“I’m thinking, I’m thinking!” Amber shouted back. Next to her, N/Ice was fighting to return to reality.
Simwan thought frantically. Stored among all these special potions and lotions and such, there had to be something they could use against their attacker. But what would be appropriate? If they employed the wrong application, it might only make things worse. Whatever they chose, it had better be something soon. Pithfwid’s exhaustion was becoming plain to see.
Of course, he thought.
“Taredon menzies, fluton forth—I call thee!”
The broom that came tearing down the aisle that led back to the front of the store was moving as fast as if it had been summoned by a First-Level witch. Except that there was no witch present, it wasn’t a riding broom, and it looked just like what it was: a broom that was used to sweep up when the pharmacy closed for the night. But a broom was exactly what the situation called for. Steadying himself, Simwan held both hands out in front of him, one above the other, palms extended. The broom handle slammed into his waiting fingers with enough force to stagger him—but that was what he wanted. This was no task for a feeble old broom that was already shedding its straws.
Gripping it in both hands, he stepped as close to the squalling, hissing, mewling mess of dust and cat as he dared. “Pithfwid—get out of there! Pithfwid!”
Eyes flaring, ears flattened, the cat rolled clear. Shaking its head and ears, the snaggle-toothed dust bunny scrambled to its feet, cocked its powerful back legs, and leaped.
“Immaculatos!” Simwan cried, and brought the broom down as hard as he could.
The shock of contact traveled up the handle and quivered his arms. There was a brilliant flash of dark light and an explosion of dust. The girls staggered backward a step or two and even Mr. Gemimmel had to reach out with one hand to brace himself against the wall. As he recovered from the shock of contact, Simwan prepared to swing the broom again. There was no need. Lying on the floor between them was a small pile of grime from the center of which glowed two small, intense red eyes. Breathing hard, muscles tensed, Pithfwid approached the pile, drew back his head—and sneezed. Quite deliberately, and with intent aforethought. For an instant, those twin glowing orbs lying within the grunge looked frightened.
Then they were gone, as the cat sneeze scattered the dust in all directions.
Sitting himself down, Pithfwid licked one paw and began to groom himself. “Very nice, Simwan. What better to fight dust with than a household broom?”
“Not quite a household broom.” Letting go of the handle, Simwan watched as the seriously strained sweeper settled itself, a little unsteadily, against the supportive shelving. “One of Mr. Gemimmel’s brooms.” Turning, he examined the empty shelf anew. “What do you think? Is it safe now?”
“Let me check.” Rising from the ground, N/Ice elevated until she was hovering at eye level with the shelf. “Looks clean. Sparkling clean, in fact.”
Simwan was disappointed. “That means no clues. Or if there were any, they’ve gone with the sneeze.”
“Not necessarily. Let me have a look.” Gathering himself, Pithfwid cleared the distance in a single effortless jump and began prowling the length and breadth of the shelf between the two ancient amphorae.
Simwan felt a hand on his arm. It was Rose, backed by Amber and N/Ice.
“You’re usually a pain in the behind, Simwan, but for a big brother, you can be pretty cool sometimes.”
“Yeah,” agreed Amber. “I wouldn’t have thought of a broom.”
“That’s not surprising,” sniffed N/Ice, “since you usually act without thinking.”
“Oh so?” Amber turned on her sister. “I didn’t see you coming up with any suitable enchantments!”
“Yeah,” added Rose pugnaciously. “In fact, we almost didn’t see you at all!”
While his sisters fell to arguing loudly among themselves and Mr. Gemimmel tried his futile best to calm them, Simwan watched as Pithfwid paced back and forth, back and forth along the length of the shelf, looking for—what? As it developed, the cat wasn’t using his eyes as much as he was his other senses. Cat senses.
When he finally halted, it was as sharply as if he had been struck by another homicidal dust bunny. But in this instance, he had only come up hard against a revelation.
“I smell a rat.”
“We all smell a rat, Pithfwid,” commented Mr. Gemimmel patiently.
The cat turned to his humans. “No, I mean literally. A real rat. Rattus rattus, only more so. Mucho more so.”
