by E. E. Knight
Eventually they climbed up a pile of fallen brickwork and into a chamber roofed by the remaining masonry and tree roots. The tree roots ran down the sides of columns, rose out of statues of human figures like bizarre hair braids, explored crumbles and cracks and dark ends of holes.
Rats filled the chamber, not in a smooth sea but rather in little puddles of brown fur, constantly shifting according to whim. Wistala had found some piles of bat droppings in the home cave that smelled worse—but not by much. Light came down from above in a pair of shafts, large and small, through some kind of half-clogged well in the roof.
The rats retreated from their entrance, disappearing into innumerable holes and cracks in a flurry of naked tails. The stouter-hearted bared fangs at the cat from beneath piles of fallen brick.
Wistala spat out the rat. It scampered away, shaking saliva from its hind feet.
“Better hop up on my head,” Wistala suggested as a braver group of rats gathered on a pile of rags and bones at the center of the room.
It wasn’t easy to hold the weight of the cat at the end of her neck, especially with the taste of rat in her mouth—the hairy beast had fouled her tongue in its terror—but she did her best to raise Yari-Tab up.
“Tell them we come to make a bargain, if there’s any such word the rodents use.”
Yari-Tab yeeked out something.
That set up a storm of chittering like crickets.
More questions and answers passed back and forth. Wistala hoped Yari-Tab wasn’t committing her to driving the men away in exchange for the coin or anything mad like that.
Her head swam, and she lowered it. The rats backed away and returned, easily frightened, easily encouraged.
“Just a moment—they’re calling for someone,” Yari-Tab said. She made a pretense of nonchalance, licking mud from her paws, but her tail twitched.
Wistala stilled it with a sii.
A creeping, cloud-eyed rat appeared, white all around the eyes and snout. The other rats jostled it as it came forward. A big brute of a rat dashed from the shadows and bowled it over, before scampering around them in a quick circle.
Wistala felt Yari-Tab instinctively lunge after the rodent, drawn by the motion, but held her back by the tail. The cat let out an outraged hiss.
The cloud-eyed rat would not be discouraged. It approached and yeeked.
“What did he say?”
“I can’t make nose or tail out of it. I know we were called nightstalkers.”
“Just say what I say: I’ve come to claim coin rightfully mine, mistakenly taken by the rats.”
With a great deal of halting and repeating, Yari-Tab chirped out the message. More rats had gathered, until they surrounded the pair like a gray-brown field.
The big rat that had jostled the cloud-eyed one stood up on its haunches and chattered. Wistala noted that the brute had a patch of fur missing from its shoulder, pink scar tissue with a few spikelike hairs had replaced brown fur. The older rat yeeked in return.
“Well?” Wistala asked.
“What do you suppose ‘finders keepers’ means?” Yari-Tab asked.
“They have it, anyway. Ask them what they could possibly use hominid coin for?”
“Oh, my aching head.” Yari-Tab chattered back. After that, only the cloud-eyed rat spoke, and at length.
Yari-Tab stopped to scratch the back of her ear. “I think I’m getting a perch on this. The rats seem to think if they get enough coin together, men will come and fight over it and leave bodies strewn about as they did long ago, and the rats will have great feasting.”
“Tell them—tell them it does no good to just gather it if the men don’t know about it. If they’ll return the coin from behind the false wall, only enough for me to fill my bags, I’ll spread rumors among the men about their hoard. Then the men will come and fight.”
Yari-Tab yeeked, but was cut off by the big rat, who ran up to her and stood nose to nose, baring his teeth.
“You’ve just been called a lying every-name and then some.”
“Tell them this: I intend to find or replace my coin. I’ll dig and I’ll dig, looking for more. Who knows how many holes I’ll open up, and then these tunnels will be crawling with cats.”
Yari-Tab’s eyelids went so wide, Wistala feared her eyeballs might roll out of her head. “We might not want to threaten—”
“Just say it,” Wistala said, widening her stance and lowering her belly as the feline translated.
At that, the big brute rat screeched and jumped. It had courage; Wistala had to grant it that. It landed on her back and started to clamber up her neck, all awful sensation, rat claws digging into the base of her scales.
