"Charles de Lint - The Moon is Drowning While I Sleep" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

old friends too tired to talk, just taking comfort from each
other's presence.
The cobblestoned streets that web out from the
courtyard are narrow, too tight a fit for a car, even the
small imported makes. They twist and turn, winding in and
around the buildings more like back alleys than
thoroughfares. If you have any sort of familiarity with the
area you can maze your way by those lanes to find still
smaller courtyards, hidden and private, and, deeper still,
secret gardens.
There are more cats in Old Market than anywhere else in
Newford and the air smells different. Though it sits just a
few blocks west of some of the city's principal
thoroughfares, you can hardly hear the traffic, and you
can't smell it at all. No exhaust, no refuse, no dead air. Old
Market always seems to smell of fresh bread baking,
cabbage soups, frying fish, roses and those tart,
sharp-tasting apples that make the best strudels.
Sophie and Jilly were bookended by stairs going down
to the Kickaha River on either side of them. The streetlamp
behind them put a glow on their hair, haloing each with a
nimbus of light. Jilly's hair was darker, all loose tangled
curls; Sophie's was soft auburn, hanging in ringlets.
In the half-dark beyond the lamp's murky light, their
small figures could almost be taken for each other, but
when the light touched their features, Jilly could be seen to
have the quick, clever features of a Rackham pixie, while
Sophie's were softer, as though rendered by Rossetti or
Burne-Jones. Though similarly dressed with paint-stained
smocks over loose T-shirts and baggy cotton pants,
Sophie still managed to look tidy, while Jilly could never
seem to help a slight tendency toward scruffiness. She was
the only one of the two with paint in her hair.
"What sort of dreams?" Jilly asked her friend.
It was almost four o'clock in the morning. The narrow
streets of Old Market lay empty and still about them,
except for the odd prowling cat, and cats can be like the
hint of a whisper when they want, ghosting and silent,
invisible presences. The two women had been working at
Sophie's studio on a joint painting, a collaboration that was
going to combine Jilly's precise, delicate work with
Sophie's current penchant for bright flaring colors and
loosely rendered figures. Neither was sure the experiment
would work, but they'd been enjoying themselves
immensely, so it really didn't matter.
"Well, they're sort of serial," Sophie said. "You know,
where you keep dreaming about the same place, the same
people, the same events, except each night you're a little
further along in the story."
Jilly gave her an envious look. "I've always wanted to