Done! Saash shouted into the weave. It snapped completely flat, a dazzling tapestry along which many-colored fires rolled outward to the borders, bounced, rippled in again. The dark crack in the air slammed shut. Behind it, the blind white eye of the 6:23's locomotive slid ponderously at them in a roar of diesel thunder. Rhiow and Urruah threw themselves to the right of the track, under the platform; Saash leapt to the left. The loco roared straight through the rewoven and now-harmless gate substrate, stirring it not in the slightest, and brakes screeched as the train gradually slid down to the end of its platform and gently stopped.
The train sat there ticking and hissing gently to itself, the huge wheels of one car not two inches from Rhiow's and Urruah's noses. "A little close," Urruah said from where he crouched, wide-eyed, a few feet away.
"A little," Saash said, from the far side. "Rhiow? I want to do some low-level diagnosis on this gate before we leave. The other three I can check from here; but I want to look into this one's log weave and see who left it in this state."
"Absolutely," Rhiow said. "Wait till they move this thing."
It usually took fifteen or twenty minutes for the train to empty out and for the crew to finish checking it. Urruah rose after getting his breath back. "I need to stretch," he said, and walked off to the end of the platform. Rhiow went after him.
Down the track they met Saash, who had had the same idea. At the sight of her, Urruah made a face, his nose twitching. "Aaurh up a tree, look at you! And you stink!"
Saash made a matching face, for once unwilling to sit down and wash. But then she grinned. "Your delicate sensibilities?" Saash said sweetly.
Urruah had the grace to look sheepish. He wandered away through the carnage. "Not a trick you'd want to use every day. But effective…!"
"It saved us," Rhiow said softly. "And them. Nice work, Saash."
Saash looked wry. "I know what I'm good for. Fighting isn't it."
"Technical expertise, though…" Rhiow said.
"Rats," said Saash, "make a specific shape in space. There's a way they affect strings in their area, one that no other species duplicates. There's a way to exploit that." She shrugged her tail; but she smiled.
"Keep that spell loaded," Rhiow said, heartfelt. "We may need it again."
From down the track came a rumble and groan of wheels as the train started backing out into the tunnel where all the upper-level tracks merged. Rhiow and the team moved a couple of tracks eastward to avoid it, Urruah wandering ahead. "So what will we do after this?" he said.
"Get cleaned up," Rhiow said, with longing.
"I mean after that…. We could go down to the Oyster Bar and romance the window lady."
Rhiow flicked an ear in mild exasperation, wondering how Urruah could think of any food, even oysters, when surrounded by a smell like this. But they were a passion of his. Occasionally Rhiow had secretly followed Urruah down to the restaurant's pedestrian-service window after finishing work, and had seen him stand there in line with the other commuters— provoking much amused comment— and then wheedle bluepoints out of one of the window staff, a big broad blond lady, by force of purr alone. For her own part, Rhiow would never have done something so high-profile in the terminal itself. But Urruah had no shame, and Rhiow had long since given up trying to teach him any.
"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.
Two
Here 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 Rome
o 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."
Rhiow got up and shook herself again, not that it helped. "Well, give T'hom my best when you hear from him," she said. "Go well, Advisory… and watch out for that caffeine."
"Dai stihó, Rhiow," Carl said. "Stay in touch. And mind the rats."
"You got that in one," she said, and headed down the stairs.
* * *
When Rhiow got back down to the tracks, she found that Saash and Urruah had moved over to the far side, near the wall. Between them lay the kitling, now curled into a tight ball. He was cleaner: Saash was washing him, and looked up from that now as Rhiow came over.
"How is he?" Rhiow said.
"He woke for a moment," Saash said, "but went right out again— understandable. No bones broken, no internal injuries. He's just bitten up and shocked to exhaustion. Sleep's best for him, and a wizardry to kill the filth in the bites. But not here."
"No, indeed not," Rhiow said, glancing around. No ehhif terminal staff were out on the tracks as yet, but it wouldn't do for any to come along and find this kitling. The ehhif 's relations with terminal cats had become somewhat difficult over the last few years. Every now and then the place was "swept," and sick or indigent cats found there were taken away, along wi
th sick or indigent ehhif who had also taken refuge in the tunnels for shelter rather than food. "Well, he's got to have somewhere to rest. But I can't help: the outside places near my den are too dangerous for a kit."
"I live in a Dumpster," Urruah said, with execrable pride. "There would be room… but I don't think it's the place for him if he's sick."
"No," Rhiow said, "but it's good of you to offer." She didn't say what she was thinking: that attempting to keep a young tom barely out of kittenhood in close company with a tom of siring age was a recipe for disaster, whether the tom lived in a Dumpster or a palace, and whether he was a wizard or not. Mature toms couldn't help their attitude toward kittens in general, and male ones in particular, no matter how they tried.
"I think I can put him up," Saash said. "There are a lot of places way down and back in the garage where the ehhif never go. One big high ledge that I use sometimes will serve: it's four levels down. None of the ehhif go down there except to fetch cars out, and not often— it's long-term storage space. This kitling won't be heard, even if he cries, and if I have to, I can lay a barrier to hold either him or the sound in till he's well enough to go."
"You'll have to spend some time there to be sure he's settled," Rhiow said, "and if he catches you, Abha'h will powder you again—"
Saash hissed softly, but the sound was resigned. "I suppose it's in a good cause," she said. "And I have to eat sometime; he'd catch me then anyway. Will you two lend a hand with the jump? I don't propose to carry him all the way home in my mouth."
"No problem. Urruah?"
"As long as she does the circle," Urruah said, emitting a cavernous yawn. The morning's exertions were beginning to catch up with him.
Rhiow yawned, too, then laughed. "Quick," she said, "before we all fall asleep where we stand…"
Saash glanced around her, eyeing the area, and with a quick practiced flick of her tail laid out the boundaries of the spell, sweeping the area clean of random string influences and defining the area where she wanted the new ones to anchor. When the anchors were in place, looking like a cage of vertical bright lines around the edges of the circle, Saash added the only ingredient needed: the words. She said one word in the Speech, and the anchors leaned inward above them, knotting into the tip of a cone. Then three more words— the medium-precision versions of Saash's and Rhiow's and Urruah's names, and a fourth generic medium-precision term for their "passenger," with only the physical characteristics of his size and color added in, since they didn't know his name or anything about his personality. With the details completed, the dirt and cinders under their feet went webbed with more bright lines, the anchors that would hold the four of them inside the spell. "Location's coming," Saash said to Urruah. "Ready?"