one Rhiow had heard before: she got a sense that her ehhif liked being “talked to,” even when they couldn’t hear half of what was being said, and, even if they could, would have no idea what the words meant anyway. This tendency made them either great idiots or very fond of her indeed, and either conjecture only made Rhiow twitchier under the present circumstances. She stomped her forefeet alternately on the coverlet, as much from impatience as from pleasure at having her head scratched.

“Come on, then,” said Hhuha. She got out of bed, threw a house-pelt around her, and headed toward the kitchen. Rhiow went after her, not in a hurry: this was no time to trip Hhuha halfway there and have to deal with an ehhif temper tantrum that might take half an hour to resolve. By the time Rhiow got to the kitchen, Hhuha was cranking a can open.

“Mmm,” Hhuha said, “nice tuna. You’ll like this.”

“I hate the tuna,” Rhiow said, sitting down and curling her tail around her forefeet. “It’s not made from any part of the fish that you’d ever eat. You should read more of the label than just the part about the dolphins.”

“Yum, yum,” Hhuha said, putting the plate down on the floor. “Here you go, puss. Lovely tuna.”

Rhiow looked at the gelid stuff with resignation. Oh, well, she thought, it’s food, and I need something before I go out. And anyway—manners… She reared up and gave Hhuha a good rub around the shins before starting to eat.

“You’re a good kitty,” Hhuha said, and turned, yawning, to take something out of the refrigerator.

Rhiow purred with amusement and satisfaction as she ate. The compliment was true enough, but also true was that, while she had been rearing up to rub against Hhuha’s leg, she had seen where the container of salmon pate had been pushed back behind some drinking containers on the counter beside the ffrihh.

“God, I’m glad it’s Sunday,” Hhuha said, and shut the refrigerator again, heading for the bedroom. “I couldn’t bear the thought of work after last night.”

Rhiow sighed as she finished one last bite and turned away from the dish, reluctant: eating too much now would make her want a nap, and she had no time for that. “Must be nice to have weekends off,” Rhiow muttered, sitting down to wash. “I wish I did.”

The rest of her personal hygiene took only a few minutes more: her ehhif had put a hiouh-box. out on their small terrace for her, where it was under cover from rain. While using it, Rhiow went off into unfocused mode briefly and could hear them talking as Hhuha opened the window-coverings and the window.

“Mmngnggh…” Iaehh’s voice. “Did she eat?”

“Uh huh.” A pause. “She’s out now… I don’t know… I’m still not sure it’s a great idea to have her box out there.”

“Oh, come on, Sue. Better there than in the bathroom. You’re the one who was always muttering about walking in the kitty Utter in the morning. Anyway, she’s not going to fall or anything.”

“I don’t mean that It’s encouraging her to get down on that lower roof that worries me.”

“Why? It’s not like she can get to anywhere else from there. She can roam around and get some fresh air… and she’s been doing it for months now without any trouble. She would have gone missing a long time back if she could have.”

“Well, I still worry.”

“Susannnnn … She’s not stupid. It’s not like she’s going to try to go twenty stories straight down.”

Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a slight smile as she finished tidying the box, then got out and shook her feet fastidiously. Bits of litter scattered in various directions, skittering off the terrace. They can make water run uphill and fly off to the Moon when they like, she thought, resigned, but they can’t make hiouh-litter that won’t stick to your paws. A serious misplacement of priorities…

Rhiow went to the edge of the railed terrace, looked down. Her ehhif’s apartment was near the corner of the building. Its wall fell sheer to the next terrace, thirty feet down, but she had no interest in that. Off to the left was an easy jump, about three feet, to the concrete parapet of a lower roof of a building diagonally behind theirs, but Rhiow wasn’t going that way either. Her intended path lay sideways, along the brick wall itself. Some fanciful builder had built into it a pattern of slightly protruding bricks, a stairstep pattern repeating above and below. The part of it Rhiow used led rightward down the wall to the building’s other near corner, about fifty feet away; and six feet below that, in the direction of the street, was the raised parapet of yet another roof, the top of the next building along.

Rhiow slipped through the railings, stepped carefully up onto the first brick, and made her way downward along the wall, foot before foot, no hurry. This segment of her road, the first used each day setting out and the last to manage before getting home, was also the trickiest: no more than two inches’ width of brick to put her feet on as she went, nothing to catch her should she fall. Once she almost had, and afterward had spent nearly half an hour washing and regaining her composure, horrified at what might have happened, or worse, who might have seen her. Wasted time, she thought now, amused at her younger self. But we all learn…

At the corner of the building Rhiow paused, looked around. Soft city-noise drifted up to her the hoot of horns over on Third, someone’s car alarm wailing disconsolately to itself four or five blocks north, the rattle of trays being unloaded at the bakery eastward and around the corner. All around her, the sheer walls of other apartment and office buildings turned blind walls and windows to the sight of a small black cat perched on a two-inch-wide brick, ninety feet above the sidewalk of Seventieth Street. No one saw her. But that was life in iAh’hah, after all: no one looked up or paid attention to any but their own affairs.

Except for a small group of public servants, of whom she was one. But Rhiow spent no more time thinking about that than was necessary, especially not here, where she stuck out like an eye on a week-old fish head. Her business was not to be noticed, and by now, she was good at it.

She measured the jump down to the parapet. No matter that she had done it a thousand times before: it was the thousandth jump and one, misjudged, that would cheat you out of a spare life you had been saving for later. Rhiow crouched, tensed, jumped; then came down on the cracked foot-wide concrete top of the parapet, exactly where she liked to. She made the smaller jump down onto the surface of the roof, looked around again, her tail twitching.

No one there. Rhiow stepped across the coarse cracked gravel as quickly as she could: she disliked the stuff, which hurt her feet. She passed wire vent grilles and fan housings making a low moaning roar, blasting hot air up and out of the air-conditioning systems below; summer was coming on, and the unseasonably hot weather this last week had turned the city-roar abruptly louder. The smells had changed, too, as a result. The air up here reeked of the disinfectant that the biggest ehhif-houses put in their ventilating systems these days and also stank of lubricating oil, dust settled since last winter, sucked-out food scents, mouth-smoke, garbage stored in the cellars until pickup day…

After that, the fumes and steams coming up from the city street seemed fresh by comparison. Rhiow jumped up on the streetside parapet, looking down. Seventieth reached east to the river, west to where her view was blocked past Third by scaffolding for a new building and digging in the street itself, something to do with the utility tunnels. The street was an asphalt-stitched pattern of paved and repaved blacktop, pierced by the occasional gently steaming tunnel-cover, lined with the inevitable two long lines of parked cars, punctuated by the ehhif walking calmly here and there. Some of them had houiff on the leash: Rhiow’s nose wrinkled, for even up here she could smell what the houiff left in the street, no matter how their ehhif cleaned up after them.

