Chapter 9
A week’s worth of breakfasts later—mostly fish, unfortunately for Father’s blood-hungry appetite—Wistala smelled smoke in the evening twilight of the forest west of the river gorge.
Game had become scarce in the area around Father and Bartleghaff, who seemed to do little but befoul his perch and goad Father into burning him up like a feathery candle.
Smoke in the forest, with the wood so wet from the constant spring rains, could mean only one thing—hominids. No other creatures save dragons wielded so dangerous a weapon.
With luck, she’d have hers in a few more months. Coming aboveground early had its terrors, but she had to admit she was thriving on the variety of food to be found.
And speaking of variety of food—as she rolled the smoke smell around in her nostrils, she got the mouthwatering scent of charred flesh, which she hadn’t had since Father brought home a burned sheep to the egg shelf what seemed like a lifetime ago.
The smoke smell was as easy to follow as a bright moon on a cloudless night through the trees. After a little casting back and forth, she came to a wide hollow.
It was an unnatural sort of place, like a dry creek, only the bottom was filled with tiny broken stones all roughly the same size, and the overgrown banks carried no smell of running water, though every rill for miles was brim-full with the rains. The hollow bent around the peak of the hill as though a claw like Bartleghaff’s obelisk had scored the hillside. But from the heights, one could both see either end of the streambed-like cut for a goodly length and be out of the wind.
A dwarf had chosen to camp here.
“Great things have small beginnings,” Mother used to like to say when she and Jizara compared their minuscule size to her bulk.
Her vengeance would begin here. As a bonus, the dwarf had a string of ponies. Surely she’d bring down one or two and be able to carry several limbs back to Father before the birds made off with it all.
She stayed downwind in the smoke smell. Examining each sii-and saa-hold as she crept up, she reached a pounce point in the cut of the bank. Perhaps two bounds to reach the dwarf, and if he had an ax, he didn’t keep it beside him. . . .
The dwarf wasn’t even helmed, though he did have a sort of mask across his face and just a few scraggles of beard showing. Her store of dwarf-lore was not great, but she knew that a dwarf without a full beard was either very young or some kind of criminal. The only thing remarkable about him was his riding boots, which rose all the way to his hips.
The dwarf carefully set his frying pan down and stood.
Wistala froze, waiting for him to reach for a weapon.
But he wasn’t looking in her direction.
She tried to follow his gaze, but all she could see was the string of tasty-looking ponies, chewing their meals in bags attached to their noses.
One of the middle ponies had no interest in his meal; instead he stood miserably with one hoof tipped forward.
The dwarf went to his little two-wheeled cart and returned with a bag. She watched the dwarf lift the pony’s hoof and shake his head. He scratched it between the ears, grumbling something in his tongue, and went to work.
Wistala had gnawed at enough horse hooves to know that men sometimes put iron soles on the bottoms of their saa to save their beasts sore-footedness. Perhaps one had come loose. In any case, the dwarf carefully cleaned the pony’s hoof, extracting a sizable rock with a long device shaped like a dragon’s snout, and applied some kind of tart-smelling salve from a covered clay pot. Then he pounded in a fresh shoe, driving nails right into the animal’s foot. The pony didn’t like the hammering, but placed its foot on the ground, happy to rest its weight on all fours again.
Still grumbling, the dwarf refilled the nose bags from a sack and returned to his now-cold meal. The dwarf mopped up a little congealed grease with a lump of bread and left the rest.
The desire to leap and kill left Wistala. Any sort of creature that would leave his own dinner to see to the comfort of a four-legged brute didn’t seem the type to slaughter hatchlings in their cave. Besides, he held no helm or shield with flames; as far as she could tell, he had no sort of insignia on him, unless you counted the strange angular design like the gems Father gave them to play with on the rear doors of his cart.
He removed the nose bags on his ponies and posted them so they could nibble at the grass and growth on the banks or lie down. The nose bags intrigued Wistala, Bartleghaff’s story of men carrying around water in the bodies of animals had stayed with her. They seemed just the right size for fish.
The dwarf cleaned his tools and then sprayed a sweet-smelling liquid on his short, thin beard using a bag that hissed like a hatchling as he squeezed it.
