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.