Simwan found himself eyeing the nearby shelves uneasily, searching for tiny, beady, reflective rodent eyes. The girls edged a little closer to each other. Having certain magical powers and abilities didn’t mean one was not afraid of anything. On the contrary, it was just that kind of special knowledge that made one afraid of more things, because there were more things to be afraid of.
“What do you mean, ‘more so’?” Simwan asked the cat.
Pithfwid replied while actively sniffing the floor around the base of the shelving that had held the Truth. “I mean I smell not your ordinary rat. This is something special. Something uniquely foul. Nasty rat. Rat it out, I say.” He drew back his head sharply, raised a paw, and sniffed again of a certain spot. “There’s a scent here that was spilled by no ordinary rodent. Not by a cricket’s whiskers, no.” He looked up again, first at Simwan, then over at the wide-eyed girls. “I think it may be the spoor of the Crub.”
Simwan swallowed hard and the girls set to talking animatedly among themselves. Even Mr. Gemimmel looked concerned. Simwan had heard of the Crub. Just like he’d heard about the Demon King, Agraloth, the Scimitar of Sarakined, and a host of other significantly unpleasant deities that budding sorcerers and sorceresses were required to know about.
Of all the creatures that plagued mankind, fantastical and phantasmagorical, earthy and Ord, none was more common, more potentially dangerous, more intelligent, or more relentless than the rat. And of all the world’s rats the king, the emperor, the worst of them all, was the Crub. Though few had seen him (or at least lived to tell of the encounter), he was thought to be the smartest, cleverest, wisest, and most heartless of all his kind. Which raised the obvious question.
What would the Crub want with the Truth?
Nothing good, Simwan knew. Nothing good at all. He thought of their mother, Melinda Mae, who was so closely bound to the Truth, and a lump formed in his throat. Now more than ever, it was clear that they had to get it back—and quickly.
Lowering his head and his paw once more, Pithfwid sniffed at a tiny lump of dust that was still intact. But this time he didn’t sneeze. Instead, he leaped back, let out a sharp-voiced yowl of surprise, and bottled his tail.
Something was emerging from the dust.
It got big fast. A writhing torso sprouted arms and legs. A head emerged from lissome shoulders. The body was clad in a clinging gown of what looked like spun silver, and an argent disc balanced atop a head crowned with long black hair. Dark eyes blazed with outraged realization.
“You!” the figure declaimed. One arm rose and an index finger pointed first at the cat, who was backing away, and then at each of them in turn. “How dare you insult the fount of wisdom and fertility to whom I have often prayed! How dare you threaten him and his works!”
“Time to go, I think.” With that, Pithfwid was off and running. Though his natural inclination was to try to talk things out, Simwan saw the wisdom of the cat’s reaction and took to his heels. The girls and Mr. Gemimmel were right behind him.
And the glowing, flaring apparition was right behind them, pursuing them around shelves and down increasingly bright corridors. “Die, die, all of you! For your insults, you deserve to be slain where you stand!” From the silver disc atop her head, bolts of fiery white light reached for the fleeing figures. One made contact with Pithfwid’s tail, sending him raci
ng past the humans, smoke trailing from the tip of that appendage where the lightning had struck.
As they ran, the Deavy children tried to think of a proper spell with which to counteract the pursuing harridan. But it’s hard to think when you’re running for your life, pursued by a person as deadly as she is beautiful. Surprisingly, Mr. Gemimmel kept up with his much younger companions, muttering to himself all the while.
“Dear me—have to quash this now—will be Hell to pay if she gets out on the street.” Like an electronic grocery store scanner, his eyes flicked over every shelf and every container they raced past, identifying the contents, searching for something specific.
They were halfway back to the front of the store when he suddenly skidded to a halt, grabbed a small, thick glass bottle off a shelf, and pulled the stopper. Not even bothering to utter a supporting hex, he turned to confront the shrieking, threatening, oncoming wraith. Simwan and the girls slowed and gathered behind him while Pithfwid took shelter among the larger boxes.