The dwarf turned in. Once she heard snores, she crept up and licked the contents of his pan. Then she picked up two of the nose bags in her mouth. The startled ponies shifted and whinnied in alarm.
She shot into the brush as the dwarf came awake, still with the grease on her tongue. Once out of hearing from the dwarf’s camp, she dropped the nose bags and licked her teeth, searching for lost tidbits. Delicious.
Father didn’t like her playing with the nose bags: “The Four Spirits gave dragons everything they need to survive, and your mother’s wit will fill any gaps.” Once dragons started relying on hominid artifice, they’d be painting their scales and wing tissue again like the decadent dragons of Silverhigh.
But Mother’s wit told her to improvise. The nose bags were big enough to hold rabbit and pheasant or several fish. When she dumped a meal of squab—oh, the thrill of leaping on them as they took wing—out for Father, he bent so far as to say that circumstances permitted a temporary utilization of the nose bags.
They were so clever! Leather straps designed to hold them on the ponies’ heads had little brass latches like dragonclaws poking through holes punched in the straps, and a rope drawstring closed them like the leg coverings she’d examined on the man Auron ate. Wistala, after a good deal of trial and error that was more error than trial, fixed the straps so they hung across her shoulders just where the neck-dip began. They swung about a little, which was a bother, and snagged on her scales. She wished she could find that dwarf again and convince him to fix the bags together somehow.
“Tell me again about burning the bridges at Sollorsoar,” Wistala urged her father.
“You’ve heard that one before,” Father said.
“I like the part where the elves either must jump into the river or burn,” Wistala said. It was easy to place the faces of wide-eyed elves who rode after Auron upon the group of warriors trapped at the center of the bridge.
“You’re an odd sort of dragonelle, Wistala. Those saddlebags, and now war stories. Even your Mother only asked for my battle anecdotes when she wanted to be lulled to sleep. You gobble them like gold.”
“She’s a young Ahregnia, or imagines herself one,” Bartleghaff said.
Curse that condor! Every time he mentioned Ahregnia, Father went into one of his lectures. She felt her sii extend as Father cleared his long throat.
“My sire knew her as sister, Wistala. A bitter female, consumed by revenge for her lost mate. Scarred she was, poisonous of mind, with tongue as sharp as her claws. Leave battles to dragons, and save your hearts for husband, hatchlings, and home cave.”
“Jizara, Auron, and Mo—”
“Are mine to avenge, daughter. If I can ever get aloft again.”
Father spread his wings, wincing at the pain in his ax-hacked neck and shoulders. He beat his wings, stirring hardly enough wind to blow Wistala’s fringe to the other side of her neck. One long black fringe-point dropped to the corner of her eye, and she reached up with her left sii and snipped it short with her claws.
“That’s a terrible habit, Wistala,” Father barked. “A long fringe means a healthy dragonelle.”
A failed attempt at flight always leaves Father irascible. But his tone still stung, no matter how many times she told herself that.
“You’re just wearing yourself out,” she said. “I smelled deer spoor in the woods. I’ll try to find you a yearling.”
“What I really need is some metal. Look at these scales coming in! A snake would be ashamed.”
“Deer wouldn’t carry gold and silver,” Bartleghaff said.
“I saw a . . . a . . . ,” Wistala said, searching for the word, “. . . road. Might riders carry gold?”
“They’d carry weapons, as well,” Father said. “I thought I saw some ruins in the forest to the southwest, probably Old Hypatian. There might be iron to be plucked. I’d settle for nails. You could carry them in your neck contraption.”
“How far?” Wistala asked.
“Too far for you to find it on foot. You’d spend weeks searching,” Bartleghaff said.
“Exactly,” Father said. “Listen, old vulture, you’re getting fat on all those fish heads. Fly and guide her so your wings stay in training.”
“Why?” Bartleghaff asked. “I need nails like I need a captive hawk’s hood and tether.”
“Call it a favor to an old friend keeping an eye on his daughter. Two, if you can spare a glance down now and then.”
“High flier! Not an errand-wing,” Bartlegaff cawed.
“Smoldering pile of feathers for taking advantage of her hospitality,” Father said. He spat a globule of fire off the steep rock-side facing the river, watched it fall and hit the froth in a hiss. It rode the waves for a moment, still burning, before succumbing to the white water. “She’s been catching and hauling fish for you for weeks. And you fair bubbled with gratitude last night over that rabbit. Or did the gratitude get coughed up along with the bones?”
