“Well, with old Hamnpork, boss, I reckon we'll know when he turns up,” said Sardines.
“Could you drop into the pit on a string?”
“I'm game for anything, guv,” said Sardines, loyally.
“Into a pit with a dog in it, sir?” said Nourishing. “And won't the string cut you in half?”
“Ah, I've got something that helps there, boss,” said Sardines. He took off his thick coil of string and put it aside. There was another coil under it, glistening and light brown. He pulled at a piece of it, and it snapped back with a faint “twang”. “Bands of rubber,” he said. “I pinched them off a desk when I was looking for more string. I've used 'em before, boss. Very handy for a long drop, boss.”
Darktan took a step back on the boards. There was an old candle lantern there, lying on its side, the glass smashed, the candle eaten long ago. “Good,” he said. “Because I've got an idea. If you can drop down—”
There was a roar from below. The rats looked over the beam again.
The circle of heads had thickened around the lip of the pit. A man was talking in a loud voice. Occasionally there was a cheer. The black top hats of the rat-catchers moved through the crowd. Seen from above, they were sinister black blobs among the grey and brown caps.
One of the rat-catchers emptied a sack into the pit, and the watchers saw the dark shapes of rats scurrying in a panic, as they tried to find, in that circle, a corner to hide in.
The crowd opened slightly and a man walked to the edge of the pit, holding a terrier. There was some more shouting, a ripple of laughter, and the dog was dropped in with the rats.
The Changelings stared down at the circle of death, and the cheering humans.
After a minute or two Nourishing tore her gaze away. When she looked around she caught the expression on Darktan's face. Maybe it wasn't just the lamplight that made his eyes full of fire. She saw him look along the stable to the big doors at the far end. They had been barred shut. Then his head turned to the hay and straw piled up in the loft, and in the cribs and mangers below.
Darktan pulled a length of wood out of one of his belts.
Nourishing smelled the sulphur in the red blob on the end.
It was a match.
Darktan turned and saw him staring at her. He nodded towards the piles of hay in the loft. “My plan might not work,” he said. “If it doesn't, you'll be in charge of the other plan.”
“Me?” said Nourishing.
“You. Because I won't be… around,” said Darktan. He held out the match. “You know what to do,” he said, nodding to the nearest rack of hay.
Nourishing swallowed. “Yes. Yes, I think so. Er… when?”
“When the time comes. You'll know when,” said Darktan, and looked back down at the massacre. “One way or the other, I want them to remember tonight,” he said quietly. “They'll remember what they did. And they'll remember what we did. For as long as they… live.”
Hamnpork lay in his sack. He could smell the other rats nearby, and the dogs, and the blood. Especially the blood.
He could hear his own thoughts, but they were like a little chirp of insects against the thunderstorm of his senses. Bits of memory danced in front of his eyes. Cages. Panic. The white rat. Hamnpork. That was his own name. Odd. Never used to have names. Just used to smell other rats. Darkness. Darkness inside, behind the eyes. That bit was Hamnpork. Everything outside was everything else.
Hamnpork. Me. Leader.
The red-hot rage still boiled inside him but now it had a kind of shape, like the shape a canyon gives to a river in flood, narrowing it, forcing it to flow faster, giving it direction.
Now he could hear voices.
“… just slip him in, no-one'll notice…”
“… OK, I'll shake it up a bit first to get him angry…”
The sack was jerked around. It didn't make Hamnpork any more angry than he was already. There wasn't any room for more anger.
The sack swung as it was carried. The roar of humans grew louder, the smells grew stronger. There was a moment of silence, the sack was upturned, and Hamnpork slid out into a roar of noise and a pile of struggling rats.
He snapped and clawed his way to the top as the rats scattered, and saw a growling dog being lowered into the pit. It snatched up a rat, shook it vigorously, and sent the limp body flying.
The rats stampeded.
“Idiots!” screamed Hamnpork. “Work together! You could strip this fleabag to the bone!”
The crowd stopped shouting.
