North! Or Be Eaten Read Online Free PDF Page A

sat broken and sad as a trampled lily. Beside it, to his relief, Oskar’s own Books and Crannies still stood, just as Addie Shooster had assured him it did, intact except for a strip of wooden shingles missing from the roof.
    Oskar’s shock at the battered state of the Glipwood Township turned to dread when he spotted the source of the screams.
    A team of black horses stood harnessed to the Black Carriage. But it wasn’t the Black Carriage Oskar had seen the night Podo Helmer and Peet the Sock Manbattled the Fangs. This carriage was longer and sleeker, and was, to Oskar’s horror, more frightening to behold than the other. Instead of one chamber, there were several horizontal compartments just big enough for a man, as if the carriage were a wagon bearing a stack of iron coffins turned on their sides. Long spikes rose from the top of the carriage, creating a fortlike enclosure where two Fangs perched with crossbows.
    Joe Shooster lay motionless in the street. A cluster of Fangs surrounded him and jabbed him with the butts of their spears. Another Fang clutched Addie’s arms behind her back and pushed her down the steps from the jail. One of the Fangs on top of the carriage turned a switch, and the lowest of the horizontal doors clanged open. Two of the Fangs dragged Joe to the carriage and threw him in. Addie screamed as they forced her into the box above Joe’s. The Fangs slammed the coffin doors and laughed as the hooded driver whipped the horses and drove the carriage out of sight.
    Then a conversation drifted up through the window.
    “That was fun,” said a Fang standing in the street below.
    “Aye. Nothin’ like the squirmin’ and the screamin’,” said another wistfully. “Wish there was more of it these days. Been standin’ around in thisss town for days with nothin’ to do but pick at me scales.”
    “Won’t be long afore we have some action,” said the first.
    “Eh? What do you know that I don’t?”
    “The ridgerunner says the Igibysss are in the forest.”
    “Imposssible.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the cows woulda swallowed ‘em up by now.”
    “Nah. They’re with that socky fella. The mean one. He ain’t afraid of the toothy cows. The ridgerunner says he’s got bridges all through the trees. Says they’re livin’ in a tree house.”
    Oskar’s eyes widened, and he smiled in spite of his pain. The Igibys were alive!
    “Livin’ in a what?” said the Fang.
    “A tree house.”
    There was a pause.
    “What’s a tree house?”
    “Don’t know. Sounds familiar, though. Something about it gave me an odd sorta sick in me gut.”
    “Well, we’ll find out tomorrow. Tonight the rest of the troops arrive; then we’removin’ into the forest to find ‘em. Leavin’ tomorrow after first feeding. Catch ‘em by surprise.”
    “No,” Oskar breathed.
    Then his strength snuffed out like a candle, and he collapsed to the floor of room eight, unaware of the small puddle of blood that gathered beneath him.
    1 . Bomnubbles! Woe!
    2 . Three Honored and Great Subjects: Word, Form, and Song. Some silly people think that there’s a fourth Honored and Great Subject, but those scientists are woefully mistaken.
    3 . By Helba Grounce-Miglatobe, a well-known psychologician who claimed to have been ridiculed unduly as a child and as such was an expert, according to her book, in the field of “meanery and insultence.”

4
Appropriate Words from Ubinious the Whooned
    T he next morning after breakfast, Peet the Sock Man returned to the tree house, carrying a skinned and gutted cave blat over his shoulder. He mentioned casually that there might be a pack of horned hounds hot on his tail, at which point Podo roused Nugget to be on alert. As Peet pulled himself and the cave blat carcass up through the tree house door, the howl of a horned hound curled through the air, and Nugget bounded into the woods after it.
    Janner and Tink sat cross-legged on the floor of the tree house, trying their best to attend to