“Die, DIE!” the creature howled, lifting one arm to strike directly at the elderly apothecary.
“I think not,” he responded primly. Drawing back his own arm, he flung the contents of the bottle in her direction.
The powder struck the specter square in the midsection. She halted immediately, gazing down at herself in puzzlement. To Simwan, tossing nothing but a little powder seemed a particularly ineffectual gesture on the pharmacist’s part.
Straightening, the apparition raised her arm anew, once more preparing to strike. Then a strange expression came over her beautiful but tormented face. Her eyes bulged slightly. She coughed: lightly at first, then harder, doubling forward as the hacking fit overcame her. In fact, she doubled over so hard that her head went all the way into her belly. And kept going until she was no longer doubled over on herself, but tripled over, then quadrupled over. And then, with a brief pop and a modest flash of light, she was gone, having disappeared right inside herself.
“That,” declared Mr. Gemimmel firmly, his lower lip curling up over the upper, “is how you deal with an infection. Biowarfare, indeed!” Turning, he resumed walking toward the front of his store. “Even the conjured should know better than to mess with a druggist.”
The girls were still discussing what they had just witnessed when Simwan moved close enough to their host to ask, “An infection, you say?”
Mr. Gemimmel nodded somberly. “Like the carnivorous dust bunny, a thing deliberately planted by the thief, this Crub creature, to deal with anyone who might try to trace its evil deed.”
“So what did you throw at it?” Peering back over his shoulder, Simwan tried to remember if he had seen a label on the bottle full of powder. “Antibiotics?”
“Not this time. The infection was site-specific. I had to use antinilotics, since the infection took the form of a vengeful Egyptian deity.”
Overhearing this, the girls interrupted their conversation. “Which deity?” Amber inquired with evident interest.
“Well now.” Mr. Gemimmel smiled as they approached the outskirts of the pharmacy storage area and the front of his store. “Based on the evidence that most discerning feline Pithfwid discovered, who else would you expect but the goddess Rat-taui?”
Pithfwid nodded agreement. “This little episode should give you some idea of what we’re up against, children.” Simwan bristled at being called a child, but said nothing. It did no good to argue with Pithfwid anyway. The cat continued. “The Crub is the end-all of every rat that ever spread a plague or stole the last portion of a starving man’s food or bit a baby on the toe. It’s big and mean and hateful: a bundle of pure evil wrapped in brown bristles and tipped with teeth at one end and an obscenely naked tail at the other. It’s the master of rat magic as well as rat knowledge, and it controls entirely too much of both.” Whiskers quivered. “We’re going to have to be lucky as well as smart to catch it.”
“We don’t need to catch it,” Rose argued. “We just need to get the Truth back from it.”
“I’m afraid those goals will wind up being one and the same,” Pithfwid told her resignedly. “Remember your mother. There’s no time to lose.”
By the time they reached the pharmacy counter, the number of customers in the store had multiplied, what with only the two clerks to handle all the business. After making good on his promise, Mr. Gemimmel plunged in to help his employees deal with the customer backlog. That left cat and kids to walk out the front door and return to their bikes, which were waiting for their owners right where they had been left.
“So, what do we do now?” Rose looked at Amber. Amber squinted hard enough to see N/Ice, who wasn’t quite all there. N/Ice reached out to her brother, made a face when her hand passed cleanly through his arm, and shut her eyes tight until she had reconstituted enough of herself to grab him firmly.
“Yes, big brother. What do we do now?”
Simwan looked up South Harrison. It was getting dark. They couldn’t do anything else until tomorrow, and he said as much. “I think we ought to let Pithfwid sniff a circle around the outside of Mr. Gemimmel’s store.” He smiled down at the cat. “You smelled the Crub inside the pharmacy. Think you can smell it outside as well?”
“If it left any kind of trail, I’ll find it.” Pithfwid leaped up into the basket that was attached to the handlebars of Simwan’s bike. “Since all rats leave trails, the Crub ought to leave one ten times as distinctive. And as you know, cats also have a nose for the Truth. But it’s getting dark, and I’m hungry, and we should be at our most awake and alert when we attempt this.”
