King Rat

by China Miéville

  He reached up to it, and saw King Rat. He stopped moving, shocked.

  King Rat stood in thrall, his face slack, his limbs swinging vaguely, stripped of dignity, a string of drool stretching and snapping from his lower jaw. Saul stared, fascinated and horrified.

  He hated King Rat, hated what he had done, but something in him was appalled at seeing him so shorn of power.

  Saul turned and grasped the swinging box, pulled hard, snapping the rope.

  He smashed it hard against the wall.

  The music stopped at the instant of impact. Metal and plastic spattered out of the broken casing. He slammed it twice more against the brick. Its speakers burst out of their housing. A tape flew from the ruined cassette deck.

  Saul turned and looked at the assembled multitude.

  They stood still, confused.

  Understanding and recollection seemed to well over them all simultaneously. In a panic, a terrified flurry, the rats emitted a communal hiss and disappeared, scampering over each other, made clumsy by the fallen.

  The mountain crumbled and disappeared. Lame and ruined rats tried to follow their fellows. The first wave was gone; then the second wave, limping after them; and the third wave, the dying, hauled themselves away, sliding on blood.

  The ground was covered with bodies. Corpses lay two, three thick. Loplop crawled into a corner.

  King Rat stared at Saul. Saul looked back at him for a moment, then returned his attention to the ruined stereo. He fumbled in the mud until he found the tape.

  He wiped it, examined the label.

  Flute 1, it said. It was handwritten. It was Natasha’s writing.

  “Oh fuck,” Saul shouted and pushed his head into the crook of his arm. “Oh fuck, oh leave them alone, you fucker,” he breathed.

  He heard King Rat move forward. Saul looked up sharply. King Rat looked uneasy. He moved with a deferential cast to his limbs, resentment curling his mouth. He was intimidated, Saul realized.

  Saul nodded.

  “It’s just noise to me,” he whispered. He nodded again, saw King Rat’s eyes widen. “Just noise.”

  With a shriek Loplop saw Saul, ran towards him flapping his rags and his arms, stumbled as he ran.

  King Rat started. Saul stepped smartly out of Loplop’s way and watched as the Bird Superior slipped in mud, went over in a half-controlled fall and banged his head against the wall.

  Saul gesticulated at King Rat, danced back a few steps.

  “Keep that motherfucker under control!” he shouted.

  Loplop still shouted, still yelled his incoherent cries as he tried to stand. King Rat strode to where Loplop slithered in mud, and gripped his collar. He tugged him, pulled him along the slippery sewer bottom. Loplop struggled and whimpered. At the entrance to the tunnel King Rat crouched before him, held his finger before Loplop’s face. Saul could not tell if he was speaking to Loplop, or merely holding him still, with those eyes. Some kind of communication passed between them.

  Loplop stared past King Rat at Saul. He looked afraid and enraged. King Rat regained his gaze and seemed to say something, gesticulated. Loplop’s eyes returned to Saul, and the same rage filled him as before, but he backed away, moved away through the tunnels, disappeared.

  King Rat turned back to Saul.

  As he walked back through the bodies of the rats, Saul saw that King Rat had regained his furtive swagger. He had composed himself.

  “Back, then?” King Rat asked casually.

  Saul ignored him. He looked up into the shaft from which he had pulled the stereo. Several feet above, a grille was visible, and above it the drab orange-shot black of the city night. Something was affixed to the inside of the narrow shaft.

  “So what you here for, then, chal?” asked King Rat, his insouciance wearing and affected.

  “Fuck you,” replied Saul quietly. He stood on tiptoe, reached up into the vertical tunnel. He could feel a corner of paper flapping in wind. He gripped it, pulled gently, but succeeded only in tearing the corner away.

  He looked down briefly. King Rat stood near him, his hands held uncertainly to his chest.

  Saul looked around him at the corpses.

  “Another fine display of leadership skills, then, Dad.”

