The Book of Night With Moon (7 page)

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl looked at her. "You're thinking of rogues," he said. "I'd think you would be, too, Har'lh," Rhiow said, "the evidence being what it is at the moment."

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

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

"If you like… but I'm not requiring it of you."

"I know. I'd just like to be sure the trouble isn't some kind of structural problem."

"All right. But watch yourself down there."

"I will, Advisory."

"Anything else I need to know about this?"

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

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

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

"Feline? Human?"

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

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

"No signs of trouble."

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

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

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

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

Carl nodded. "I'll take One-sixteen home and check it," he said.

"Don't be seen," Rhiow said. "Nothing runs on the lower levels on Sunday."

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

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

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

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

Carl waved the cappucino at her. "I drink a lot of this. I get jangled, but I survive."