No matter, she thought. It’s just the way the city is. And better get on with it, if you want it to stay that way.

Rhiow sat down, curled her tail around her forefeet, and composed herself. Amusing, to be making the world safe for houiff to foul the sidewalks in, but that was part of what she did.

Her eyes drooped shut, almost closed, so that she could more clearly see, and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, she 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…

There was more to the formal version of the meditation, but Rhiow was far enough along in her work now, after these six years, to (as one of her ehhif associates put it) depart from the Catechism a little. The idea was to put yourself in order for the day’s work, reminding yourself of the priorities—not your own species-bound concerns, but the welfare of all life on the planet: not your personal grudges and doubts, but the fears, however idiotic they seemed, of all the others you met. There was always the danger that the words would become routine, just something you rattled off at the start of the workday and then forgot in the field. Rhiow did her best to be conscientious about the meditation and her other setup work, giving it more than just speech-service … but at the same time, the urge to get going and do the work itself drove her hard. She presumed They understood.

Rhiow got up again, stretched, and trotted off down the roofs parapet to its back corner, which looked inward toward the center of the block between Seventieth and Sixty-ninth. She had egress routes all around the top of the building, but this was the least exposed; this time of day, when even an ehhif could see clearly, there was no point in being careless.

At the back corner Rhiow paused, glanced downward into the dusty warm darkness of the alley between the two buildings. Nothing was there but a rat, stirring far down among the garbage bags behind the locked steel door that led to the street. The far windows in the nearest building were all blinded with shades or curtains, no ehhif face showing. Well enough, she thought, and said under her breath the word that reminds the ephemeral of how it once was solid.

Rhiow stepped out, felt the step under her feet, there as always, and went on down: another step, another, through the apparently empty air, Rhiow trotting down it like a stairway. This imagery struck Rhiow as easier (and more dignified) than the tree-climbing paradigm often used by cats who lived out, and the air seemed amenable enough to the image made real: an empty stairway reaching twenty stories down into the alley’s dimness, the stairsteps outlined and defined only by the faintest radiance of woven string structure. The strings held the wizardry in. Inside it, air was briefly stone again, as solid to walk on as it would have been a billion years back, before ancient eruption and the warming sun on Earth’s crust let the atmosphere’s future components out. Shortly, when Rhiow was down, it would be free as air again. But like all the other elements—in fact, like all matter, when you came down to it, sentient or not—air was nostalgic, and enjoyed being lured into being as it had been once before, long ago, when things were simpler.

Eight feet above the ground, where the surrounding walls were all bund, Rhiow paused. I could jump on that rat, she thought. Once again she saw the rustle and flicker of motion, heard the nasty yummy squeak-squeal from inside one of the black plastic garbage bags. Involuntarily, Rhiow’s jaw spasmed, chattering slightly—the spasm that would break the neck of the prey clenched in it. Her mouth watered. Not that she would eat a rat, indeed not: filthy flea ridden things, Rhiow thought, and besides, who knows what they’ve been eating. Poison, half the time. But cornering one, hitting it, feeling the body bruise under your paw and hearing the squeal of pain: that was sweet. Daring the rat’s jump at your face, and the yellowed teeth snapping at you— and then, when it was over, playing with the corpse, tossing it in the air, celebrating again in your own person the old victory against the thing that gnaws at the root of the Tree—

No time this morning, she thought, and you’re wasting energy standing here. Let the air get on with doing what it has to. Carrying smog around, mostly…

She went down the last few almost-invisible steps, jumping over the final ones to the dusty brick-paved surface of the alley. The noise inside the garbage bag abruptly stopped.

Rhiow smiled. She said the word that released the air from solidity: upward and behind her, the strings faded back into the general fabric of things from which they had briefly been plucked, and the air dispersed with a sigh. Rhiow walked by the garbage bag toward the streetward wall and the gate in it, still smiling. She knew where this one was. Later, she thought. Rats were smart, but not smart enough to leave garbage alone. It was two days yet until collection. The rat would be back, and so would she.

But right now, she had business. Rhiow put her head out under the bottom of the iron door, looked around. The sidewalk was empty of pedestrians for half a block; most important, there were no houiff in sight. Not that Rhiow was in the slightest afraid of houiff, but they could be a nuisance if you ran into them without warning—the ridiculous barking and the notice they drew to you were both undesirable.

A quiet morning, thank Iau. She slipped under and out, onto the sidewalk, and trotted along at a good rate. There was no time to idle, and besides, one of the first lessons a city cat learns is that it’s always wise to look like you’re going somewhere definite, and like you know your surroundings. A cat that idles along staring at the scenery is asking for trouble, from houiff or worse.

She passed the dry cleaner’s, still closed so early, and the bookshop, and the coffee-and-sandwich shop—open and making extremely tantalizing smells of bacon: Rhiow muttered under her breath and kept going. Past the stores were five or six brownstones in a row, and as she passed the third one, a gravelly voice said, “Rhiow!”

She paused by the lowest step, looking up at the top of the graceful granite baluster. Yafh was sitting there with a bored look, scrubbing his big blunt face: not that scrubbing it ever made much difference to his looks. The spot was a perfect one for beginning the day’s bout of hauissh, the position-game that cats everywhere played with each other for territorial power, or pleasure, or both. In hauissh, early placement was everything. Now any cat who might appear on the street and try to settle down in the area that Yafh was temporarily claiming as “territory” would have to deal with Yafh first—by either confronting him head-on, moving completely out of sight, or taking a neutral stance… which would translate as appeasement or surrender, and lose the newcomer points.

Rhiow, since she was just passing through, was not playing. Business certainly gave her an excuse not to pause, but she rarely felt so antisocial. She went up the stairs, jumped onto the baluster, and paced down toward Yafh to breathe breaths with him. “Hunt’s luck, Yafh—”

His mouth a little open, Yafh made an appreciative “tasting” face at the scent of her cat food. “If I had been really hunting, I could have used some luck,” he said. “One of those little naked houiff, say … or even a pigeon. Even a squirrel. But there’s nothing round here except roaches and rats.”