Bartleghaff worked his trailing wing feathers with his beak. “Oh, very well.”
“Have a few mouthfuls of metal yourself, daughter. You’re growing, and you need your ferrites. If you come across any quartz or fine sand, a mouthful or two wouldn’t hurt. Scours the teeth and aids the digestion.”
“So you and Mother have told me. Over and over,” Wistala said. But she couldn’t hide her excitement at the errand.
Bartleghaff’s guidance consisted of a few visits throughout the day, mostly to tell her she was heading in the wrong direction. He always picked out landmarks that she couldn’t see, even by climbing a tall tree! She’d follow a ridge he put her on for an afternoon, only to have him swoop down and tell her she’d been making too easterly for hours, and she had to veer back south. She felt her fire bladder twitch at some of the abuse he employed—birdspeech had no end of colorful calumnies.
“You could come down and correct me more often,” she said, her fire bladder pulsing in time to her angry hearts.
“You could rest in a clearing now and then so I might see you through these confounded trees.”
She guessed it was a young forest. Now and then she passed a stone wall that led nowhere and divided nothing but its mossy side from the bare. She found a tall brick building on a bank. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to divert the stream years ago so that it flowed close to the building; now all was overgrown and inhabited by raccoons who retreated to tight holes in the bricks and bared their teeth when she sniffed at them. According to Father, where one man came, soon there would be ten and then hundreds, but whatever men had lived here, they’d long ago abandoned the land to the thriving trees, leaving the waterfall and pool they’d crafted to tasty frogs and fish.
She chased some smaller crows away from a dead groundhog and decided the meat was too noisome to interest her, but Bartleghaff thought it palatable.
Greenstuff filled every nook and cranny of the ruins, but where wind and water contested the mosses and lichens, marble still gleamed. Wistala crept to the edge of the forest, swarmed up a tree looking out over the ruins, and tried to put a mental map together.
Wistala watched men graze their sheep in the wide grassy lanes of what must have once been a city as their women and children gathered nuts and berries. Dogs, more interested in disturbing the cats sunning themselves atop ruined walls or in the gaps between decorative friezes, trotted from man to sheep, learning whatever might be discovered in each other’s tailvents.
The fallen city had three clusters to it, each atop a hill, linked by low walls between, like three spiderwebs sharing a hollow log. A marsh stood at the very center of the three hills, but ancient vine-wrapped columns projected from it, showing that it hadn’t always been a wetland. The village of the men stood a few dozen dragon-lengths off, outside a fallen gate that admitted a stream into the ruins. The stream fed the marsh.
She decided to hunt and rest for the day, and then explore the ruins at night. Metal would smell the same day or night, and she’d just as soon poke around after the men had retreated to their hearths. She just hoped they didn’t loose dogs in the rubble.
She released Bartleghaff. Retracing her steps would be of no difficulty now that she knew the landmarks. She could find the brick ruin by the stream, and from that the ridge, and from that the wall corners, and from that—
“Keep clear of those men,” Bartleghaff warned. “If you smell stewing lamb, just shut your nostrils. ‘Temptation hatches instigation which hatches assassination!’ ”
The old condor had perched over Father too long: he was starting to sound like a dragon.
“Tell Father I’ll be back in a day or two.”
“Wasted air. He’ll send me back to watch you,” Bartleghaff grumbled. He took to the skies, wings wider than she was long beating the air as he rose.
Wistala flattened some tall grass and let the sun clean her scales. As twilight fell, she found a pile of old timber riddled with termites and tore open the pieces with her claws, taking up the crunchy tunnelers three at a time with her tongue.
Insect eating, once started, is difficult to stop, and it was a very lucky termite that escaped into the fallen leaves. The next thing she knew, the sun had disappeared in her silent fall, and the night belonged to her.
It was a warm summer night, with red clouds purpling overhead. The air had a thick softness to it that promised a hot day tomorrow.
Wistala started her search, mostly following her nose from corner to alley to stoop.
