"h.e.l.lo, Howler," Silent said. "I just want to talk to your boss. Can we do it the easy way?"

Howler bared his fangs.

Silent called on the Aspect of Brother Lion and roared like thunder. Howler recoiled, his pungent urine spattering the ground.

"You see?" Silent said. "The easy way is better."

"I'm not so sure," rumbled Ragged Ear. Silent turned to see the big Doberman standing in front of a confusion of curved, colored pipes built for human children to climb on and crawl through. Brother Lion's voice had scared every other dog into keeping its distance, but not the alpha. "I might be willing to go to some trouble to pay you back for your tricks."

"Do you really want to start up that old fight again?" Silent replied. "What's the point, when Her Majesty has already taken the prize?"

Ragged Ear snorted. "What do you want, shaman?"

"Black cats are going missing."

"And you think I deserve the credit?"

"No. Even if you had some reason to hunt blacks and blacks only, you're not cunning enough to catch so many. But your pack ranges all over the city. Perhaps you've noticed something odd."

"Maybe I have, but why would I tell you?"

"I'll owe you a favor."

"I don't need anything from the likes of you."

"No? You have white hairs on your muzzle that weren't there the last time we talked. You're favoring your right foreleg, and that has tooth marks on it. You're getting old, and others are starting to challenge you for mastery of the pack. A day may come when you need a charm to help you win one of those duels."

Ragged Ear c.o.c.ked his head. "You'd do that?"

"Why not? What do I care which hound is the boss?"

"Well... you know downtown? The part with the narrow brick streets and old, sooty buildings?"

"Of course."

"It stinks of power. Your kind of power."

Silent waited a moment. "Is that all you have?"

"Yes. We're not stupid. We cleared out as soon as we caught the scent."

"So really, you barely know anything at all."

The Doberman grinned. "But I did know a little, and you agreed to trade for it."

"Don't worry, I'll keep my end of the deal." Not with any great enthusiasm, but honor demanded it.

It took two days' travel to reach the center of the city, and Silent's paws were sore by the time he arrived. He couldn't smell anything except the vile, hot spew of the countless cars, trucks, and buses, but then, he wasn't a dog.

Stained by the shadow of a high-rise, the cathedral looked like a clump of dirty icicles growing upside down. A sort of antimagic, feeble but cold and forbidding, seethed in the pale stone walls.

Silent glowered at the church. Even before Ragged Ear steered him to the district, he'd suspected he was going to end up here, but he'd hoped otherwise.

He bounded up the steps and waited. When a human opened a door, he slipped inside.

The interior of the cathedral was quiet, cool, and dim, the stained gla.s.s dull for want of sunlight. The votive candles smelled like rotting flowers. Silent prowled onward, searching for priests. The third one he found wore a silver ring. It had a sort of raised cross on it, but, scrutinized closely, the emblem was also a hammer.

Silent stalked the human, waiting for him to move from the cavernous nave to some secluded area. Then something hissed from overhead.

Silent looked up. Yellow eyes in a black feline face glared down from the choir loft. The priest reached inside his jacket, then staggered and collapsed before he could pull anything out.

Astonished, Silent faltered for an instant, then screeched at his fellow cat. Calling on Sister Cheetah's Aspect, he raced for the stairs leading upward.

The a.s.sa.s.sin was gone by the time he reached the loft. But at least the priest was shaking off the effects of the curse. a.s.sisted by people who'd come running when he fell, he clambered to his feet.

Silent jumped on top of the railing enclosing the loft and crouched there waiting for the priest to look up and see him. He was poised to spring for cover if the man reached for his weapon again, but he didn't. He just gave a tiny nod.

Eventually the priest convinced the other humans that it was safe to let him alone. Then he led Silent down a hallway and stepped inside a room.

Despite everything, this could still be a trap, and Silent followed warily. But the priest, a round, bald man with muddy brown eyes, was alone. He sank down behind a desk in a cluttered little office.

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 s.p.a.ces 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 s.p.a.ces. 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.

He asked some of his fellow prisoners what they'd experienced here. Their answers sickened him.

The sun set. Sealed in a room with no windows, he couldn't see it, but like any black cat, he could feel it, and he was glad. Maybe he shouldn't have been. Demons and their servants were more powerful at night. But so was he.

