Page 52 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

“How do you know about it?”

“My mother showed me this chamber and the trick, and I imagine she got it from hers. Rats aren’t very clever—if you put a little light in a room, they’re far braver about traveling the shadows than they are when it’s holefill black.”

“Did your father ever teach you at all?”

“Never knew him.” She made another light descent and trotted to the far corner of the passageway. “One of a dozen possibles and not much for hanging about goes the feline proverb.”

Wistala tried to imagine what the home cave would have been like with other hatchlings and mother-dragons about. Other male hatchlings pouncing her—she got a pang as she thought of Auron.

So much less to eat!

Wistala found herself liking Yari-Tab, though once she began talking, she was like a mountainside stream on a warm spring day, running always.

They entered an arched chamber, dead-ending in a collapsed cascade of dirt and masonry. The cut-off passage was about the size of Father if you didn’t count his neck and trunk, cobwebbed above and rat-fouled below.

“You’re sending the rats running,” Yari-Tab said, hearing scrabbling sounds from a series of holes at the edge of the room. They were choked with dirt, broken stone, and everything from bits of bark to twigs.

She paused at one that stood under a crack in the wall where a good deal of masonry had fallen away, showing dirt behind mixed in with chunks of man-cut stone, both enlarging and blocking the passage. “There are bits of tunnel beneath this. Lots in other places are filled with swamp water, but this one has so much rat-scent coming up out of it, I think it’s got to lead to the Deep Run.”

“How do you know the Deep Run exists?”

“The rats squeak it to each other when they’re being chased.”

With every word, it became easier to understand the cat. Wistala wasn’t sure if they were speaking Feline or Drakine or some simplified version blending the two. Their slit-pupiled eyes regarded each other in the darkness.

Wistala sniffed at the blockade. Only the tiniest glimmer of light came from the stone in the other room, but it was enough for her eyes to work on. “The rats have dug a hole. Why don’t you just enlarge it?”

“A feline? Dig?” Yari-Tab flipped onto her back and rolled around in delight, batting at a bit of old cottonwood seed that had drifted down somehow, fighting it like an enemy. “Digging’s for the rodents,” she said as she sat and reset her fur.

Wistala thrust her snout into the hole, widened it enough for her sii, and went to work. Soon she sent showers of dirt in either direction, extracting or shoving the bigger pieces out of the way.

Yari-Tab found a perch out of the way of the digging and settled down to watch.

Her claws struck metal, badly rusted. Some kind of bars had been set into the tunnel, which trapped sticks, which collected leaves, which stopped dirt and blockaded the inlet.

The bars vexed her even after she dug her way through. Though rusted, they were too hard to bite, and all her claws could achieve against them were a series of scorings. Just beyond, a mound of dirt blocked the inlet, but a rat path ran up toward the top of the sluice. She backed out of the tunnel.

“Finished already?” Yari-Tab yawned.

Wistala blew dirt out of her nostrils. “See if you can get through the rat hole now.”

The cat disappeared down the hole and returned, mud tipping her whiskers. “You’re almost there. Beyond the bars is a hole, and beyond that I smell fresher air and hear lots of water drips.”

“Except I can’t get beyond those bars.”

“Surely your neck can get through,” Yari-Tab said, cleaning herself.

“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?

---