THE SAND CATS, FELIS MARGARITA, INHABITED A deep, semicylindrical chamber built at waist height into the rear of the terraces. Their floor was spread with coarse sand and pebbles that looked suspiciously like what covered the beaches of Southampton. A complex set of dehumidifiers in the roof kept the chamber more arid than any other spot in England. A few bone-dry pieces of acacia and, of all things, a dried sponge were illuminated with an orange halide heat lamp. Though unintended, the sand cats’ narrow cattery came across as a kind of tidy accessory to their enormous cousins’ weedy cement heap, plugged into the same mass of mud-spattered, unnaturally smooth concrete. The orange light glowed like the inside of an old bread toaster.
Cuthbert started to bend close to look into the orange-glowing pocket but was distracted. He turned around. He felt a presence near, something low and smutty and ancient. He searched the nearby hedges with his eyes. There was a tremble in a certain holly branch, and dark shapes, the size of footballs, scurrying beneath it. Something was rustling in there. The wind, he thought. Or a little field vole? Or his eyes playing tricks.
He rotated back around abstractedly. He read part of the short description of the animals printed on a black rectangle. The sand cat’s specialized urinary system allows it to survive long without drinking. It derives nearly all the moisture it needs from food. He tapped on the window of the cat enclosure. A single golden paw extended spectacularly from the shadows. He could not help but smile.
“Wakie, wakie!” Cuthbert said.
Three of the animals came into focus in the dark. They stood up, their backs rising into huge, awakening arches. Their keepers had petted and touched them assiduously since their arrival from Chad, and they were unafraid of humans. They were among the few animals in the zoo not yet extinct in the wild, but they were far from safe.
“Hello, you lot,” he said. “Yam beautiful, yow am.”
Cuthbert liked them immediately. The docile animals’ gold-green eyes were jeweled and soothing. One of them, whose keeper had named it Muezza (after the Prophet’s pet, according to the sign), gazed at Cuthbert. It bucked to the side and puffed its ringed tail. It was accustomed to human contact, but not totally at ease with strangers, and never at this hour.
The sand cats were smaller and stretchier-looking than the mogs Cuthbert saw on the streets of London, but their faces were wide and their ears immense—huge golden triangles that could hear the bellies of desert vipers and the feet of jerboas in the Sahara. The cats seemed wide awake in their glass case; they were pawing the window now, looking into Cuthbert’s eyes.
Come, Seeker, Cuthbert thought he heard Muezza say. Come, Saliq. The cat’s head inclined slightly sideways when it mewled. The attention engrossed Cuthbert greatly. Was saliq a word of blame, or a warm assignation? It seemed a bit of both.
Cuthbert felt he didn’t have time to bother with the fine points of a cat greeting. He still wanted to solve the conundrum of the Gulls of Imago. To him the Penguin Pool remained the most obvious mechanism of an unfathomable, and perhaps good (and perhaps not) sort of power, and he wanted to turn it on.
“Ow bist?* Have you seen any seagulls in the area?” he asked the cats.
If there was one thing Cuthbert knew about the moggies of London, it was that they watched birds gingerly. He touched his forehead against the glass. The cats circled around one another, taking turns rubbing against the pane. There was no other response.
Cuthbert decided to change tack. “If a’m a ‘saliq,’ mates, perhaps you would be willing to lend a hand—I’m officially seeking otters,” he said. “That’s my immediate business. And seagulls—oi’suppose. They’re important . . . to help these penguins out, see? And I’m looking for a sort of ghost—or two ghosts, in a manner of speaking. There’s this fellow, this Tecton—e’s split into a million living bitties. ’E’s a load of gulls these days. And my older brother—Drystan. ’E’s the most important, mind you. I say ‘ghost,’ but it’s only as ’e’s missing. He ain’t jedded.”*
Muezza squeezed his way past the other cats, and as he did, he also seemed to squeeze subtly past Cuthbert’s world of prayers and madness and dreams, and to speak with familiarity and directness: “You free us, brother, and I can tell you about many, many, many small living pests, and perhaps about other things, too.”
“I don’t see how it’s possible, cat. I only have these bolt cutters, right?” He held them up by one handle, and shook it around, as though gripping a great swan or goose by the neck.
“Oh, brother seeker—and ‘brother-seeker’—surely you know that I would also take you, of all creatures, to the sacred path. I am here to tell you that the path leads eventually to the Shayk of Night. Don’t be afraid. I know your purpose. The Shayk has been waiting for you. But I get ahead of myself.”
“That so,” Cuthbert said. He wondered what to make of the cat’s strange ideas. They struck him as no less inscrutable than the penguins’, but this animal had at least alluded to a plan, as well as a quid pro quo arrangement of genuine promise. Given the fact that he’d made a sort of promise to the penguins, he felt inclined to work with this creature.
“Can you help me free the otters into the cut? This is my most important task.”
“Yes, I can help. All things are possible,” said the cat.
“Really?”