The Book of Night With Moon (15 page)

I would say,
Urruah said with a silent wrinkling of his whiskers,
that we have our job cut out for us.

Rhiow kept walking toward the end of the roof. "There's an opening down here," she said to Arhu as they went. "It's a little tricky to get through, but once in, everything else is easy. How much other experience have you had with buildings?"

He shrugged. "Today."

She nodded. He was young and inexperienced enough not even to have the usual cat-reference, which likened buildings to dens, or in the case of the taller ones, to trees hollowed out inside. Rhiow had always been a little amused by this, knowing what trees the city buildings were echoes of. She'd occasionally heard humans refer to the city as a jungle: that made her laugh, too, for she knew the real "jungle," ancient and perilous, of which the shadowy streets were only a reflection.

"Well, you're going to start picking up more experience fast," she said. "This is one of the biggest buildings in this city, though not the tallest. If you laid the almost-tallest building on the island— see that one, the great spike with the colored lights around the top?— yes,
that
one— laid it down on its side and half-buried it as the Terminal's buried, then this would
still
be larger than that. There are a hundred thousand dens in it, from the roof to the deepest-dug den under the streets, at the track levels. But we'll start at the top, tonight. The path we'll take leads under this roof-crest where we're walking, to the substructure over the building's inner roof. You said you came through the main concourse… did you look up and see blue, a blue like the sky, high up?"

Arhu stopped well clear of the edge of the roof, which they were nearing, and thought a moment. "Yes. There were lights in it. They were backwards…."

His eyes looked oddly unfocused.
The height bothers him,
Rhiow thought,
no matter what he says…
And then she changed her mind, for his eyes snapped back to what seemed normalcy.
Well, never mind. A trick of the light…

"Backwards," though.
"Saw that, did you?" she said, which was another slight cause for surprise. "Very perceptive of you. Well, we'll be walking above that: it's all a built thing, and you'll see the bones of it. Come here to the edge now and look down. See the hole?"

He saw it: she saw his tongue go in and out, touching his nose in fright, and heard him swallow.

"Right. That's what I thought the first time. It's easier than it looks. There's just a tiny step under it, where the brick juts out. Stretch down, put your right forepaw down on that, turn around hard, and put yourself straight in through the hole. Urruah?"

"Like this," Urruah said, slipping between them, and poured himself straight over the edge into the dark. Arhu watched him find the foothold, twist, and vanish into the little square hole among the bricks.

"Do that," Rhiow said. "I'll spot for you. You won't fall: I promise."

Arhu stared at her. "How can you be sure?"

Rhiow didn't answer him, just gazed back. Sooner or later there was always a test of trust among team-working wizards— the sooner, the better. Demonstrations that the trust was well-founded never helped at this stage: start giving such proofs and you would soon find yourself handicapped by the need to provide them all the time.

She kept her silence and spoke inwardly to the air under the little "step" of outward-jutting brick, naming the square footage of air that she needed to be solid for this little while— just in case. Arhu looked away, after a moment, and gingerly, foot by foot, started draping himself over the edge of the cornice, stretching and feeling with his forefeet for the step.

He found it, fumbled, staggered— Rhiow caught her breath and got ready to say the word that would harden the air below. But somehow Arhu managed to recover himself, and turned and writhed or fell through the hole. A scrabbling noise followed, and a thump.

Rhiow and Saash looked at each other, waiting, but mercifully there was no sound of laughter from Urruah. They went down after Arhu.

Inside the hole, they found Arhu sitting on the rough plank flooring that ran to the roof's edge underneath the peak, and washing his face in a very sincere bout of composure-grooming. A line of narrow horizontal windows, faintly orange-yellow with upward-reflected light from the street, ran down both sides of the roof, about six feet below its peak, and northward toward Lexington. From below those windows, thick metal supporting beams ran up to the peak and across the width of the room, and a long plank-floored gallery ran along one side, made for
ehhif
to walk on.

