In the corner lot nearest them, a house under construction stood outlined by the light of the moon. Though fully framed, two of its walls were unsided, and its studs threw long, shadowy ribs across the new driveway.
LaRish poked JaRed in the side with one paw and pointed. “There. Do you see them in the burn pile?”
JaRed looked, seeing nothing but a stack of discarded lumber and assorted construction materials. “I don’t see anything.”
“I do,” JoHanan said. “There’s a great fat one at the far end.”
Now JaRed saw it. A rat, motionless, standing sentry in the shadows of the pile. As he looked, he saw movement farther back. “More than one,” he said.
LaRish nodded. “Many more. Probably two hundred in that pile. They are gathering here to attack Tira-Nor.”
“With only two hundred rats?” JaRed asked.
LaRish shook his head. “Two hundred in each pile. Did I not say to use your eyes, leetle one?”
JaRed began to understand. For every house there would be a trash pile, and in every trash pile two hundred rats were hunkered down, waiting for the command to attack and drive the mice of Tira-Nor from their home. “But that means—LaRish, how are they doing it?”
“It takes time to move such a large army. But rats are not patient. Many have been here for weeks. Their leader must be powerful indeed to keep them together so long.”
JoHanan whistled softly. “If the stories are true—”
“Do not trust stories. Rats are moved by only two things: hatred and fear. When they obey, it is because they are afraid or because they hate. They will attack us for both reasons. They fear this master of theirs, and they hate us.”
“But why?” JoHanan asked. “What have we done to them?”
“Done?” LaRish spat. “You needn’t have done anything to be hated. Some creatures hate because they don’t know anything else.”
“What do you want me to do?” JaRed asked.
“Count them,” LaRish said. “As close as you can. We must know how many they are.“
JaRed nodded.
“I brought you because you are small, JaRed. Because you can make yourself invisible. This is better than big muscles or sharp teeth. Go and see without being seen. Then come back here and tell me. Be brave, JaRed, but not foolish, yes? ”
JoHanan nudged LaRish with one paw. “I’m going with him, right?”
LaRish shook his head. “You make too much noise when you walk, Prince. You sound like the ox.”
“I do not!” JoHanan protested.
“Besides, you must be able to count higher than ten.”
“When I am king, LaRish, I will demote you to private.”
JaRed pushed through the screen of grass and padded down the rise to the boundary of the closest lot. The moon cast a long shadow on the back of the house, and JaRed stayed in darkness all the way to the concrete wall of the foundation. He crept forward to the corner and peered around it to the burn pile.
The rat sentry stood fully awake and was walking toward him. Moonlight glimmered in the rat’s beady eyes. It cocked its head to one side, sniffing.
Klogg. Klogg of the thunderous legs and dull brain. Muttering to himself as he paced.
“One two, one two,” Klogg burbled. “And not a whisker of food to chew.” He turned, sniffed, and ambled the other direction. “Hunger and rot is all we’ve got. When GoRec’s around that’s quite a lot. One two, one two.”
JaRed waited, willing himself to perfect stillness. He would blend in. He would disappear. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His nose twitched, and he wanted badly to scratch a place behind his ear. But when at last he looked again, Klogg had shuffled behind the burn pile, with only his shadow visible on the far side.
JaRed glanced back to where LaRish and JoHanan lay concealed, but he could not see them. He shrugged inwardly and nosed around the corner. He could think of no other way in.
He darted through the full force of the moonlight, praying Klogg would not round the corner too soon. If Klogg sounded the alarm he would have no chance.
He kept close to the foundation, speeding the length of the garage, and rounded the far corner without even looking back. He fled over the cool, moist concrete of the freshly poured driveway and retreated into the doorless mouth of the garage.
Had Klogg seen him?
No sound came from the burn pile except the distant murmur of Klogg’s complaining, and no other sentries were visible.
Through the open garage doorway he could make out two other burn piles. Their irregular heaps were twisted and made grisly by the light of a street lamp that funneled its yellow cone over them. Discarded spears of splintery gray lumber poked outward like weathered bones. The other burn piles were hidden by the bulk of the other houses, or were shrouded in black up and down the street.
Time to move on. It might be safe here, but he could learn nothing by staring from the inside of a garage. He would have to cross the street. Either in darkness— but in full view of Klogg on the northeast side of the house—or under the light of the street lamp, where he could be seen by anyone who happened to be watching.
He padded toward the street, concealing himself in the darkness of the concrete steps of the front porch. The yard was all dirt and weeds and wild tufts of dead grass, unlike that of some of the other houses, which had been carpeted in sod.
He moved forward through the dirt, from shadow to shadow, his paws as light on the earth as the evening breeze.
At the curb he stopped under the saw-toothed leaves of a dandelion, his head outlined by the lampshadow of its white and fuzzy crown.
The black ribbon of street lay before him on the other side of a concrete gutter drain. The street was hard as rock and bald as the smooth pate of Round Top.
For a while he simply stared at the two burn piles. He saw no movement, no sentries. He saw no flicking, hairless tails. Nothing moved in either pile.