Rhiow knew: she had smelled them on his breath, and she kept her own taste-face as polite as she could. “Don’t they feed you in there, Yafh? If it weren’t for you, your ehhif would have those things in their stairwells, if not their beds. You should leave them and go find someone who appreciates your talents.”

Yafh made a most self-deprecating silent laugh and tucked himself down into half-crouch again, folding his paws in. After a moment Rhiow joined in the laugh, without the irony. Of the many cats in these few square blocks, Yafh was the one Rhiow knew and was known by best, and some would have found that an odd choice of friends, for one with Rhiow’s advantages. Yafh was a big cat for one who had been untommed very young, but unless you took a close look at his hind end, you would never have suspected his ffeih status from the way his front end looked. 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.”

“Hunt’s luck to you too,” he said, “you poor rioh.” It was a naughty punning nickname he had given her some time back—the Ailurin word for someone’s beast of burden.

Rhiow went on her way, past the empty doorsteps, smiling crookedly to herself. At the corner she paused, looking down the length of Third. The light Sunday morning traffic was making her life a little easier, anyway: there was no need to wait. She trotted across Third, dashed down along the wall of the apartment building on the comer there, and ducked under the gate of the driveway behind it, making for the maze of little narrow alleys and walls on the inside of the block between Third and Lexington.

This was probably the most boring part of Rhiow’s day: the commute down to the Terminal. She could have long-jumped it, of course. Considering her specialty, that kind of rapid transit was simple. But long-jumping took a lot of energy—too much to waste first thing in the morning, when she was just getting started, and when having enough energy to last out the day’s work could mean the difference between being successful or being a total failure. So instead, Rhiow routinely went the long way: across to Lexington as quickly as she could manage, and then downtown, mostly by connecting walls and rooftops. The route was circuitous and constantly changing. Construction work might remove a long section of useful wall-walk or suddenly top the wall with sharp pieces of glass; streets might become easier to use because they were being dug up, or alternately because digging had stopped; scaffolding might provide new temporary routes; demolition work might mean a half-block’s worth of barriers had suddenly, if temporarily, disappeared—at least, until construction work began. Typically, though, Rhiow would have at least a few weeks on any one route—long enough for it to become second nature, and for her to run it in about three-quarters of an hour, without having to think much about her path until she got down near Grand Central and met up with the others.

This morning, she spent most of the commute thinking about Ailh-down-the-road, the poor thing. Ailh was a nice enough person: well-bred, a little diffident—a handsome, close-coated little mauve-beige creature, with brown points and big lustrous green eyes. Not, Rhiow had to admit, the kind of cat one usually meets on the streets in the city; which made her unusual, memorable in her way. But apparently Ailh also couldn’t control herself well enough to keep her scratching outside, though she had access to the few well-grown trees in their street. It was a shame. A shame, too, that ehhif were so peculiarly territorial about the things they kept in their dens. Being territorial about the den itself, that any cat could understand; but not about things. It was one of the great causes of friction between two species that had enough trouble understanding one another as it was. Rhiow wished heartily that ehhif could somehow come by enough sense to see that things simply didn’t matter, but that was unlikely at best. Not in this life, she thought, and not in the next couple either, I’ll bet.

Just west of Third on Fifty-sixth, Rhiow paused, looking down from an iron-spiked connecting wall between two brownstones, and caught a familiar glimpse of a blotched brown shape, skulking wide-eyed in the shadows of the driveway-tunnel leading into the parking garage near the corner. This was one of the more convenient parts of Rhiow’s morning run: a handy meeting place fairly close to the Terminal, where the ehhif knew her and her team, and didn’t mind them. Not for the first time, Rhiow considered Saash’s luck in getting herself adopted by the ehhif who worked there. Luck, though, she thought, almost certainly has nothing to do with it, in our line of work,…

She jumped down from the wall, ran under a parked car, looked both ways from underneath it, and hurried across the street. Saash, now crouched down against the wall of the garage, saw her coming, got up, and stretched fore and aft.

She was a long-limbed, delicate-featured, skinny little thing. Rhiow wondered one more time whatever could be the matter with her that she didn’t seem able to put on weight: Saash was hardly there. Her coloring supported the illusion. In coat she was a hlah’feihre, what ehhif called a tortoiseshell—but not one of the bold, splashy ones. Saash’s coat was patched softly in many shades and shapes of brown, gray, and beige, all running into one another: in some lights, and most especially in shadow, you could look straight at her and hardly see her. It was probably something to do with her kittenhood, which she rarely discussed—but hiding had been a large part of it, and you got the feeling Saash wouldn’t be done with that aspect of her life for a long time, if ever. She had never quite grown into her ears, and the size of them gave her a look of eternal kittenishness— while the restless way they swiveled made her look eternally wary and uneasy, despite the ironic humor in her big gold eyes.

“ ’Luck,” Rhiow said, and Saash immediately turned her back, sat down, put her left back leg over her left shoulder, and began to wash furiously. Rhiow sat down, too, and sighed. Another cat would probably have sniffed and walked off at the rudeness, but Rhiow had been working long enough with Saash to know it wasn’t intentional.

“Is it bad this morning?” Rhiow said.

Saash kept washing. “Not like last week,” she muttered. “Abha’h put that white stuff on me again, the powder.” There was another second’s satisfied pause. “I took a few strips off him while he was putting it on, anyway. Whether the junk does help or not, it still smells disgusting. And the taste—!”

Rhiow gazed off in the direction of the street, waiting for Saash to finish washing, and making faces at the flea powder, and scratching, and shaking herself. Rhiow privately doubted that the problem was fleas. Saash simply seemed to be allergic to her own skin, and itched all the time, no matter what anyone did: she couldn’t make more than a move or two before stopping to put her fur back in order, even when it was perfectly smooth. When they had started working together, Rhiow had thought the constant grooming was vanity, and blows had been exchanged over it. Now she knew better.

Saash shook her coat out and sat down again properly. “There,” she said. “I’m sorry, Rhi. ’Luck to you too.”

“You heard?”

“They called me,” Saash said in her little breathy voice, “right in the middle of breakfast. Typical.”

“I was sleeping myself. Any sign of Urruah yet?”

Saash looked disdainful. “He’s probably snoring at the bottom of that Dumpster he was describing in such ecstatic detail yesterday.” She made an ironic breath-smelling face, one suggestive of a cat whiffing something better suited for a houff to roll in than for any kind of meal.