The dog stared down its nose at Hamnpork. It was trying to think. The rat had spoken. Only humans spoke. And it didn't smell right. Rats stank of panic. This one didn't.
The silence rang like a bell.
Then Jacko grabbed the rat, shook him, not too hard, and tossed him down. He'd decided to do a sort of test; rats shouldn't be able to talk like humans, but this rat looked like a rat—and killing rats was OK—but talked like a human—and biting humans got you a serious thrashing. He had to find out for sure. If he got a wallop, this rat was a human.
Hamnpork rolled, and managed to get upright, but there was a deep tooth wound in his side.
The other rats were still in a boiling huddle as far away from the dog as possible, every rat trying to be the one at the bottom.
Hamnpork spat blood. “All right, then,” he snarled, advancing on the puzzled dog. “Now you find out how a real rat dies!”
“Hamnpork!”
He looked up.
String uncoiled behind Sardines as he fell through the smoky air towards the frantic circle. He was right above Hamnpork, getting bigger and bigger…
… and slower and slower…
He came to a stop between the dog and the rat. For a moment he hung there. He raised his hat, politely, and said, “Good evening!” Then he wrapped all four legs around Hamnpork.
And now the rope of elastic bands, stretched to twanging point, finally sprang back. Too late, too late, Jacko snapped at empty air. The rats were accelerated upwards, out of the pit—and stopped, bouncing in mid air, just out of reach.
The dog was still looking up when Darktan leapt off the other side of the beam. As the crowd stared in astonishment, he plummeted down towards the terrier.
Jacko's eyes narrowed. Rats disappearing into the air was one thing, but rats dropping right towards his mouth was something else. It was rat on a plate, it was rat on a stick.
Darktan looked back as he fell. Up above, Nourishing was doing some frantic knotting and biting. Now Darktan was on the other end of Sardines' string. But Sardines had explained things very carefully. Darktan's weight alone wasn't heavy enough to pull the weight of two other rats back up to the beam…
So, when Darktan saw Sardines and his struggling passenger had disappeared safely into the gloom of the roof—
–he let go of the big old candle lamp he'd been holding for the extra weight and bit through the rope.
The lamp landed heavily on Jacko and Darktan landed on the lamp, rolling down onto the floor.
The crowd was silent. They'd been silent since Hamnpork had been propelled out of the pit. Around the top of the wall which, yes, was far too high for a rat to jump, Darktan saw faces. They were mostly red. The mouths were mostly open. The silence was the silence of red faces drawing breath ready to start shouting at any moment.
Around Darktan the surviving rats were scrambling aimlessly for a foothold on the wall. Fools, he thought. Four or five of you together could make any dog wish you'd never been born. But you scrabble and panic and you get picked off one at a time…
The slightly-stunned Jacko blinked and stared down at Darktan, a growl rising in his throat.
“Right, you kkrrkk,” said Darktan, loud enough for the watchers to hear. “Now I'm going to show you how a rat can live.”
He attacked.
Jacko was not a bad dog, according to the way of dogs. He was a terrier and liked killing rats in any case, and killing lots of rats in the pit meant that
he got well fed and called a good boy and wasn't kicked very often. Some rats did fight back and that wasn't much of a problem, because they were smaller than Jacko and he had a lot more teeth. Jacko wasn't that smart, but he was a lot smarter than a rat and, in any case, his nose and mouth did most of the thinking.
And he was surprised, therefore, when his jaws snapped shut on this new rat and it wasn't there.
Darktan didn't run like a rat should. He ducked like a fighter. He nipped Jacko under the chin and vanished. Jacko spun around. The rat still wasn't there. Jacko had spent his show business career biting rats that tried to run away. Rats that stayed really close were unfair!
There was a roar from the watchers. Someone shouted, “Ten dollars on the rat!” and someone else punched him in the ear. Another man started to climb into the pit. Someone smashed a beer bottle on that man's head.
Dancing back and forth under the spinning, yapping Jacko, Darktan waited for his moment…
… and saw it, and lunged, and bit hard.
