The Book of Night With Moon (26 page)

He looked up, openly scared now.

"Yes," Saash said. "Well, you plainly know now what the Whisperer's voice sounds like. If she goes out of her way to warn you about her sister…"

Rhiow flicked one ear forward and back.
Well, madam, you're taking proper care of him. But what about
me
? What am I supposed to make of
this
? It makes no sense whatever—
She moved a little farther down to look at the rest of the scraped-off papyrus.—
semit-her-abt-uaa-s; mhetchet-nebt-Tuatiu ash-hrau khesef-haa-heseq—

Rhiow stopped, feeling something suddenly shift in the back of her mind. In the darkness there, light moved, reshaped itself, recognizing something that belonged to it.

The words were winged: they flew, fluttered in the darkness inside her, lodged among the other scrawls and curves of light. A moment's shifting, shuffling, as things resettled themselves. Then quiet again… but it was an unsettling sort of silence.

In that darkness in the back of her mind, though, there was no dramatic change: absolutely nothing was happening. Rhiow looked up, licking her nose uneasily. The others had moved on again. "Here's what the story's all about," Urruah said. "The first battle…"

They went to look at the glass case. Near the head of the long rolled-out papyrus was a picture of a huge Tree, under which stood a slightly disreputable looking tabby-tom, holding a great curved knife or sword in one hand, and using it to chop a large snake into ample chunks, the way someone in a hurry might cut up salami. The furious snake glared at the Cat, the impression being that simply being cut in pieces was not going to slow it down permanently.

Rhiow, her tail still lashing with bemusement, jumped down from the case and went to join them. "The Cat who stood under the Great Tree on the night the enemies of Iau, the agents of evil, were destroyed," said Saash.

"Urrua," Rhiow said. "He who Scars, the Lightning-Clawed—"

Arhu, who had been recovering a little, looked up at Urruah and started to grin. Urruah grimaced. "It was a pun," Urruah said, very annoyed. "My mother loved puns." For in Ailurin, adding the terminal aspirant to the Great Tom's name turned it into
urruah,
"flat-nose," a joke-name for someone who'd acquired so much scar tissue there that he could hardly breathe.

Rhiow smiled slightly, seeing Arhu getting ready to start teasing again. Saash said, "It says, 'There dropped from the Queen one last child, and he Burned dark and tore Her in his passing. And still His children tear Hers as He tore, when queen and tom come together.' " Urruah rolled his eyes slightly, as he tended to when this part of the full litany was recited. " 'Murderer of the young is He, sly Trickster, silent-roaming sire of all dangers that abide our people: but sudden Savior also, one-eyed Wanderer in the dark, midnight Lover, lone Singer, He Who Scars and is Scarred: Urrua, Whom the Queen bore last, the Afterthought, Her gift to Herself.' "

At the phrase "murderer of the young," Arhu looked suddenly at Urruah, who at least had the grace not to smile. When Rhiow finished, Arhu sat, looked down the hall and up again at the papyrus, and said, "So when was this big fight?"

"A couple million years ago," Saash said.

"The beginning of time," said Urruah.

"Now," said Rhiow.

Arhu looked from one to another of them, baffled. "Well," Rhiow said, "all three are true, really. This universe was barely cooling down from the fireball of its birth when the fight started. It's been refought many times since, though some battles stand out. And…" she sighed, looked down at Arhu, "we're going out to fight it again, this afternoon. And you're coming with us."

He stared at her…

…then leapt up and yowled with joy.

People all around the big room stared, didn't see anything, went back to looking at the exhibits. "This is
great!"
Arhu yelled. "We're going to have a fight! This is going to be
terrific!
When can we leave? Let's go now!"

More heads were turning all around. Rhiow looked at Urruah.
Not even you,
she said silently,
could have been this excited about the prospect of going into a fight that could possibly get you killed.

I don't know,
Urruah said, seriously seeming to consider it.
Maybe I was.

Rhiow sighed again. "Let's get you out of here," she said to Arhu, "before security shows up." She glanced over Arhu's head at the others. "We need to confer and eliminate any duplicate spells you're carrying… and then we've got to get down to the Terminal. Our backup will be waiting."

They headed out. As they went, Rhiow threw one last look over her shoulder at the statue of the Queen.
What am I looking for?
she asked herself a moment later. Poor rude rendering of another species' mystery that it was, done by creatures who couldn't ever quite get clear on the concept— But even so, sometimes it was consoling to have a concrete image to look at, however misleading one knew the concreteness to be, or the image of a regard that might actually fix on you.

The stone Queen, however, looked thoughtfully out into the dim blue space of the Egyptian Collection, apparently thinking her own thoughts. It was an expression that suggested to the viewer,
What are you looking at Me for? Go work out your own salvation.

It was, of course, the only kind of look most People would accept from their Maker. But Rhiow, at this moment, found herself thinking:

Maybe I've been with
ehhif
too long….

She went after the other three.

Did you get what you came for?
Saash said.

Rhiow shivered.
I think a little bit more,
she said.

