The Book of Night With Moon by Diane Duane

at the other end. Better you than me, Saash said.
    How's our foundling?
    Sleeping still. Go ahead, Rhi; Urruah's around if anything's needed.
    Dai, then.
    You too. And be careful…
    Rhiow let the link between them lapse, and watched the gate, letting its weft steady and the colors pale from their use-excited state. Then she reached into the weave with a paw and plucked at one specific string, a control structure. The whole weave of the gate resonated with light and power as it ran a brief diagnostic on its own fabric. Then it displayed a smaller glowing pattern, a "tree" structure— many-branched at the top, narrowing to a single "trunk" at the bottom.
    With a single claw, Rhiow snagged the trunk line. The string blazed, querying her identity: the access for which Rhiow was asking was restricted.
    Rhiow hung on to the string. The power blazing in it ran up through claw and paw and sizzled along her nerves, hunting for her access "authorization" from the Powers That Be. It found that, along with Rhiow's memory of her own acceptance of the Oath, woven together into the tapestry of life-fire and thought-fire that was how the wizardry perceived her brain. Satisfied, the wizardry rebounded, ran burning out of her body and down the weft of the gate. The tapestry rippled with light; the string structure puckered inward. The sphere in the air snapped open.
    Warm green shadow shading down to a rich brown, slanting golden light leaning through the dimness in shafts… And that smell. Rhiow did not linger but leapt through, and waved the gate closed behind her with a flirt of her tail.
    She landed in loam, silent, springy, deep. Rhiow came down soundlessly but hard, as always forgetting the change until it actually came upon her— and then, within a breath's time, she was wondering how she'd ever borne the way she'd been until a second ago, bound into the body of one of the People, not even a very big body as the People reckoned such things. Rhiow lifted the paw that had plucked the gate-string out, found it ten times bigger, the claw an inch-long talon; looked down at the print that paw had left in the soft loam, and found it as wide across as an ehhif 's hand was long. The usual unbelieving look over her shoulder reassured her about her color: she was still glossy black. She would have found it difficult to handle if that had changed as well.
    Rhiow stood surrounded by many brown pillar-trunks of shaggy-barked trees, limbless this far down: their first branches began far above her head, holding out thin-needled bunches of fronds like an ehhif 's hands with fingers spread. No sky could be seen through the overlapping ceiling of them, though here and there, ahead and to the sides, some gap of growth let the sun come slanting through to pool, tawny-golden, on the needle-carpeted floor. Rhiow padded along toward where more light came slipping among trunks more sparsely set, a bluer, cooler radiance.
    A few minutes later she stepped out from among the trees onto a mossy stone ledge lifted up above the world; she looked downward and outward, breathing deep. The breeze stirring among those trees and rustling their tops behind her had nothing to do with New York air: it was a wind from the morning of the world, bearing nothing but the faint clean smell of salt. In a sky of cloudless, burning blue, the sun swung low to her right, passing toward evening from afternoon; westward, low over the endless green hills, its light burnished everything gold.
    It was summer here. It was always summer here. The sun lay warm on her pelt, a lovely basking heat. The wind was warm and always bore that salt tang from the glimmering golden-bronze expanse of ocean just to the east. The whole view, excepting the occasional cliff-face or ledge like the one on which Rhiow stood, was covered with the lush green of subtropical forest. Here was the world as it had been before magnetic fields and poles and climates had shifted. Whether it was actually the same world,