But he could not be sure. Not until he got close enough to see, to hear, to smell. Up close he would be able to see the rat droppings, hear the tell-tale snoring, smell the odor of their unwashed bodies. Or he would be able to see that the piles were empty, that the rats had not come in so great a force as LaRish feared.
But he would have to get close enough to see which it was.
He would have to cross the street under the light of the lamp.
He searched the sky for winged enemies. Rats were not the only hunters he feared. But he saw only the spangled blackness. Light from the street lamp ruined his night vision, and his eyes were not so good as the owl’s. One never saw the white death before it came. Or if you did, you were already too late to do anything about it.
He took a deep breath ... and ran.
He jumped, tore through blinding yellow light, reached the far side, and left the pavement with a leap that gave him wings. He buried himself in the shadow of a paper bag and lay very still, listening.
He had not been seen.
He peered around the corner of the bag, still in shadow, and stared at the closest burn pile. He sniffed, but could smell nothing. It didn’t look as though it were infested with rats.
He moved closer, across a gravel-strewn lawn, to where an empty paint bucket lay on its side. He was almost on top of the pile now. If anything were awake and watching from inside, it could scarcely miss him.
He moved closer.
His nose nearly touched a piece of torn fiberboard siding. A yellow fungus grew on the end of it, and on the whole it smelled of sawdust. Dark, irregular holes into which he could not see glared back at him, but no rats.
JaRed skirted around the north side of it, aware that Klogg, if he were paying attention, might conceivably see his movements from across the street. He swept through moonlight to the next pile, but it too was unoccupied.
He felt lighter. Perhaps the rat army was not so terrible as the other scouts had imagined. Perhaps someone had exaggerated. He returned to the first pile and stalked back to the curb.
> Now to make it back to the far side of the street and go home.
He was halfway across before he saw the eyes looking at him from the open grate of the sewer drain.
Eyes like empty wells. Black and cold and hard, like windows into a bottomless pit. Filled with nothing.
JaRed didn’t stop. He didn’t slow down, nor did he change his course.
He sprang for the weeds and flashed like a bolt of gray lightning back toward the hill where LaRish and JoHanan waited.
Those eyes! They were rat eyes. But how could they be? They were too far apart, too cunning, too large.
Unless they belonged to the rat leader, the one they called Master.
JaRed stopped halfway across the lawn, a blind panic rising in his chest.
Looking down and mumbling to himself, Klogg rounded the corner of the burn pile that lay between the two closest houses and was making his way toward him.
JaRed had nowhere to go. He couldn’t make it past Klogg to safety. It was too great a distance. Klogg needed only to bar the way with his great bulk and sound the alarm. In seconds the place would be crawling with rats from the pile.
JaRed bolted to the open concrete of the driveway, more than fifty paces from the garage, as the moon turned its blue-white treason against him.
He turned—slowly it seemed to him—and saw rats leaping into view, gushing in a disordered line from the drain onto the street. They popped into existence like something from one of the old stories: the birth of evil, which knew no childhood but came full grown into the world.
The rats seemed confused and angry. Their posture and their expressions told JaRed they had been only recently awakened.
Klogg apparently noticed neither JaRed nor the other rats. His voice fell in muffled bursts as his pacing brought him closer to the space between the houses. “One two, one two. Is that his nose or a stinking shoe? One two ...”
If he were coming from the other direction, JaRed thought, I’d try to run past him. But there wasn’t room.
Klogg looked up. His eyes fixed on JaRed for a moment.
Behind JaRed, several rats squealed, but a voice like thunder quieted them with a word: “Silence!”
Klogg looked beyond JaRed to the street, and his eyes widened.
JaRed fled into the darkness of the garage. He leapt over the threshold of the doorway inside and raced over the plywood subfloor. He took the stairs in an effortless blur. Up and up. There was nowhere else.
He found himself in a hallway on the third floor and decided in a flash to hide in the room at the eastern end. Two of its walls were sided, so it lay mostly in shadow. He huddled in the corner, his nostrils assailed by the strange odors of cut wood, paint, glue, and other things he could not distinguish. Here and there a loose piece of discarded lumber lay forgotten in the darkness. His body shook.
I should not have come here. I should have risked running past Klogg and the burn pile.
But there had been no time to think. Besides, it was too late now.
He was trapped. They were coming for him. A whole army of rats. Wroth’s army.
He lay very still and listened.
No wonder the burn piles had been empty. They weren’t hiding in the burn piles. They were in the rain sewers!
And why not? It hadn’t rained for weeks. There might be thousands of them in there by now. All they would need on the surface would be a few sentries. One burn pile as a lookout post. And when the time was right …
The moon shone dully, its snowy light painting the floor in stripes through the long studs of the unsided walls. The night air seemed cooler here. The sweat of exertion and fear brought goose bumps beneath JaRed’s fur.
Voices stirred in the space between the houses. JaRed heard nothing from inside the house. Indeed, the house still seemed empty.
