The Philosophical Strangler(91)

So doing away with the dwarves was ruled out. On the other hand, we couldn’t just let them go either. They’d be bound to raise the alarm trying to sneak out of the mansion. In the end, we struck a deal with them. If they’d help us dig out the Cat, we’d figure out some way to take them with us when we escaped.

Then, as it turned out, they did all the digging. Greyboar offered to help, but the dwarves turned him down.

“Shoulders like yours,” explained one of them—Eddie, his name was—“be good for breaking rocks out in the open, where you’ve got room to swing a hammer. But this here’s close-in work, like. You’d just get in the way.”

Then Greyboar offered my help, and that of the Trio. But the dwarves turned him down again.

“By the looks of ’em,” sniffed another—Lester, he was called; the last one, for the record, was named Frank—“they haven’t done an honest day’s work between ’em in the last five years.”

I let it go, but the Trio were deeply insulted.

“ ’Aven’t never done no ’onest day’s work,” groused the Weasel.

“Aye an’ do we look like idiots?” demanded G.J., red in the face.

“Not since we’s little ’uns, anyhow,” grumbled McDoul. “Not since we’s sprung usselfs from th’sweatshop, after knifin’ the o’erseer.”

In the event, finding the dwarves turned out to be a blessing. Now that they were motivated to work as fast as possible, instead of stalling, they cut right through the rock. Work like moles underground, dwarves could. Not surprising, really, most of them did a stint in the mines sometime in their lives. It was one of the few jobs people would give to dwarves. And while the work was brutal, at least the poor little bastards didn’t have to worry about pogroms as long as they were underground. Your average lynch mob had a fear of hunting dwarves down there. The tricky little devils had this way of making the tunnels real narrow. Not to mention the cave-ins that always seemed to inflict the few vigilantes who were stupid enough (or drunk enough) to chase dwarves below the surface.

So the dwarves did all the digging. Greyboar stayed down there almost the whole time, fussing and fuming and driving the poor little guys crazy. The Trio and I, on the other hand, being sane and rational men, spent the time up in the Cardinal’s chamber. Good company, the Trio, especially with plenty of ale to keep their stories coming.

And there was another upside to the whole affair—a big upside. The Trio started prying up loose boards, more out of habit than anything else, and discovered the Cardinal’s secret stash. A whole chest full of gold coins, gems and jewelry. All of it obtained illegally, no doubt, so the Cardinal could hardly report the loss to the authorities.

On the spot, we arranged a satisfactory split. A third for me, a third for Greyboar, and a third for them. It took me an hour to get the Trio to agree to it. Fifty-nine minutes of ferocious debate with me, them advancing the ludicrous proposition that we should split it evenly—a fifth apiece. One minute for Greyboar to come up and reason with them.

It only took the dwarves a bit more than half a day to break into the Cat’s cell. Without them, it would have taken two days. And the cell was right where Vincent had told us. Yes, everything was working just according to The Plan. Except for one little problem.

The Cat wasn’t in the cell.

* * *

We wasted two hours while Greyboar inspected the cell about ten thousand times. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The cell wasn’t more than five feet by seven feet by four feet tall, with a small alcove added on where the hardtack was stored. And every surface was faced with hard rock, so there was no way to dig out if you didn’t have tools. There wasn’t any sign of digging, anyway.

The point here being that all it took was two minutes to figure out the Cat wasn’t there and hadn’t dug her way out. But still the big lummox spent two hours at it before he gave up.

Oh, she’d been there, all right. There wasn’t any doubt about that. Every surface of the cell was covered with handwriting, scratched with a sharp stone. You couldn’t mistake the Cat’s hand—she wrote with big bold letters, probably because she was half blind.

You couldn’t mistake the language, either. Pure Cat. The Trio were positively awestruck.

“Never seen sech command of y’profanity,” marveled Geronimo Jerry.

“Genius, genius, th’Cat,” whispered Erlic, in tones you usually hear in a church.

“ ’Tis not alone th’mastery o’ the curse,” admired McDoul, “but th’beauty o’ th’anatom’cal depictions—an’ th’lass ne’er repeated herself the onc’t! Imposs’ble, o’ course, th’most o’ th’acts ascribed to th’Judge—but th’imagination! Ne’er could’ve thought o’ th’half o’ them, m’self.”