Chris Willrich - [BCS261 S01] - Shadowdrop (html)

by Shadowdrop (html)

  There was no chance of reaching the cat door. There was a human exit but I couldn’t manage the bolt. That left only the trap door for garbage.

  I leapt upon the lever as the candlequick bounded after. The panel flipped up and the thing was catapulted into the air, landing amongst a stack of maps. Flames danced up.

  I peered down. Because the lowest level of the tower was a mass of beams, scaffolding, and piping, the garbage door opened on a plunge through cool early-evening air and down through a pit into the sewers. However, a third of the way to the ground lay a narrow walkway intended for magical servitors. Whiskerdoom had pointed it out to me once from the outside. The walkway was too small for a human, but a leaping cat might land safely.

  The candlequick was back, and fire licked my tail. I leapt.

  I clawed the wooden walkway’s edge but my hind legs dangled. No points for dignity. As I scrabbled my way to safety my waxen foe gesticulated angrily like the vanguard of a tiny torch-wielding mob. I hissed back, but my feline pride was hollow. Leaving Nightwise and Postgrad well the worse for knowing me, I launched myself down into the twilight.

  The stars were out when I reached Foottown and collapsed beside Tru’s door. It took minutes before the urgent voices within penetrated my skull.

  “Where did Tru go to, Dru? Where!”

  “To Scarside, Mama... I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”

  “What in the world’s five corners is she doing there? Trying to find Zik?”

  “She thought the black cat was trying to find Zik, Papa.”

  “The black cat!”

  “Tru said she had to help.”

  “This is what comes of her reading books! You were very wicked not to tell us sooner.”

  “I know, I know...” The conversation dissolved into bellows and wails.

  I wanted to rest. I couldn’t rest. It was as if my whole city had walked under a ladder while spilling salt under the full moon. Now Tru had at last fallen to bad luck too. I knew that despite all their puffed-up belligerence, her parents would never dare enter Scarside.

  But I would. Maybe I couldn’t stop Wurm, but I could help Tru. I dragged my carcass up and hunted my doom.

  The feet of Emperor Garn lay at the very place where Foottown began, where the crumbled Old Wall cast dawn shadows. Hidden in the garden between the feet, I recognized a groggy pair of elderly moonshroom vendors, plucking their silvery fungal wares from a shaded arc of the wall and aiming their wheelbarrow at Scatterwind Market. Moonshrooms got their best flavor if they soaked up moonlight, and the ships’ decks were fine places to catch it. Tru had read me that, out of a book.

  As they scrounged for their keys, I slipped inside Emperor Garn’s left foot, and the old woman cursed, “Another one, Bren!”

  “Count your blessings, Marg,” said the old man. “It didn’t cross our path.”

  “Well, lock it in,” said the woman, chuckling. “We can fetch old Glu the alchemist later. I’m sure he can distill something out of a black cat.”

  “Didn’t used to be so many black cats around,” Bren said, his voice receding.

  “Or monsters,” said Marg.

  “Or earthquakes,” said Bren.

  “Or squeaky wheelbarrows.”

  “It’s the times. Young people these days.”

  “No respect for their elders. The way they throw rocks at our houses.”

  “We used to throw rocks.”

  “Yeah, but we did it respectfully.”

  The squeaking receded. I nosed and clawed among their ledgers and dishes and cuttings and pots but saw no secret passage. And yet Whiskerdoom guided me, for a pungency arose amid the tickle of the herbs and the smell of human sweat; he’d sprayed a corner. No wonder the residents were so eager to alchemize me.

  Investigating, I found a broken piece of floorboard. This wood appeared different from the neighboring planks. Perhaps the current owners had needed to repair this spot because past occupants had known of the old secret passage and left it uncovered. Whatever the truth, I was able to wiggle through the break into the recess beneath the floor.

  I pawed around in the dark. Yes. There was a sliding panel in the old metal, well-crafted by the delven whom Garn had employed. It took only a steady paw. The passage was snug for a crawling human, spacious for a cat.

  It led toward Scarside. Back in Garn’s day that had been a wealthy district, so maybe he’d wanted a hidden path from a friend’s manor to the city’s edge? Now the walls lay far beyond his statue and Scarside was in ruins. Time made its passage, I reflected, and not just for cats.