“Saash,” Rhiow said, “for pity’s sake, don’t start in on him this morning: I can’t cope. —Were They more specific with you than They were with me? I got a sense that something was wrong with the north-side gate again, but that was all.”

Saash looked over her shoulder and washed briefly down her back. “Au, it’s the north one, all right,” she said, straightening up again. “It looks like someone did an out-of-hours access and forgot that the north gate’s diurnicity timings change when it’s accessed. So it’s sitting there still patent.”

“And after we just got the hihhhh thing fixed…!” Rhiow lashed her tail in irritation.

“My thought exactly.”

“But who in the worlds would be accessing it out-hours without checking the rates first? That’s pretty basic stuff. Even ehhif know enough to check the di-timings before they transit, and they can’t even see the strings.”

“Well, whoever came through didn’t bother,” Saash said. “Until we close it down again, the gate won’t be able to slide back where it belongs for the day shift. And to get it shut, we’ll have to reweave the whole vhai’d portal substrate until the egress stringing matches the access web again.”

Rhiow sighed. “After we spent all of yesterday doing just that. Urruah’s going to love this.”

“Whenever he wakes up,” Saash said dryly, sitting down to scratch again; but whatever else she might have said was lost as her ehhif cams bustling up from down the ramp.

“Oh, poor kitty, you still scratchin’, I gotta do you again!” Abad cried as he came toward them, feeling around for something in the deep pockets of his stained blue coverall. Abad was a living example of the old saying that an ehhif either looks like its cat to begin with or gets that way after a while—a tall, thin tom, fine-boned, brown-complected, with what looked like an eternal expression of concern. As Abad finally came up with the canister of flea powder, Saash took one wide-eyed look, said “Oh no!” and took off around the corner of the garage door and down the sidewalk toward Lexington. By the time he got into the open doorway and started looking for her, Saash had already done a quick sidle. Rhiow got up and strolled out onto the sidewalk after them. Abad stood there looking first one way, then the other, seeing nothing. But Rhiow, as she came up beside him, saw Saash slow down by the corner of the apartment building and look over her shoulder at Abad, then sit down again and start washing behind one ear.

“Aah, she hidin’ now,” Abad said sadly, and bent down to scratch Rhiow, whom he at least could still see. “Hey, nice to see you, Miss Black Cat, but my little friend, she gone now, I don’ know where. You come back later and she be back then, she play with you then, eh?”

“Sure,” Rhiow said, and purred at the ehhif for kindness’ sake; “sure, I’ll come back later.” She stood up on her hind legs and rubbed hard against Abad’s leg as he stroked her. Then she went after Saash, who glanced up at her a little guiltily as she stood again.

“You do that to him often?” Rhiow said. “I’d be ashamed.”

“We all sidle when we have to,” Saash said. “And if your fur tasted like mine does right now, so would you. Come on, you may as well… we’re close, and enough people are out now that they’ll slow us down if we’re seen.”

Rhiow sighed. “I suppose. It’s getting late, isn’t it?”

Saash squinted in the general direction of the sun. “I make it ten of six, ehhif-time.”

Rhiow frowned. “That first train from North White Plains is due at twenty-three after, and we can’t let it run through a patent gate. Which Dumpster did he say it was?”

“Fifty-third and Lex,” Saash said. “By that new office building that’s going up. There’s a MhHonalh’s right next to it, and the workmen keep throwing their uneaten food in there.”

At the thought, Rhiow grimaced slightly, and looked over her shoulder to see what Abad was doing. He was still gazing straight toward them, looking for Saash: seeing nothing but Rhiow, he sighed, put the flea powder away, and went back into the garage.

Rhiow stood up and sidled, feeling the familiar slight fizz at ear-tips, whisker-tips, and claws as she stepped sideways into the subset of concrete reality where visible light would no longer bounce off her. Then she and Saash headed south on Lex toward Fifty-third, taking due care and not hurrying. The main problem with being invisible was that other pedestrians, ehhif and houiff particularly, had a tendency to run into or over you; and since they and other concrete things were still fully in the world of visible light, in daytime they hurt to look at. In the “sidled” state, though, you were already well into the realm of strings and other nonconcrete structures, and so your view was littered with them too. The world became a confusing tableau of glaringly bright ehhif and buildings, all tangled about with the more subdued light-strings of matter substrates, weft lines, and the other indicators of forces and structures that held the normally unseen world together. It was not a condition that one stayed in for long if one could help it—certainly not in bright daylight. At night it was easier, but then so was everything else: that was when the People had been made, after all.

Rhiow and Saash trotted hurriedly down Lexington, being narrowly missed by ehhif pedestrians, other ehhif making early deliveries from trucks and vans, houiff out being walked, and (when crossing streets) by cabs and cars driving at idiotic speed even at this time of morning. There was simply no hour, even on a Sunday, when these streets were completely empty; solitude was something for which you had to go elsewhere. One had to weave and dodge, or hug the walls, trying not to fall through gratings or be walked into by ehhif coming unexpectedly around corners.

They made fairly good time, only once having to pause when an under-sidewalk freight elevator started clanging away while Saash was walking directly over its metal doors. She jumped nearly out of her skin at the sudden sound and the lurch of the opening doors, and skittered curbward— straight into a houff on the leash. There was no danger: the houff was one of those tiny ones, a bundle of silky golden fur and yap and not much else. Saash, however, still panicked by the dreadful clanging of the elevator alarm and the racket of the rising machinery, hauled off and smacked the houff hard in the face, as much from embarrassment as from fright at jostling into it, and galloped off down the street, bristling all over. The houff, having been hit claws-out and hard by something invisible, plunged off down the sidewalk in a panic, half-choking on its collar and shrieking about murder and ghosts, while its bewildered ehhif was towed along behind.

Rhiow was half-choked herself, holding in her merriment. She went after Saash as fast as she could, and didn’t catch up with her until she ran out of steam just before the corner of Fifty-fourth. There Saash sat down close to the corner of the building and began furiously washing her fluffed-up back fur. Rhiow knew better than to say anything, for this was not Saash’s eternal itch: this was he’ihh, composure-grooming, and except under extraordinary circumstances, one didn’t comment on it. Rhiow sat down back to back, keeping watch in the other direction, and waited.