  “Fuck you, you pissing little half-breed, I’ll kill you…”

  “Oh give it a rest, old man,” said Saul, disgusted. “You need me, you know it, I know it, so shut up with your stupid threats.” He returned his attention to the tunnel. He jumped up and grabbed the top of the paper, pulled it down with him when he fell.

  It came away in his hands. He spread it out.

  It was a poster.

  It was designed by someone with Adobe Illustrator, a sixth-form aesthetic and too much time. Garish and jumbled, a confusion of fonts and point sizes, information crowding itself out and details fighting for space.

  A line drawing took up most of the sheet: a grotesquely muscled man in sunglasses standing impassive behind a twin-deck turntable. He stood with his arms folded, as the chaotic writing exploded around him.

  JUNGLIST TERROR!!! it exclaimed.

  One night of Extreme Drum an’ Bass Badness!

  £10 entry, it exclaimed, and gave the address of a club in the Elephant and Castle, in the badlands of South London; and a date, a Saturday night in early December.

  Featuring da Cream of da Crop, Three Fingers, Manta, Ray Wired, Rudegirl K, Natty Funkah…

  Rudegirl K. That was Natasha.

  Saul let out a little cry. He bent slightly, his breath pushed from him.

  “He’s telling us,” he hissed to King Rat. “He’s inviting us.”

  Something was scrawled on the bottom of the poster, an addendum in a strange ornate hand. Also featuring a special guest! it proclaimed. Fabe M!

  Jesus he was pathetic! Saul thought. He sank slowly back against the wall as he grasped the paper. Fabe M! Look, he’s trying to play games, thought Saul, but this isn’t his environment, he doesn’t know what to do, he can’t play with these words…

  It made him feel obscurely comforted. Even in the misery of knowing that his friends were in the hands of this creature, this monster, this avaricious spirit, he felt a triumph in the ineptitude with which his foe stumbled on jargon. He was trying for nonchalance, scribbling an addition in Drum and Bass style, but the language was unfamiliar and he had stumbled. Fabe M! It sounded stupid and contrived. He wanted Saul to know that he had Fabian, that Fabian would be at the club, but he was not on his home ground, and his clumsy affectation showed that.

  Saul found himself chuckling, almost ruefully.

  “Bastard can’t play no more.” He crushed the paper and threw it at King Rat, who had been hovering nervously, resentfully. King Rat snatched it out of the air. “Fucker’s telling us to come and get them,” said Saul, as King Rat opened out the sheet.

  Saul pushed past King Rat, kicked his way through the bodies of the rat dead.

  “He’s operating like a fucking Bond villain,” he said. “He wants me. Knows I’ll come for him if he dangles my friends in front of me.”

  “So what’s a rat to do?” said King Rat.

  Saul turned and stared at him. He knew, quite suddenly, that his eyes were as hidden to King Rat as King Rat’s were to him.

  “What am I going to do?” Saul said slowly. “A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge. I’m going to go, of course. I’m going to Junglist Terror. To rescue my friends.” He could feel that sentiment within him which had disturbed him before, a part of him saying fuck it, don’t go, it’s not your problem any more.

  That was King Rat’s blood. Saul would not listen to it. I am what I do, he thought, furiously.

  There was a long silence between the two of them.

  “You know what?” said Saul finally. “I think you should come too. I think you will.”

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  Squadrons of rats spread out across London. Saul harangued them in foetid alleys, behind great plastic bins. He raged to them about the Piper, told them that their day had come.

  The massed ranks of the rats stood quivering, inspired. Their noses twitched; they could smell victory. Saul’s words broke over them like tides, swept them up. He communicated with them by his tone; they knew they were being commanded, and after centuries of furtive skulking they became brave, puffed up with millennial fervor.

  Saul ordered them to prepare. He ordered them to search out the Piper, to bring Saul information, to find his friends. He described them, the black man and the short woman being kept hostage by the Piper. The rats did not care about the people being held. They represented nothing except a task set by Saul.

