Beloyuz sent him an odd look, and then the first smile he’d gotten from the Chernagor noble, “Yes, Your Majesty. That is very plain. The next question will be, do you mean it?”
Difficult, Grus thought. Definitely difficult. “You’ll see,” he told Beloyuz.
Lanius had almost gotten used to rustling noises and meows in the archives. He put away the diplomatic correspondence between his great-great-grandfather and a King of Thervingia and got to his feet. “All right, Pouncer,” he said. “Where are you hiding this time, and what have you stolen from the kitchens?”
No answer from the moncat. Difficult, Lanius thought. Definitely difficult. He made his way toward the place from which he thought the noise had come. Pouncer was usually pretty easy to catch, not least because he didn’t care to drop whatever he’d carried off. He would have been much more agile if he’d simply gotten rid of whatever it was this time when the king came after him. He hadn’t figured that out; Lanius hoped he wouldn’t.
“Come on, Pouncer,” Lanius called. “Where are you?” How many hiding places the size of a moncat did the vast hall of the archives boast? Too many, the king thought. If Pouncer didn’t make a noise or move when he was close enough for Lanius to see him, he could stay un-caught for a depressingly long time.
There! Was that a striped tail, sticking out from behind a chest of drawers stuffed full of rolled-up parchments? It was. It twitched in excitement. What had Pouncer spotted in there? A cockroach? A mouse? How many important documents had ended up chewed to pieces in mouse nests over the centuries? More than Lanius cared to think about—he was sure of that.
Pouncer… pounced. A small clunk said it hadn’t put down its prize from the kitchens even to hunt. Half a minute later, it emerged from concealment with a spoon in one clawed hand and with the bloody body of a mouse dangling by the tail from its jaws. Seeming almost unbearably pleased with itself, it carried the mouse over to Lanius and dropped it at his feet.
“Thank you so much,” Lanius said. Pouncer looked up at him, still proud as could be. Lanius picked up the mouse and then picked up the moncat. As soon as the mouse was in Lanius’ hand, Pouncer wanted it back. Since the king was carrying the moncat, it had, essentially, three hands with which to try to take the dead mouse away from him. Lanius didn’t try to stop it; he would have gotten clawed if he had.
Getting the mouse back, though, seemed much less important to Pouncer than trying for it. As soon as it belonged to the moncat and not to the king, Pouncer let it fall to the floor of the archives. Then the beast twisted in Lanius’ arms, trying to get away and recover the mouse again. Moncats and ordinary cats were alike in perversity.
Lanius held on to Pouncer. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. The moncat bared its teeth. He tapped it on the nose. “And don’t you try to bite me, either. You know better than that.” Pouncer subsided. The king had managed to convince the beast that he meant what he said. If the moncat had decided to bite, it could have gotten away easily enough. But, having made its protest, it seemed content to let the king carry it back to the chamber where it lived.
It did show its teeth again when Lanius took away the serving spoon it had stolen. That was a prize, just like the murdered mouse. Lanius tapped the moncat on the nose once more. Pouncer started to snap at him, but then visibly thought better of it. He unbarred the door and put Pouncer inside.
“I’m going to take this back to the kitchens,” he told the animal. “You’ll probably get loose again and steal another spoon, but you can’t keep this one.” Then he closed the door in a hurry, before Pouncer or any of the other moncats could get out.
He was walking down the corridor to the kitchens when Bubulcus came around a corner and started bustling toward him. He wondered if the servant had been bustling before spying him. He had his doubts; Bubulcus, from what he’d seen, seldom moved any faster than he had to.
Bubulcus pointed to the spoon in Lanius’ hand and asked, “Which the nasty moncat creature has stolen, Your Majesty?” When the king nodded, Bubulcus went on, “Which I had nothing to do with, not a thing.” He struck a pose that practically radiated virtue.
“I didn’t say you did,” Lanius pointed out.
“Oh, no. Not this time.” Now Bubulcus looked like virtue abused. “Which you have before, though, many a time and oft as the saying goes, and all when I had nothing to do with anything.”
“Not all,” said Lanius, precise as usual. “You’ve let moncats get loose at least twice, which is at least twice too often,”
Bubulcus’ long, mobile face—his whole scrawny frame, in fact— became the image of affronted dignity. He seemed insulted that the king should presume to bring up what were, after all, only facts. “Which wasn’t my fault at all, hardly,” he declared.
“No doubt,” Lanius said. “Someone held a knife at your throat and made you do it.”
“Hmp.” Bubulcus looked more affronted still. Lanius hadn’t thought he could. “Since you seem to have nothing better to do than insult me, Your Majesty, I had better be on my way, hadn’t I?” And on his way he went, beaky nose in the air.
“You don’t need to look for me in the moncats’ chambers—I’m nor there,” Lanius said. Bubulcus stalked down the corridor like an offended cat. The king had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. He’d won a round from his servant. Then the impulse to laugh faded. He wondered what sort of atrocity Bubulcus would commit to get even.
When Lanius walked into the kitchens, spoon in hand, the cooks and cleaners all exclaimed. “I saw it, Your Majesty!” a chubby woman named Quiscula exclaimed. She had a white smear of flour on the end of her nose, and another on one cheek. “That funny beast of yours came out right there. He grabbed the spoon from a counter, and then he disappeared again.” She pointed.
Right there was what seemed like nothing more than a crack between wall and ceiling. Lanius tried to get up there for a closer look, but none of the stools or chairs in the kitchens raised him high enough. He sent a cleaner out to have a ladder fetched. He might not command everything in Avornis, but he could do that.
He could also wait close to half an hour for the ladder to get there. When it finally did, it proved old and rickety, anything but fit for a king. He went up it anyway, though not before saying, “Hang on tight down there. If this miserable thing slips, I’ll land on my head.”
He’d gone up several rungs before he thought to wonder whether his subjects wanted him to land on his head. That made him pause, but only for a moment. He couldn’t very well ask them. That was liable to give them ideas they might not have had before. If he acted as though an accident weren’t possible, that might at least make it less likely.
The ladder creaked, but the cooks and cleaners held it steady. And it was tall enough to let Lanius get a good look at the crack. It was wider than it had appeared from the ground—certainly wide enough for a moncat’s head to go through it. And where the head would go, the rest of the moncat could follow.
Lanius stuck his hand into the crack and felt around. His palms and fingers scraped against rough stone and brickwork. The opening got wider farther back. A person couldn’t have hoped to go through the passageway, but it wouldn’t be any trouble for a moncat.
“This is how you get to the kitchens, all right,” Lanius muttered. “Now—where do you sneak into the archives?” He’d never seen Pouncer come out there. The moncat usually appeared in about the same part of that large chamber, but cabinets and crates and barrels all packed with parchments made searching for an opening much harder than it was here.