Jacko's eyes crossed. A piece of Jacko that was very private and of interest only to Jacko and any lady dogs he might happen to meet was suddenly a little ball of pain.
He yelped. He snapped at the air. And then, in the uproar, he tried to climb out of the pit. His claws scraped desperately as he reared up against the greasy, smooth planking.
Darktan jumped onto his tail, ran up his back, scampered to the tip of Jacko's nose, and leapt over the wall.
He landed among legs. Men tried to stamp on him, but that meant other men would have to give them room. By the time they'd elbowed one another out of the way and stamped heavily on one another's boots, Darktan was gone.
But there were other dogs. They were half-mad with excitement in any case, and now they pulled away from ropes and chains and set off after a running rat. They knew about chasing rats.
Darktan knew about running. He sped across the floor like a comet, with a tail of snarling, barking dogs, headed for the shadows, spied a hole in the planking and dived through into the nice, safe, darkness—
Click went the trap.
CHAPTER 9
Farmer Fred opened his door and saw all the animals of Furry Bottom waiting for him. ‘We can't find Mr. Bunnsy or Ratty Rupert!’ they cried.
—From “Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure”
“At last!” said Malicia, shaking the ropes off. “Somehow I thought rats would gnaw quicker.”
“They used a knife,” said Keith. “And you could say thank you, couldn't you?”
“Yes, yes, tell them I'm very grateful,” said Malicia, pushing herself upright.
“Tell them yourself!”
“I'm sorry, I find it so embarrassing to… talk to rats.”
“I suppose that's understandable,” said Keith. “If you've been brought up to hate them because they—”
“Oh, it's not that,” said Malicia, walking over to the door and looking at the keyhole. “It's just that it's so… childish. So… tinkly-winkly. So… Mr. Bunnsy.”
“Mr. Bunnsy?” squeaked Peaches, and it really was a squeak, a word that came out as a sort of little shriek.
“What about Mr. Bunnsy?” said Keith.
Malicia reached into her pocket and pulled out her packet of bent hair pins. “Oh, some books some silly woman wrote,” she said, poking at the lock. “Stupid stuff for ickle kids. There's a rat and a rabbit and a snake and a hen and an owl and they all go around wearing clothes and talking to humans and everyone's so nice and cosy it makes you absolutely sick. D'you know my father kept them all from when he was a kid? ‘Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure’, ‘Mr. Bunnsy's Busy Day’, ‘Ratty Rupert Sees It Through’… he read them all to me when I was small and there's not an interesting murder in any of them.”
“I think you'd better stop,” said Keith. He didn't dare look down at the rats.
“There's no sub-texts, no social commentary…” Malicia went on, still fiddling. “The most interesting thing that happens at all is when Doris the Duck loses a shoe—a duck losing a shoe, right?—and it turns up under the bed after they've spent the entire story looking for it. Do you call that narrative tension? Because I don't. If people are going to make up stupid stories about animals pretending to be human, at least there could be a bit of interesting violence…”
“Oh, boy,” said Maurice, from behind the grating.
This time Keith did look down. Peaches and Dangerous Beans had gone. “You know, I never had the heart to tell them,” he said, not to anyone in particular. “They thought it was all true.”
“In the land of Furry Bottom, possibly,” said Malicia, and stood up as the lock gave a final click. “But not here. Can you imagine someone actually invented that name and didn't laugh? Let's go.”
“You upset them,” said Keith.
“Look, shall we get out of here before the rat-catchers come back?” said Malicia.
The thing about this girl, Maurice thought, was that she was no good at all at listening to the way people spoke. She wasn't much good at listening, if it came to that.
“No,” said Keith.
“No what?”
“No, I'm not coming with you,” said Keith. “There's something bad going on here, much worse than stupid men stealing food.”
Maurice watched them argue again. Humans, eh? Think they're lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven.
How the humans shout, hissed a tiny voice in his head.
Is that my conscience? Maurice thought. His own thoughts said: what, me? No. But I feel a lot better now you told them about Additives. He shifted uneasily from paw to paw. “Well then,” he whispered, looking at his stomach, “is that you, Additives?”
