The Book of Night With Moon

  Why did my light go out?

  Rhiow went back in thought, suddenly, to her first diagnostic on the malfunctioning gate, the other day. The gate had as much as told her that it had been interfered with, somehow, during its function.

  But nothing should be able to produce such interference except more wizardry.

  Another wizard…

  She shied away from that thought. There were rogues, though they weren't much discussed. The common knowledge was that wizardry did not live in the unwilling heart: a wizard uncomfortable with his power, unable to bear the ethical and practical choices it implied, soon lost the power, and any sense of ever having had it. But a wizard who was quite comfortable with the Art, and then started to find ways to use it that weren't quite ethical…

  Normally such wizards didn't last long. The universe, to which wizardry was integral, had a way of twisting itself into unexpected shapes that would interfere with a rogue's function. Equally, there was no particular safety in assuming that a rogue was willingly cooperating with the Lone One— or with what It stood for. Like many another ill-tempered craftsman, sa'Rráhh the Destroyer was careless with her tools, as likely to throw them away or break them in spite as to reward them for services done. So when rogues appeared, they tended to be a temporary phenomenon.

  Yet a personally maintained wizardry, once done and set in motion, shouldn't be able to be interfered with.

  Except by the wizard who created it…

  Rhiow blinked once or twice as that thought intruded.

  Did something affect me down there?

  She thought hard. The recurring difficulties she had been having with threatening imagery…

  Surely not.

  But when had she ever had anything like that happen before? Certainly she had been scared to the ends of her guard-hairs the last couple of times she'd been Downside. But nothing had gone wrong inside her head.

  There were ways, though, to get inside another being's mind against its will. Wizards knew about them… but did not use such "back doors" except in emergencies: they were highly unethical.

  But if one of my team—

  She put the thought aside. It was ridiculous. Saash would never do any such thing: her commitment to the Powers, and to Rhiow personally, was total. She was incorruptible, Rhiow would swear. Urruah was, too: he was just too stubborn and opinionated, once he had his mind made up about which side he was on, to change without signs as readable as an earthquake.

  But Arhu…

  Rhiow found herself thinking, once more, about the weak link, the new link, the new "member" of the team.

  That was something she was going to have to deal with, of course, and the sooner the better… how much she disliked the idea of having a team member simply thrust on them, even if it was by the Powers That Be. Teams of wizards came together willingly, for reasons of work and affinity… otherwise they fell apart under the strain of frequent exposures to life-or-death situations. Feline teams, made up of members of the most independent-minded species on the planet, had to have close personal relationships and had to be absolutely convinced of each other's reliability.

  One came by such certainty only slowly. She and Saash had started working together a while after they met, about a year after Rhiow had passed her Ordeal, maybe two years after Saash's. It had been a casual thing at first— pulling together to do an assigned job, then drifting apart again. But the "apart" periods had become fewer and fewer as they realized they had a specialization in common. This was a commonplace phenomenon among wizards. After the first blaze of power associated with your Ordeal, the power begins to fade somewhat with age: but you soon find something to specialize in, and make up by concentration and narrowing of focus what you lose in sheer brute force, becoming, in a phrase Rhiow had heard Har'lh use once, "a rifle instead of a fire hose." After a while she and Saash started to be "listed" together in the Whispering as "associated talents," the Manual's delicate way of suggesting that they were beginning to become a team. Some time after that, Urruah turned up in their professional life as a "suggested adjunct" for a couple of missions, and simply became part of the team over time.

  There were still a lot of things they all didn't know about each other, but wizardry by no means required total disclosure, any more than relationships in the rest of life did. How many lives along you were, what you had gone through in this one… how much personal information came out, and when, was all a matter of trust and inclination, and the need for privacy that was inextricably part of feline life and which balanced them both.

  Rhiow would swear to the Queen's own face, though, that she knew Urruah and Saash well enough to say that neither of them would ever go rogue or sabotage a wizardry in process. If there had been sabotage today, its source was elsewhere.