  I emerged within the husk of an ancient manor, and many more passages opened to me. Luckily, Whiskerdoom had continued marking territory. I appreciated his arrogance, as I tracked the reek through a tangle of old human habitation and lost streets between. Sometimes the way led through dry sewers, other times over piles of rubble, and on the whole the maze was like the entrails of some titanic ravaged beast. At last I found the now-abandoned place where I’d spotted Whiskerdoom in the Orb, and I smelled fearful cat and angry hellsnout.

  I don’t know how long I followed those scents through shattered mansions before I heard a boy human calling through the darkness, “Help! Hey! Maybe now?”

  I padded down a peculiar tunnel beneath the flow of the River Dragondraught. I had the impression of titanic hands having shoved aside the ruins, patting them down into a structure composed of old tiles, stones, frescoes, beams, windowpanes, statues, sundials, trellises, gazebos. I didn’t trust the stability of this path, nor did I approve of its nearly forty-five-degree downward slant.

  But then: “Why are you doing this?” cried another human, and it was the voice of a girl. A voice I knew. There was no turning back.

  The passage twisted and switched back and plunged some more and at last opened upon more narrow corridors that had actually begun their existence as such. This new region had the look of a wine cellar, or a dungeon, or the dungeon of a wine seller. Old barrels lay mustily to either side. I crept up to an interior balcony and beheld a fire-lit underground sanctum.

  It seemed that before the Day of the Footless Emperors, some oenophile had concealed rather more than casks of Chateau d’If. Huge iron braziers rose to the level of the balcony, illuminating all in chaotic flickers. Vast frescoes displayed fire-breathing dragons upon the walls. A massive altar silently snarled in the shape of a draconic snout. A huge circle of flame rose unnaturally from the floor before the altar. I sensed a theme.

  Slouched before the altar and within the ring of fire were one girl, three boys, and fifty black cats.

  I didn’t cry out, for all that I saw Whiskerdoom and Grimtail and Tru and Zik. They needed my silence now. I crept forward, nose to stone, and studied the captives. Most were unconscious—and perhaps the loop of magical fire had something to do with that. I noted various arcane-looking symbols carved around the perimeter, symbols that looked rather more ostentatious than mere ancient writing. I couldn’t make sense of them, but I suspected they weren’t notes about grape picking or fermentation.

  Whiskerdoom, one of the few wakeful cats, guarded the unconscious Grimtail while sizing up the figure behind the altar. Judging by the hooded red robe, the concealed shadowy face, and the knife with the ambiguously rusty stains, their captor was either auditioning for the role of Chief Evil Cultist in The Tragedy of King Laughgloom, or the altar had an ugly dual purpose. The knife itself earned marks for flamboyance. It bore a disturbingly crimson fringe of flame that always treated the jabbing direction as “up,” and only its thin line of smoke finally admitted natural law and vainly sought the sky. To make matters worse, the human or human-shaped thing in the cloak had three glowing red eyes under the hood to match the dagger, arranged in a downward-pointing triangle. Tentacles slithered from the robe, which possessed rather more sleeves than two. My enemy was both horrifying and practical.

  “I regret how it must be, children,” said that dusty voice I recognized from the wrecked ship, a voice
that seemed to echo with wind and sand blowing over old bones: Ruingift. “The cats we have uses for. You children are a distraction. You are too few for forced labor, too poor for ransom. Perhaps we will grind you into food for the cats.“

  “Why, we’d never eat them,” scoffed Whiskerdoom. “Too stringy.”

  Ruingift turned toward him as if in understanding. “Maybe the hellsnouts will do it then.” It gestured to the six mutated beasts who cavorted and snuffled around the fiery perimeter.

  “We’re Foottowners!” said Tru, clearly not understanding Whiskerdoom. “We’re used to being stepped on. You don’t scare us.”

  “Your courageous words are as irrelevant as the fear that twists your insides. But have the courage to admit your fear, and perhaps you can serve me. I will found a new realm, and I will need servants.”

  “Oh, yes, do go on, give us the speech,” Whiskerdoom said, in a voice that drawled indifference.

