The Book of Night With Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

them too. The world became a confusing tableau of glaringly bright ehhif and buildings, all tangled about with the more subdued light-strings of matter substrates, weft lines, and the other indicators of forces and structures that held the normally unseen world together. It was not a condition that one stayed in for long if one could help it— certainly not in bright daylight. At night it was easier, but then so was everything else: that was when the People had been made, after all.
    Rhiow and Saash trotted hurriedly down Lexington, being narrowly missed by ehhif pedestrians, other ehhif making early deliveries from trucks and vans, houiff out being walked, and (when crossing streets) by cabs and cars driving at idiotic speed even at this time of morning. There was simply no hour, even on a Sunday, when these streets were completely empty; solitude was something for which you had to go elsewhere. One had to weave and dodge, or hug the walls, trying not to fall through gratings or be walked into by ehhif coming unexpectedly around corners.
    They made fairly good time, only once having to pause when an under-sidewalk freight elevator started clanging away while Saash was walking directly over its metal doors. She jumped nearly out of her skin at the sudden sound and the lurch of the opening doors, and skittered curbward— straight into a houff on the leash. There was no danger: the houff was one of those tiny ones, a bundle of silky golden fur and yap and not much else. Saash, however, still panicked by the dreadful clanging of the elevator alarm and the racket of the rising machinery, hauled off and smacked the houff hard in the face, as much from embarrassment as from fright at jostling into it, and galloped off down the street, bristling all over. The houff, having been hit claws-out and hard by something invisible, plunged off down the sidewalk in a panic, half-choking on its collar and shrieking about murder and ghosts, while its bewildered ehhif was towed along behind.
    Rhiow was half-choked herself, holding in her merriment. She went after Saash as fast as she could, and didn't catch up with her until she ran out of steam just before the corner of Fifty-fourth. There Saash sat down close to the corner of the building and began furiously washing her fluffed-up back fur. Rhiow knew better than to say anything, for this was not Saash's eternal itch: this was he'ihh, composure-grooming, and except under extraordinary circumstances, one didn't comment on it. Rhiow sat down back to back, keeping watch in the other direction, and waited.
    To Saash's credit, she cut the he'ihh short, then breathed out one annoyed breath and got up. "I really hate them," she said as they went together to the curb, "those little ones. Their voices—"
    "I know," Rhiow said. They waited for the light to change, then trotted across, weaving to avoid a pair of ehhif mothers with strollers. "They grate on my nerves, too. But would you rather have had one of the big ones?"
    "Don't tease," Saash muttered as they trotted on toward the next corner. "I feel foolish now for hitting the poor thing like that. It wasn't its fault. And I was sidled too. Those little ones aren't always very resilient thinkers; if I've unhinged it somehow…"
    "I doubt that." But Rhiow smiled. "All the same, you should have seen the look on its face. It—"
    She stopped, ears pricked. From nearby, sounds of barking and snarling and yowling were rising over the muted early-morning traffic noise, becoming louder and louder. The two of them paused and looked at each other, eyes widening— for one of the two lifted voices, they knew.
    "Sweet Queen around us," Saash said, "what's he doing?!"
    They took off at a run, dodging among ehhif going in and out of the early-opening bakery at the end of the block, and tore around the corner. A dusty car with one tire flat and another booted was parked on their side of Fifty-third: Rhiow jumped up on its trunk and then leaped to its roof to