  And as for Arhu…

  She sighed. She would have to deal with him tomorrow. But not before noontime, anyway. They would all need a good night's sleep tonight, odd as it was to be asleep now. Over the next few days, they could all get back to their normal schedules.

  She stretched out on the bed, rolled over so that her feet were in the air in what Hhuha described as the somebody-shot-my-cat position, and let herself drift off to sleep, but not before burping once, gently, as the pepperoni settled itself.

  * * *

  By noon the next day she was at the garage and was surprised to meet Saash by the door, lying sprawled well out of the way of the cars, but there was no sign of Arhu.

  "Sleeping," Saash said, washing one paw calmly.

  "He could probably use it."

  "Don't know, Rhi," Saash said, standing up and arching her back to stretch, then lying down again. "I wonder if he might not be better awake."

  "You saw the Eye, then."

  "I did. Risky business this, Rhi. He's likely to attract high-profile attention."

  "Believe me," Rhiow said, "it's on my mind. How did you sleep?"

  "After the jitters went away… well enough. But, Rhi, I'm not going down there again for a good long while, not if Iau Dam of Everything walks right in here and offers me Her job."

  "Don't see why we should," Rhiow said. "Even Ffairh went only three or four times in his career, and only once down deep."

  "May She agree with you," Saash said, and stood up— looked around carefully for any sign of Abad, and then scratched, and afterward sat down and began washing the fur into place again. "Meanwhile, are you going to let him sleep?"

  "No," Rhiow said. "And I have an excuse. Where's Urruah this morning?"

  "Off again. Something about his o'hra."

  "Spare me," Rhiow said, putting her whiskers forward. "Look, you get some more sleep if you can. I'll take him off your hands for the day: he can go with me to check the track-level gates out again this afternoon— I want to see if they've replaced that switching track yet. Maybe help them a little if I can, now that the problem with Thirty's solved. If you want me, call."

  "Thanks, Rhi," Saash said, and let out a cavernous yawn. "Don't wait for the call, though."

  Rhiow sidled herself and made her way up to the ledge where Saash slept. There was Arhu, curled up small and tight, as if trying to pass for a rock. His breathing was so shallow, it could hardly be seen.

  She hunkered down near him, and purred in his ear. There was no response.

  Right, she thought, and extended a claw, and sank it carefully into the ear closest to the ground.

  He whipped upright, eyes wide, and stared at her; then slumped back down again, the eyes relaxing again to a dozy look, with more than a touch of sullenness to it. "What?"

  "It's time you were awake," Rhiow said.

  "After yesterday? Come on." He put his head down again, closed his eyes.

  Rhiow put her claw into the other ear this time, and somewhat more forcefully. Arhu sat up, and hissed. "What?"

  "Trying not to see," Rhiow said, "won't help."

  He stared at her.

  "That's not what I'm here about," she said, "not mostly, anyw
ay. I promised to teach you to walk on air. The sooner we get this lesson handled, the better… since you're going to be going on rounds with us for a while yet, I think, and we can't slow ourselves down all the time by using non-climbing routes. Get up, have a wash, you'll have your first lesson, and then we'll get you something to eat. Some more of that pastrami, maybe?"

  Arhu looked at Rhiow with a little more interest. But the look suddenly went cooler. "I'm not going back down there," he said.

  "Good," Rhiow said, a little wearily, "then you and Saash are in complete agreement. It's not high on my list, either. Come on, Arhu, let's get a move on…."

  * * *

  The lesson went quickly: faster than Rhiow would have thought possible. It reinforced a feeling she had been having, that Arhu could learn with blinding speed when he wanted to… and right now he wanted to, in order to get rid of Rhiow.