Yari-Tab disappeared under a wave of rodents as others jumped on. The feline let out such an earsplitting yowl, the mass of rats around them froze for a moment.
That worked so well, Wistala added a roar of her own, not so sharp to the ears, but a good deal louder—even if it came out as a strangled cry. The tide of rats turned, save for a few locked in combat with hatchling and cat. The rat sank its teeth into the soft flesh beneath her jaw. Wistala whipped her head to and fro, but the brute hung on, digging in. Wistala opened her mouth and swung it so its hindquarters flipped up and into her mouth.
Even in death, the rat’s teeth didn’t relax.
Yari-Tab, blood-smeared and wild-eyed, exploded out of the rats and jumped to the top of Wistala’s broad back, clawing up by way of the canvas bags. From there, the cat lashed out with her paws, swatting rats even as she hung on to the twisting hatchling. Wistala bit the rats clamped to her friend’s haunches.
It was over in a few heartbeats. Wistala and Yari-Tab stood panting, the torn rat still dangling from the hatchling’s neck like a blood-dripping ornament.
Only the cloud-eyed rat still stood its ground. Perhaps it hadn’t seen the bloody contest.
“Well?” Wistala asked it, prying the dead rat loose with a claw. It came away with no small amount of flesh and blood between its jaws, its scarred shoulder red with her blood.
Yari-Tab trembled so on her back, it reminded Wistala of the beating wings of her dreams, only hundreds of times faster.
The rat yeeked heartily.
“Did you catch that?” Wistala asked.
“What?” Yari-Tab said. “Oh. My apologies, noble rathunter.” A conversation ensued. Wistala tried licking out her wounds as the noises passed back and forth. Though shallow, the bites hurt abominably. A great forest boar wouldn’t have been able to draw so much blood with its tusks against her scales as the rats could with tiny sharp teeth.
“The meal of it is, he’s going to give you the coin,” Yari-Tab said.
“What’s his price for the rats we killed?”
“Nothing. He thinks it’s good for the hotheads to kill themselves off now and then. More room for the rest.”
Wistala swallowed the remaining half of the brute rat. It wasn’t so bad after all, and she was as hungry as she’d ever been eating bones and claw-thin, fresh-spawned slugs in the home cave. “Even so. No sense leaving bodies lying around to remind them.”
A procession of rats led them to a dank, dark room at the meeting of two sets of stairs where a metal cistern, big enough to hold a clutch of dragon eggs, lay half on its side.
Wistala’s wounds still stung, but less now, and the pain was being replaced by a warm itch that in a lot of ways was worse than the sharper hurt.
Gold and green-covered coins lay within. The spill of metal didn’t shine or glitter or gleam, but even the most tarnished coin made Wistala briefly swish her tail and stand with head erect, saliva suddenly thick at her gumline. A hoard!
Kill the rats! Kill them all! Kill the cat! Kill anything that so much as makes an echo near my glitters!
“Tchatlassat!” Yari-Tab squeaked as Wistala dragon-dashed forward, bowling her over. “Sister!”
Wistala stood with hindquarters to the coin, the shadows around her dark and red and angry.
The rats scat
tered, but Yari-Tab stood her ground, though she stood sideways, back arched, ready to flee.
“Sister!” she repeated, sounding passably Drakine.
Wistala blinked. The red faded. She took a mouthful of metal, more to give the wet in her mouth something to work on while she set her thoughts in order. She’d never expected the glamour of gold to be so strong!
“Oh! Sorry, tchatlassat, I came over funny. The rat bites are making me moody.”
Yari-Tab said, “Your eyes went all red and fiery. I was worried for a moment that you had the froth.”
“Better now.” She took another mouthful of coin, rolled it around with her tongue until it was good and slimy, then let it slip down her throat. A brief, pleasant tinkle sounded from within as it clanked into the first bit.
“Let’s see how much I can carry.”
The rats regathered to watch.
