Rhiow seems a typical New York City cat: pampered by her Upper East Side owners, permitted in good weather to lounge on the apartment balcony, never allowed to run free. Or so the humans think. Rhiow is much more than she appears. With her teammates Saash and Urruah, she works with human wizards, protecting the world from dark forces and helping to maintain the network of magical transport gates that connect all parts of the world. The Book of Night with Moon is the gateway to an amazing, secret animal world. In it we learn much about cats: they have a complex language, society, and history; they can call on skills unknown to their owners; they live lives of challenge and danger that culminate, if they are lucky, in a "tenth life" that equates to the human heaven. That tenth life is the fate of one of Rhiow's team as they, plus the foundling Arhu, find themselves caught up in a danger that threatens not only the cats of the world, but humans as well.

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 nightlife -- a 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 you -- the 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.

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 yesterday -- a 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.

You would walk on, pause in the center of the room, and look upward, as many times before, at the starry, painted vault of the heavens -- its dusk-blue rather faded, and half the bulbs in the Zodiac's constellations burnt out. The Zodiac is backward. They'll be renovating the ceiling this spring, but you doubt they'll fix that problem. It doesn't matter, anyway: after all, "backward" depends on which direction you're looking from....

You would walk on again then, guided by senses other than the purely physical ones, and stroll silently over to the right of the motionless up-escalators, toward the gate to Track 25. Once through its archway, everything changes. The ambiance of the terminal -- light, air, openness -- abruptly shifts: the ceiling lowers, the darkness closes in. Lighting comes in the form of long lines of fluorescent fixtures, only one out of every three of them lit, this time of day. They shine down in bright dashed lines on the seven platforms to your right, the nine to your left, and straight ahead, on the gray concrete of the platform that serves Tracks 25 and 26.

 

The hugely popular author of Deep Wizardry and The Door into Summer presents a luminous fantasy about cats that calls to mind such classics as Watership Down, Tad Williams's Tailchaser's Song, and Brian Jacques's Redwall series.

"Laughter here and there, spellworks, battles and personal growth all mesh into a Tolkienesque tale. Quite a nice piece of work."

 

"Part quest adventure in the tradition of Watership Down and part comic commentary in the style of the Morris the Cat commercials, Duane's tale purrs with charms that even ailurophobes will find irresistible."

 

"Fantasy-loving ailurophiles will curl up and purr."

 

"It is full of sass, vinegar, blood, piss, and occasional references to things operative, science fictional, political, urban-mythical, and lots of magic. Did I love it? I could not put it down."

 

Diane Duane was a psychiatric nurse before turning to writing full time in 1980. Since then she has published 20 novels, including several collaborations with her husband, Peter Morwood. She also writes screenplays, served as senior writer for the BBC-TV education series Science Challenge, and writes scripts for CD-ROM computer games. She lives with her husband in rural Ireland.

 

The Book of Night with Moon by Diane Duane
Continue Browsing		View Wish List