To Saash’s credit, she cut the he’ihh short, then breathed out one annoyed breath and got up. “I really hate them,” she said as they went together to the curb, “those little ones. Their voices—”

“I know,” Rhiow said. They waited for the light to change, then trotted across, weaving to avoid a pair of ehhif mothers with strollers. “They grate on my nerves, too. But would you rather have had one of the big ones?”

“Don’t tease,” Saash muttered as they trotted on toward the next corner. “I feel foolish now for hitting the poor thing like that. It wasn’t its fault. And I was sidled too. Those little ones aren’t always very resilient thinkers; if I’ve unhinged it somehow…”

“I doubt that.” But Rhiow smiled. “All the same, you should have seen the look on its face. It—”

She stopped, ears pricked. From nearby, sounds of barking and snarling and yowling were rising over the muted early-morning traffic noise, becoming louder and louder. The two of them paused and looked at each other, eyes widening—for one of the two lifted voices, they knew.

“Sweet Queen around us,” Saash said, “what’s he doing?!”

They took off at a run, dodging among ehhif going in and out of the early-opening bakery at the end of the block, and tore around the corner. A dusty car with one tire flat and another booted was parked on their side of Fifty-third: Rhiow jumped up on its trunk and then leaped to its roof to get a better view. Saash came after, skidding a little on the roof and staring down the street. At the second impact, the car’s alarm went off. Rhiow and Saash ignored it, knowing everyone else would, too.

Fifty-third was a mess of construction in this block: several beat-up yellow Dumpsters were lined head to tail on the north side, and scaffolding towered several stories above them, against the front of two brownstones being renovated. Near the middle Dumpster, which sat with its lid open, a group of men in T-shirts and hard hats, and two others in security guards’ uniforms, stood staring in astonishment at something between them and the Dumpster. At the sound of the car alarm, the men gave one glance toward the end of the street, saw nothing, and turned their attention back to what they had been watching.

The barks and growls scaled up into a yipping howl of sheer terror, and the men scattered, some toward the scaffolding, some toward the street From among them burst a huge German shepherd, tawny and black. Its ears were plastered against its skull, its tail was clamped between its hind legs, and it leapt four-footed into the air and came down howling, and spun in circles, and shook itself all over. But it could do nothing to dislodge the gray-striped shape that clung to its neck, yowling at the top of his voice … not in fear or pain, either. Urruah was having a good time.

“Oh, not today” Rhiow muttered. “Come on, Saash, we’ve got to do something, that gate won’t wait—!”

“Tell him,” Saash said, dry-voiced, as the unfortunate houff and its rider came plunging toward them. Urruah’s eyes were wide, his mouth was wide as he yowled, and he had both front pawfuls of claws anchored in the houff’s collar, or maybe in its upper neck behind its ears; his back claws kicked and scrabbled as if he thought he’d caught a rabbit, and was trying to remove its insides in the traditional manner. The dog continued to howl, jump, and turn in circles, and still couldn’t rid himself of his tormentor: the howls were more of pain than fear, now. Urruah grinned like an idiot, yowling some wordless nonsense for sheer effect.

Rhiow saw one of the security guards pull out his gun. He wouldn’t be so stupid—I she thought. But some ehhif were profoundly stupid by feline standards, and one might take what he thought was a safe shot at the cat tormenting his guard dog, even if he stood an even chance of hitting the dog instead.

She glanced at the scaffolding above the group of ehhif. “Saash,” Rhiow said. “That bucket.”

Saash followed her glance. “I see it. In front of the Dumpster?”

“That’s the spot.” Rhiow turned her attention to Urruah and the houff.

An almighty crash came from just in front of the second Dumpster. The bucket full of wet cement-sand had come down directly in front of the security guard with the gun. He jumped back, yelling with surprise and fear at being splattered, as the other ehhif did; then spun, looking upward for the source of the trouble. There was no one there, of course. Several of the men, including the second security guard, disappeared into the construction site; the man with the gun stood staring upward.

Rhiow, meantime, waited until the houff was within clear hearing range—she didn’t want to have to shout. As it lurched closer to the car where she and Saash sat, Rhiow chose her moment… then said the six syllables of the ahou’ffriw. It was not a word she spoke often, though part of the general knowledge of a feline in her line of work. Sidled as she was, Rhiow could see the word take flight like one of the hunting birds that worked the high city, arrowing at the houff. The word of command struck straight through the creature, as it had been designed to do when the houff themselves were designed; struck all its muscles stiff, froze the thoughts in its brain and the intended movements in its nerves. The houff crashed to the concrete and lay there on its side, its tongue hanging out, its eyes glazed. Urruah went down with it, and after a moment extricated himself and got up, looking confused.

“I don’t know about you,” Rhiow said softly—and Urruah’s head jerked up at the sound—“but we’re on callout this morning. You had some different business, maybe? The Powers That Be suggested you take the morning off to beat up defenseless houff?”

Urruah squinted to see her better. “Oh, ’luck, Rhiow.”

“ ’Luck is what none of us are going to have if you don’t pull yourself together,” Rhiow said. “Come on. We’ve got ten blocks to make before twenty-three after.”

“Long-jump it,” Urruah said, stepping down off the houff.

“No,” Rhiow said. “No point in throwing away power like that, when we may have something major to do in a few minutes. Get sidled and come on.” She jumped down from the car: Saash followed.

They crossed the street and went on down Lexington again: Urruah first, sidled now, and taking it easy for the moment; then Saash. Rhiow paused just for a moment to look over her shoulder at the houff. He was staggering to his feet again, looking groggy but relieved.

Good, Rhiow thought. She went after the others and caught up with Saash first. “That was slick,” she said, “with the bucket.”

“It was in a bad position to start with. Pull a string or so, change the bucket’s moment of inertia—” Saash shrugged one ear back and forward, casual, but she smiled.

Rhiow did, too, then trotted forward to catch up with Urruah. “Now,” she said, more affably, “you tell me what all that was about.”

He strolled along for a moment without answering. Rhiow was tempted to clout him, but it would be a waste of energy, and it really was difficult being annoyed for long at so good-looking a young tom, at least when he was behaving himself. Urruah was only two and a half, having passed his Ordeal and started active practice a year ago. He was good at what he did, and was pleased with himself, on both professional and physical counts: a big, burly, sturdy tabby, silver and black, with silver-gray eyes, a voice all purr, some very ornamental scars, and a set of the biggest, sharpest, whitest teeth that Rhiow could remember seeing on one of the People in several lives. She occasionally wondered, when Urruah pulled dumb stunts like this, whether those teeth went straight up into his skull and filled most of it, leaving less room for sense.

