Cat Tales (23 page)

“I believe the fee you set was two hundred eagles,” he said. “If my son revive in sound health, as you say that he shall, I will add another fifty.”

“That is unlooked for,” I said.
“The fee is set and to
be met,
as the saying goes. Only do make certain that Horseface carries out her duties in good order and all shall be well.”

“Horse—?”

“Please pardon me. I meant no offense. The term rose unbidden to my lips.”

“As it sometime has to my thoughts.” He smiled. “Yet she is fitting in her office, though imperfect in manner. Nevertheless, she shall see that you are offered wine and cake before you depart.”

“I thank your kind courtesy, but I must hasten to other duties. Maestro Astolfo always has several affairs in hand and I seem always to lag behind the order of his requests. If you will dispatch the eagles to him by messenger, along with a letter favoring or disfavoring my labors here, as you see fit, we shall be obliged.”

“That is soon done,” he said, “and again I tender my gratitude. I shall fully commend your execution of the matter.”

With the usual bows and flourishing of my short cloak, I took leave.

T
HERE WAS TO BE a petite fete of celebration for the three of us, marking a success in my first unguided excursion into sciomantic venture. We hoped also to be celebrating the return of Mutano's voice, but he had so far kept silent in our company. He had, in fact, kept apart from us for long stretches. We surmised that he was exercising his throat; the voice of a man of his make, confined for a long period in the voice-box of a cat, must have suffered diminution, if not deterioration. Astolfo suggested that he might be practicing an aria supple and trillful to amaze us.

The cook had told the steward to lay out our supper on a corner of the long table in the dining room, but Astolfo would not have it. The rains had returned, and he desired the closeness of the kitchen with its oven heat and lamplight glancing from the surfaces of burnished copper and polished crystal. He was punctilious upon the victuals too: turbot and cold veal, varied herbage, a roast of venison, and then an apple tart with a great wedge of cheese from my native province. Topery would include cider and beer and a bottle of wine, aged and heady.

He and I sat at the table the steward had brought in and sipped at draughts of cider whilst we waited for Mutano to appear.

As I expected, Astolfo used the time to ask sharp questions about the Sativius children and my procedure in dividing the shadows. I described in detail every stage of preparation, every step of the process, and every piece of apparatus. During my peroration, he smiled at certain passages, closed his eyes and appeared to meditate during others. When I concluded, he pressed his fingertips together and considered silently for a space. Then: “I will say it is to your credit that you appear to have discovered, by strength of your own wit, another of the traditional methods of taking shadows.”

I tried not to show that I was a little crestfallen. “Then this method was known already?”

He blinked his gray eyes and slowly rested them upon mine. “The world was here long before you and I scuffed its soil with our boots. There were mages of great mentation who came before, rank on serried rank. Much of the lore they gained has been devoured by time. If we had it in its greater bulk, we should feel ourselves as small in comparison to them as scurrying voles.”

“Hath this method I thought mine own a name?”

“Severing
you know as the term for the thieving of a shadow surreptitiously, without the awareness of its caster.
Sundering
you know as when a shadow is taken by violence, raped away from the parent object.
Surrendering
we call it when a person voluntarily gives over a shadow to the purposes of another. You have discovered without the aid of instruction the process of
seduction,
wherein the shade is lured from the parent object and leaves it gradually by force of attraction to another object or under its own volition.”

“You have before now hinted that shadows might possess minds and wills independent,” I said. “I do not see how this can be.”

“Yet you might have tried another ‘experiment,' as you call it and then come to a different turn of mind.”

“How so?”

“Your procedure is so ingenious and so complicated that I hesitate to describe this one other method. After your machinations, it will seem but puerile.”

“In the instance of children, that one most confident in the love of its parents, or of one of them, will have the stronger shadow and it shall absorb the weaker. You yourself observed that Rudensia's mother gave her a caress habitual, without thinking. Her shade was the stronger.”

“That is a simpler and less expensive method of division,” I admitted. “Still, I believe that mine would more impress the paterfamilias.”

“I must agree,” Astolfo said. “But yours had a large element of danger. When you profused the shadow in the silvered glass with energetic spark, you were fortunate that it did not acquire enough
vis
to escape on its own and leave our child bereft.”

“That is why I told Mutano to smash the glass upon the precise instant.”

He nodded. “Yes, you had that forethought, at least — and having spoken of him, we have summoned his presence.”

Mutano entered the kitchen with something of a swagger in his march, came to the table and gazed down upon the viands with hearty pleasure. He smiled upon Astolfo and me, as beamingly as if he first saw us upon returning from a wearisome journey.

“Now we are complete,” Astolfo said, “and the occasion is meet for the proposal of toasts. Falco, if you will but pour Mutano a healthy measure —”

I poured the good beer into his mug.

“— I will begin by congratulating our younger friend upon his triumph in an enterprise of his own.”

We drank and refilled and I raised my glass in Mutano's direction. “And Mutano must be feted. He has made it certain, without taking the man's life, that Castilio will never again despoil young maidens or steal away the paramours of others. I present also my grateful thanks for his aid at the house of Sativius.”

We drank and refilled and Mutano pointed his glass toward Astolfo and me in turn. He cleared his throat officiously, took a deep breath, and said in three melodious tones:

“Miaou.”

The author tells us. “When the characters of
shadow-master Astolfo, the neophyte shadow-thief
Falco, and the hulking, mute manservant Mutano
appeared unbidden in my mind, I had not thought
how Mutano came to be without power of speech. Then one evening as I looked upon our taciturn cat
Eugenia (“Oogie”), it occurred to me that someone
had stolen his voice — just as cats have been said to
steal the breath from persons on the verge of death.

  
Then I wrote the story.

   
Five times.