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.>“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?”