“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.