The Aeronaut's Windlass (42 page)

“Ought we stand up?” Folly asked her jar worriedly. “Won’t it be seen as disrespect if we do not?”

“A human who is sitting down is a human who cannot possibly pounce on a cat faster than the cat can spring away,” Bridget replied. “Stay sitting. It’s more polite.”

“Oh, Bridget makes it perfectly sensible,” Folly said, smiling. “I’m so glad I wondered aloud.”

Rowl prowled over to Bridget and settled comfortably in her lap.

“Oh,” said the strange cat. “They belong to you. I had wondered why they waited about.”

“This one belongs to me,” Rowl said, leaning his head up to nudge the underside of Bridget’s chin. “That other one works for me.”

“With you,” Bridget said, beneath her breath.

Rowl flicked a careless ear. “It’s the same thing.” He turned to the strange cat and said, “I am Rowl, kit of Maul of the Silent Paws. This is Littlemouse. That one has not yet earned a real name.”

“Her name is Folly,” Bridget put in, saying all but Folly’s name in Cat.

“No real name,” agreed the other cat. “I am Neen, kit of Naun of the Nine-Claws.”

“I have heard of the Nine-Claws,” Rowl said. “They seem perfectly adequate.”

“I have heard of the Silent Paws,” Neen replied. “I find nothing overly objectionable about them.”

“The humans of my habble sent Littlemouse here to ask for help from cats.”

Neen lashed his tail thoughtfully. “That seems overly intelligent for humans.”

“I thought the same,” Rowl said. “Littlemouse, ask.”

Bridget stared calmly at Neen, matching the cat’s enigmatic, confident expression as best she could. “If it is not too much trouble, I would like to speak to your clan chief.”

Neen tilted his head and returned her stare. “It almost sounds like a cat.”

“It sounds precisely like a cat,” Rowl replied, some of the hair along his spine rising. “Littlemouse is mine and I will thank you to remember it.”

Bridget ran a hand down Rowl’s spine in just the way he most preferred and hastened to add, “I know that this request is unusual, Neen, kit of Naun, but it is very important to the Spirearch, Lord Albion, and it may be that only the Nine-Claws can help us. I beg your indulgence in this matter, and will accept whatever decision you make in it.”

Neen lashed his tail left and right for a moment before rising and saying, “It is Naun’s place to decide, I think. Remain here. Naun will see you. Or he won’t. Farewell, Rowl’s Littlemouse.” Then he turned and vanished into the shadows.

“Goodness, so abrupt,” Folly muttered.

“Cats are not to be rushed,” Bridget said. “On the other hand, it’s rather difficult to slow them down, once they’ve decided to start.” She traced Rowl’s ears with her fingertips and said to him, “I take it we should wait.”

“You should,” Rowl said approvingly, turning in a circle and then lying down in her lap. “I, however, am weary from all that diplomacy. I shall sleep.”

*   *   *

T
he Nine-Claws kept them waiting for all of half an hour.

Then a pair of large male cats appeared from the shadowed hallway. They sat down at the very limits of Bridget’s vision, where the yellow-gold gleam of their eyes was the thing she could best see.

“Folly,” Bridget said. She touched Rowl’s back lightly, and the cat lifted his head at once. “Of course,” he said, and yawned. “Now they are quick.”

“It’s as though they have no consideration for others at all,” Bridget said in a dry tone.

“I suspect that they do not,” Rowl growled. “But this is their territory. We must show them . . .” He shuddered. “Respect.”

Bridget nodded firmly and said to Folly, “Let Rowl walk first. Stay even with me, shoulder-to-shoulder, and try not to look at any specific cat for more than a second or two—it makes them uneasy. Very well?”

“Don’t worry,” Folly said to her jar. “I’m here to protect you.”

“Yes, thank goodness for that,” Bridget said, rising as Rowl climbed out of her lap. She offered a hand to Folly and hauled the slender apprentice etherealist to her feet.

Rowl looked back and up at them, his expression enigmatic, then turned and prowled forward.

They followed the pair of male cats into darkness that rapidly swelled and swallowed them. Bridget would have been blind if not for Folly and her jar of expended lumin crystals. There must have been several hundred of the little crystals in the girl’s container, each producing a faded remnant of its original glow. Any one of them could have barely produced light enough to be seen from the corner of one’s eye—but taken together, they cast a very soft, nebulous radiance that at least allowed Bridget to follow the cats without walking into a wall or tripping over debris on the tunnel floor.