She found a few nails, almost unrecognizable for their rust, and found it was easier to break up the wood where they still lay than it was to pull them out. She ate one—it tasted almost like blood. She found what might have once been a cutting tool beneath some broken shards of pottery. It smelled like bad steel.
She chased a smell down and dug at the base of a wall, but found only bits and pieces of mixed metal and glass.
“What-t-t on earth-th-th are you?” a voice said to her in rather breathy birdspeech.
A pair of yellow eyes, slit like hers, watched her from a deep shadow.
“A scaled snaggletooth. Are you a cat?”
“Look, learn, and give in to the awe!” the owner of the eyes said. Wistala found her easy to understand, her body and throat issued patterns sisterly to dragonspeech.
The eyes came out into the moonlight, walking along the wall. Wistala read the thin orange-striped silhouette from whiskers to long twitching tail. “A word of advice: Never ask a softstalker whether she’s a feline or not. If she is, you may admire at leisure. If she isn’t, you’ll just shame her. My name is Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter, born this spring here in Tumbledown, and I’ve never seen anything dumb enough to swallow metal before. Even dogs are brighter. Did you think it a beetle?”
“No. I have strange appetites.”
“I’ll say,” Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter agreed. “Have you a name?”
“Wistala. Here hunting metals.”
“I prefer rats, myself.”
“I don’t smell blood on you.”
The cat licked one of her black paws and rearranged the hair on her ears. “The moon hasn’t smiled on me yet tonight. I’m a free spirit. All the big males have the best spots staked out for their mates and kits.”
The cat seemed terribly thin to Wistala. “I hate rats. My brothers could swallow them whole, but those tails . . .” She shut her nostrils.
“You must know these ruins, then,” Wistala said.
“Of course.”
“Do you know where I can find more metal?”
The cat turned a neat circle, looked Wistala up and down. “You’ve got short thick claws. Almost badgerlike. How are you at digging?”
“I—I don’t know. I’ve clawed through ice.”
“The rats have a place under Tumbledown here. They call it Deep Run. A network of tunnels. Not built by them, of course. Supposedly there are outlets in the swamp, but no self-respecting feline will traipse around in there for fear of the channelbacks. I know a hole that leads to Deep Run. If you enlarge it, I’ll show you some metal coin. It’s old and crusty, but metal nonetheless. Nice little mouthfuls. Of course, you’ll have to dig again. I don’t think you’d fit.”
Wistala considered. At the rate she was going in the ruins, her improvised nose bags would take days to fill. The men had obviously picked the surface clean of anything useful.
Anything worth the having is worth the effort, Mother used to say.
“It’s a bargain.”
“It occurs to me,” the cat said, “that once underground, you could make a meal of me.”
“Can you keep something from the birds earthbound and ditch-gossips?”
“Of course. Felines are full of secrets.”
Wistala drew herself up on her stubby legs. “I’m a dragon, feline, and I give you my word as Wistala Irelianova that I’ll keep a fair bargain if you will.”
Whiskers twitched. “And what would a dragon be?”
Wistala froze for a moment. The cat seemed perfectly worldly, well-spoken and felicitous of fang. Apart from the chopped-short neck and face, she was almost drakine after Jizara’s elegantly limbed fashion. How could she not know what a dragon was?
“We are old, falling between mountains and man, gifted by the Four Spirits with strengths to order the world.”
The cat’s back rose in a graceful arc. “Order? Order is the enemy of the feline. We thrive on chaos, and if there’s not enough about, we instigate some. I hope you haven’t come to bring order to Tumbledown.”
“Nothing like.”
“I should think a creature meant to bring order to the world would be bigger.”
“I’m young.”
Yari Sunwarm Fourth Orangedaughter turned her alarmed pose into a casual stretch. “Make me this hole, Wistala Irelianova, and I and my kits will be in your debt and keep your secret that a dragon has come to Tumbledown.”
“Bargain.”
“Then let us touch whiskers . . . errr . . .”
Wistala extended her griff. “Will these do?”
“How beautiful! Yes, of course.”
The cat approached and stood nose-to-nose with her, then put her head alongside Wistala’s. Wistala felt the cat’s whiskers tickle as they flicked along her scales and probed the gaps. They prrumed at each other, and Wistala felt a warm affinity.
“I fear I shall have to like you for your mind, Wistala Irelianova. You are too hard to perch on for a comfortable nap and smell like that furnace the men use to cook their metal.”
