The cooks were already up. Several of them had been so for hours, baking. The smell of fresh bread reached Kormak’s nostrils and made his mouth water.

Lila went into the pantry and produced a jug of milk, poured some into a bowl then went to another cupboard and put the bowl down. Kormak looked down. There was a small, very sick looking kitten in the basket. Its ear was torn and one of its eyes was milky. It meowed feebly, rolled over and started lapping the milk.

Lila tickled it under the chin but it ignored her and looked at him beseechingly. “Typical,” Kormak said.

“That’s right, you don’t like cats, do you?” Lila said. “I remember now.”

Kormak shrugged. “I neither like nor dislike them.”

“That’s what people say when they really don’t like them.”

“You have an interesting approach to understanding people,” Kormak said.

“There’s not so many about these days. They mostly seem to have vanished. Cats, kittens, all of them.”

Kormak felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. “Is that right?”

“Storytellers in the market say they have all gone to the Moon for the winter. I don’t think so.”

“Where do you think they have gone?”

“Not the Moon.”

One of the cooks looked up and said, “And not into any of my pies no matter what anyone says.”

Lila went over to the man, clapped him on the shoulder and said, “No one is accusing you of anything.”

The big doughy faced man smiled and then just as suddenly looked angry. “Somebody is killing them though.”

“What?” Kormak asked.

“For a couple of months there, every full moon, dead cats were showing up everywhere. Some were skinned. Some were skeletons. Some were found on middens. Some looked as if they were half eaten.”

Lila nodded. “Bounce’s mother had just had a litter. Last full moon, they vanished. I found Bounce in a hole in the yard wall, mangled he was, bleeding, as if he had been in a fight, his fur all ripped and bloody. I thought he was going to die.”

“He might well have,” said the cook. “If the mistress had not tended to him with her own hands.”

“I felt sorry for him,” Lila said. “He lost his brothers and sisters and his mother all at the same time.”

The cat was moving around now. Kormak could see that he was limping. He started feeling a certain sympathy for the battered little beast but he did not let it show on his face. “What would do that?”

“I don’t know,” said the cook. “But there’s those that have taken to skinning and eating cats. They’re a bunch of hungry, thieving bastards down in the Rat’s Maze.