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“I can’t dig with my head.”
“Well, don’t look at me.”
Wistala’s tail swished of its own mind, and she crawled back down the sluice. She put her head through the bars and felt around with her nostrils. At the bottom joins, the water had worn away masonry, and it was quite crumbly on the other side. She extracted her head and went to work with one of her claws.
When she cleared off chunks all around the bricks holding the bar, she pushed again, but still it wouldn’t yield.
“Stone and bone, what a bother!” Muscles convulsed in her chest, and she spat at the bar. A rope of spit clung to it, as ineffectual as her claws. But it gave off a sharp, hot odor.
Am I getting my foua this early?
She heard a rat make a yeeking noise and scuttle.
If she could only part the bars a little so they’d offer more room, like—
Wistala remembered sleeping between Auron and Jizara. Jizara always took the warm spot against Mother, and Auron would sleep to the outside, leaving her cramped in the middle. Sometimes they pressed so close, she could hardly breathe. When they did that, she turned on her back and used her short, strong saa legs to part them.
She wedged her hindquarters sideways, pressing her tail through the gap, and backed as far as she could between the bars. She pressed with her legs at the center of the bar, just as she used to do at the center of Auron’s back.
It bent!
With that achieved, she repositioned herself between the bars facing the other way. She bent that one, as well. Now she had enough space to really put her legs and back into it—
Craaak!
The sudden release of pressure shocked her into thinking she’d broken her back instead of the bar for a moment, but sure enough, the bottom join had broken free of the rest of the clawed-away masonry. With half its strength gone, she could get down on all fours under it.
Ten heartbeats later, it was done—she could get through.
“Done it done it done it!” she called up to Yari-Tab.
“I knew you would,” the feline called back, sounding half-awake.
With the bars out of the way, clawing earth seemed like pushing through nothing more than a pile of fallen leaves. She spun as she dug, all four limbs working once and tail helping shove out the loosened earth, and then she got through. Her nostrils filled with fresher-moving air.
And the smell of rats.
A smooth-sided tunnel yawned beneath, water and muck filling the bottom. Other arched-off tunnels branched off it, some dry, others trickling a bit of water and algae. A green lichen grew at the rim of the water, some weak cousin of the growth from the home cave. Or rather the stuff living in the lichen—Mother had told her that the lichen itself didn’t glow; rather, the light came from tiny creatures that thrived on its fuzzy surface.
“Come and have a look, sister,” Wistala said.
Her water-lids fluttered up and back down when she realized what she’d said.
Yari-Tab crept easily between dirt pile and a tangle of roots holding the earth that hadn’t fallen.
“Such scents! Such hunting! I’ll never suffer an empty belly again.” Her tail stood straight up as she looked out over the water-bottomed tunnel. Walkways big enough for a man stretched to either side of the main channel; other passages branched off everywhere.
“Watch yourself. They can be savage when cornered. If they’re anything like cave rats, that is.”
“Oh, to be sure.”
“The coin?”
“But, of course.”
Yari-Tab tore herself away from what Wistala suspected were dreams of bloody rat livers and climbed back up the sluice. This time she went to the glow-room, reignited it by rubbing herself round the stone again, and took off down another passage. She passed under a low arch and came to a badly cracked wall.
“Someone took a lot of trouble to seal the metal behind this wall and make it look like just another stretch of passageway. It’s just inside that hole at the bottom.”