“It’s Tala to my friends.”
“Then I’m Yari-Tab to you. Follow.”
The cat jumped away, tail flicking this way and that in excitement. Dragons and felines must be related somehow! Even their naming customs bore some resemblance.
“What’s catspeech like, Yari-Tab?”
The cat spoke from deep in her throat: long garble garble hrrr hunt and fair garble garble hrr blood.
Why, felines used words of Drakine!
“Beware blighters bearing gifts,” Wistala said back to her in Drakine, quoting an old dragon-proverb.
“Watch out for—ummm, dirty presents?” Yari-Tab said, as she trotted up a leaning column that reminded Wistala of a windblown tree on a mountainside.
“Close. That was dragonspeech.”
“Well, I never! I feel like I’ve got a new tchatlassat.”
Wistala thought she knew the word. “A . . . clutchmate?”
“More like a—umm . . . cousin. A distant blood relation who is also a friend.”
What was the word for that in drakine? Ah yes, kazhin. “My mother never told me about felines.”
“Mine taught me to hunt, and that’s about all. But that’s felines for you. Great at telling their own tales and looking out for same, indifferent to anyone else’s. We’ve got to find that basement now. Ahhh.”
Yari-Tab jumped down from the column to a protruding branch, then to a broken windowsill, and then to the ground in a sort of controlled fall. She landed a good deal lighter than a dragon.
“Can you fit down this, Talassat?”
Wistala looked down what appeared to be an overgrown hole. Brambles trailed over an overhanging pile of rubble.
Yari-Tab ventured in and turned so her eyes glittered from the darkness. Above it three ancient arches, all broken open at the top, hosted a tangle of spider-legged plants.
“It widens out a little way down. Can you smell the rats?”
Wistala stuck her head in, smelled the rat urine mixed with old leaves and wormcast. The gap yawned bigger than it looked; it was mostly closed off by roots and their attendant mosses and trapped leaves. She pushed her head down and through, catching bits of lichen and dry air-root in her scales.
She found they were on stairs, Yari-Tab already down and through another hole, a half-filled passageway.
She tracked by smell and sound—the cat’s footfalls were as silent as morning mist, but Wistala could hear her breath and sniffing.
“I wish I had my fire,” Wistala said.
“Fire?”
“Yes, dragons can spit fire. I don’t like not being able to see. A torf here and there makes all the difference.”
“That’s part of the fun, hunting by ear and nose. Though all this talking has sent the rats running.”
“Sorry. I like being underground—I just want to explore thoroughly so I can feel safe, and unless dragons live long out of the sun, their eyes can’t work on nothing.”
“It’s light you want? Want to see a bit of magic?”
“Cats and rats! You can do magic?”
Yari-Tab purred. “Oh no, but I’m fond of pretties. See this, my all-nose-and-no-smellsense-tchatlassat.”
Wistala heard the cat scamper up a wall and more prruming.
A faint glow, like an angry dragoneye, threw a faint amber light across the chamber. With a modicum of light to work with, Wistala could now see the passageway they traversed.
She reared up and sniffed at the light source. It was some humble gem, perhaps enchanted in a fashion, for it held a glowing liquid within. As her nostrils breathed on it, the light grew brighter.
Yari-Tab extracted a clump of dirt from her paw and a cobweb from her whiskers. “There you are, Talassat. Some bit of forgotten magic—they’re here and there in odd corners in the underground. The men have stripped them from the chambers they can get at. No one’s found this one.”
“How do you know about it?”
“My mother showed me this chamber and the trick, and I imagine she got it from hers. Rats aren’t very clever—if you put a little light in a room, they’re far braver about traveling the shadows than they are when it’s holefill black.”
“Did your father ever teach you at all?”
“Never knew him.” She made another light descent and trotted to the far corner of the passageway. “One of a dozen possibles and not much for hanging about goes the feline proverb.”
Wistala tried to imagine what the home cave would have been like with other hatchlings and mother-dragons about. Other male hatchlings pouncing her—she got a pang as she thought of Auron.
So much less to eat!
Wistala found herself liking Yari-Tab, though once she began talking, she was like a mountainside stream on a warm spring day, running always.
