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

over a sealed plastic bag full of liver. Everyone got sprayed with foul-smelling muck.
    Silence fell. Saash got up and ran toward the track onto which the gate had slid down. Rhiow went after, followed by Urruah when he struggled to his feet. The fur rose on Rhiow's back as they went, not just from the itch of closeness to the patent gate. From back in the upper-level tunnel came a rumbling, and the tracks ticked in sympathy: the single white eye of the 6:23's headlight was sliding toward them.
    Urruah saw it, too. "I could give it a power failure," he gasped as they ran. "No one would suspect a thing."
    "It wouldn't stop the train before it ran through the gate."
    "I could stop it—"
    "You've swapped brains with your smallest flea," Rhiow hissed. The dreadful mass and kinetic energy bound up in a whole train were well beyond even Urruah's exaggerated idea of his own ability to handle. "It'll derail, and Iau only knows how many of those poor ehhif will get hurt or killed. Come on—!"
    They ran after Saash. She stood in front of the gate, tail lashing violently as she looked the tangle of strings up and down, eyes half-closed to see them better. As Rhiow and Urruah came up with her, she turned.
    "It's still viable," she said. "Much better than I feared. The configuration that we left it in yesterday afternoon is still saved in the strings— see that knot? And that one."
    Rhiow peered at them. "Can you get them to retie?"
    "Should be able to. We can reweave later: no time for it now. This'll at least shut the thing. Urruah?"
    "Ready," he said. He was panting, but eager as always. "Where do you want it?"
    "Just general at first. Then the substrate. Rhiow?"
    "Ready," she said.
    First Saash, then Urruah, and at last Rhiow, reared up and hooked claws through the bright web of strings, and began to pull. Saash leaned in deep, set her teeth into another knotted set of burning stringfire, closed her eyes and started work. The fizz and itch in the air started to get worse, while Saash's power and intention ran down the strings through the gate substrate, and the strings obediently writhed and began reweaving themselves over the gaping portal. Through the physical gate itself, not the orderly circle or sphere Rhiow was used to but just a jagged rent in the dark air, nothing could be seen: not the train, not anything else. The gate had been left open on some void or empty place. Cold dark wind breathed from it, mixing peculiarly with the hot metallic breath of the train trundling along through the dimness toward them. Oh, hurry up! Rhiow thought desperately, for she couldn't get rid of the image of the train plunging into that jagged darkness and being lost— where? No way of telling. After a catastrophic incursion by such a huge mass, certainly the gate would derange, maybe irreparably. And what would happen to the train and its passengers, irretrievably lost into some hole in existence?
    Rhiow pulled forcibly away from such thoughts: they wouldn't help the work. Saash was deep in it, drowned in the concentration that made her so good at this work— claws snagged deep in the substrate as she drew strings out with paws and mind, knitted them together, released them to pull in others. Urruah, his face a mask of strained but joyous snarl like the one he had worn while killing rats, fed her power, a blast of sheer intention as irresistible as the stream from a fire hose, so that the strings blazed, kindling to Saash's requirements and knitting faster every moment. This was what made Urruah the second heart of the team, despite all his bragging and bad temper: the blatant energy of a young tom in his prime, harnessed however briefly and worth any amount of skill.
    Rhiow fed her energy down the weave, too, but mostly concentrated on watching the overall progress of the reweave. There, she said down the strings to the others, watch that patch there — Saash was on it, digging her forelegs into the tangle practically to the shoulders. A