Within a few moments, she had both bags filled—the pile looked hardly touched. Wistala looked around the chamber. Not a bad spot, actually, with water near and ample food. In the form of rats. But a dragon vow couldn’t just be shrugged off like a dropped leaf. Besides, Father needed the coin worse than she.
Wistala nodded to the rats and trudged back the way they’d come. Yari-Tab jumped on her back and rode, claws dug into the crosspiece for the bags.
“It’s going to feel a long way back carrying this load,” Wistala said.
“Why leave?” Yari-Tab asked. “The hunting’s going to be good with that run open. Next tailswell, I might even treat one of the local lazeabouts and have a litter of kittens. Deep Run will be our little secret.”
“I’m already overlong,” Wistala said, as they rejoined the sewer. It took her a moment to get her bearings, but only a moment—she still had her Lower World sense.
“Will you come back for more coin? I mean someday.”
“I can’t say.”
“You’ve got a funny smell and a clumsy foot-way about you, Talassat. But I must admit you’re the most interesting creature I’ve come across since I pounced my first mouse. I’ll be sorry to see you leave Tumbledown.”
Wistala sniffed the passage with the glow-crystal before reentering it. Full daylight shone outside, and there’d be men up and around. Perhaps she should sleep for a while and go back into the forest by dark. Yes. She was very tired. And the rat bites itched.
“I’m for a nap.”
“Always a good idea,” Yari-Tab agreed.
Wistala found an out-of-the-way corner with good air carrying smells from the entrance and settled down on a patch of dried mud obscuring some kind of tile artwork.
After a few tries, Yari-Tab curled up against her belly. “Your skin’s about as comfortable as a riverbed,” Yari-Tab said. “Warm belly, though.”
Together, they slept.
Chapter 10
Yari-Tab wasn’t much of a sleepmate. She got up and went off to prowl at least four times that Wistala remembered, then returned and made a production out of finding a comfortable spot.
But she did bring Wistala a dead snake a for breakfast. Wistala had no appetite, as she felt dry and sick from rat bites. Wistala wondered that the bony feline could carry the serpent, which looked fully half her weight, from wherever she’d caught it. Unfortunately, she’d have to carry the onerous weight of the coin much, much farther.
Time to be off.
“A good jump and a full belly, Talassat,” Yari-Tab said as they made their good-byes.
“A good jump and a full belly, fur-sister,” Wistala replied. The cat rubbed the side of her face against her folded griff and gave her forehead a lick.
As Wistala sniffed her way out of the ruins, she looked back at her feline friend, who found an old headless statue to sit upon and watch her leave. Wistala flicked head and tail up, and the cat raised a paw. Far off, a dog barked at the motion, and Wistala scrambled to the other side of a fallen column to put its bulk between her and the noisy dog. She looked back once more at the bottom of the hill, but Yari-Tab atop her statue was nothing but a lump against a multitude of other lumps filling the hills.
Wistala didn’t relax until she was far from the smell of burning charcoal with a forest of shadows behind her. Only then did she cast about for a meal.
She had no luck—the clanking coins atop her back sounded a warning of her approach—and she went hungry that night.
She heard the first bay from the ridgetop, her halfway-home mark, as the morning sun turned the western mountains of her birth into blood-edged teeth.
At first she guessed it to be a distant wolf cry, but when the call wasn’t answered from any quarter of the horizon, but rather taken up by other canine voices behind her—quite precisely behind her, she realized with an anxious gulp—she knew it had to be dogs.
Perhaps the dogs were after some poor stag or fox. She’d kept clear of the flocks of Tumbledown to avoid a vengeful hunt, and in all likelihood, she’d roused one anyway.
But time, she had time. Time to improvise.
Keeping to the ridge had its advantages. She could hear or see the pursuit—and it was the most direct path home. But a series of lakes to the morning side and a stream to the evening side might delay the dogs. She didn’t know much about canines except that they couldn’t smell their way across water.
Wistala trotted along until she found a sharp-sided ravine on the lake-littered side of the ridge. She let a little urine go to give it a strong dragon scent, then slid down its muddy sides. She trotted to a reed-infested pond, scattering waterfowl this way and that. She drank deep and thought for a moment—she had to get this just right.