  “I needn’t explain myself to you,” said Ruingift. “You are a kitten gifted with power you don’t deserve. I will tap that power for a worthy purpose.“

  “There is no worthier purpose,” said Whiskerdoom, making a show of yawning and licking his paw, “than to catch little animals, play with them, eat them, lie in the sun, look regal, and do it all over again tomorrow.”

  Despite all the trouble between us, I was proud of him.

  “Um, ‘scuse me,” Zik asked Ruingift, “so, are you talking to the cats?“

  “Cats,” scoffed Ruingift. “You humans are bound to them by a fiction more wicked than any sorcery. For you believe they love you.”

  Zik said, “Hey, well, my sister thinks so. Her cat’s pretty nice...”

  “You lie!” Whiskerdoom was saying, and I might have taken offense, but I realized he was correcting Ruingift. “Humans have an honored place on the love list! Directly beneath catnip, just above sunbeams.”

  “Pathetic hunter-and-prey,” Ruingift continued. “Evolutionary dead end. Parasite. You do nothing to contribute to the world but pounce and devour and sleep. Your only saving grace is you look pretty while you do it.“

  “Ah yes,” Whiskerdoom said. “Tell me how pathetic I am.”

  “Once the black cats of the Eldshore were indeed pathetic. But the Elddrake stirred once, and saw that humans bred too numerous and built too high and thus disturbed his sleep. And that elder dragon breathed out his soft vengeance. A black smoke threaded through the streets of Archaeopolis and settled upon those whom the Elddrake perceived as the most dragon-like of the inhabitants. Not a single human met his standards. But a few of the cats did. They were marked with the smoke, they and their offspring. Ironically, the naturally black cats who weren’t chosen fled the Eldshore in terror. Today in Swanisle they are considered lucky.”

  “So we have a dragon’s blessing?” Whiskerdoom said, puffing himself up. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “You have his blessing,” Ruingift jeered, “and bear his curse. It is your purpose to spread disaster amongst teeming humankind, lessening the noise that afflicts the Elddrake’s mind. You have done a terrible job.“

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You remain too little dragon and too much cat.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “You are too indifferent to the humans to properly doom them. You even allow yourselves to become familiars.“

  “Well, the food is good.”

  “Enough. I will put you to use. The Festival of Time’s Breaking is at its fever pitch tomorrow. And you shall all be released into its heart, at the start of the Parade of Missing Souls.“

  “Why?” said Tru, her fear forgotten, her anger apparent.

  “To distract people from the true danger.“

  “And what’s that?” said Tru.

  “You show some wit, girl, and for that I may spare you. And there is something about you and your brother that haunts...” Ruingift paused. As if not realizing its action, it removed the hood of its robe.

  I perceived now that both natural eyes were covered with a blindfold and three red crystals had been set into the forehead. The head looked partially caved-in, and covering that cavity was a stretch of thick parchment crowded with arcane symbols like a tribe of beetles.

  But I still recognized her.

  I knew her from the day she’d suffered a cart accident in Bookside, moments after seeing a handsome boy on a rooftop across the river.

  At the sound of my involuntary hiss, a hellsnout sniffed the air and howled.

  “Oops,” I mewed.

  “Another cat?” said Ruingift, looking up with her false eyes. “Another black cat comes here willingly? Delightful.”

  The warped dogs bellowed back and forth, hunting. They were profoundly bad at it, of course, but eventually blundered up the steps toward me.

  I sat still, imitating calmness, cleaning my face. I did it for a reason, of course. Hygiene matters. Also, when I did finally dart across the landing to the balcony, I crossed their paths. The change in the timbre of the howls was very satisfying.

  I leapt from the balcony and smacked into a tall brazier.

  I’d meant to do that.

  There was one summer I’d jumped onto a hot copper roof while fleeing the unkindness of strangers. My paws had screamed. This was like that but mercifully briefer; I bounced off, landing, naturally, on my feet.

  The brazier was rather less graceful. With a clang and a roar it toppled across the circle of magical flame. Nature’s fire and magic’s fire dueled for a time, making an opening in the circle. When great powers wrangle thus, there is often the chance for mere earthly creatures to find the exit. Whiskerdoom took his opportunity, just before the brazier went out and the magical flame closed the gap.

