Free The Book of Night With Moon by Diane Duane Page A

wizard, or dies. But for the time being, we're a pride in the nurturing sense as well as the professional one… and that's how it will be. You have any problems with that?
    She stared until Urruah dropped his eyes, though he growled in his throat as he did it. Rhiow cared not a dropped whisker for his noise. Urruah was still young in his wizardry but also profoundly committed to it, and though he could be lazy, tempery, and self-indulgent, he wouldn't attempt to deny responsibilities he knew were incumbent on him.
    "So," Rhiow said aloud. "Saash, you seem to have become queen for the day…."
    Saash made a small ironic smile, suggestive of someone enjoying a job more than she had expected. "It's all right, I can manage him. He'll sleep sound for a while…. I made one of the small healing wizardries to start the wounds cleaning themselves out."
    "Make sure you sleep, too. I'll make rounds in the Terminal in a while; Har'lh wanted the gates double-checked. Urruah, it would help if you held yourself ready while Saash is awake, in case she needs anything."
    "All right," he said, and he brightened. "It'll be ehhif lunchtime soon, and they'll be throwing lots of nice leftovers in that Dumpster around the corner. Then there's this alley, with the Gristede's. Thirty-eighth, you think, Saash?…"
    Rhiow's whiskers went forward in amusement as she turned to jump down. For the moment, she wasn't sure which was motivating Urruah more: the desire for food or the prospect of a good scrap with a tough pride. "Eat hearty," she said, "and keep your ears unshredded. Call if you need anything: you'll know where to find me."
    "Working," Urruah said, in a voice of good-natured pity.

Three

    A n hour later Rhiow strolled across the concourse again, under a "sky" glowing blue with reflection from brilliant sunshine glancing blindingly from the polished acreage of floor. She had checked the main tunnel gates first, and finished with the Lexington Avenue local gate, near the left-hand end of the platform. All their logs were reporting as they should have, including the malfunctioning gate's log, which now showed eight accesses since its repair. Things were back to normal.
    For the time being, Rhiow thought, as she headed one last time toward the upper-level track gates. The problem with worldgates was that they were inherently unstable. Space didn't like to be broached, however briefly: it strove to reseal itself by any means. Standing worldgates needed constant adjustment and maintenance to compensate for changes in local string structure caused by everything from seasonal changes in the Earth's orbit to anomalies in local conditions— solar wind, sunspots, shifts in the ionosphere or the planet's magnetic field. After a while you learned to anticipate the gates' quirks, and you routinely prepared for trouble before the full and new of the Moon, at the solstices, during close cometary passes. And every now and then, like today, the gates would find a new and totally unexpected way to make your life interesting.
    Part of Rhiow's mind kept worrying at the problem of the malfunctioning gate's lost logs while she made her way over to the gate that was best for long-range accesses, the one near Track 32. Besides that, though, she was thinking about Arhu and about all those rats. There'd been no reason for so many of them to be down there. What had attracted them? Where had they gotten in from?… Probably some passageway to the outside needed to be blocked up. Somewhere under these streets, in the tangle of tunnels and conduits too complex for even one of the People to know, the rats must have found entirely too suitable a breeding-place. As she passed through the door to the platform, Rhiow's mouth quirked with distaste at the taint of dead rat that still lingered in the tunnel air. To her, rats were a symbol of the entropy that wizards spent their lives slowing: a persistent, hungry force, implacable, that might be fought to a standstill, but rarely