by Diane Duane
The Book of Night with Moon
( Feline Wizards - 1 )
Diane Duane
Epic fantasy about a group of super-intelligent cats. Rhiow appears to be a pampered New York pet cat, but in reality she is a wizard, working alongside human beings and other animals to protect the world from the forces of darkness, which are attacking the city via the underground tunnels.
The Book of Night with Moon
by Diane Duane
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
For Keith De Candido
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.
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.[1]
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
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.
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-wal
led 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, 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…
* * *
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 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.
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.