They entered an arched chamber, dead-ending in a collapsed cascade of dirt and masonry. The cut-off passage was about the size of Father if you didn’t count his neck and trunk, cobwebbed above and rat-fouled below.
“You’re sending the rats running,” Yari-Tab said, hearing scrabbling sounds from a series of holes at the edge of the room. They were choked with dirt, broken stone, and everything from bits of bark to twigs.
She paused at one that stood under a crack in the wall where a good deal of masonry had fallen away, showing dirt behind mixed in with chunks of man-cut stone, both enlarging and blocking the passage. “There are bits of tunnel beneath this. Lots in other places are filled with swamp water, but this one has so much rat-scent coming up out of it, I think it’s got to lead to the Deep Run.”
“How do you know the Deep Run exists?”
“The rats squeak it to each other when they’re being chased.”
With every word, it became easier to understand the cat. Wistala wasn’t sure if they were speaking Feline or Drakine or some simplified version blending the two. Their slit-pupiled eyes regarded each other in the darkness.
Wistala sniffed at the blockade. Only the tiniest glimmer of light came from the stone in the other room, but it was enough for her eyes to work on. “The rats have dug a hole. Why don’t you just enlarge it?”
“A feline? Dig?” Yari-Tab flipped onto her back and rolled around in delight, batting at a bit of old cottonwood seed that had drifted down somehow, fighting it like an enemy. “Digging’s for the rodents,” she said as she sat and reset her fur.
Wistala thrust her snout into the hole, widened it enough for her sii, and went to work. Soon she sent showers of dirt in either direction, extracting or shoving the bigger pieces out of the way.
Yari-Tab found a perch out of the way of the digging and settled down to watch.
Her claws struck metal, badly rusted. Some kind of bars had been set into the tunnel, which trapped sticks, which collected leaves, which stopped dirt and blockaded the inlet.
The bars vexed her even after she dug her way through. Though rusted, they were too hard to bite, and all her claws could achieve against them were a series of scorings. Just beyond, a mound of dirt blocked the inlet, but a rat path ran up toward the top of the sluice. She backed out of the tunnel.
“Finished already?” Yari-Tab yawned.
Wistala blew dirt out of her nostrils. “See if you can get through the rat hole now.”
The cat disappeared down the hole and returned, mud tipping her whiskers. “You’re almost there. Beyond the bars is a hole, and beyond that I smell fresher air and hear lots of water drips.”
“Except I can’t get beyond those bars.”
“Surely your neck can get through,” Yari-Tab said, cleaning herself.
“I can’t dig with my head.”
“Well, don’t look at me.”
Wistala’s tail swished of its own mind, and she crawled back down the sluice. She put her head through the bars and felt around with her nostrils. At the bottom joins, the water had worn away masonry, and it was quite crumbly on the other side. She extracted her head and went to work with one of her claws.
When she cleared off chunks all around the bricks holding the bar, she pushed again, but still it wouldn’t yield.
“Stone and bone, what a bother!” Muscles convulsed in her chest, and she spat at the bar. A rope of spit clung to it, as ineffectual as her claws. But it gave off a sharp, hot odor.
Am I getting my foua this early?
She heard a rat make a yeeking noise and scuttle.
If she could only part the bars a little so they’d offer more room, like—
Wistala remembered sleeping between Auron and Jizara. Jizara always took the warm spot against Mother, and Auron would sleep to the outside, leaving her cramped in the middle. Sometimes they pressed so close, she could hardly breathe. When they did that, she turned on her back and used her short, strong saa legs to part them.
She wedged her hindquarters sideways, pressing her tail through the gap, and backed as far as she could between the bars. She pressed with her legs at the center of the bar, just as she used to do at the center of Auron’s back.
It bent!
With that achieved, she repositioned herself between the bars facing the other way. She bent that one, as well. Now she had enough space to really put her legs and back into it—
Craaak!
The sudden release of pressure shocked her into thinking she’d broken her back instead of the bar for a moment, but sure enough, the bottom join had broken free of the rest of the clawed-away masonry. With half its strength gone, she could get down on all fours under it.
Ten heartbeats later, it was done—she could get through.
“Done it done it done it!” she called up to Yari-Tab.
“I knew you would,” the feline called back, sounding half-awake.
