Wistala spat out the rat. It scampered away, shaking saliva from its hind feet.
“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.
That worked so well, Wistala added a roar of her own, not so sharp to the ears, but a good deal louder—even if it came out as a strangled cry. The tide of rats turned, save for a few locked in combat with hatchling and cat. The rat sank its teeth into the soft flesh beneath her jaw. Wistala whipped her head to and fro, but the brute hung on, digging in. Wistala opened her mouth and swung it so its hindquarters flipped up and into her mouth.
Even in death, the rat’s teeth didn’t relax.
Yari-Tab, blood-smeared and wild-eyed, exploded out of the rats and jumped to the top of Wistala’s broad back, clawing up by way of the canvas bags. From there, the cat lashed out with her paws, swatting rats even as she hung on to the twisting hatchling. Wistala bit the rats clamped to her friend’s haunches.
It was over in a few heartbeats. Wistala and Yari-Tab stood panting, the torn rat still dangling from the hatchling’s neck like a blood-dripping ornament.
Only the cloud-eyed rat still stood its ground. Perhaps it hadn’t seen the bloody contest.
“Well?” Wistala asked it, prying the dead rat loose with a claw. It came away with no small amount of flesh and blood between its jaws, its scarred shoulder red with her blood.
Yari-Tab trembled so on her back, it reminded Wistala of the beating wings of her dreams, only hundreds of times faster.
The rat yeeked heartily.
“Did you catch that?” Wistala asked.
“What?” Yari-Tab said. “Oh. My apologies, noble rathunter.” A conversation ensued. Wistala tried licking out her wounds as the noises passed back and forth. Though shallow, the bites hurt abominably. A great forest boar wouldn’t have been able to draw so much blood with its tusks against her scales as the rats could with tiny sharp teeth.
“The meal of it is, he’s going to give you the coin,” Yari-Tab said.
“What’s his price for the rats we killed?”
“Nothing. He thinks it’s good for the hotheads to kill themselves off now and then. More room for the rest.”
Wistala swallowed the remaining half of the brute rat. It wasn’t so bad after all, and she was as hungry as she’d ever been eating bones and claw-thin, fresh-spawned slugs in the home cave. “Even so. No sense leaving bodies lying around to remind them.”
A procession of rats led them to a dank, dark room at the meeting of two sets of stairs where a metal cistern, big enough to hold a clutch of dragon eggs, lay half on its side.
Wistala’s wounds still stung, but less now, and the pain was being replaced by a warm itch that in a lot of ways was worse than the sharper hurt.
Gold and green-covered coins lay within. The spill of metal didn’t shine or glitter or gleam, but even the most tarnished coin made Wistala briefly swish her tail and stand with head erect, saliva suddenly thick at her gumline. A hoard!
Kill the rats! Kill them all! Kill the cat! Kill anything that so much as makes an echo near my glitters!
“Tchatlassat!” Yari-Tab squeaked as Wistala dragon-dashed forward, bowling her over. “Sister!”
Wistala stood with hindquarters to the coin, the shadows around her dark and red and angry.
The rats scattered, but Yari-Tab stood her ground, though she stood sideways, back arched, ready to flee.
“Sister!” she repeated, sounding passably Drakine.
Wistala blinked. The red faded. She took a mouthful of metal, more to give the wet in her mouth something to work on while she set her thoughts in order. She’d never expected the glamour of gold to be so strong!
“Oh! Sorry, tchatlassat, I came over funny. The rat bites are making me moody.”
Yari-Tab said, “Your eyes went all red and fiery. I was worried for a moment that you had the froth.”
“Better now.” She took another mouthful of coin, rolled it around with her tongue until it was good and slimy, then let it slip down her throat. A brief, pleasant tinkle sounded from within as it clanked into the first bit.
“Let’s see how much I can carry.”
The rats regathered to watch.
Within a few moments, she had both bags filled—the pile looked hardly touched. Wistala looked around the chamber. Not a bad spot, actually, with water near and ample food. In the form of rats. But a dragon vow couldn’t just be shrugged off like a dropped leaf. Besides, Father needed the coin worse than she.
Wistala nodded to the rats and trudged back the way they’d come. Yari-Tab jumped on her back and rode, claws dug into the crosspiece for the bags.
“It’s going to feel a long way back carrying this load,” Wistala said.
“Why leave?” Yari-Tab asked. “The hunting’s going to be good with that run open. Next tailswell, I might even treat one of the local lazeabouts and have a litter of kittens. Deep Run will be our little secret.”
“I’m already overlong,” Wistala said, as they rejoined the sewer. It took her a moment to get her bearings, but only a moment—she still had her Lower World sense.
“Will you come back for more coin? I mean someday.”
“I can’t say.”
“You’ve got a funny smell and a clumsy foot-way about you, Talassat. But I must admit you’re the most interesting creature I’ve come across since I pounced my first mouse. I’ll be sorry to see you leave Tumbledown.”