‘Then ye have no word to speak to its favour?’ she asked.
  Her three advisors gravely shook their heads, staring at the thing as if it were a caged scorpion.
  ‘I do thank you, sirs, for your frank and sober redes,’ she said. ‘You have only confirmed me in mine own thoughts.’
  They each knelt in turn, awkwardly in the tight space, and took their leave, tripping over each other’s robes in their haste to flee, much relieved in mind that the realm had narrowly missed catastrophe. Queen Katerina, however, remained long in her upper room staring at the object with adoration and fear. The advice of her councillors, she had discovered, bore no weight with her, for it was in the sharing of the secret with them that she had made her final act of submission to the beguiling thing’s imperative. Their discouragement did but fuel her passion.
  So, the temple went up and the coffers went down. Orders went out for rare and costly materials, and tax collectors went out to inspect the inside of every earl’s treasury and to relieve every pauper of his pence. Every cat who had the liberty to travel found some pretence to visit the capital to gawk at the marvel. Startling reports were relayed, third-, fourth- and fifth-removed, to the rat city and reached the ear of Othon XVIII. Othon both refused to believe these tales and raged at the duplicity they laid bare. He oft peered in his magic boxes to renew his conviction of his temple’s surpassing splendour and, more to the point, its existence. Then, asking himself why Katerina’s rising temple could be seen and even touched without magic boxes even by plebeians, beat his breast and gnashed his teeth for having been a sucker. He dwelt obsessively on every occasion he had been tempted to stick a dagger in the Architect’s throat, now bitterly rueing so many squandered opportunities.
  Mean-times, the Queen suffered also. When the temple was but one-quarter raised, Her Majesty had a sick feeling in her belly, like after eating rotten fish, that she had made a bad mistake. When it was half-raised, she was, as the repentant swimmer half-way across a lake who knows both shores are equally beyond reach, convinced of her tragicall folly. Money poured into the city through its gate, but so did troops of artisans from far-off lands, all needing board, lodging and their weekly pay. How delighted Othon would have been had he known the exquisite torture the Queen endured as she watched the tortoise-and-hare race between the temple, which seemed barely to budge from one week to the next, and the money disappearing like water through a sieve. If the Architect did not like some work he would order it pulled down as casually as one might order a gardener to pull up a row of shrubs. He had an unassailable answer to every objection over every excess, including the Queen’s. After a futile argument with him she sometimes took to her bed for the remainder of the day. Some mornings she barely had spirit to rise. Other mornings she thought of fleeing the city and spending her remaining years hidden in a nunnery. Ever she was tempted to halt the construction. What sort of existence would it be, however, to see her failure mocking her every day from her window? And to pull it down, oh, the humiliation!—and how much would even that cost? Recoiling at both alternatives, she would put off her decision for another day, and so the temple was now three-quarters raised. Here it halted. The Queen was clean out of money. Every source was wrung dry. She’d sold her jewellery, her tiara. Everything was mortgaged. Her subjects were thoroughly shorn and on verge of revolt.
  Cats, desperate and starving, formed gangs of brigands and invaded Ratona to thieve whatever could be traded, and to trap rats of any degree that they could get their claws on. But unlike happier days, when these captives would have been trussed up and garnished for the festal fires, now they were ransomed back to the rats for coin. Their successes emboldened these roving marauders to push beyond the hinterlands and into the heartland of Ratona, where gains were fatter. These new profits in ransoming titled souls was a trade others saw they could have a share in. Mice had always been the minions of Ratona. They resented the despotic rats, but were never able to successfully rebel, for, though exceeding in number the rats, they were puny. Most were desperately poor. Now they had information to sell. More than one ransomed rat lord, returning to his estate, discovered that the mice were somewhat more prosperous than when he had departed. He could not, however, very well exterminate his entire labour force.
  These hordes of cats, causing division, unrest and chaos in his lands, infuriated King Othon XVIII. He was appalled also by this sale of his lords, as if they were commodities, like wives or maize. On first receiving news of this novel development, it baffled him. How could you sell honour any more than you could air or sunshine? When these lords returned, they seemed diminished. They carried a stain into Ratona, just as a maid gotten with child by a rapist brings disgrace to her family. Moreover, he knew where the gold was going. It enraged him to be paying the Cat Queen’s construction bills. Something had to be done to restore order.
  The idea of such trade had also stunned Queen Katerina when first Alfred A. Brussel had brightly proposed it to her as a way out of her straits. Lords abducted, captured in battle, were invaluable sacrificial victims. It made no sense to sell them back to the rats. Indeed, it was a sacred obligation to dedicate them to the Cat Goddess. To deprive her of her rightful viands would be to invite her wrath.
  Then, in the pale hour before dawn, after a night of tossing and turning, pursued in dreams by rapacious beasts with horns and I.O.U.s, Katerina was captured and bound at her wrists and ankles. Instead of being violated by disgusting rats, however, or flung off a cliff, as she anticipated, she found herself conducted before the Cat Goddess upon her high seat. ‘Daughter,’ quod the Goddess, ‘with much satisfaction have I watched the building of this temple. At last I shall be glorified by a fitting dwelling place. Thy name, too, shalleth be renowned. It would be a disgrace to us both should this temple instead become a mockery, making of us laughing stocks. I know, too, the burden of worry thou hast borne, which moveth my compassion. For, though I be a drad Goddess without pity for the disgusting rats, I have also a mother’s bosom sorrowing for the suffering of her child and a maternal desire to succour her. I urge thee, therefore, to heed the council of this Architect. I will deliver thee the vile lords of Ratland for sale in such number that this splendid building be brought to happy completion.’ Then the Queen found herself awake and much easier in mind than she had been for a long time.
  Meanwhile, King Othon XVIII had dispatched an army to patrol his hinterlands. He thought that once the cancer was cut out where it was most malignant, the rest of Ratona would more quickly be restored to health. To the rats’ ill fortune, however, one of the chiefs of the invading felines was, in addition to crook and cutthroat, an uncommonly skilled tactician. Buttons of Soriana hight was he in his later career, though in truth his origins were unknown. Perhaps behind a trash cans in a wretched alley was the place of his nativity, and it was in alleys and sewers that he fought to eat, and learned the agility of temper and deftness of mind that now served him. He organized the disparate feline gangs into a coordinated force. By his clever tricks he took by ambush so many divisions of King Othon’s army that its numbers evaporated without ever engaging in open combat, so alarming Othon that he recalled the army and sacked its general. Mean-times, the rank and file of the captured rodents were burnt on the altars of Kitania, while the abundance of degreed hostages brought in enough profit to finish the temple and apply the final touches of gilt to the mouldings.