Cats needed no such conveniences. Urruah was already strolling away down the long supporting beam at just below window-level, the golden light turning his silver-gray markings to an unaccustomed marmalade shade.

Arhu finished his
he'ihh
and looked down the length of the huge attic. "See the planks under the beams and joists there?" Rhiow said. "On the other side of them is the sky-painting that the
ehhif
artist did all those years ago, to look like the summer sky above a sea a long way from here. The painting's trapped, though: when they renovated the station some years back, they glued another surface all over the original painting, bored new holes for the stars, and did the whole thing over again."

Arhu looked at Rhiow oddly. "But they had one there already!"

"It faded," Saash said, shrugging her tail. "Seems like that bothered them, even though the real sky fades every day.
Ehhif
… go figure them."

"Come on," Rhiow said. They walked along the planks, ducking under the metal joists and beams every now and then, and Arhu looked with interest at the corded wires and cables reaching across the inside of the roof. "For the light bulbs," Saash said. "The walking-gallery is so that, when one of the brighter stars burns out, the
ehhif
can come up here and replace it."

Arhu flirted his tail in amusement and went on. "Here's our way down," Rhiow said as they came to the far side of the floor. "It's all easy from here."

A small doorway stood before them, let into the bare bricks of the wall: the door was shut. Urruah had leaped down beside it and was leaning against it, head to one side as if listening.

"Locked?" Rhiow said.

"Not this time, for a change. I think the new office staff are finally learning." He looked thoughtfully at the doorknob.

The doorknob turned: the door clicked and swung open, inward. Beyond it was a curtain: Urruah peered through it. "Clear," he said a moment later, and slipped through.

Rhiow and Saash went after him, Arhu followed them. The little office had several desks in it, very standard-issue, banged-up gray metal desks, all littered with paperwork and manuals and computer terminals and piles of computer-printed documentation. More golden light came in from larger windows set at the same height as those out in the roof space.

"Some
ehhif
who help run the station work here during the 'weekdays,' " Rhiow said to Arhu as they headed for the office's outer door, "but this is a 'weekend,' so there's no fear we'll run into them now. We're seven 'stories,' or
ehhif
-levels, over the main concourse; there's a stepping-tree, a 'stairway' they call it, down to that level. That's where we're headed."

Urruah reared up to touch the outer door with one paw, spoke in a low yowl to the workings in its lock: the door obligingly clicked open with a soft squeal of hinges, letting them out into the top of a narrow cylindrical stairwell lit from above by a single bare bulb set in the white-painted ceiling. The staircase before them was a spiral one, of openwork cast iron, and the spiral was tight. While Saash pushed the door shut again and spoke it locked, Urruah ran on down the stairs two or three at a time, as he usually did, and Rhiow found herself half-hoping (for Arhu's benefit) that he would take at least one spill down the stairs, as he also usually did. But the Tom was apparently watching over Urruah this evening. Urruah vanished into the dimness below them without incident, leaving Rhiow and Saash pacing behind at a more sedate speed, while behind them came Arhu, cautiously picking his way.

Faint street sounds came to them through the walls as they went, but slowly another complex of sounds became more assertive: rushing, echoing sounds, and soft rumbles more felt than genuinely heard. At one point near the bottom of the stairs, Rhiow paused to look over her shoulder and saw Arhu standing still about half a turn of the stairs above her, his ears twitching; his tail lashed once, hard, an unsettled gesture.

"It's like roaring," he said quietly. "A long way down…"

He's nervous about getting so close to where he almost came to grief,
Rhiow thought.
Well, if he's going to be working with us, he's just going to have to get used to it….
"It does sound that way at first," she said, "but you'd be surprised how fast you get used to it. And at how many things there are to distract you. Come on…."

He looked down at her, then experimentally jumped a couple of steps down, Urruah-style, caught up with her, and passed her by, bouncing downward from step to step with what looked like a little more confidence.

