The Book of Night With Moon Read Online Free Page A

making extremely tantalizing smells of bacon: Rhiow muttered under her breath and kept going. Past the stores were five or six brownstones in a row, and as she passed the third one, a gravelly voice said, "Rhiow!"
    She paused by the lowest step, looking up at the top of the graceful granite baluster. Yafh was sitting there with a bored look, scrubbing his big blunt face: not that scrubbing it ever made much difference to his looks. The spot was a perfect one for beginning the day's bout of hauissh, the position-game that cats everywhere played with each other for territorial power, or pleasure, or both. In hauissh, early placement was everything. Now any cat who might appear on the street and try to settle down in the area that Yafh was temporarily claiming as "territory" would have to deal with Yafh first— by either confronting him head-on, moving completely out of sight, or taking a neutral stance… which would translate as appeasement or surrender, and lose the newcomer points.
    Rhiow, since she was just passing through, was not playing. Business certainly gave her an excuse not to pause, but she rarely felt so antisocial. She went up the stairs, jumped onto the baluster, and paced down toward Yafh to breathe breaths with him. "Hunt's luck, Yafh—"
    His mouth a little open, Yafh made an appreciative "tasting" face at the scent of her cat food. "If I had been really hunting, I could have used some luck," he said. "One of those little naked houiff, say… or even a pigeon. Even a squirrel. But there's nothing round here except roaches and rats."
    Rhiow knew: she had smelled them on his breath, and she kept her own taste-face as polite as she could. "Don't they feed you in there, Yafh? If it weren't for you, your ehhif would have those things in their stairwells, if not their beds. You should leave them and go find someone who appreciates your talents."
    Yafh made a most self-deprecating silent laugh and tucked himself down into half-crouch again, folding his paws in. After a moment Rhiow joined in the laugh, without the irony. Of the many cats in these few square blocks, Yafh was the one Rhiow knew and was known by best, and some would have found that an odd choice of friends, for one with Rhiow's advantages. Yafh was a big cat for one who had been untommed very young, but unless you took a close look at his hind end, you would never have suspected his ffeih status from the way his front end looked. Yafh would fight anything that moved, and had done so for years: he had enough scar tissue to make a new cat from, and was as ugly as a houff — broken-nosed, ragged-eared, one eye gone white-blind from some old injury. Where there were no scars, Yafh's coat was white; but his fondness for dust-bathing and for hunting in the piled-up rubbish behind his ehhif 's building kept him a more or less constant dingy gray. His manner was generally as blunt and bluff as his looks, but he had few illusions and no pretensions, and his good humor hardly ever failed, whether he was using it on others or on himself.
    "Listen," Yafh said, "what's food, in the long run? Once you're full, you sleep, whether it's caviar you were eating, or rat. These ehhif let me out on my own business, at least: that's more than a lot of us hereabouts can say. And they may be careless about mealtimes, but they don't send me off to have my claws pulled out, either, the way they did with poor Ailh down the road. Did you hear about that?"
    "You'll have to tell me later," Rhiow said, and shook herself all over to hide the shudder. Such horror stories had long ago convinced her to leave her ehhif 's furniture strictly alone, no matter how tempted she might be to groom her claws on its lovely seductive textures. "Yafh, I hate to wash and run, but it's business this morning."
    "They work you too hard," he said, eyeing her sidewise. "As if the People were ever made to work in the first place! The whole thing's some ehhif plot, that's what it is."
    Rhiow laughed as she