  “You are rats,” Saul told them, sticking out his lower lip and jerking his head back like Mussolini. They gazed at him, a shifting mass of followers, peering out from all the nooks and crannies of the building site which they had congregated. “You’re the sneakers, the creepers, the rat-burglars. Don’t come to me afraid of being seen, don’t come to me with fears of the Piper’s revenge. Why will he see you? You’re rats…if he sees you you’re a failure to your species. Stay hidden creep in the spaces in between, and find him, and tell me where he is.”

  The rats were inspired. They longed to follow him. He dismissed them with a wave and they scattered hr short-lived bravado.

  Saul knew that beyond the range of his voice, the rats’ fear would quickly return. He knew that they would hesitate. He knew they would slow down as they scaled walls, look around anxiously for him to shout them on, and that they would fail. He knew: they would slink back to the sewers and hide until he found them and urged them out again.

  But maybe one would be brave or lucky. Maybe one of his rats would scale the walls that divided the Piper’s sanctuary from the outside, and pick a way through the barbed wire, scamper along the pipes and the cables, cross the wasteland, and find him.

  Somewhere, squeezed into the air-conditioning housing on the top of a financial building in the heart of the City, or in a bitumen-sealed hole under a sub-urban railway bridge, or in a room with no windows in an empty hospital beyond Neasden, or in the high tech vaults of a bank to the west of Hammersmith, or in the attic above a bingo hall in Tooting, the Piper was holding Natasha and Fabian, waiting out the week before Junglist Terror.

  Saul suspected that the Piper would avoid the gaze of rats and spiders and birds. He was not afraid of his adversaries, but there was no point advertising his presence. He had issued his challenge, had told them the night that they would die. The Piper had issued them with invitations to their own executions.

  It might be that he was only concerned with Saul, with the half-and-half, the rat-man he could not control, but he must suspect that Anansi would be there, too, and King Rat, and Loplop. They were not brave or proud. They were not ashamed to turn down challenges. But they knew that Saul was the only thing that the Piper could not control, that Saul was the only chance they had, and they knew they must be there to help him. If he did not survive, they could not.

  The rats spread throughout London.

  Saul was alone amidst the rubble and the scaffolding.

  He stood in the centre of a wide ruined landscape, a blitzed corner of London that hid behind hoardings, in easy earshot of Edgware Road. A forty-foot by forty-foot square, carpeted in crushed brick and old stone and surrounded by the backs of buildings. On one edge of the square a rough wooden fence hid the street that flanked the site, and above the fence towered the old brick walls of ancient shops and houses. Saul looked up at them. On that side the windows were surrounded by large wooden frames, rotting but ornate, designed to be seen.

  On all other sides the walls that enclosed him were vulnerable. They constituted the buildings’ underbellies, soft underneath the aesthetic carapace. Out of sight of their façades, he was ringed by great flat expanses of brick, windows that spilt at random down featureless walls. Seen from behind, caught unawares, the functionality of the city was exposed.

  This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as for the city. It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. But the city did not like to be found out. Evens as he saw it clearly for the product it was, Saul felt it square up against him. The city and he faced each other. He saw London from an angle against which it had no front, at a time when its guard was down.

  He had felt this before, when he had left King Rat, when he had known that he had slipped the city’s bonds; and he had known then that he had made off it an enemy. The windows which loomed over reminded him of that.

  In the corner of the square lurked obscure building machines, piles of materials and pickaxes, bags of cement covered with blue plastic sheeting. The looked defensive and overwhelmed. Just in front them stood the remnants of the building that had been pulled down. All that remained was a section of its front, a veneer one brick deep, with gaping, glassless holes where windows had been. It seemed miraculous that it could stand. Saul walked over the broken ground towards it.

  There were lights on in a few of the rooms that overlooked him and, as he walked silently, Saul even caught sight of movement here and there. He was not afraid. He did not believe that anyone would see him; he had rat blood in his veins. And if they did, they might be surprised to see a man striding by lamplight in the forbidden space of a nascent building, but who would they tell? And if someone were, unbelievably, to call the police, Saul could simply climb and be gone. He had rat blood in his veins. Tell the police to call Rentokil, he thought. They might have a better chance.