With the bars out of the way, clawing earth seemed like pushing through nothing more than a pile of fallen leaves. She spun as she dug, all four limbs working once and tail helping shove out the loosened earth, and then she got through. Her nostrils filled with fresher-moving air.
And the smell of rats.
A smooth-sided tunnel yawned beneath, water and muck filling the bottom. Other arched-off tunnels branched off it, some dry, others trickling a bit of water and algae. A green lichen grew at the rim of the water, some weak cousin of the growth from the home cave. Or rather the stuff living in the lichen—Mother had told her that the lichen itself didn’t glow; rather, the light came from tiny creatures that thrived on its fuzzy surface.
“Come and have a look, sister,” Wistala said.
Her water-lids fluttered up and back down when she realized what she’d said.
Yari-Tab crept easily between dirt pile and a tangle of roots holding the earth that hadn’t fallen.
“Such scents! Such hunting! I’ll never suffer an empty belly again.” Her tail stood straight up as she looked out over the water-bottomed tunnel. Walkways big enough for a man stretched to either side of the main channel; other passages branched off everywhere.
“Watch yourself. They can be savage when cornered. If they’re anything like cave rats, that is.”
“Oh, to be sure.”
“The coin?”
“But, of course.”
Yari-Tab tore herself away from what Wistala suspected were dreams of bloody rat livers and climbed back up the sluice. This time she went to the glow-room, reignited it by rubbing herself round the stone again, and took off down another passage. She passed under a low arch and came to a badly cracked wall.
“Someone took a lot of trouble to seal the metal behind this wall and make it look like just another stretch of passageway. It’s just inside that hole at the bottom.”
Wistala could smell metal through the hole. She thrust her nose in, following an instinct that wasn’t quite hunger and wasn’t quite lust.
But nothing but dusty darkness met her exploring tongue—though the dust did taste of refined metal.
“Where is it?” she asked, withdrawing her head.
Yari-Tab bunched up in the darkness, eyes widening.
“Where’s what? The hole’s full of it!”
“No, it isn’t. What kind of trick is this?” She felt her griff drop and begin to rattle, and the cat backed away.
“I wouldn’t play a trick on a tchatlassat! Never!”
“Take a look,” Wistala said.
“I . . . I can’t seem to move.”
“Fears and tears, I’m not going to hurt you.”
Wistala lay down in hungry despair, feeling frustrated. After a long moment, the cat padded to the hole and entered.
Yari-Tab reemerged. “The rats. Wouldn’t you know it.”
“What would they use coin for?”
“I’ve never made it past wondering why they eat tail-stinkies that are better off buried, myself.”
“Well, might as well ask them.”
“Ask who?”
“The rats, of course. They took it.”
Her ears went flat. “The rats? Are you frothing? They can only just vocalize. Hardly more sense than mouse-jibber.”
Wistala picked herself up and started back for the sluice. “Are you coming?”
“Do you even understand Rodent?”
“Err—”
Yari-Tab bounded after her. “Then I’m coming. Someone sensible ought to come on this expedition. This story will be worth yowling till it echos, if you pull it off.”
They returned to the opening to Deep Run. They heard rats flee ahead of them as they climbed the dirt pile.
“Inspecting your claw-work.”
“Where to next?” Wistala asked once they climbed down to the pathway beside the muddy water. She saw glittering red rat eyes on a high ledge that ran near the top of the tunnel.
“I don’t know. You instigated this dogbrained hunt. Follow the strongest smells until we corner some.”
This underground felt wrong to her; everything was even and proportioned and unnatural. She felt vaguely tense and unsettled as she explored.
They came to an outpouring of water from some aboveground entry. The fall was about as wide as she was long and fed a swampy mass of tangled water plants, here and there sending out buds on long stems like dragon necks.
“Can you jump that?” she asked, looking at the waterfall. The rats slipped through it under a low, wet overhang of fallen-away masonry.
“No. Too long,” Yari-Tab answered.
“Then hang on to my back. You’re going to get wet.”
“Oh, bother,” Yari-Tab said. Wistala winced as she felt claws dig into the base of her scales.
Wistala plunged through the spray and came out the other side into a join of passages.
