The Wizardry Consulted (Wiz, #4)(18)

With Malkin’s help he tugged the door open again and he watched her as she disappeared down the street. Then he leaned against the door and pushed it to again as the hinges protested like souls in mortal agony.

The door, Wiz thought. I’ve got to do something about that damned door.

Wiz went down the worn stone steps into the kitchen. It had to be the kitchen, he decided, because private houses don’t usually come equipped with torture chambers.

It was a high, narrow room in what he would have thought of as the basement of the house. A couple of thin barred windows high up lit the place dimly. The walls and floors were dank stone and the ceiling was rough beams and planks. There was a huge fireplace with a wicked-looking collection of iron hooks and chains hanging under the mantel, plus a contraption of iron spikes and gears and yet more chains off to one side that he vaguely recognized as some kind of spit for roasting meat. There was a stone sink in the opposite wall and in the center of the room a heavy wooden table with a rack full of hooks above it.

Gee, he thought, clean this place up, light a fire in the fireplace, put some flowers here and there, I’ll bet you could brighten it up to, oh, say, dismal.

Among the pile of supplies Malkin had purchased was a small bottle of oil. Wiz took the oil back upstairs to the door and poured some on the hinges as best he could from the inside. Then he tugged the door open to get them from the outside.

He barely had the door open six inches when a furry gray streak shot through and dashed between his legs.

“Hey!” Wiz yelled, but the streak ignored him. It was halfway up the stairs before it stopped and resolved itself into a cat.

It was a rather bedraggled and quite large cat. A tiger-striped tabby cat, Wiz thought, dredging the terms out of his subconscious. A tiger-striped tabby tomcat, he amended as the cat turned its backside toward him.

The cat sat in the middle of the stairs and looked back over its right shoulder at Wiz.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Wiz demanded of the cat. The cat continued to study Wiz with its great yellow eyes as if to say, “I live here. What’s your excuse?”

Wiz opened his mouth to say more and then shut it again when he realized there wasn’t anything he could say. Not only is arguing with a cat a lost cause, this cat was halfway up the stairs and could easily outrun him if he tried to give chase. Wiz didn’t like looking foolish any more than the average cat does, so he decided to leave it for now.

Wiz didn’t dislike cats, but from observing his friends who had cats he had arrived at a couple of conclusions. The first was that cats, not being pack animals like dogs or people, do not have consciences. That meant that if you had a cat you were sharing your life with a furry little sociopath.

The second was that every animal had evolved to exploit an ecological niche and in the case of cats that niche was people.

“Well, all right,” Wiz told the cat. “But don’t get the idea you’re staying.”

“Who are you shouting at?” asked Malkin as she came in the door with a basket of food.

Wiz nodded toward the stairs. “That.”

Malkin studied the cat and the cat studied Malkin. “I think that’s Widder Hackett’s cat,” the tall girl said finally. “Handsome enough.”

“So is a leopard, but that doesn’t mean I want to share quarters with one.”

Malkin grinned at him. “Looks like he’s decided to share quarters with you. And if you’re planning on catching him to throw him out you can do it yourself. He’s a scrapper, that one, and I’ve no fancy to get myself clawed up to put out an animal that will come right back in every time you open the door.”

“Hmmf,” Wiz snorted, weighing his ambivalence toward cats against the obvious trouble it would take to get rid of this one. “Does he have a name?”

“Widder Hackett called him Precious, but I think his name is Bobo.”

“Bobo, huh? Looks more like Bubba to me.” The cat narrowed his yellow eyes and glared at him as if to say “Watch it, bud.”

It turned out there was a stove in the kitchen. It was a ceramic tile box next to the fireplace that Wiz had dismissed as a waist-high work counter. There was also a wooden hand pump that drew water into the sink. Malkin got a fire going with the help of a fire-starting spell from Wiz and she quickly threw together a grain-and-vegetable porridge that turned out surprisingly well. They ate in the kitchen under the glow of a magic light globe Wiz conjured up.

The only excitement came when Bobo cornered and caught a rat in the upstairs hallway. He came trotting down the stairs, head high, with the limp furry corpse dangling from his mouth and settled himself under the sink to eat with the humans. Wiz turned his back to the sink and tried to ignore the occasional crunching noises from Bobo’s direction.

“Cat’s got his uses,” Malkin observed.

“Unfortunately I don’t have a violin that needs stringing.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a spell to clean dishes either,” Malkin said as she scraped the last of the stew from her bowl.

“I can probably whip one up tomorrow.”

“Let it be for tonight then. But one way or another, Wizard, you’ll clean those dishes tomorrow. And tomorrow it’s your turn to cook.”

“Who’s the boss in this outfit anyway?”

“Depends,” Malkin said lazily, “on who needs who the worst, don’t it?”