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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.”
