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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.