First Wistala loosed the rest of her urine at the pond’s edge, allowing most of it to go into the water. With a little luck, it would spread and filter through the whole pond until the dogs would detect it on every bank.
She left a confusion of muddy tracks and knocked over reeds at the bank, then rolled in waterfowl droppings, smearing her sii and saa thoroughly with them. Then she backtracked and climbed the ridge to her original path at a different spot, and carefully avoided the well-marked ravine.
All the climbing made her legs weary. The heavy yoke of coins across her neck felt heavier at each step, even as her stomach felt emptier despite the water.
At the thought of the coins, her mouth flooded with the slimy drool she’d had when she first came across them. Father wouldn’t notice a mouthful or two gone—and they’d carry lighter in her stomach.
Once clear of her dog-dodge, she hurried as best as she could along the ridgetop, carrying tail high and doing her best to keep from snapping branches or trotting through muddy hollows. When her breath left her, she paused and ate a big mouthful of coin from each bag, more to take the desire out of her mind and mouth than because she actually needed it. . . .
An hour later, she came off the ridge, fixing her snout on the mountain notch that marked the source of the river gorge. If she traveled hard, she’d reach Father before nightfall. The rat bites were itching worse than ever, not quite pain, but adding to her bone-deep weariness.
She tore the loose bark off a fallen tree and managed to get a few insects, but they only made her hunger worse. Oh, for a sick porcupine or a one-winged pheasant!
A noise behind, light footfalls . . .
Wistala caught a glimpse of a hairy back, thinner than a bear’s but not much smaller. She jumped up a bank and turned into a concealing patch of milkweed.
A black dog, with foam-flecked tongue and yellow teeth, padded out of the brush. Its eyes were wide and nervous as it put its long pointed snout to the trail. It had an odd sort of fur, extremely short at its head and limbs, thick and spiked like a badger’s about the shoulders and upper back. It bore no tail that she could see. A leather collar, fixed high about its neck, and studded rings showed it to be domesticated. Even more oddly, two matching red runes were painted on its flanks. They reminded Wistala of flames or lightning bolts.
It sniffed the air and turned a nervous circle.
&
nbsp; Wistala held her breath.
The dog trotted along her trail, nose pointed down but eyes watching the way ahead, passed her little bank upwind. The dog, like most fur-bearers, smelled like a dungheap. A faint smell of blood came from it, too.
Leap on it leap on it leap on it!
But she couldn’t. All her body seemed capable of was shivering beneath the white-yellow flowers of the milkweed.
The dog turned, obscenely bulging eyes with their evil round pupils fixing on her location. It gave one querulous bark and looked right and left, as though searching for allies among the tree trunks.
Wistala shot forth to the edge of the bank and planted her feet, extended her griff and hissed at the beast:
“Go away!”
If it understood her, it gave no sign. Instead it let loose with a deep-throated snarl and came straight at her.
Fast, so fast, it was on her in an eyeblink. They came down the bank, rolling together, the dog’s long limbs tangled with her own, teeth clattering against teeth. It yelped as she landed on its hindquarters but still sunk its teeth into her sii-shoulder joint. The upper teeth had no luck against her scales, but the lower went home.
Wistala raked it with her rear claws and felt blood and sinew. The dying dog hung on, closing its eyes to the pain. . . .
She resisted the urge to tear it free from her skin; that would do more damage. She waited until its heart stopped and then gently pried its jaws open.
Distant dog barks from the ridge told her at least one of the canine’s yelps had been heard. She nosed into the dog’s claw-torn belly and found the liver. Mother always said, if you could just eat one piece of an animal, it should always be the liver.
The body twitched as she chewed and lapped at dripping blood. It was an old dog. There were white circles about its eyes, ears, and nose. Perhaps it had become confused and broken away from the rest of the pack—
Then she licked the bite wound clean and pressed on.
Despite the meal, she’d come off worse from the engagement. Her front limb was horribly sore; she could hardly stand to move it, so she hobbled along as best as she could using the other three, now heading up into the foothills of the mountains.