T
he lunch rush was just beginning out in the streets, but there wasn't much the team could do about that except hug the building side of the sidewalk, all the way down, and try to keep from being trampled. It was a relief to get into Grand Central, where few people hugged the walls: the crush was in the middle, a river of legs and briefcases and shopping bags, flowing faster in the center of the stream than by the banks.

Rhiow and her team made their way down to Track 30. She was relieved, on passing the Italian deli, to find it so completely thronged with
ehhif
that not even the most reckless kitling could have gotten near it without doing violence to the crowd. Even so, Arhu threw a longing glance at it as they passed, then looked guiltily at Rhiow.

"Maybe later," she said, "if you're good."
And we're all still in one piece…

A train from Rye had just come in, and the last of its passengers were filtering off. Far down the platform, off to one side, stood two
ehhif
watching the others get off the train: a boy and a girl. They were young; Rhiow was no expert on ages, but she thought perhaps the young queen-
ehhif
was fourteenish, the tom a year or so younger. They looked like anyone else who might have come off the train— both wearing shorts and oversized T-shirts and beat-up running shoes, the queen wearing a fanny pack: a couple of suburban kids, apparently fresh in from up Westchester for a good day's hanging out. But these two had something none of the other commuters had— the shift and tangle of hyperstrings about them, which meant that they too were sidled.

"Prompt," Saash said, as they walked down the platform toward the two.

"Har'lh's plainly been keeping an eye on things," Rhiow said.
Good. Because if we need help, I'd prefer it to be the kind that an Advisory would send…

As the team came up to them, the two young
ehhif
hunkered down to a level more comfortable for conversation. "We're on errantry," said the young queen, "and we greet you."

"You're well met on the errand," Rhiow said. "We can definitely use some help on this one."

"Yeah, that's what Carl said. I'm Nita; this is Kit."

"Rhiow; and Urruah there, and Saash; and Arhu—"

The young queen-
ehhif
looked at Arhu with interest. "You're new to this, aren't you," she said.

He gave her a look. "So what?"

"Hey, take it easy," she said. "You just reminded me a little of my sister, that's all."

"The day I look like any
ehhif
's sister—"

Nita smiled, a little crookedly. "Sounds like her, too," she said, under her breath, to her partner.

"She meant only," said the young tom-
ehhif,
"that her sister just passed Ordeal a little while ago."

Arhu blinked at that. Rhiow said to him, "It happens sometimes that you get littermates who're wizards. Not so often as it used to: the tendency is for the trait to skip a couple of generations between occurrences in a family."

"Yeah," Kit said. "My dad says he thinks it's so your parents won't be too scared to have more kids… and so that you won't, either."

"I thought
ehhif
wizards usually kept their business secret from nonwizards," Saash said, curious. "Supposedly humans don't believe in wizardry… is that right?"

"Mostly they don't. Oh, we keep it private from everybody but family. It's the wizard's choice, in our species. Hide it or spill it, you can get in nearly as much trouble either way. But I guess we're lucky… our parents coped pretty well after the initial shock, though we still have a little trouble with them every now and then." Kit looked around him. "It's been pretty noisy down here this morning— they were pulling up a piece of track down there. Had to have jackhammers used on it: the guys said it had been melted right into the concrete. I take it that means this gate is the busted one."

Rhiow flirted her tail in agreement. "Yes. We'll be using a different one for our access, though: the Lexington Avenue local gate— it's had the least use lately. Har'lh tells me you've worked with it before?"

"Yeah," Nita said, "when its locus was still anchored upstairs. We used it for a rapid-transit jump when it was dislocated, some years ago. It was the usual thing— someone was digging up the potholes on Forty-second and messing with the high-tension power cables during a sunspot maximum. The combined structural and electromagnetic disruptions made the gate's stabilizer strings pop out of the anchor stratum, and the portal locus came loose and jumped sixty stories straight up." She smiled a small, dry smile. "Tom and Carl said that getting it back where it belonged, afterward, was interesting. That was you, was it?"

"Not me," Rhiow said, "my predecessor, Ffairh. He told me about it, though."

"And then after all that, you had to move it over to Lex, didn't you? But they'd moved the deli it was in back of when the construction started here."

"That's right, when they started renovating the Hyatt passageway. Everything's been pretty ripped up lately…." Rhiow looked around her. "Well, your expertise will be welcome… we're going a long way down on this run, and keeping the gate anchored and patent is going to be important."

"Shouldn't be a problem," Kit said. "Carl says you took a lot of care last time to fasten the gate down good and tight. We'll make sure it stays stuck open for you while you're down there. There shouldn't be any way a patent gate can be dislocated or interfered with."

Rhiow had her doubts this week. "That's what conventional wisdom would say," she said, "but the gates' behavior lately hasn't been conventional."

Nita shook her head. "We'll do the best we can for you," she said. "If we need help, we'll yell for Carl."

"Right. Let's get started," Saash said, and headed over for the gate.

It was as they had left it the other day: hanging there, the warp and weft of the hyperstrings glowing a slightly duller red than before, token of a lack of extension in the last day. Once more Saash sat up on her haunches, reached in, and plucked at the gate's diagnostic strings: they followed her claw outward, and light sheened down them, violet in the darkness. "Same as yesterday," she said to the two young wizards.

"Looks perfectly normal," Kit said.