  Purposely, therefore, Rhiow spun the lesson out. An hour and a half later, they were standing on the air directly above the roof of Grand Central, maybe thirty stories up, sidled, and fairly close to the windows of the Grand Hyatt. Rhiow had to smile, for many of those windows did not have their curtains pulled, and inside them, one could see (as one almost always could) the occasional pair of ehhif doing what Hhuha sometimes facetiously called "the cat-scaring thing." Rhiow could not remember when she had last been scared by it, even by some of the noises Hhuha and Iaehh made in their throes. Arhu, however, had been betrayed by his prurient curiosity, and was watching one pair of ehhif with complete and disgusted fascination.

  "Don't skywalk where you can easily be seen," Rhiow was saying, while wondering how much of what she told him was sinking in. "If you do it between buildings, make sure the walls are blind… or that you're sidled. Which has its dangers, too. Birds won't see you…."

  "That could be nice," Arhu said, briefly distracted; he glanced around and licked his chops.

  " 'Nice'? It could be fatal. There are more kinds of birds in this city than pigeons and sparrows and starlings. If one of the Princes of the Air hits you at eighty miles an hour, you'd better pray you're high enough up for a long-enough fall to reconstruct the wizardry."

  "The Princes—"

  "And a couple of 'princesses,' " Rhiow said. "There's a falcon-breeding program based on top of a building down near Central Park South. One of the hatchlings, about ten clutches ago, was a wizard: he's been promoted since, to Lord of the Birds of the East— a Senior for his kind. The rest of them are stuck-up as anything, think they're royalty, and kill more pigeons in a given day than they need to. They're a menace. Especially if they hit you with one of those little claw-fists of theirs, at high velocity, while you're invisible. The impact alone might kill you, for all I know. It sure kills the pigeons."

  She sighed then as the two ehhif fell together, exhausted, at the end of their bout. "Come on," she said. "Enough looking for one day…"

  Arhu's tail lashed. "If I stop looking at this," he said, almost absently, "I'll just see something else…."

  Yes, Rhiow thought, that's the problem, isn't it…. "Come on," she said, "and we'll go down to the concourse and see about that pastrami. You can't see things while you're eating, I don't think. The chewing is supposed to interfere."

  He looked at her with a glitter of hope in his eyes. "All right," he said.

  They walked down the air together, Arhu still doing it very slowly and carefully, as if it were a normal stairway; went right down to ground level, nearest the wall, and slipped inside the brass doors. Arhu looked around them as they walked together past the main waiting room toward the concourse.

  Suddenly Arhu stopped and stared. "What are those?" he whispered.

  Rhiow looked over into the waiting room. It had been one of the first areas to have its refurbishment completed, and was now routinely used for art exhibitions and receptions, and sometimes even parties. At the moment, though, the big airy space looked oddly empty, even though there were things in it… rather large things. In the center of the room, on a large black pedestal with velvet crowd-control ropes around it, caught in midstride— almost up on its toes, its tail stretched out horizontally and whipping out gracefully behind it— a dinosaur skeleton was mounted. Its huge head, empty-eyed, jaws open, seemed to glare down at the few casual observers who were strolling around it or pausing to read the informational plaque mounted nearby.

  Rhiow gazed up at it and smiled sardonically. "Yes," she said, "I guess it doesn't look much like what we were dealing with last night. A lot bigger. These are part of the Museum of Natural History's new exhibition… and the ehhif are all excited about it because now they think they know, from these new models, how the saurians really held themselves and moved."

  Arhu took a few steps toward the biggest of the mounted skeletons…. cocked his head to one side, and listened. After a moment, he said, "And those are real bones?"

  "They dig them up and wire them together," Rhiow said. "It always struck me as a little perverse. But then, they have no way of seeing what we saw last night."

  They walked on. "This place looked a lot different, the other night," Arhu said.

  "If it's any help, it never looks the same way twice to me," Rhiow said. "I mean, the physical structures are always the same, obviously— well, not always, not with all this renovation and with exhibitions coming and going out in front. But night and day pass, the light changes, the ehhif here are never the same ones at any given moment…. Though the city still isn't as big as you might think: you'll glimpse the occasional familiar face…"

  "That's not what I meant," Arhu said, more slowly, with a puzzled expression. "It was bigger, somehow. It echoed."