“That houff,” Urruah said, as they crossed Fifty-second, “took my mouse.”

“Wait a minute,” Saash said. “You’re trying to tell us that you actually caught a mouse, when there was all that perfectly good MhHonalh’s food in the Dumpster?”

Urruah gave Saash a scathing look. Saash simply blinked at him, refusing to accept delivery on the scorn, and kept on walking. “It was a terrific mouse,” Urruah said. “It was one of those bold ones: it kept jumping and trying to bite me in the face. I was going to let it go after a while: you have to respect that kind of defiance! And then that miserable ehhif shows up at shift-change and lets his houff off the chain where they keep the thing all night, and it comes running out of there, jumps into the street practically on top of me, and eats my mouse! Must have a lot of wolf in it or something. But what would you have done?”

“Not ride it down the street and nearly get myself shot,” Rhiow said dryly. “Or the poor houff. A good slapping around would have been plenty. And do you really expect a houff to mind People’s manners? It didn’t know any better. But that ehhif’s reckless with the houff. And it must have been awfully hungry. I wonder what can be done about your poor mouse-eater…”

“Not our problem,” Urruah said as they crossed Fifty-first.

“Everything in this city is our problem,” Rhiow said, “as you know very well. I’d say you owe that houff a favor, now; you overreacted. Better arrange a meeting with one of our people on the houff side and see what can be done about him. I’ll expect a report tomorrow.”

Urruah growled under his breath, but Rhiow put her ears back at him. “Business, Urruah,” she said. “There’s work waiting for us. Put yourself aside and get ready to do what you were made to.”

He sighed, and after a half a block his whiskers went forward again. “Tell me it’s the northside gate again.”

Rhiow grimaced. “Of course it is.”

“Somebody did an out-of-hours access,” Saash said, “and left it misaligned.”

“The substrates still hinged?”

“Hard to tell from just the notification, but I hope so. If we go in prepared to do a subjunctive restring—”

And they were off, several sentences deep into gate-management jargon before the three of them crossed Fiftieth. Rhiow sighed. Saash and Urruah might have frictions, but the technical details of their work fascinated them both, and while they had a problem to solve they usually managed to avoid taking their claws to one another. It was before work, and after, that difficulties set in; fortunately, the team’s relationship was strictly a professional one, and no rule said they had to be friends. For her own part, Rhiow mostly concentrated on balancing Saash and Urruah off against one another so that the team got its work done without claws-out transactions or murder.

Just south of the southwest corner of Fiftieth and Lex was then: way down into Grand Central. Outside the delicatessen on the corner, a street grating that covered the west-side ventilation shaft was damaged, leaving room enough to squeeze through without mussing one’s fur. They slipped down through it, Urruah first, then Saash and Rhiow, and followed the downward incline of the concrete shaft for a few yards until they were out of sight of the street. All of them paused to let their eyes settle, now blessedly relieved of the bright sunlight. The dimness around them began to be more clearly stitched and striated with the thin radiance of strings, properly separate now, and their colors distinct rather than blindingly run together.

“Smells awful down here today,” Saash said, wrinkling her nose.

“Just your delicate sensibilities,” Urruah said, grinning. “Or the flea powder.”

Saash lifted a paw to cuff him, but Rhiow shouldered between them. “Not now. Your eyes better? Then, let’s go on.”

The concrete-walled shaft was four feet wide and no more than two feet high, low enough to make you keep your tail down as you went. It stretched for about thirty feet ahead before turning off westward at a right angle, where it stopped. Under the end of the shaft was a concrete ledge, much eroded from waste water dripping down it, and below that, a drop of some ten feet to the “back yard,” the northeastern bank of sidings where locomotives and loose cars were kept when the East Yard was congested with trains being moved.

One after another they jumped down, avoiding the eternal puddle of water that lay stagnant under the shaft-opening in all but the driest weather. In the darkness the clutter and tangle of strings was more visible than ever, and many of them were pulled curving over to a spot between Tracks 25 and 26, blossoming outward from it in all directions like a diagram of a black hole’s event horizon. That particular nodal symmetry meant an open worldgate, and was the signature of Rhiow’s business and her team’s. With worldgates in place and working properly, wizards out on errands didn’t have to spend their own precious energy on rapid transit to get where the Powers That Be assigned them. Without working gates, solutions to crises were slowed down, lives were hurt or untimely ended, and the heat-death of the Universe progressed unchecked or sometimes sped up.That was what all those in the team’s line of work were sworn to stop; and moments like this, as Rhiow stood and eyed the incredible mess and tangle of malfunctioning strings, made her wonder why they all kept trying when things kept going this spectacularly wrong.

The strings curving in to the nodal junction shivered with light and with the faintest possible sound, as if all being plucked at once. And the curvature wasn’t symmetrical: there should have been a matching “outward” curvature to complement the “inward” one. Taken together, the signs meant an unstable gate, which might shift phase, mode, or location without warning. “Time?” Rhiow said.

’Twenty after,” Saash said.

They sprinted through the darkness, across the tracks. Though even a cat’s eyes take time to adjust to sudden darkness, they had the advantage of knowing their ground; they were down here three times a week, sometimes more, slipping so skillfully among the tracks and buildings that they were seldom seen. Urruah went charging ahead, delighted as always by a challenge and a chance to show off; Rhiow was astonished to see him suddenly stumble as he came down from a jump over track. Something squealed as he fell on it.

“Irh’s balls,” he yowled, “it’s rats! Rats!”

More squeals went up. Rhiow spat with disgust, for the rats were all over the place, like a loathsome carpet: she’d been so intent on the gate that they hadn’t even registered until she ran right into them. Some rats now panicked and ran off shrieking down the tunnels, but for every three that ran, one stayed to try to slash your leg or ear.

Rhiow prided herself on having a fast and heavy paw when she needed it, and she needed it now. She disliked using the killing bite until she was sure the thing being bitten couldn’t bite her back in the lip or the eye: the only way to be sure was to crush skulls and break backs first, so she got busy doing that, hitting wildly around her. Up ahead of her, Urruah was yowling delight and rage, and rats flew from every stroke. But Saash, Rhiow thought in sudden concern. She’s no fighter. What if—

She looked over to the left. Saash was crouched down, her eyes gone so wide that they were just black pools with a glint of rim; a rat nearly her own size was crouched in front of her, preparing to jump. Saash opened her mouth and hissed at it.