“You don’t think it’s still around here, do you?” Rose found herself peering anxiously up and down the street. “The Crub, I mean.”
“Anything is possible.” Resting his front paws on the side of the basket, Pithfwid stood up and pointed. “It came here looking for the Truth, and when it found it, it stole it away. It’s taken it off somewhere, no doubt to do something disagreeable with it, so we’ve got to try to pick up its trail as soon as we can. But not until tomorrow. Dust bunnies and a vengeful goddess of the Nile are enough to deal with in one afternoon. I’m starving. Let’s get moving. Don’t you want to get home before dark? Or do you want to wait around and see if the Crub left anything else behind to confront those who might be foolish enough to try following him?”
III
They said nothing to their parents of the confrontation in the drugstore, nor of what they had learned. Upon hearing such, Mr. and Mrs. Deavy would most likely have forbidden their children to pursue so serious a matter any further. Which, of course, was exactly what Simwan and the coubet intended to do. So they ate dinner quietly, and worked on their homework afterward. For Simwan, that meant digging into Early European History, Algebra, and Intermediate Malfeasance; for the girls, American Government, Seventh-Level Spelling (of the word kind), Fourth-Adept Spelling (of the hex kind), and Beginning Potions II, the latter involving learning the recipe for baking cookies that included both chocolate and brimstone chips. Before going to bed, they were allowed two hours of television, video games, Internet, and consensual thaumaturgy. The evening proceeded normally, and their parents suspected nothing.
The next morning, they waited for Martin to go off to work and Melinda Mae to head for town hall, where she was working with a group of local activist Ords to organize protests to try to stop the development. Simwan noticed with concern that she was moving much more slowly than usual. Once they had the house to themselves (thank goodness for their school district’s special October break), the Deavy progeny were on their bikes and racing furiously for town once more.
Unsurprisingly, it was Pithfwid who picked up the trail outside the drugstore. Not only was his sense of smell more acute than theirs, he could go nosing about drain pipes and cracks in the sidewalk and the tops of weeds without drawing attention to himself. Every time Simwan or one of the girls wanted to do the same, the
y had to keep a lookout for passersby. Clearsight was a small town, and word would spread quickly if someone saw Amber, for example, down on all fours and with her pert nose shoved into a clump of broomweed.
Whiskers wrinkling in disgust, the cat pointed one paw due east from the back of the building. “The beast went thataway.”
“You’re sure?” Rose asked as her siblings gathered around.
The cat nodded. “The spoor is unmistakable, and still strong. It can’t be anything else. Nothing normal would linger this long.” The paw bobbed. “Due east, it headed.”
“Can you tell if it had the Truth with it?” Amber had her head back and was sniffing the air for herself. Yes, there it was: a faint but definite stink, not unlike the stench that had come from the Deavy garbage disposal when Melinda Mae had put some bad eggs down it one morning and had forgotten to turn it on, leaving them to fester there for an entire day.
Eyes agleam with expectation, Pithfwid shook his head brusquely. “No, I can’t. Now, if the Crub was packing lies instead of the Truth, it would be different. It would smell like those sessions the developers keep holding at the town hall.” Turning, he trotted to Simwan’s bicycle and jumped effortlessly into the basket that adorned its handlebars. “The smell will last a long time, but it won’t last forever.”
Poplar Street gave way to Lincoln Lane, and then to Ainsworth. This narrow, one-lane road dead-ended at the top of a short drop-off. From there the scent trail led downward into the dense woods that surrounded Clearsight.
“We’ll have to leave our bikes here,” Simwan declared as he dismounted. While his mountain bike could handle the slope, there was no telling where the trail led, and it would be better to position their transportation where it could be found quickly and easily than risk breaking an axle or throwing a chain somewhere deep in the forest. With Pithfwid in the lead, they clambered down the embankment. It wasn’t steep, but the covering of fallen leaves made it hard to see the rocks beneath.
“Keep an eye out,” he warned his sisters. “It’s possible the Crub booby-trapped its trail like it did the shelf in Mr. Gemimmel’s store.”