The door opened, and the men who'd captured him came back through. The one with the narrow face opened a cage and dragged a dachshund out. The little black dog tried to bite, but its teeth couldn't penetrate the human's brown leather work gloves.

The other man, thickset with blond hair sheared very short, jabbed a hypodermic into the dachshund's flank. In a few moments, its frantic struggles subsided to an almost imperceptible squirming. The man holding it laid it atop a steel table, and his partner set down the needle and picked up a cordless power drill. He pressed the b.u.t.ton, and the bit spun and whined.

Silent had no obligation to act, for it was only a dog quivering helpless on the table. If he were as cunning as a magus was supposed to be, he'd wait to learn more before making a move. But he was simply too disgusted.

He called on Brother Tiger and swiped at the door of his cage. It flew open and dangled askew, hanging by one hinge. He leaped out onto the linoleum floor.

The humans pivoted in his direction. He charged them and ripped at the leg of the one with the drill.

His claws cut to the bone, the gashes s.p.a.ced more widely than seemed possible, because at present he wasn't just a cat but rather a fusion of cat and tiger. The man screamed and dropped, his blood spurting. The captive animals clamored.

Silent pivoted toward the man with the narrow face. His eyes wide, the human backed away and lifted a pocket pistol.

The gun was a problem. It likely wouldn't kill Brother Tiger, but it could put a hole in Silent that would kill him when the Aspect departed.

He darted under the table. The human would be waiting to shoot when he reappeared, but at least this way he didn't have to cover the entire distance running straight at the muzzle of the gun. Instead of charging directly at his foe, he swung left.

He bounded into the open. The pistol banged, and the bullet cracked into the floor beside him.

Silent closed the distance and tore the human's leg out from underneath him. His foe fell down, and, his arm now shaking, tried again to point the gun. Silent leaped and clawed at his hand, half severing it and knocking the pistol away. The man convulsed.

Silent spun around to check on his other adversary. Still supine, the man was only shivering and twitching. By the looks of it, there was no fight left in either one of them.

Silent stood and panted. It wasn't difficult to roar like a lion or run like a cheetah. But even for an adept, generating the strength and shadowy semblance of a tiger's size and weight was a more taxing feat.

The other prisoners begged him to free them. He wanted to, but perhaps it would be better to scout now and come back for them later. He was still considering when the door opened once again.

A slender, raven-haired woman dressed in an Animal Control coverall entered the room, with several black cats padding at her back. The maimed men whined, evidently begging for her help.

When she answered, even a cat could recognize the note of scorn in her voice. She raised her hand, and each man jerked and then lay still. Points of light flew up out of their mouths and into her grasp. She squeezed them together, mashing them into a jelly, which she then licked off her palm and fingers. Now perceiving her true nature, the caged animals cowered.

Her repast complete, the demoness shrank and became a black cat. In heat. The scent of her evoked an instant pang of desire, even though Silent recognized her for what she truly was. It was surely a ploy to addle him, and he struggled to clear his head.

Perhaps she could tell that he was straining, for she laughed at him. "Silent," she purred. "When I heard what happened in the cathedral, I suspected we'd meet by and by."

He didn't like it that she knew his name, but then, he didn't like anything about this situation. "Who are you, and what are doing here?"

"When I wear this shape, some people call me Barb." She lifted a paw and unsheathed gleaming claws to display their secondary points. "As for what I'm doing, haven't you guessed?"

"You've taken control of the animal shelter, or at least a part of it, and turned it into a place of torment. You offer the black-cat prisoners a way out, but only if they agree to become what you want them to be."

"Actually, it's a little more subtle than that. The prisoners never a.s.sociate me with captivity and abuse. That's all done by humans under my control. I'm the shadow that comes in the night offering comfort, hope, and liberation if only the blacks will join me in a war against mankind. And why wouldn't they? By that time, most of them are only too eager to strike back."

"But what's the point?"

"Why, to corrupt souls. To create living weapons, wield them to a.s.sail servants of the good and spread misery and despair, and, in time, to pa.s.s them along to human warlocks to serve as their familiars. With any luck, to stir up the old mistrust between men and cats all over again."

"Her Majesty won't allow that."

"Your Queen isn't here, only you, and you can't stop me. But you can join me."