Dibstone Cat

Maya Harding, twenty-nine, came up the quarry road just as the sun went orange over the limestone, and the first thing she saw was Lindsay Thorson already halfway up a ladder with one end of the banner in her hands.

Of course she was. Lindsay, thirty-two, who had lived in Bhitargaon all of four years and somehow knew every caretaker, every shopkeeper, and apparently every ladder in the district. Maya had lived here six, since grad school at twenty-three, and people still asked her if she was visiting.

"Careful on that rung, it wobbles!" Jacques called from below, arms full of rope. He spotted Maya and waved the rope as a man would greet a ship. "Maya! You made it! The light is perfect, look at this light."

"It is nice," Maya said, which was true and also annoying. Jacques Xavier, thirty-one, local historian, had been her close friend since her second week in town, and she had been looking forward to this ceremony for a month. She had not been looking forward to watching him and Lindsay finish each other's sentences for three hours.

"Can I take the other end?" she asked, already walking toward the ladder.

"Oh, we're actually past that part, sorry," Lindsay called down cheerfully. She didn't sound sorry. She never did, which was the whole trick of her, Maya thought. Lindsay could say anything and it came out sunny. "We're on the tie-off now. You could hold the... actually, do you want to hold the weight of the pole? It drifts left."

So Maya held a pole that drifted left for twenty minutes while the two of them tied knots and discussed, at length, whether the banner should hang facing the quarry mouth or the west wall. They settled it by both saying "west, obviously" at the same time, and then laughing about it, and Maya stared at a rusted cart wheel and thought about how she had a master's degree and still felt like the third wheel of a tricycle.

"I'm going to look around," she announced.

"Chamber two is locked, stay out of there, Allen's fussy about it," Jacques said. "Everything else is fine."

Everything else, it turned out, included a side passage off the main floor that Maya had never noticed in three previous visits. The light was going fast, but the passage had that pale gray glow limestone gives back after dark, so she followed it in and found herself in a small chamber she was fairly sure wasn't on Jacques's tour. Four ore carts sat in it, abandoned, their wheels seized with rust, and on the wheel of the nearest cart sat a cast-iron doorstop shaped like a sleeping cat.

It was a funny thing to find in a quarry. It was curled up, tail over nose, cast in black iron with a patina of orange rust blooming along its spine. Maya picked it up and it was warm.

Not sun-warm. The chamber hadn't seen sun in decades. It was warm like a laptop that had been running all day, warm from underneath, and Maya stood there holding a doorstop that weighed about as much as a phone book and felt her own pulse in her palms.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody. "Okay, that's weird."

"Put it down, don't put it down, actually can I see it?"

Maya nearly threw the thing. Lindsay stood in the passage mouth, silhouetted, holding two paper cups.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Thirty seconds? I brought chai, Jacques is being precious about the knot. Is that the cat? He said you'd find it, he didn't say you'd pick it up." She came closer and held out a cup. "Here. Warm it up, it's getting cold."

Maya took the chai because her other hand was busy. "You know this thing?"

"I know too much about this thing, honestly. Sit, my feet hurt." Lindsay sat on the edge of a cart, which groaned but held. "Okay. So you know I do pacemaker memory reads? It's niche work, most of these units only log events, but some of the newer ones store... context, basically. Snippets. It's supposed to help doctors, not anybody else."

"Right."

"So last year a man named Devendar Pratap died, he was eighty-six, heart failure, and his unit came to me for the routine archive before it's wiped. And his last stored fragment isn't cardiac at all. It's audio and a visual impression, and it's old, Maya. It's older than the pacemaker. It's a memory, and it isn't his, and it's a chant, a siege chant, from inside this quarry. Someone was hiding down here during the 1668 siege while a hundred men outside the wall sang it."

The cat was still warm in Maya's hand. "A memory from three hundred years ago was on his pacemaker?"

"That's what I said. His granddaughter said he claimed the quarry gave it to him. Everyone assumed he was a sweet confused old man. But I read the file and the chant is real, it matches a fragment Jacques found in a Persian chronicle, same meter, same nonsense refrain." Lindsay sipped her chai. "And here's the part I haven't told Jacques, because he'll put it in a paper and then a hundred tourists will show up. The fragment isn't just audio. It ends with a... a feeling. Pressure. Like the quarry itself was listening."

Maya looked at the cat. "It's warm."

"It's what?"

"Feel."

Lindsay set down her cup and reached out, and the moment her fingers touched the iron beside Maya's, a hum started. Low, felt more than heard, up through both their hands and into their wrists, and somewhere behind them, out in the main chamber, the banner fabric rippled with no wind at all.

Neither of them let go. The hum rose a little, settled, and held, like a machine idling, or as a throat clears and waits to be introduced.

"Are you doing that?" Maya asked.

"Are you doing that?"

"Obviously not."

