III
When he woke it was not quite dark, and a faint gray dawn came into the cell.
The jester was snoring. Somewhere Dax thought he heard a rat. His muscles tensed, and he found himself on his feet by instinct—the idea of a rat was surprisingly attractive and he was hungry again. The noise stopped. He remembered that he had been having a dream—a strange nightmare of chasing after Mallison and catching him, and tearing him ... with his claws and teeth.
A rusty bell started ringing somewhere in the castle.
The jester snorted, sat up and looked out of the narrow window. Then he lit the candle and said his prayers, kneeling on his bed. Dax stretched, and the old man cleaned his teeth with a splinter and took a draught from the ale pot. It had a sour stench, but Dax found that he no longer minded—there were so many conflicting smells around, the most interesting of which had been the rat. A new, more immediately hopeful one, was of cooking that drifted up from below. It seemed that these people ate meat for their breakfast. And they liked it early.
"Come along, Tybalt," the jester said, putting on his headdress, and went to the door. Dax slipped through quickly so as not to get his tail caught as the jester closed it. They went down the winding stairs again.
At the bottom they came upon another cat—a big red tom—who on catching sight of Dax fluffed his tail and laid back his ears, spitting. Dax had a momentary impulse to see if communication was possible with him, but the big cat yowled and fled down the hallway.
"Ah, Tybalt," the old man said. "Jesters and cats! Even their own kind spits at them!" As they got to the kitchen Dax saw the two hounds that had growled at him the night before. He was glad that they were now leashed and in the charge of a boy in a short woolen surcoat.
But when they saw Dax the boy was unable to hold them back, and they jerked their leashes from his hand and came running and barking. Dax was terrified. He bolted ahead of them along the vaulted corridor and into the Great Hall, but came face to face with another brace of hounds whose ears pricked up at the sound. Dax without any conscious thought dodged sideways and ran up the tapestry on the wall.