  He stood under the free-standing façade. He stretched his arms up, prepared to scramble over the city himself, to join his emissaries in their search. He did not believe that he would find Fabian or Natasha or the Piper, but he could not fail to look for them. To acquiesce in the Piper’s plans would be to abrogate his own power, to become collaborator. If he were to meet the Piper on the ground the Piper had specified, he would be dragged there, he would be unwilling. He would be angry.

  He heard a noise above him. A figure swung into view in one of the empty window-frames. Saul was still. It was King Rat.

  Saul was not surprised. King Rat followed him often, waited until the rats had left, then poured scorn on his efforts, ridiculed him in agonized contumely, incoherent with rage at the behavior of the rats who had once obeyed him.

  King Rat grasped his small perch with his right hand. He crouched, his left arm dangling down between his legs, his head lowered towards his knees. Seeing him, Saul thought of a comic-book hero Batman or Daredevil. Silhouetted in the ruined window, King Rat looked like a scene-setting frame at the start of an epic graphic novel.

  “What do you want?” Saul said finally.

  In a sinewy sliding movement King Rat emerged, from the window and landed at Saul’s feet. He bent his knees on landing, then rose slowly just before him.

  His face twisted.

  “So what silly buggers are you playing now, cove?”

  “Fuck off,” said Saul and turned away.

  King Rat grabbed him and swung him back to face him. Saul slapped the other’s hands down, his eyes wide and outraged. There was a horrible unease moment as Saul and King Rat stared at each other their shoulders wide, their fists ready to strike. Slow and deliberately, Saul reached up and pushed King on the chest, shoved him slightly back.

  His anger boiled up in him and he shoved King Rat again, growled and tried to make him fall. He punched him suddenly, hard, and images of his father raced through his mind. He felt a desperate desire to kill King Rat. It shocked him how fast the hatred could overtake him.

  King Rat was stumbling slightly on the uneven ground, and Saul reached down to snatch up a half brick. He bore down on King Rat, flai
ling brutally with his weapon.

  He swung it at King Rat’s head, connecting and sending his opponent sprawling, but King Rat hissed with rage as he fell. He rolled painfully across the shattered ground and swung his legs up at Saul, taking him down. The fight became a violent blur, a flurry of arms and legs, nails and fists. Saul did not aim, did not plan; he flailed in rage, feeling blows and scratches bruise him and rip his skin.

  Blood exploded from a vicious strike below his eye and his head rocked. He slammed his brick down again but King Rat was not there, and the brick struck stone and burst into dust.

  The two rolled and grappled. King Rat slid from Saul’s grip and hovered like a gadfly, ripping him open with a hundred cruel scratches and dancing out of the range of retaliation.

  Saul’s frustration overwhelmed him. He suddenly broke off his frenzied attack with a shouted curse. He stalked away across the rubble.

  Another vicious half-fight. He could not kill him. King Rat was too fast, too strong, and he would not engage Saul properly, he would not risk killing Saul, King Rat wanted Saul alive, for all that he was growing to hate him for his following among the rats, for his refusal to obey him.

  King Rat shouted scornfully after him. Saul could not even hear what he said.

  He felt blood well from the deep scratches on his face and he wiped himself as he began to run, surefooted despite the terrain. He threw himself at one of the walls which overlooked him, scrambled up its tender surface, slipping by those unadorned windows, leaving a long smear of blood and dirt on his way up the bricks.

  He stared briefly behind him. King Rat sat forlornly on the hulking piles of cement. Saul turned away from him and set out over the top of London. He looked around him as he moved, and sometimes he stopped and was still.

  On the top of a school, somewhere behind Paddington, he saw harsh security lights catching on billowing cobweb suspended below the railings topped the building. The fragile thing was empty an long deserted, but he lowered himself to the ground and stared around him. There were other, smaller webs below it, still inhabited, less visible without the accumulated dust of days.