The rat blew up.

And here I was worrying, Rhiow thought, both revolted and impressed. “Saash,” she shouted over the squeals and the cracking of bones, heading after Urruah, “can you extend the range on that spell? We don’t have time for this!”

Saash shook herself to get the worst of the former rat off her, hissed, and spat. “Yes,” she said. “Believe me, I’d have had it ready for numbers if I’d known! Give me a moment—”

She crouched again, looking intent, and Rhiow concentrated on defending her. The rats were coming faster now, as if they knew something bad was about to happen. Rhiow felt the bite in her tail, another in her leg, and struck out all around her in a momentary fury that she knew she couldn’t maintain for long. “Urruah,” she yelled, “for the Dam’s sake get your mangy butt back here and lend us a paw!”

The answer was a yowl that was actually cheerful in a horrible way. A moment later Rhiow could see him working back toward them by virtue of an empty space around him that moved as he moved. Rats would rush into it, but they wouldn’t rush out: they went down, skulls smashed or backs broken. Once Rhiow saw Urruah reach down with that idiot grin, grab a rat perfectly in the killing-bite spot at the base of the skull, and whip around him with the thing’s whole body, bludgeoning away the other rodents coming at him. It was disgusting, and splendid.

Urruah jumped right over Rhiow, turned in midair, and came down tail-to-tail with her. Together they struck at the writhing squealing forms all around, while between them Saash scowled at the dirty gravelly ground, with her eyes half-shut. “Nervous breakdown?” Urruah yelled between blows.

Rhiow was too busy to hit him. Saash ignored him completely. A moment later, she lifted her head, slit-eyed, and hissed.

Rhiow went flat-eared and slack-jawed at the piercing sound, more like a train’s air-brakes than anything from a tiny cat’s throat. Urruah fell over sideways as the force of it struck him. From all around them came many versions of a loathsome popping sound, like a car running over a sealed plastic bag full of liver. Everyone got sprayed with foul-smelling muck.

Silence fell. Saash got up and ran toward the track onto which the gate had slid down. Rhiow went after, followed by Urruah when he struggled to his feet. The fur rose on Rhiow’s back as they went, not just from the itch of closeness to the patent gate. From back in the upper-level tunnel came a rumbling, and the tracks ticked in sympathy: the single white eye of the 6:23’s headlight was sliding toward them.

Urruah saw it, too. “I could give it a power failure,” he gasped as they ran. “No one would suspect a thing.”

“It wouldn’t stop the train before it ran through the gate.”

“I could stop it—”

“You’ve swapped brains with your smallest flea,” Rhiow hissed. The dreadful mass and kinetic energy bound up in a whole train were well beyond even Urruah’s exaggerated idea of his own ability to handle. “It’ll derail, and Iau only knows how many of those poor ehhif will get hurt or killed. Come on—!”

They ran after Saash. She stood in front of the gate, tail lashing violently as she looked the tangle of strings up and down, eyes half-closed to see them better. As Rhiow and Urruah came up with her, she turned.

“It’s still viable,” she said. “Much better than I feared. The configuration that we left it in yesterday afternoon is still saved in the strings—see that knot? And that one.”

Rhiow peered at them. “Can you get them to retie?”

“Should be able to. We can reweave later: no time for it now. This’ll at least shut the thing. Urruah?”

“Ready,” he said. He was panting, but eager as always. “Where do you want it?”

“Just general at first. Then the substrate. Rhiow?”

“Ready,” she said.

First Saash, then Urruah, and at last Rhiow, reared up and hooked claws through the bright web of strings, and began to pull. Saash leaned in deep, set her teeth into another knotted set of burning stringfire, closed her eyes and started work. The fizz and itch in the air started to get worse, while Saash’s power and intention ran down the strings through the gate substrate, and the strings obediently writhed and began reweaving themselves over the gaping portal. Through the physical gate itself, not the orderly circle or sphere Rhiow was used to but just a jagged rent in the dark air, nothing could be seen: not the train, not anything else. The gate had been left open on some void or empty place. Cold dark wind breathed from it, mixing peculiarly with the hot metallic breath of the train trundling along through the dimness toward them. Oh, hurry up! Rhiow thought desperately, for she couldn’t get rid of the image of the train plunging into that jagged darkness and being lost—where? No way of telling. After a catastrophic incursion by such a huge mass, certainly the gate would derange, maybe irreparably. And what would happen to the train and its passengers, irretrievably lost into some hole in existence?

Rhiow pulled forcibly away from such thoughts: they wouldn’t help the work. Saash was deep in it, drowned in the concentration that made her so good at this work—claws snagged deep in the substrate as she drew strings out with paws and mind, knitted them together, released them to pull in others. Urruah, his face a mask of strained but joyous snarl like the one he had worn while killing rats, fed her power, a blast of sheer intention as irresistible as the stream from a fire hose, so that the strings blazed, kindling to Saash’s requirements and knitting faster every moment. This was what made Urruah the second heart of the team, despite all his bragging and bad temper: the blatant energy of a young tom in his prime, harnessed however briefly and worth any amount of skill.

Rhiow fed her energy down the weave, too, but mostly concentrated on watching the overall progress of the reweave. There, she said down the strings to the others, watch that patch there— Saash was on it, digging her forelegs into the tangle practically to the shoulders. A moment while she fished around deep inside the weave, as if feeling for a mouse inside a hole in a wall: then she snagged the string she wanted and pulled it into place, and the part of the weave that had threatened to come undone suddenly went seamless, a patch of light rather than a webwork. The tear in the darkness was healing itself. Peering around its right edge, Rhiow saw the train coining, very close now, certainly no more than a hundred yards down the track. It’s going to be all right, she thought, it’ll be all right, oh, come on, Saash, come on, Urruah—!

