Duane,Diane - Wizards - Feline Wizards 1 - The Book Of Night With Moon

THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

by DIANE DUANE

A Note on Feline Linguistics

Ailurin is not a spoken language, or not simply spoken. Like all the human languages, it has a physical

component, the cat version of "body language," and a surprising amount of information is passed through

the physical component before a need for vocalized words arises.

Even people who haven't studied cats closely will recognize certain "words" in Ailurin: the rub against a

friendly leg, the arched back and fluffed fur of a frightened cat, the crouch and stare of the hunter. All of

these have strictly physical antecedents and uses, but they are also used by cats for straight forward

communication of mood or intent. Many subtler signs can be seen by even a human student: the sideways

flirt of the tail that says "I don't care" or "I wonder if I can get away with this..." the elaborate yawn in

another cat's face, the stiff-legged, arch-backed bounce, which is the cat equivalent of making a face and

jumping out at someone, shouting "Boo!" But where gestures run out, words are used—more involved

than the growl of threat of purr of contentment, which are all most humans hear of intercat communication.

"Meowing" is not counted here, since cats rarely seem to meow at each other. That type of vocalization is

usually a "pidgin" language used for getting humans' attention: the cat equivalent of "Just talk to them

clearly and loudly and they'll get what you mean sooner or later." Between each other, cats sub-vocalize

using the same mechanism that operates what some authorities call "the purr box," a physiological

mechanism that is not well understood but seems to have something to do with the combined vibration of

air in the feline larynx and blood in the veins and arteries of the throat. To someone with a powerful

microphone, a cat speaking Ailurin seems to be making very soft meowing and purring sounds ranging up

and down several octaves, all at a volume normally inaudible to humans.

This vocalized part of Ailurin is a "pitched" language, like Mandarin Chinese, more sung than spoken. It is

mostly vowel-based—no surprise in a species that cannot pronounce most human-style consonants. Very

few noncats have ever mastered it: not only does any human trying to speak it sound to a cat as if he were

shouting every word, but the delicate intonations are filled with traps for the unwary or unpracticed. Auo

hwaai hhioehhu uaeiiiaou, for example, may look straightforward: "I would like a drink of milk" is the

Cat-Human Phrasebook definition. But the people writing the phrasebook for the human ear are laboring

under a terrible handicap, trying to transliterate from a thirty-seven-vowel system to an alphabet with only

five. A human misplacing or mispronouncing only one of the vowels in this phrase will find cats smiling

gently at him and asking him why he wants to feed the litter-box to the taxicab? ... this being only one of

numerous nonsenses that can be made of the above example.

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So communication from our side of things tends to fall back on body language (stroking, or throwing

things, both of which cats understand perfectly well) and a certain amount of monologue—which human-

partnered cats, with some resignation, accept as part of the deal. For their communications with most

human beings, the cats, like so many of us, tend to fall back on shouting. For this book's purposes, though,

all cat-to-human speech, whether physical or vocal, is rendered as normal dialogue: that's the way it seems

to the cats, after all.*

One other note: two human-language terms, "queen" and "tom," are routinely used to translate the Ailurin

words sh'heih and sth'heih. "Female" and "male" don't properly translate these words, being much too

sexually neutral—which cats, in their dealings with one another, emphatically are not. The Ailurin word

ffeih is used for both neutered males and spayed females.

—DD

*Cat thoughts and silent communications are rendered in italics.

I am the Cat who took up His stance

by the Persea Tree, on the night we

destroyed the enemies of God....

Pert em hru, c. 2800 b.c., tr. Budge

Bite: bite hard, and find the tenth life.

--The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye

(feline recension of The Book of Night with Moon): Ixiii, 18

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.

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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,

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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....

-=O=-***-=O=-

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

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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.

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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."

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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

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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.

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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

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THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

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

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Duane, Diane - Wizards - Feline Wizards 1 - The Book Of Night With Moon

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