The sand cat said, “You really must, brother. The mercy of the Shayk of Night is not boundless. He is not Allah!”
Cuthbert looked into the cage, but it was impossible to see a thing. He did not understand what the “Shayk of Night” meant precisely, but he felt now a need to meet the animal that, if nothing else, held his little friend’s spirit in thrall. (In fact, the zookeepers had made a point recently of allowing their big cats to wander their exhibits at night instead of keeping them in old-fashioned night rooms. Somewhere, an ebony mutation of Panthera pardus watched.)
Muezza said: “It’s written that the Night, Al Layl, holds the glory of Allah in it, somewhere within it, always, like a bright star. If you let the Shayk free, he will be the harbinger of the Judgment Day, you will see. He is part of the preparation period. As are you.”
Cuthbert felt shaken by the cat’s words, and the hairs on his neck stood up. What Muezza said was just the sort of eschatological banter that could pick up Cuthbert like a scrawny lamb on Armageddon’s Valley of Jezreel, and lurch him away to utter craziness.
Cuthbert asked, in a wavering whisper, “Can he help me to abstain from the Flōt?”
The cat said: “In his way, yes. There is no question.”
Cuthbert felt encouraged, but the cat’s vagueness, again, concerned him.
“But I don’t see him, Muezza,” he said, still speaking quietly, his voice going husky. “I don’t see any star either, for that matter. Just the comet-craft. I don’t like all this Judgment Day talk. Do not forget: y’am a cat.”
“I? Forget that?” asked Muezza. “I see him as clearly as I see you. What do you think you are? And the star—it’s just a comparison, saliq.” That Muezza could suddenly talk as if metaphors could be metaphors and nothing else, as if their long discussion was not a figurative exploration, had the effect of calming Cuthbert. It was as though a creature in a Flōt dream had said to him, “I’m here because you’re smashed, bloke, and that’s that.”
“A’m sorry,” said Cuthbert. “I’m . . . having mind trouble.”
“That is a most excellent way of saying it, brother. You have nothing to be sorry about, not tonight. You possess the same fatal grace our kind all do. Why wouldn’t you?”
With that, he finally realized that Muezza, from the moment they met, actually considered him feline. He did not see the point of disabusing him of the notion; he wondered whether, perhaps, on some level, he had indeed become cat.
Cuthbert grasped his bolt cutters with both hands and stepped over the steel fence. He cut open the leopard enclosure. As far as he could tell, there was no leopard there anyway.
“You think a’m a cat, don’t you?”
“Funny, saliq. You are blessed. And whatever else would you be? You are not just any cat. You are the Mahdi. You will soon meet your Shayk.”
“A’m scared, Muezza. I don’t believe I’ll be hurt. But I don’t like this feeling of fear—it tears you apart. Why can’t I hear him? Perhaps it is better if you take me to the otters. I know about otterspaeke—that I can grasp, at least a bit. Gagoga maga medu and all that.”
“The Shayk is silent,” said the sand cat. “Forget about your zoo otters for a while. We are cats. The Shayk is more vital, for the moment, to us all. However, he may not need, perhaps, to speak with you, not here, not now. He is here to take you, in ways you need not imagine, to Allah. What could there possibly be to say, even with someone as capitally important as you?”
In the deep murk of the enclosure, several shadows seemed to burst to life for a second or two. It was as if little dark doors were swinging open to reveal silhouettes of lost souls.
“Oh, now I see something!” said Cuthbert. There was a kind of sirocco of dark heat that stole past him. “That something? That it? Am I seeing it?”
“I do not know, saliq. It’s not so simple. But something is wrong, I sense. This is not how I expected this to go. The Shayk, he is disturbed, I fear. We must leave now. You will see him, I promise, before the night ends.”
“The darkness—it’s fucking roasting, like boiling oil.” Cuthbert stuck his head into the gap in the enclosure, ignoring Muezza. He slurred, “A’m ready, ready, ready. To stop killing myself. With booze, right? Help me, Shayk.”
Muezza said, in a severe tone, “We really must leave. He can kill you, saliq. He is not . . . easy to predict.”
“I don’t care,” said Cuthbert. “Not really.”
“Your insect juice speaks now. We do not want to anger him, and you are too important to endanger. You—you caged Kitten-Man—you are more to Allah than even the Shayk. He prepares to stalk upon endless fields of urban darkness, to tear great secrecies, flesh from bone, and we must accept that. It is a powerful thing to be blessed to behold, but we don’t want to behold it now.”
“Why is he angry?”