The Book of Night With Moon Read Free Page B

life you had been saving for later. Rhiow crouched, tensed, jumped; then came down on the cracked foot-wide concrete top of the parapet, exactly where she liked to. She made the smaller jump down onto the surface of the roof, looked around again, her tail twitching.
    No one there. Rhiow stepped across the coarse cracked gravel as quickly as she could: she disliked the stuff, which hurt her feet. She passed wire vent grilles and fan housings making a low moaning roar, blasting hot air up and out of the air-conditioning systems below; summer was coming on, and the unseasonably hot weather this last week had turned the city-roar abruptly louder. The smells had changed, too, as a result. The air up here reeked of the disinfectant that the biggest ehhif -houses put in their ventilating systems these days and also stank of lubricating oil, dust settled since last winter, sucked-out food scents, mouth-smoke, garbage stored in the cellars until pickup day…
    After that, the fumes and steams coming up from the city street seemed fresh by comparison. Rhiow jumped up on the streetside parapet, looking down. Seventieth reached east to the river, west to where her view was blocked past Third by scaffolding for a new building and digging in the street itself, something to do with the utility tunnels. The street was an asphalt-stitched pattern of paved and repaved blacktop, pierced by the occasional gently steaming tunnel-cover, lined with the inevitable two long lines of parked cars, punctuated by the ehhif walking calmly here and there. Some of them had houiff on the leash: Rhiow's nose wrinkled, for even up here she could smell what the houiff left in the street, no matter how their ehhif cleaned up after them.
    No matter, she thought. It's just the way the city is. And better get on with it, if you want it to stay that way.
    Rhiow sat down, curled her tail around her forefeet, and composed herself. Amusing, to be making the world safe for houiff to foul the sidewalks in, but that was part of what she did.
    Her eyes drooped shut, almost closed, so that she could more clearly see, and be seen by, the less physical side of things. I will meet the cruel and the cowardly today, she thought, liars and the envious, the uncaring and unknowing: they will be all around. But their numbers and their carelessness do not mean I have to be like them. For my own part, I know my job; my commission comes from Those Who Are. My paw raised is Their paw on the neck of the Serpent, now and always….
    There was more to the formal version of the meditation, but Rhiow was far enough along in her work now, after these six years, to (as one of her ehhif associates put it) depart from the Catechism a little. The idea was to put yourself in order for the day's work, reminding yourself of the priorities— not your own species-bound concerns, but the welfare of all life on the planet: not your personal grudges and doubts, but the fears, however idiotic they seemed, of all the others you met. There was always the danger that the words would become routine, just something you rattled off at the start of the workday and then forgot in the field. Rhiow did her best to be conscientious about the meditation and her other setup work, giving it more than just speech-service… but at the same time, the urge to get going and do the work itself drove her hard. She presumed They understood.
    Rhiow got up again, stretched, and trotted off down the roof's parapet to its back corner, which looked inward toward the center of the block between Seventieth and Sixty-ninth. She had egress routes all around the top of the building, but this was the least exposed; this time of day, when even an ehhif could see clearly, there was no point in being careless.
    At the back corner Rhiow paused, glanced downward into the dusty warm darkness of the alley between the two buildings. Nothing was there but a rat, stirring far down among the garbage bags behind the locked steel door that led to