When I saw them emerge, I wondered again at the strangeness which had paired me in friendship with an opener. And a cat, at that.
Coming up to me, I saw that Graymalk was almost disturbed, or at least puzzled, by the way she raised her right paw and regarded it.
“This way now,” the old one stated, and he looked at me as he said it, so I knew that I was included in the invitation.
He led us up an alleyway beside the Palace of Seventy Delights, where fluted dustbins of umber, aquamarine, and russet, their sides inscribed with delicate traceries of black and silver, handles of malachite, jade, porphyry, and chrysoberyl stood, holding forgotten mysteries of the temple. Purple rats fled our approach, and a single lid shivered, emitting a bell-like tone which echoed from the rose-crystal wall.
“In here,” he told us, and we followed him into a darkened recess which held a temple postern. Beside it, a less substantial door quivered upon the crystal wall, a churning milkiness beginning within its suddenly apparent rectangle there as we approached.
When we came up before it, he turned to me.
“As you have been a friend of one of my own,” he said, “I would give you a boon of knowledge. Ask me anything.”
“What does tomorrow hold for me?” I said.
He blinked once.
Then, “Blood,” he said. “Seas and messes of it all around you. And you will lose a friend. Go now through the gate.”
Graymalk stepped into the rectangle, was gone.
“Thanks, I guess,” I said.
“_Carpe baculum!_” he added as I followed, somehow knowing that I recalled a bit of my Latin, and doubtless getting some obscure cat-laugh out of telling me to fetch a stick in a classical language. You get used to little digs from cats about being a dog, though I’d thought their boss might be above that sort of thing. Still, he is a cat, and he probably hadn’t seen a dog in a long time and just couldn’t resist.
“_Et cum spiritu tuo_,” I replied, moving forward and entering.
“_Benedicte_,” I heard his distant response as I drifted again in that place between worlds.
“What was all that business at the end?” Graymalk called back to me.
“He gave me a quick quiz on my Virgil.”
“Why?”
“Damned if I know. He’s inscrutable, remember?”
Suddenly, she wavered within another rectangle. It was odd, watching her go two-dimensional and ripple that way. Then she turned into a horizontal line, and its ends collapsed upon its middle and she was gone. When my turn came it didn’t feel that complicated, though. I joined her atop Dog’s Nest before the block of stone, which was again just a stone with some scratches on it. The sun was far into the west, but the storm was over.
I turned in a circle. No one was sneaking up from any direction.
“There’s still enough light to check out that spot you located,” she said.
“Let’s save it for tomorrow. I’m late making my rounds,” I told her.
“All right.”
We headed homeward. I thought about the old cat’s boon, but that wasn’t till tomorrow.
“Dognappery’s a lot less lush than Celephais,” I said, as we walked.
“What’s it like?” she asked.
“I’m back in a primal wood with an old wolf named Growler. He teaches me things.”
“If there are any Zoogs about,” she said, “we passed over your wood to the west of the River Shai. It’s below the Gate of Deeper Slumber.”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking of the small brown creatures who lived in the oaks and fed on the fungi, except when there were people about. Growler laughed at them as he did at most things.
The clouds purpled in the west and our paws grew damp from the grasses. Blood and messes. . . . Perhaps I could use a review.
Tonight Growler and I would ramble, till we fought and I was beat.