Yari-Tab hopped off her back and made a great show of flicking her tail this way and that and kicking up her rear legs as she shook off the wet, a good deal of her grace and all of her dignity gone. She was even bonier than Wistala had imagined, obviously—
A ripple broke the pool, and the water exploded as a blur of a long-nosed shape lunged for Yari-Tab. Wistala saw snaggly yellow teeth and open mouth—
Once when Wistala was just out of the egg, a stalactite had cracked in the home cave, and Mother came to the edge of the egg shelf in a flash, putting her scaly bulk between the hatchlings and the gloom of the cave before the echo faded. Mother explained it later as “the fighting instinct,” and something very similar must have happened in some same depth of Wistala’s brain that kept her hearts beating.
Wistala jumped forward, threw herself into the jaws, felt them close on her scales and belly. An irresistible force dragged her into the water and under into darkness.
Whatever had a hold of her was perhaps surprised at her size, for it tried to shake her, but managed to only wave her back and forth in the black water filled with tiny strings of water roots. Wistala clawed with both sii and saa, lashed with her tail, brought her head round, and bit whatever held her at the join of its jaw. She got one saa into the teeth and tried to pry the jaws apart.
The pressure vanished, and the beast rolled, pulling her around it like a constricting snake as she left its jaws. It was perhaps the weight of a pony, though all jaws and tail, limbs smaller even than hers—
Since it had released her, she returned the favor, and it swam off into darkness. As she broke the surface of the water, she saw a thick tail with a serrated fringe like leathery teeth swirl the water and capsize the podlike blossoms of the water plants.
Wistala hugged ground and pulled herself up beside Yari-Tab, spat out a loosened hatchling tooth.
“That was a channelback!” Yari-Tab said from a perch at the top of the wall. For a half-starved cat, she was quite a jumper. She hopped down and landed softly next to Wistala.
“It fled. I was too big a mouthful anyway.”
“If you miss on your first pounce—,” Yari-Tab said.
“Try, try again elsewhere,” Wistala replied, paraphrasing an old dragonelle proverb. A creature that lived by hunting could ill-afford fights with prey; a lost eye or a broken limb could mean death by starvation.
“Thank you, tchatlassat,” Yari-Tab said. They turned and climbed away from the tunnel lake to a drier path, only to be attacked again.
Wistala felt a pull at her saa as she saw a trio of rats leap down from the ledge above—she lashed out instinctively with her saa and swished with her tail.
Two rats landed on her back, one on her head. It went for the eyes, and she panicked, whipping her head and rolling. Yari-Tab squealed as her body weight rolled over the cat.
She felt a bite in the naked flesh under her sii-pit. She whipped her head down, pulled the rat up by her teeth as she might a tick, crushed it, and flung it back into the channel water. Something bit at her hindquarters again, and she kicked—
Then they were gone as quickly as they’d come. She smelled blood and rats thick all around.
Yari-Tab had one pinned, both claws digging into its shoulders as it kicked out. The feline opened her teeth—
“Wait!” Wistala said.
“Whyever? The foul beasts bit my—”
“I want him to show us to the coin.”
The rat squeaked in fright.
“Ask it,” Wistala urged. “Ask it where the shiny metal is.”
Yari-Tab squeaked out something, and the rat chattered back.
“He says he knows just what you mean and that there’s lots. Don’t believe a word, though. Rats will say anything once you’ve got your claws in them.”
“I’ll take the chance. Tell him to show us.”
“He’ll bolt down the first hole or dive—”
Wistala bent down and took the rat in her mouth. She held her jaws just open enough for the rat to see the tunnel through her rows of teeth.
Yari-Tab purred. “That’ll keep him in line.” She squeaked up at the rat.
“He begs you not to swallow.”
Wistala tried to form words but couldn’t. She tilted her head and rapped a claw on the stepstones.
“Oh. Of course.” She squeaked out again. “He says straight ahead for a while.”
To any rats, or perhaps cave toads or bats lurking in the tunnels, they must have made a strange procession. Wistala walking with her head aloft, jaw set in its grimace, a rat nose protruding from between prominent fore-fangs. An orange-striped cat walking beneath, hopping over mud and rat droppings, occasionally rising up on its hind legs to squeak into the hatchling’s mouth, in and out of mottled moss-light.
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 scattered, 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.