He'd been worried about that ever since he'd realized he'd eaten a Changeling. They had voices, right? Supposing you ate one? Suppose their voice stayed inside you? Suppose the… the dream of Additives around inside him? That sort of thing could seriously interfere with a cat's napping time, it really could.
No, said the voice, like the sound of wind in distant trees, it is I. I am… SPIDER.
“Oh, you're a spider?” whispered thought-Maurice. “I could take on a spider with three paws tied behind my back.”
Not a spider. SPIDER.
The word actually hurt. It hadn't before.
Now I'm in your HEAD, cat. Cats, cats, bad as dogs, worse than rats. I'm in your HEAD, and I will never go AWAY.
Maurice's paw jerked.
I'll be in your DREAMS.
“Look, I'm just passing through,” Maurice whispered desperately. “I'm not looking for trouble. I'm unreliable! I'm a cat! I wouldn't trust me, and I am me! Just let me get into the nice fresh air and I'll be right out of your… hair or legs or furry bits or whatever!”
You don't want to run AWAY.
That's right, thought Maurice, I don't want to run—Hold on, I do want to run away!
“I'm a cat!” he muttered. “No rat is going to control me. You've tried!”
Yes, came the voice of Spider, but then you were STRONG. Now your little mind runs in circles and wants someone else to do the thinking for it. I can think for you.
I can think for EVERYONE.
I will always be with you.
The voice faded away.
Right, thought Maurice. Time to say farewell, then, Bad Blintz. The party is over. The rats have got lots of other rats and even these two humans have got one another, but I've just got me and I'd like to get me somewhere where strange voices don't talk to me.
“'scuse me,” he said, raising his voice. “Are we going or what?”
The two humans turned to look at the grating.
“What?” said Keith.
“I'd prefer going,” said Maurice. “Pull this grating out, will you? It's rusted right through, it shouldn't be a problem. Good lad. And then we can make a run for it—”
“They've called in a rat piper, Maurice,” said Keith. “And the Clan is all over the place. He'll be
here in the morning. A real rat piper, Maurice. Not a fake one like me. They have magical pipes, you know. Do you want to see that happen to our rats?”
His new conscience gave Maurice a good kicking. “Well, not exactly see,” he said reluctantly. “Not as such, no.”
“Right. So we're not going to run away,” said Keith.
“Oh? And what are we going to do, then?” said Malicia.
“We're going to talk to the rat-catchers when they come back,” said Keith. He had a thoughtful look.
“And what makes you think they'll want to talk to us?”
“Because if they don't talk to us,” said Keith, “they're going to die.”
It was twenty minutes later that the rat-catchers arrived. The door of their hut was unlocked, thrown back, then slammed shut. Rat-catcher 2 bolted it, as well. “You know where you said it was going to be such a good evening?” he said, leaning against it and panting. “Tell me about it again, 'cos I think I missed that part.”
“Shut up,” said Rat-catcher 1.
“Someone punched me in the eye.”
“Shut up.”
“And I think I lost my wallet. That's twenty dollars I won't see again in a hurry.”
“Shut up.”
“And I wasn't able to pick up any of the surviving rats from the last fight!”
“Shut up.”
“And we left the dogs behind, too! We could've stopped to untie 'em! Someone'll pinch 'em.”
“Shut up.”
“Do rats often whizz through the air like that? Or is that the kind of thing you only get to hear about when you are a hexperienced rat-catcher?”
“Did I say shut up?”
“Yes.”
“Shut up. All right, we'll leave right now. We'll take the money and nick a boat down at the jetty, OK? We'll leave the stuff we haven't sold and just go.”
“Just like that? Johnny No Hands and his lads are coming upriver tomorrow night to pick up the next load and—”
“We'll go, Bill. I can smell things going bad.”
“Just like that? He owes us two hundred doll—”
“Yes! Just like that! Time to move on! The jig is up, the bird has flown, and the cat is out of the bag! The—Did you say that?”
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