"Okay. Okay, wow." Lindsay's voice had gone careful, the way it did when she was excited and trying not to show it. "The fragment ends with a phrase. I never could translate the last word. Devendar's recording of it, his own voice repeating it on the archive, it's..." She sang it, quietly, three notes and a drop, the nonsense refrain Maya had just been told about, and the cat purred.

There was no other word for it. A cast-iron doorstop, purring against their joined hands, and out in the main chamber the banner rippled again, longer this time.

"Jacques is going to see the banner moving," Maya said.

"Jacques is going to say it's a draft. He will say the word draft with total confidence." Lindsay finally let go, and the hum faded to almost nothing, though the warmth stayed. "Maya. Listen to me. I have read a hundred of these files and none of them ever did anything but sit there. This thing responded to us. To both of us, together, I think. I touched it alone yesterday for ten minutes and got nothing but cold fingers."

"You touched it yesterday?"

"I found it yesterday. Allen showed me chamber two, this thing was on a shelf there, it's his, he uses it for the gate. He moved it out here this afternoon for the ceremony, some decorative thing, the cat's on the old quarry seal." She picked the cat up one-handed now, and it stayed warm but silent, and she made a frustrated sound. "Why does it need two of us? What is it about..."

She stopped. Maya felt the stop like a dropped stitch.

"What?"

"Nothing. It's probably nothing. Devendar's fragment, the pressure, the listening feeling, there's a line in his granddaughter's notes, she said he told her the quarry only speaks to two people at once. He said one person hears an echo and two people hear a voice."

From the main chamber came Jacques's voice, echoing off the limestone: "Lindsay? Did you fall in a hole? We're lighting the lamps."

Lindsay stood up, still holding the cat, and looked at Maya with an expression Maya had never been on the receiving end of before, an expression that said we are in this together now, whatever this is.

"We light lamps, we smile, we eat the samosas, and then," Lindsay said, "you and I are coming back down here after everyone leaves. Deal?"

"Deal," Maya said, and was surprised to find she meant it, and more surprised to find she wasn't jealous anymore, not even a little. The cat purred once against Lindsay's palm, soft, like agreement.

Jacques had set up the unfurling on the flat shelf near the main chamber's north wall, and by the time Maya and Lindsay got there, twelve lamps were lit and forty-some early guests were milling around eating samosas at the preview unfurling, before the real ceremony. Allen Sylvester stood off to the side with his arms crossed, watching the crowd like a man counting exits.

"There you are," Jacques called. "Maya, you're on the corner, the corner nearest the cat. Lindsay, hold the far end, yes, that one. Everyone, on my count."

The banner came down off its roller in sections. It was enormous, maybe eight meters, and so fragile that Jacques had spent three years negotiating with the district archive just to let it outside. The cloth was a grayish red, patched in six places, and when the last section dropped open the crowd made a sound like a wave.

"Oh, it's so much bigger in person," someone said behind Maya.

"Quiet, quiet, look at the figures," Jacques said, and he wasn't wrong. The weave showed a siege scene, drawn in faded dye. A fort wall, then rows of small woven men outside it, and below them, cut into the hillside, a row of dark openings that everyone present recognized immediately, because they were standing in one.

"That's us," a man said. "That's this quarry, look at the openings."

"It's the quarry from the outside," Jacques said, delighted. "Seventeenth century, look at the fort silhouette, it matches. And see the men with their arms up? We think they're singing. The chronicle fragment describes a chant sung at the walls on the last night."

And that was when the lamps flickered.

Not all of them. Three of them, the ones nearest the banner, dipped together, and Maya felt the hum come up through her shoes before she heard it. The cat doorstop sat on the cart wheel maybe four meters away, exactly where Allen had staged it, and it was purring. Loudly. Loudly enough that the woman next to Maya said, "Is that a generator?"

"Figure," Lindsay said, very quietly, to nobody.

Maya looked back at the banner and her stomach dropped. The figures were moving. Not the cloth, the cloth hung perfectly still, but the dyed figures, faintly, the way a reflection moves on water. Small woven men lifting their arms and lowering them, lifting and lowering, in rhythm, and out of the rhythm came the chant, thin as a radio through a wall, three notes and a drop, three notes and a drop.

"Does everyone hear that?" Maya asked, and the answer, from the faces around her, was no. Jacques was still talking about the chronicle. Allen had gone very still, but he was staring at the cat, not the banner.

"Jacques," Allen said.

"Not now, Allen, I'm at the good part."

"Jacques. The cat."

Jacques turned. The cat was purring, the lamps were flickering, the figures were marching on the cloth, and into that arrangement of wrongness stepped something else entirely. A man. Faint, gray, the height of a man, standing at the edge of the lamp light with his arms raised, mouth open, singing.

Maya did not scream, which she would later be proud of. She grabbed Lindsay's sleeve instead, and Lindsay was already grabbing hers, and the two of them stood there holding each other's sleeves like the last two people who could see it, because they were. Around them the crowd saw nothing. Jacques saw nothing. Only Allen, who had