“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.