The pair of warriors—they could be nothing else, given their size, their silence, and their arrogant demeanor—led them into the ventilation tunnels of the east side of the Spire. While the Builders had created Spire Albion in the shape of a perfect circle, each habble was laid out as a square fitting within that circle. The extra spaces, at the cardinal points of the compass, were filled with a variety of supporting structures—cisterns, ventilation tunnels, waste tunnels, and the like. Cats generally preferred the smaller ventilation tunnels for habitation. Bridget could barely squeeze into one of the little tunnels and still wriggle forward, and she devoutly hoped that Naun would meet them in one of the larger tunnels or intersection chambers.

It took them only a few minutes to reach a large intersection chamber where, apparently, the Nine-Claws had decided to receive them. It was a roomy space, with ceilings that stretched up out of the meager light of Folly’s jar, forty feet wide and perhaps twice as long. Eight ventilation tunnels intersected at this point, and the moving air of the Spire’s living breath swirled around the chamber, a constant, droning sigh.

The far side of the chamber featured several pieces of wooden furniture, including a footstool, a wooden chair, a high barstool, and an impressive, darkly stained table. They were lined up in that order as well, obviously as stairs leading up to what amounted to a dais.

A score of warrior cats were arrayed on the various pieces of furniture or on the ground at their feet—up to the large table, where a single, heavily muscled tomcat of purest black sat with his eyes mostly closed. On the barstool, just below the level of the table, sat Neen, with a bored expression, though his tail lashed left and right in agitation.

“He has his
own
furniture?” Rowl demanded, under his breath. “Oh. That is simply outrageous. What is he doing with those? Cats have no need for such things.”

“Why do I suspect you’re going to want me to buy some for you?” Bridget asked.

“That is not the point.” Rowl sniffed. “We will discuss such matters later.”

Bridget kept herself from showing any teeth when she smiled and looked carefully around the large chamber. There were a great many cats looking on. In the wan light Folly held, she could see little of them but for indistinct shapes and the flicker of reflections of green-gold eyes.

Hundreds of them.

“Oh, my,” Folly whispered. “There are certainly more cats here than I have seen in the duration of my life. And oh, look. Kittens.”

Bridget arched a brow sharply, and turned her head to follow the direction Folly was pointing out to her jar. She did indeed spy several tiny sets of eyes, many of them coming closer as the curious kittens crept forward, noses extended, their ears pricked toward the visitors.
That
was odd. Cats did
not
expose their kittens to humans. Even Bridget and her father, with their strong relationship with the Silent Paws, had seen kittens no more than half a dozen times in her life.

And now the Nine-Claws had received them in the very same communal chamber where their kittens were being cared for. In fact . . .

“This is all of them,” Bridget breathed to Rowl. “This is the entire clan. Kittens and all.”

Rowl narrowed his eyes and made a quiet sound in his throat. “Impossible. Too many tunnels must be watched and guarded and held against encroachers.” But even as he said it, Bridget saw his eyes scanning the room, taking an approximate count of their hosts.

“They’re nervous,” Folly whispered. “Banding together for safety.”

“Cats don’t do that,” Bridget said, or began to say—but she stopped herself. Cats absolutely operated in groups to hunt and defend territory more safely. But they certainly did not ever allow themselves to appear to be doing such a thing. Such a lack of independence would be seen as unacceptable.

Even a “team” of cats working together tended to be a loose coalition more than anything, and lasted no longer than was necessary. Clan chiefs like Maul or Naun maintained their position through a dense, complicated network of one-on-one relationships, through building a general consensus, and when necessary through the exertion of personal pressure where possible, and force when necessary. Getting half a dozen cats to agree upon almost anything was the next-best thing to impossible.

Getting several
hundred
to move together, to abandon their individual territories, to share a single living space was . . .

...unheard-of. Literally. From all she knew of cats, Bridget would never have believed such a tale if someone had told it to her.

What in the name of God in Heaven was happening in this habble?