The gate substrate looked less like a bottomless hole now, and more like a flapping, flattening tapestry woven of light on a weft of blackness. The gap was narrowing to a tear, the tear to a fissure of black above the tracks. The train was fifty yards away. Still Saash stood reared up against the glowing weave of substrate, pulling some last few burning strings into order. Rhi, she thought, hold this last bit—

Half deafened, Rhiow reached in and bit the indicated strings to hold them in place while Saash worked in a final furious flurry of haste, pulling threads in and out, interweaving them. Not for the first time, Rhiow wondered what human had once upon a time seen a gate-technician of the People about her business, and later had named a human children’s game with string “cat’s-cradle”—

Done! Saash shouted into the weave. It snapped completely flat, a dazzling tapestry along which many-colored fires rolled outward to the borders, bounced, rippled in again. The dark crack in the air slammed shut. Behind it, the blind white eye of the 6:23’s locomotive slid ponderously at them in a roar of diesel thunder. Rhiow and Urruah threw themselves to the right of the track, under the platform; Saash leapt to the left. The loco roared straight through the rewoven and now-harmless gate substrate, stirring it not in the slightest, and brakes screeched as the train gradually slid down to the end of its platform and gently stopped.

The train sat there ticking and hissing gently to itself, the huge wheels of one car not two inches from Rhiow’s and Urruah’s noses. “A little close,” Urruah said from where he crouched, wide-eyed, a few feet away.

“A little,” Saash said, from the far side. “Rhiow? I want to do some low-level diagnosis on this gate before we leave. The other three I can check from here; but I want to look into this one’s log weave and see who left it in this state.”

“Absolutely,” Rhiow said. “Wait till they move this thing.”

It usually took fifteen or twenty minutes for the train to empty out and for the crew to finish checking it. Urruah rose after getting his breath back. “I need to stretch,” he said, and walked off to the end of the platform. Rhiow went after him.

Down the track they met Saash, who had had the same idea. At the sight of her, Urruah made a face, his nose twitching. “Aaurh up a tree, look at you! And you stink!”

Saash made a matching face, for once unwilling to sit down and wash. But then she grinned. “Your delicate sensibilities?” Saash said sweetly.

Urruah had the grace to look sheepish. He wandered away through the carnage. “Not a trick you’d want to use every day. But effective … !”

“It saved us,” Rhiow said softly. “And them. Nice work, Saash.”

Saash looked wry. “I know what I’m good for. Fighting isn’t it.”

’Technical expertise, though…” Rhiow said.

“Rats,” said Saash, “make a specific shape in space. There’s a way they affect strings in their area, one that no other species duplicates. There’s a way to exploit that.” She shrugged her tail; but she smiled.

“Keep that spell loaded,” Rhiow said, heartfelt. “We may need it again.”

From down the track came a rumble and groan of wheels as the train started backing out into the tunnel where all the upper-level tracks merged. Rhiow and the team moved a couple of tracks eastward to avoid it, Urruah wandering ahead. “So what will we do after this?” he said.

“Get cleaned up,” Rhiow said, with longing.

“I mean after mat… We could go down to the Oyster Bar and romance the window lady.”

Rhiow flicked an ear in mild exasperation, wondering how Urruah could think of any food, even oysters, when surrounded by a smell like this. But they were a passion of his. Occasionally Rhiow had secretly followed Urruah down to the restaurant’s pedestrian-service window after finishing work, and had seen him stand there in line with the other commuters—provoking much amused comment—and then wheedle bluepoints out of one of the window staff, a big broad blond lady, by force of purr alone. For her own part, Rhiow would never have done something so high-profile in the terminal itself. But Urruah had no shame, and Rhiow had long since given up trying to teach him any.

“Window’s not open on Sunday,” Saash said. “Do you ever think about anything but your stomach?”

“I sure do. Just the night before last there was this little ginger number, with these big green eyes, and she—”

Saash sat down in a clean spot behind a signal and started having herself a good scratch, yawning the while. “Urruah, you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who’s even slightly interested in your nightly exploits.”

“Au, it’s not your fault,” Urruah said magnanimously. “You can’t help not taking an interest, poor thing: you’re ffeih, after all.”

Rhiow smiled slightly: she had given up trying to teach Urruah tact too. But there was no arguing the statement, on either Saash’s part or her own. Before her wizardry, while still very young with her ehhif, Hhuha had taken Rhiow to the vet’s and unqueened her. Saash had had this happen, too, so long ago that she couldn’t even remember it. Being ffeih did free you from certain inconvenient urges; sometimes Rhiow wondered how still-queened wizards managed when heat and an assignment coincided. “Still,” Rhiow said, “Saash has a point. Till tomorrow, it’s MhHonalh’s or nothing for you, my kit.”

“Worth waiting for,” Urruah said, unconcerned, still ambling along. He paused, peering down. “Here, you missed one, Saash. Iau’s sweet name, but these things are getting big this year—”

He broke off. “Rhiow? This isn’t a rat.”

The alarm in his voice made Rhiow’s heart jump. She hurried over and stood with him to stare down unhappily at the small sodden heap of fur and limbs lying on the rail. Sometimes you ran into them down here, People who were sick or careless, and ran afoul of the trains: there was nothing much you could do but send their bodies on and wish them well in their next life. So young, she thought sadly: this catling could hardly have been out of his ’tweens, still kittenish and not yet old enough to worry about sex.

“Poor kit,” Saash said. “I wonder—”

He moved. A gasp, a heave of his chest, a kick of one leg. Another heave of breath.

“I don’t believe it,” Rhiow said. She bent down and gave his head a lick. He tasted foul, of cinder and train fumes as well as rat blood. She breathed breaths with him: the scent/taste was hurt and sick, yes, but not dead yet.

And someone said in her head, Rhiow? Are you free?

It was a voice she knew, and one she had expected to hear from, but not right this minute. The others heard it, too, from their expressions.

Urruah made a wry face. “The Area Advisory,” he said. “I guess we should be honored.”

“We got that shut,” Saash said, flicking an ear at the gate. “We’re honored. —You go on, Rhi. We’ll see to this one … and I’ll start those deep diagnostics. I’ve checked all four gates’ logs now. The other three are answering properly: no effect on them from this event. One thing, though. The log weave on this one is blank. No transits or accesses showing since the midnight archive-and-purge of the log.”

Rhiow blinked at that and started to demand explanations, but Saash turned away to the catling. “Ask me later.”

Rhiow jumped up onto the platform. “Next train’s at seven oh four,” she said, looking over her shoulder at them.

Urruah gave her a tolerant look. “It’s clear over on Track Thirty-two,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

Rhiow sighed. She was a mess, a layer of dust and track cinders kicked up by the North White Plains local now stuck to the rat detritus that had sprayed her, but there was no time to do much about it. She shook herself hard, scrubbed at her face enough to become slightly decent—then trotted on up the platform, out through the gate, and into the main concourse.