clambered her way onto the windowsill to perch there wobbling, and nosed the
shutter aside.
She saw the tall shape lurching across the street, with something slung over its
shoulder. Tyr’s nose was full of the smell of burning and blood from below her.
She added everything swiftly together-the tallness and the scorch and the meat
down there-and realized that he was bringing her dinner after all. Wildly
excited, she began to yip-Then horses came running at the tall one. Tyr’s
feelings about this were mixed. Horses kicked. But once one horse had stopped
kicking, and the tall one had given her some, and it had been very good. More
food? Tyr thought, as much as she ever thought anything. But the horses didn’t
stop when they got to the tall one and the meat. For a moment she couldn’t see
where the tall one was. Then the horses separated, and Tyr whimpered and sniffed
the air. She caught the tall one’s scent. But to her horror, the scent did
something she had never smelled it do before: it cooled. It thinned, and
vanished, and turned to meat. And the Presence, the something that made the
world alive, the Presence went away….
When the universe is destroyed before one’s eyes, one may well mourn. Tyr had no
idea of what mourning was, but she did it. Standing and shaking there on the
window-sill, anguished, she howled and howled. And when the horses got too close
and the tall things on them pointed at her, she panicked altogether and fell out
of the window, rolled bumping down the roof-gable and off it. The pain meant