Rowl strolled forward through the chamber as if there weren’t enough potentially hostile cats surrounding them to smother them all to death beneath their sheer weight. As deaths went, Bridget thought, being asphyxiated by warm, soft, furry little beasts seemed a bit less ghastly than some she had considered lately, but nonetheless she preferred to avoid it. Rowl, generally speaking, knew very well what he was about—but when his natural ability and confidence failed, the results tended to be the sorts of events one felt obligated to write down in one’s diary. She hoped, rather fervently, that this would not be one of those occasions.

Rowl went straight to the lowest stool and mounted it as calmly as if it had belonged to him, and the cats who sat there were forced to give way awkwardly at the last moment or else find themselves bowled over. Rowl proceeded up the pieces of furniture until he reached the high stool upon which sat Neen. Once he had reached that, Rowl calmly took a seat beside his counterpart and faced Naun attentively.

Naun watched this display with narrowed eyes, and the tip of his tail twitched once or twice. Then he eyed Neen.

Neen idly lifted a paw, cleaning it fastidiously. He was not precisely ignoring his clan chief—but he was, Bridget felt, walking near some sort of boundary.

Naun’s voice was a deep growling tone. “You are Rowl of the Silent Paws.”

“I know that,” said Rowl. After a moment he added, “Sire of the Nine-Claws.”

Naun growled in his chest. “Arrogant. Just like the other Silent Paws who have visited my domain.”

“I know that, too,” Rowl said. “You know why I have brought these humans to you.”

“Yes,” Naun said. His green-gold eyes flicked to Folly and Bridget. “They believe we owe them some sort of service.”

“Sire of the Nine-Claws,” Bridget said, taking a small step forward.

That drew the eye of every cat there. Bridget felt rather abruptly severely unnerved by the attention of so many consummate predators, however small each of them might be individually. She swallowed and kept her voice steady. “Lord Albion, the Spirearch, sent us to request your aid in a matter in which we believe only the Nine-Claws can help us.”

Naun peered at Bridget and tilted his head this way and that for a moment. “Is that some kind of trick, kit of Maul? Like when the humans make those hideous dolls appear to speak?”

“It is no trick, sire,” Rowl said easily. “This is my human, Littlemouse.”

“And it
speaks
,” Naun mused.

“As I told you,” Neen noted.

The elder Nine-Claw eyed his kit and considered his own front paws for a moment, as if deciding whether or not he needed to choose one with which to reply.

Rowl feinted at Neen’s nose with one paw and the other young cat flinched. Instantly every warrior cat in the place was on its feet, and Bridget felt almost certain that she could actually
hear
the mass of fur upon spines suddenly springing straight up. The air whispered with hundreds of low sounds of feline warning.

Bridget found herself holding her breath.

Rowl ignored the chorus of angry growls with a certain magnificent indifference to reality, looking at Neen in strict disapproval.

“Respect your sire,” Rowl said severely. “Or you will oblige him to teach you, here and now, when he obviously has greater concerns before him.”

Neen blinked at Rowl several times. He took note of the room, and all the cats staring at him, and abruptly became disinterested, looking out at nothing in particular, his eyes half closing.

There was a long silence. And then Naun let out a low sound of amusement, and his ears assumed a more relaxed, attentive angle. Bridget felt her pent-up breath slowly easing out of her again, as several dozen of the watching cats joined their clan chief in sharing their amusement.

“You have courage, Rowl Silent Paw,” Naun noted. “Or you are mad.”

“I know that, too,” Rowl replied. “Will you hear Littlemouse’s request?”

“Littlemouse,” Naun said, his gaze traveling up and down Bridget’s large frame. “A fine name for her.”

“She grew more than was expected,” Rowl explained. “It was most inconsiderate, but what can one expect?”

“Humans rarely concern themselves with the needs of cats,” Naun agreed. “And those who do are rarely to be trusted.”

Rowl lifted his chin. “Littlemouse, kit of Wordkeeper, is exceptional.”

Naun studied Bridget with unblinking eyes for a time. Then he said, “Rowl, kit of Maul, you are a welcome guest in my domain.”

Rowl tilted his head sharply to one side. “Whatever do you mean, sire?”

Naun’s unreadable eyes, for an instant, were hot with rage. “The Nine-Claws are no friends to humans. No matter to whom they belong.” The older cat turned to stare hard at Bridget. “Littlemouse, kit of Wordkeeper, you and your companion are unwelcome here. You will depart immediately. You will not return to these tunnels; nor will you attempt to make contact with my clan. Should you refuse to abide by either of these commands, your lives are forfeit.”