  "It does that more at night than in the daytime," Rhiow said. "Emptier."

  "No," Arhu said. "It was full; I saw it full. Or I think I do now." He stopped and stared at the concourse before him: a late lunchtime crowd, the crush easing somewhat. "I heard something… a lot of noise. I walked in to find out what it was. Then—" He shook his ears as if they hurt him. "I don't want to think about that," he said.

  "You're going to have to, sooner or later. But come on," Rhiow said. "Pastrami first."

  Rhiow came unsidled long enough to do her "trick" again for the man in the Italian deli, and he gave her not only pastrami but cheese as well. She shared the pastrami happily enough with Arhu but never got a chance to do so with the cheese: as soon as he smelled it, he immediately snatched the whole thing and gobbled it, almost choking himself— a topologically interesting sight, like watching a shark eat a mattress. "Oh, this is wonderful," Arhu attempted to say around the mouthful, "what is this?"

  "Solid milk," Rhiow said, just a little wistfully, watching it vanish. "They have a lot of kinds. This one's called 'mozzarella.' "

  "What a terrific invention!"

  "So ehhif are good for something after all?"

  He glanced sidewise at her, and his face shut down again. "Not much besides this."

  Rhiow held her peace until he finished the cheese. "Come on, get sidled," she said, "and we'll come back and see him again later: he's a soft-hearted type."

  They strolled a little way out into the concourse, sat down by the east wall, out of the way of people's feet, and well to one side of the cash machines. Arhu craned his neck back in the bright noon light and looked up at the ceiling again. "It is backward."

  "Yes… and you saw that before. Seeing is going to be a problem for you now… and a gift."

  "If it's a gift, they can take it back," he said bitterly. "I can't stop seeing things now. Though you were right about the chewing."

  "What kinds of things?"

  "I don't know what most of them are," Arhu said. "It's like when the Whisperer… when she tells you stuff… but there's always more than just what she tells you. I see pictures of things behind things behind things, and it all keeps changing. I don't know where to put my feet."

  "Images of alternate futures," Rhiow said, wondering if she now was beginning to understand Arhu's clumsiness. Ar
hu looked at her strangely.

  "Anything can change a future," Rhiow said. "Say one thing, do one thing, and it goes one way. Do something else, and it goes another. What would have happened if the Whisperer had offered you the Oath, and you'd said no? What if you'd slipped off the brickwork, the other night? What if the police-ehhif had come and caught you trying to steal the pastrami, and they had taken you away to an animal shelter? Each of your futures would have been different. And there are thousands more."

  "But which of them is real?" Arhu muttered.

  Rhiow swished her tail slowly from side to side. "All of them… until you make the choice, perform the act. You're only seeing possibilities."

  "But it's not just things behind things," Arhu said. "There are other images, things that stay."

  "The past," Rhiow said softly. "That at least holds still… some ways, anyway. Are you seeing your past lives?"

  "No," Arhu said, and then added, very surprised, "I think this is my first one."

  "We all have to start somewhere," Rhiow said.

  "How many have you had?"

  She gave him a look. "That's a question you don't usually ask. If the Person you're talking to volunteers the information—"

  He scowled, turned away. "That's what Saash said when I asked her what her Ordeal was like."

  "And she was right to say so," Rhiow said. "That's personal business, too, as personal among wizards as the issue of lives is among People. Go around asking People questions like that and you're going to get your ears boxed."

  Arhu looked scornful. "You guys are sure sensitive. Won't talk about this. Can't do that, somebody's feelings might get hurt. How do you ever get anything done?"

  "If there were more People in the world concerned about being sensitive," Rhiow said, rather shortly, "we'd have a lot less work to do…. Look, Arhu, you've had a bad time of it so far, I'd say. But we're trying to teach you the rules so that you'll have a better time later. All I can do is warn you how People are going to take the things you say. If you still say them…" She shrugged her tail.