She followed him. In the dimness below them, she could see a wedge of light spilling across the floor: Urruah had already cracked open the bottom door. Through it, the echoes of the footfalls and voices of
ehhif
came more strongly.

"Now get sidled," Saash was saying, "and keep your wits about you: this isn't like running around under the cars in the garage.
Ehhif
can move pretty fast, especially when they're late for a train, and you haven't lived until you've tripped someone and had them drop a few loaded Bloomie's bags on you."

Arhu merely looked amused. He had sidled himself between one breath and the next. "I don't see why
we
should hide," he said. "If you take care of this place, like you say, then we have as much right to be here as all of them do."

"The right, yes," Rhiow said. "In our law. But not in
theirs.
And in wizardry, where one species is more vulnerable than the other to having its effectiveness damaged by the conflict of their two cultures, the more powerful or advanced culture gives way graciously. That's us."

"That's not the way People should do it," Arhu growled as they stepped cautiously out into the Graybar passage, one of the two hallways leading from Lexington Avenue to the concourse. "I don't know a lot about
hauissh
yet, but I do know you have to fight to get a good position, or take it, and keep it."

"Sometimes," Urruah said. "In the cruder forms of the game… yes. But when you start playing
hauissh
for real someday, you'll learn that some of the greatest players win by doing least. I know one master who dominates a whole square block in the West Eighties and never even so much as shows himself through a window: the other People there know his strength so well, they resign every day at the start of play."

"What kind of
hauissh
is that?" Arhu said, disgusted. "No blood, no glory—"

"No scars," Urruah said, with a broad smile, looking hard at Arhu.

Arhu looked away, his ears down.

"Last time they counted his descendants," Urruah added, "there were two hundred prides of them scattered all over the Upper West Side. Don't take subdued or elegant play as a sign that someone can't attract the queens."

They came out into the concourse and paused by the east gallery, looking across the great echoing space glinting with polished beige marble and limestone, and golden with the brass of rails and light fixtures and the great round information desk and clock in the middle. The sound of
ehhif
footsteps was muted at the moment; there were perhaps only a hundred of them in the Terminal at any given moment now, coming and going from the Sunday evening trains at a leisurely rate. Then even the footstep-clatter was briefly lost in the massive bass note of the Accurist clock.

Arhu looked up and around nervously. "Just a time-message," Saash said. "Nine hours past high-Eye."

"Oh. All right. What are all those metal tubes stuck all over everything? And why are all the walls covered with that cloth stuff?"

"They're renovating," said Saash. "Putting back old parts of the building that were built over, years ago… getting rid of things that weren't in the original plans. It should look lovely when they're done. Right now it just means that the place is going to be noisier than usual for the next couple of years…."

"The worldgates have occasionally gotten misaligned due to the construction work," Rhiow said. "It means we've had to keep an extra close eye on them. Sometimes we have to move a gate's 'opening' end, its portal locus, closer to one platform or away from another. It was the gate by Track Thirty-two, last time: they were installing some kind of air-conditioning equipment on Thirty-two, and we had to move the locus far enough away to keep the
ehhif
workmen from seeing wizards passing through it, but not so close to any of the other gates' loci to interfere with them…."

"What would happen if they
did
interfere?" Arhu said, with just a little too much interest for Rhiow's liking.

Urruah sped up his pace just enough for Arhu to suddenly look right next to him and see a tom two and a half times his size, and maybe three times his weight. "What would happen if I pushed those big ears of yours down their earholes, and then put my claws far enough down your throat to pull them out that way?" Urruah said in a conversational tone. "I mean, what would be your opinion of that?"

They all kept walking, and when Arhu finally spoke again, it was in a very small voice. "That would be bad," he said.

"Yes. That would be
very
bad. Just like coincident portal loci would be bad. If you were anywhere nearby when such a thing happened, it would feel similar. But it would be your whole body… and it would be
forever.
So wouldn't you agree that these are both events that, as responsible wizards, we should do all we can to forestall?"