"Diane Duane - Feline Wizards 1 - The Book Of Night With Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

to the cats, after all.*
One other note: two human-language terms, "queen" and "tom," are routinely used to translate the Ailurin
words sh'heih and sth'heih. "Female" and "male" don't properly translate these words, being much too
sexually neutralтАФwhich cats, in their dealings with one another, emphatically are not. The Ailurin word
ffeih is used for both neutered males and spayed females.
тАФDD
*Cat thoughts and silent communications are rendered in italics.
I am the Cat who took up His stance
by the Persea Tree, on the night we
destroyed the enemies of God....


Pert em hru, c. 2800 b.c., tr. Budge
Bite: bite hard, and find the tenth life.
--The Gaze of Rhoua's Eye
(feline recension of The Book of Night with Moon): Ixiii, 18




Chapter One

They never turn the lights off in Grand Central; and they may lock the doors between 1 and 5:30 a.m., but
the place never quite becomes still. If you stand outside those brass-and-glass doors on Forty-second
Street and peer in, down the ramp leading into the Grand Concourse, you can see the station's quiet
nightlifeтАФa couple of transit police officers strolling past, easygoing but alert; someone from the night
cleaning crew heading toward the information island in the center of the floor with a bucket and a lot of
polishing cloths for all that century-old brass. Faintly, the sound of rumblings under the ground will come
to youтАФthe Metro-North trains being moved through the upper- and lower-level loops, repositioned for
their starts in the morning, or tucked over by the far-side tracks to be checked by the night maintenance
crews. On the hour, the massive deep gong of the giant Accurist clock facing Forty-second strikes, and the
echoes chase themselves around under the great blue sky-vault and slowly fade.

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 THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON


By five o'clock the previous day's dust will have been laid, the locks checked, the glass on the stores in the
Graybar and Hyatt passageways all cleaned: everything done, until it's time to open again. The transit
policemen, still in a pair because after all this is New York and you just can't tell, will stroll past, heading
up the stairs on the Vanderbilt Avenue side to sit down in the ticketed passenger waiting area and have
their lunch break before the day officially starts. Anyone looking in through the still-locked Forty-second
Street doors will see nothing but stillness, the shine of slick stone and bright brass.
But there are those for whom locked doors are no barrier. Were you one of them, this morning, you would
slip sideways and through, padding gently down the incline toward the terrazzo flooring of the concourse.
The place would smell green, the peculiar too-strong wintergreen smell of a commercial sweeping
compound. Your nose would wrinkle as you passed a spot on the left, against the cream-colored wall,
where blood was spilled yesterdayтАФa disagreement, a knife and a gun pulled, everything finished in a
matter of seconds: one life wounded, one life fled, the bodies taken away. But the disinfectants and the
sweeping compound can't hide the truth from you and the stone.