Diane Duane - The Book of Night with Moon

Just west of Third on Fifty-sixth, Rhiow paused, looking down from an iron-spiked connecting wall between two brownstones, and caught a familiar glimpse of a blotched brown shape, skulking wide-eyed in the shadows of the driveway-tunnel leading into the parking garage near the corner. This was one of the more convenient parts of Rhiow’s morning run: a handy meeting place fairly close to the Terminal, where the ehhif knew her and her team, and didn’t mind them. Not for the first time, Rhiow considered Saash’s luck in getting herself adopted by the ehhif who worked there. Luck, though, she thought, almost certainly has nothing to do with it, in our line of work,…

She jumped down from the wall, ran under a parked car, looked both ways from underneath it, and hurried across the street. Saash, now crouched down against the wall of the garage, saw her coming, got up, and stretched fore and aft.

She was a long-limbed, delicate-featured, skinny little thing. Rhiow wondered one more time whatever could be the matter with her that she didn’t seem able to put on weight: Saash was hardly there. Her coloring supported the illusion. In coat she was a hlah’feihre, what ehhif called a tortoiseshell—but not one of the bold, splashy ones. Saash’s coat was patched softly in many shades and shapes of brown, gray, and beige, all running into one another: in some lights, and most especially in shadow, you could look straight at her and hardly see her. It was probably something to do with her kittenhood, which she rarely discussed—but hiding had been a large part of it, and you got the feeling Saash wouldn’t be done with that aspect of her life for a long time, if ever. She had never quite grown into her ears, and the size of them gave her a look of eternal kittenishness— while the restless way they swiveled made her look eternally wary and uneasy, despite the ironic humor in her big gold eyes.

“ ’Luck,” Rhiow said, and Saash immediately turned her back, sat down, put her left back leg over her left shoulder, and began to wash furiously. Rhiow sat down, too, and sighed. Another cat would probably have sniffed and walked off at the rudeness, but Rhiow had been working long enough with Saash to know it wasn’t intentional.

“Is it bad this morning?” Rhiow said.

Saash kept washing. “Not like last week,” she muttered. “Abha’h put that white stuff on me again, the powder.” There was another second’s satisfied pause. “I took a few strips off him while he was putting it on, anyway. Whether the junk does help or not, it still smells disgusting. And the taste—!”

Rhiow gazed off in the direction of the street, waiting for Saash to finish washing, and making faces at the flea powder, and scratching, and shaking herself. Rhiow privately doubted that the problem was fleas. Saash simply seemed to be allergic to her own skin, and itched all the time, no matter what anyone did: she couldn’t make more than a move or two before stopping to put her fur back in order, even when it was perfectly smooth. When they had started working together, Rhiow had thought the constant grooming was vanity, and blows had been exchanged over it. Now she knew better.

Saash shook her coat out and sat down again properly. “There,” she said. “I’m sorry, Rhi. ’Luck to you too.”

“You heard?”

“They called me,” Saash said in her little breathy voice, “right in the middle of breakfast. Typical.”

“I was sleeping myself. Any sign of Urruah yet?”

Saash looked disdainful. “He’s probably snoring at the bottom of that Dumpster he was describing in such ecstatic detail yesterday.” She made an ironic breath-smelling face, one suggestive of a cat whiffing something better suited for a houff to roll in than for any kind of meal.

“Saash,” Rhiow said, “for pity’s sake, don’t start in on him this morning: I can’t cope. —Were They more specific with you than They were with me? I got a sense that something was wrong with the north-side gate again, but that was all.”

Saash looked over her shoulder and washed briefly down her back. “ Au, it’s the north one, all right,” she said, straightening up again. “It looks like someone did an out-of-hours access and forgot that the north gate’s diurnicity timings change when it’s accessed. So it’s sitting there still patent.”

“And after we just got the hihhhh thing fixed…!” Rhiow lashed her tail in irritation.

“My thought exactly.”

“But who in the worlds would be accessing it out-hours without checking the rates first? That’s pretty basic stuff. Even ehhif know enough to check the di-timings before they transit, and they can’t even see the strings.”

“Well, whoever came through didn’t bother,” Saash said. “Until we close it down again, the gate won’t be able to slide back where it belongs for the day shift. And to get it shut, we’ll have to reweave the whole vhai’d portal substrate until the egress stringing matches the access web again.”

Rhiow sighed. “After we spent all of yesterday doing just that. Urruah’s going to love this.”

“Whenever he wakes up,” Saash said dryly, sitting down to scratch again; but whatever else she might have said was lost as her ehhif cams bustling up from down the ramp.

“Oh, poor kitty, you still scratchin’, I gotta do you again!” Abad cried as he came toward them, feeling around for something in the deep pockets of his stained blue coverall. Abad was a living example of the old saying that an ehhif either looks like its cat to begin with or gets that way after a while—a tall, thin tom , fine-boned, brown-complected, with what looked like an eternal expression of concern. As Abad finally came up with the canister of flea powder, Saash took one wide-eyed look, said “ Oh no!” and took off around the corner of the garage door and down the sidewalk toward Lexington. By the time he got into the open doorway and started looking for her, Saash had already done a quick sidle. Rhiow got up and strolled out onto the sidewalk after them. Abad stood there looking first one way, then the other, seeing nothing. But Rhiow, as she came up beside him, saw Saash slow down by the corner of the apartment building and look over her shoulder at Abad, then sit down again and start washing behind one ear.

“Aah, she hidin’ now,” Abad said sadly, and bent down to scratch Rhiow, whom he at least could still see. “Hey, nice to see you, Miss Black Cat, but my little friend, she gone now, I don’ know where. You come back later and she be back then, she play with you then, eh?”

“Sure,” Rhiow said, and purred at the ehhif for kindness’ sake; “sure, I’ll come back later.” She stood up on her hind legs and rubbed hard against Abad’s leg as he stroked her. Then she went after Saash, who glanced up at her a little guiltily as she stood again.

“You do that to him often?” Rhiow said. “I’d be ashamed.”

“We all sidle when we have to,” Saash said. “And if your fur tasted like mine does right now, so would you. Come on, you may as well… we’re close, and enough people are out now that they’ll slow us down if we’re seen.”

Rhiow sighed. “I suppose. It’s getting late, isn’t it?”

Saash squinted in the general direction of the sun. “I make it ten of six, ehhif- time .”

Rhiow frowned. “That first train from North White Plains is due at twenty-three after, and we can’t let it run through a patent gate. Which Dumpster did he say it was?”

“Fifty-third and Lex,” Saash said. “By that new office building that’s going up. There’s a MhHonalh’s right next to it, and the workmen keep throwing their uneaten food in there.”