The Book of Night With Moon by Diane Duane Page B

from that immense green silence. Not now: perhaps not in this life: perhaps not until after the ninth one, if luck and her fate led her that far. It was dangerous enough for her just to be here— as dangerous as it was for any being to remain, for a prolonged period, out of its own time or space.
    Meantime, though, she might briefly enjoy the sight of the true and ancient Manhattan, the living reality of which the steel- and concrete-clad island was a shadowy and mechanistic restatement. Ehhif built "skyscrapers" half in ambition, half in longing— uncertain why the ambition never satisfied them no matter how they achieved it, and not remembering what they longed for. They had been latecomers, the ehhif: they had not been here very long before the world changed, and this warm, still wilderness went chill and cruel. It was the Lone One's fault, of course. That fact the ehhif dimly remembered in their own legends, just as they vaguely remembered the Tree, and an ancient choice ill-made, and the sorrow of something irrevocably lost.
    Rhiow sighed, and turned her back on the lulling vista of the Old World, padding back among the trees. Better get on with what she had come here to do, before being here too long did her harm.
    Rhiow made her way silently through the dimness beneath the trees toward the great cliff-outcroppings on this side of the Mountain's foot. Thinking of the Lone One brought Arhu to mind again. No question who he heard speaking to him, Rhiow thought, the first time, at least. She knew well enough the voice that had awakened her this morning, and which spoke to all feline wizards on behalf of the Powers That Be: the wisdom that first whispered in your ear to offer you the Art and the promise of your Ordeal, and then, assuming you survived, taught you the details of wizardry from day to day and passed on your assignments. Tradition said the one Who actually spoke was Iau's daughter, Hrau'f the Silent, Whose task was to order creation, making rules and setting them in place. The tradition seemed likely enough to Rhiow: the voice you "heard" had a she-ish sense about it and a tinge of humor that agreed with the old stories' accounts of Hrau'f's quiet delight in bringing order from chaos.
    But the question remained: whose voice had spoken second? For Queen Iau had other daughters. There was another "she" involved with wizardry, one whose methods were subtle, whose intentions were ambivalent— and rarely good for the wizard….
    Rhiow came to the bottom of the scree-slope that ran up to the base of the cliff-face. Here the trees bore the scars of old stonefalls: boulders lay among the pine needles, and the brown soft carpet grew thinner toward the sheer bare cliff. At the top of the scree-slope, jagged, silent, and dark, yawned the entrance to the caves.
    She padded up the stones, paused on the flat rubble-strewn slab that served for a threshold, and gazed in. It was not totally dark inside, not this near to the opening— and not where the master anchor-structures for the New York gates all hung, a blazing complex of shifting, rippling webs and wefts, burning in the still, cool air of the outer cave.
    Rhiow sat down and just looked at them, as she always did when she made this trip. Learning the way these patterns looked had been one of her first tasks as a young wizard. Her Ordeal had revealed that she had an aptitude for this kind of work, and afterward the Powers had assigned Rhiow to old Ffairh to develop her talent. She remembered sitting here with him for the first time, her haunches shifting with impatience, both with delight at her splendidly big new body, and with the desire to get up and do something about the patterns that hung before her, singing and streaming with power. Or rather, to do something with them.
    Ffairh had stared at her, eyes gleaming, and Rhiow had stopped her fidgeting and sat very still under his regard. Ffairh had been nothing much to look at in their homeworld— a scruffy