  “The others,” I said.

  “I know, sister,” he said, smoking a little at the edges, “but we’ve got to run.”

  “Pepper?” Tru said in wonder. She looked around and came to the same conclusion as Whiskerdoom. “Run, Pepper!”

  We darted into the nearest tunnel, chancing the depths of Scarside. Behind us Ruingift called out, “You! I know you—!”

  We quickly became lost in a labyrinth of ancient corridors and collapsed buildings. We sought the narrowest passages and in this way evaded the maddened hellsnouts. Even so their echoes hounded us everywhere. At last we emerged at the base of the great chasm.

  The night had passed. The Bloodsday sun rose just high enough to tease details from the gash’s darkness, and so we could pick our way along the rubble where the Dragondraught flowed from the falls toward Scatterwind and the sea. The waters gurgled and echoed like a vast salivating beast.

  “This whole chasm,” I mused, “made by a dragon stirring in its sleep...”

  We pressed downriver in silence.

  “Thank you, sister,” Whiskerdoom said at last.

  “My pleasure,” I said, and it was true. Despite everything I was exhilarated. Curiosity, and loyalty, hadn’t killed me after all! “But I’m sorry I got you into trouble.”

  “It was exciting! I kept using my Spell of Trinket Questing—the one the Underseers use for finding lost keys, wands, that sort of thing—and zoomed in on a tattoo Tru chanced to describe as occupying an embarrassing spot on Zik. Decent primate, she is. Scratched those nice delicate spots beside the ears, just the right amount of pressure. Anyway, I braved—I!—the streets, the crotchety old humans, the tunnels, the hellsnouts, and got captured! It was incredible!”

  “You’re not angry?”

  “This is the most invigorating day I’ve had in years. Admittedly, it might have ended much worse. Then my opinion of it would perhaps be different. I might have been fed human... by the Swiftest Mouse, Shadowdrop, those human children, they’re doomed.”

  “Maybe... However, I think Ruingift wanted them terrified, not dead.” Or so I wished to believe.

  “We have to get back, put a stop to all this.”

  I was startled. I’d never felt so in accord with my brother. It pained
me to argue with him.

  “Whiskerdoom, we have to gather what black cats remain and warn the city.” As we walked, I told him all I knew.

  Whiskerdoom was silent for a time, which was an interesting change. We fell into the rhythm of travel, and it was possible to pretend we were kittens again, just enjoying companionship in the wide and misty world.

  At last he said, “My mistress? I still cannot believe it. It’s true Wurm has a temper, but... it’s well I don’t have my collar, or else I’d call to her.”

  “And what would you say to her?” I said. “‘Excuse me, Mistress, but are you trying to destroy the city? Is your good friend Ruingift going to release our brethren into the festival to distract everyone while you do?’”

  “Who would want to destroy the city? Three thousand years they’ve had a city, and before that a village and with its chickens and goats, and before that a temple with jagged pillars as if to hold up the sky, and before that caves with strange paintings of absurdly large prey. It’s been abandoned and reclaimed before, and had many names—oldest of cities, eternal.”

  “But it’s not eternal.” I waved a paw at the clouds in the sky, all those mighty white sketches of beasts and vessels and continents, all ready to drift apart. “Humans seem immortal to cats, and the city seems immortal to humans, but we’re all just the flit of a crow’s wing beneath the sky of Time. This could be our last day, brother.”

  Whiskerdoom halted. “You’ve changed. If I didn’t know better I’d think I was talking to a wizard. Don’t forget where you come from.”

  “I come from an alley in Archaeopolis. Brother, you are serving Archaeopolis’ enemy. I am sorry. It doesn’t mean you’ve done wrong. Working with somebody who’s partially evil is, in my view, part of the cost of living. But knowing someone is absolutely evil should change your calculations, shouldn’t it?”

  Whiskerdoom hissed and strode on. Here it was again, the sudden anger, the ear-folding, snarling fury. “Do not worry,” he growled. “I do not need your pity! It is clear I made a mistake, and I will pay.”