“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.