Silent jumped onto a chair. “Do you have the Gift of Siegfried?” he asked. If not, he’d have to expend some of his own power to establish communication.
“We call it the Blessing of Saint Francis,” the man replied, “but yes, I understand you. Strange as it seems, I saw you scare the other cat away. So I suppose I ought to thank you.”
“Thank me by explaining what’s going on. My Queen sent me to look into it.”
The priest blinked. “You’re a black cat yourself. Don’t you know?”
“All I know is that others like me are disappearing. Until I saw the black attack you, I suspected the Inquisition was persecuting our kind as you have in times past.”
The human frowned. “Those who came before me didn’t mean to ‘persecute’ anyone unjustly. They believed they were fighting Satan’s servants. Because, as you probably understand better than I, the Devil gave gifts to all cats, but to blacks most of all, with the promise of even stronger magic if they would bow down before him.”
“Yes,” Silent said, “but what you and those like you have always refused to understand is that very few of us have ever taken the bait.”
“You say that,” the inquisitor replied, “but suddenly there’s a whole little army of black cats with their power to hex and jinx awakened. They’re using it to attack the clergy and others who perform good works. Making people sick and causing accidents. I think that if you hadn’t chased it off, the one that came for me would have given me a heart attack.”
Silent didn’t want to believe what the priest was saying, but he’d just seen proof that at least one black had bartered himself to the Old Serpent. “What’s the Inquisition doing about it?”
The human sighed. “Not much. Maybe you don’t realize, but there really isn’t any such Office anymore. The world has changed, and even the Church doesn’t want to believe in magic, demons, or animals that talk. We in the Society of the Hammer try to continue the work of the witch hunters, but there are only a handful of us. I’m the only one for several states around, and evidently I’m no good at my job, because I haven’t been able to accomplish anything.”
Silent would never have expected to feel sympathy for one of his kindred’s traditional foes, but now he did. A fleeting twinge of it, anyway. “At least you figured out that blacks are going wrong. That puts me farther ahead than I was before.”
“Then you mean to stop what’s going on?”
“Yes. Cats are free to do almost anything they like, but not to give themselves to the Fallen Star. It’s against Her Majesty’s laws.”
“Then maybe,” said the priest, a plea in his tone, “we can work together.”
“I’d like that,” Silent lied, “but unfortunately, no human could keep up with me through the narrow spaces and over the rooftops while I hunt for answers. I’ll come back if it turns out you can help.”
“Well, all right.”
“Meanwhile, can you let me out of the building?”
Once outside, Silent pondered what he’d learned and wished there were more to it. It was good, if also daunting, that he now knew who the enemy was, at least in general terms. But he still didn’t understand how the Old Serpent’s agent was making contact with black cats, how the corruptor could persuade so many to surrender to the wicked side of their natures, or where they were all hiding.
It was three days later that, pacing along a sidewalk, dodging the feet of striding, oblivious humans, he peered down an alley and saw several cats foraging amid the refuse in a row of dumpsters. Two were black. They were reckless to show themselves in broad daylight, but perhaps they hadn’t heard about their fellows disappearing. Felines were the most cultured, sophisticated species in the world, but even so, they had no means of rapid universal communication such as mankind enjoyed.
Silent supposed it was up to him to warn the pair. He started down the alley. Then a yellow tom staggered a step and let out a puzzled meow. He flopped over onto his side in the open pizza box in which he’d been standing.
Over the course of the next several moments, somnolence overtook all the cats. Some jumped out of the dumpsters and tried to bolt, but they couldn’t outrun a danger that was now inside their bellies. Something was wrong with the garbage.
The last of them, a Siamese, collapsed beside the tire of a parked car. Then a door in a brick wall opened, and two men in gray coveralls came out. The garments had ANIMAL CONTROL stenciled on the backs. Silent couldn’t read human language any more than he could speak it without a spell in place, but he’d learned to recognize certain symbols and labels, and this was one of them.
He hadn’t hesitated to invade the cathedral, but he faltered now. Perhaps it was because the Inquisition was mostly a terror in the tales of generations past, while Animal Control still hunted cats every day.
But Silent was Her Majesty’s knight, sworn to protect her subjects, and with luck, Brother Lion’s roar would frighten humans as effectively as it startled dogs. He invoked the Aspect, drew a deep breath, then saw what the men were doing.
Each human moved to pick up one of the blacks, stepping over other slumbering cats to do it. After they collected the pair and carried them around a corner, they came back for the others, but even so, it was obvious which prizes they’d truly wanted to capture.
Silent had hoped to scare them off. Now he would have been happy to hurt them. But he’d seen the “animal shelter,” a gray concrete fortress of a place not far from the cathedral. It wouldn’t be as easy to infiltrate as the church had been. So perhaps there was a cleverer way to handle this situation.
He trotted toward the nearer of the men. He meowed as if hopeful for a petting or a morsel.
The human exchanged glances with his partner. Then he squatted down and crooned, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” There was a smile on his long, narrow face, but he had the malicious eyes of someone who’d rather yank a cat’s tail than stroke its head.
Silent stayed where he was. He didn’t want to appear too unwary, lest it arouse suspicion.
Moving slowly, the human extracted a plastic bag from a pocket. He took a white pellet out of it, and the mouthwatering smell of fish suffused the air. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”
Silent trotted forward and took the oily meat. Even knowing it might be tainted, it was hard not to gobble it down. For cats had many virtues, but self-denial wasn’t chief among them, not even for champions of the realm.
He suffered the human to pick him up and carry him around the corner, then put up a token struggle when his captor sought to stuff him into a cramped steel box. The man did it anyway, clanged the barred door shut, and went back for other prisoners. Silent spat out the fish, then batted it out onto the floor of the cargo bay where it couldn’t tempt him anymore.
After the men gathered and caged all the cats, they shut the back of the truck, and then the vehicle shuddered into motion. Silent lay down in the stuffy, rumbling, rattling darkness and hoped he hadn’t just made a fatally reckless move.
The first several rooms in the animal shelter weren’t as horrible as rumor claimed. They lent credence to the accounts of those animals claiming to have survived imprisonment here, who to some degree refuted the tales of neglect and mutilation. But the man carrying Silent’s box didn’t stop in any of those spaces. He took him through two more doors and into nightmare.
The back room reeked of filth and festering wounds. Some animals bristled, snarled, barked, or hissed when one of their captors appeared. Others cringed to the backs of their tiny cages, and a few didn’t even seem to notice, as if they’d fled deep inside themselves.
The human shook Silent out into a wire cage, one of many stacked in rows. The food and water bowls were empty, and they stayed that way. Silent’s mouth grew dry, and he ignored the discomfort as best he could. At least he was sure his captors wouldn’t let a black cat die of thirst. That wasn’t what this was about.