Perhaps the rats had not seen him go into the garage. He hardly dared to hope.
A voice like thunder boomed from the ground below one skeletal wall. “Which way did he go?”
“Which he do you mean, your greatness?” Klogg’s voice rose from the emptiness below, higher and lighter now, airy with fear.
JaRed crept silently across the plywood floor and peered down into the empty space between the two houses. Far below, the burn pile spat out sentries who formed a semicircle behind Klogg and glared at him.
The height from which JaRed looked down staggered him. The world tipped, yawned, drained away.
He thought of the Great Owl and his daily dive for prey. What must the Owl see when he leaned into the earth, pitting his great silky wings against the weight of the world?
JaRed felt a rush of wind, as though he were actually falling, pitching forward into the looming nothingness.
Below him, rats from the sewer flowed around the burn pile, washed against the foundations of both houses, and settled into a frothing mass. They were the biggest rats JaRed had ever seen, and they moved in unison, like some kid of special guard.
Yes. A rat kingsguard. To guard the rat master.
LaRish’s voice echoed in his memory. How many are there?
His task was to count them. But how could he? There must be hundreds. And surely these were not all. They would not rouse an army just to hunt one mouse.
We must know how many there are. Think, leetle one!
He bent forward and counted. Ten. Twenty. Fifty in that knot by the wall, with maybe five knots between the houses. He added the numbers in his brain. Two hundred fifty huge rats. And more swarming over the driveway. And probably more still were emerging from the sewer.
Which meant there must be thousands under the earth. Thousands who hated Tira-Nor and had sworn themselves to its destruction. In his mind JaRed saw them coming, scrambling through the familiar tunnels of Tira-Nor like water breaking from a dam. An ocean of hatred pouring through the fur-cozy tunnels of his city, biting, squealing, killing. Propelled by a demonic fury even the kingsguard could not resist. Tira-Nor would not survive. It couldn’t. Hopelessness swept over him. Pushed him down. Drove him chest first into the wood so hard he felt his breath leaving him.
The creaking of lumber in the night breeze came like laughter from the throat of Lord Wroth.
JaRed shuddered.
Then, as JaRed looked, it stepped out of shadow and into the full light of the moon.
The hugest rat JaRed had ever seen. Bigger than he thought possible. Large as a full-grown rabbit. Its movements were as effortless as a weasel’s. It didn’t shamble when it walked. It flowed.
GoRec. King of rats.
The monster growled, and Klogg stumbled backward, apologizing all over himself before finally cowering in submission.
JaRed felt a brief stab of pity for him.
GoRec said nothing at first, just raised up on his haunches until he towered over the shivering Klogg.
“You,” GoRec bellowed. “You allowed one of their spies to get away!”
Klogg hunkered down, as though by seeming smaller he could avoid notice. “Puh—puh—please.”
GoRec’s body seemed to waver in the moonlight, swaying once, twice, three times above Klogg.
Then GoRec struck.
The movement was so fast JaRed barely saw it. One moment GoRec was standing on his hind paws, the next moment his teeth were in Klogg’s throat and he was shaking the smaller rat like a dog killing a snake.
JaRed couldn’t bear to watch the killing. No, he thought. I won’t look. He backed up, his throat closing into a knot.
But then he couldn’t resist. He crept forward and peered over the edge again, telling himself that seeing could not be worse than imagining.
He was wrong.
JaRed turned his head as the rats cheered. What sort of monster was this? What kind of creature took pleasure from another’s suffering?
He did not move for several moments, but simply stared at the sky, the unblinking stars, the black emptiness. In the distance long wisps of fog drifted over the trees of the Dark Forest.
Without warni
ng JaRed felt the presence again, its stillness and majesty so tangible his head felt heavy under the weight of it. He was not alone.
In an instant he stopped worrying about himself, about how he was going to get past the new sentries at the burn pile. He thought only of two equally necessary things: escaping the presence of ElShua, and keeping the presence of Elshua.
“My Lord,” he whispered.
He heard no answer, but the presence grew stronger. JaRed ducked his head, tried to press his body into the plywood flooring. But then, without willing it, he stepped forward. His left forepaw grasped the head of a rusting ten-penny nail, cool to the touch.
His paw shook. Sweat stood in beads on his forehead. He must, somehow, pick up the nail. But why? What madness was this?
A voice as clear and distant as the moon whispered, “JaRed.” So soft, yet it splashed into the room like a waterfall.
“Lord.” JaRed had never felt so helpless, as though his body and soul were being sucked into a whirlwind, as though the air itself were being peeled back like skin off an onion.
“Don’t be afraid,” the voice said. “Take the iron stick. Be a fang for my venom.”
Then it was gone.
As the years passed,the Owl’s burden of soul-bearing grew wearisome indeed. One day, as he carried a tiny shrew in his beak, his temper snapped like a dry twig.
He landed in the garden behind ElShua and spat out the shrew in the sunlit field.
The shrew’s body had withered in sickness. Its life had ebbed away so slowly, and in such loneliness, that at last not even the insects, not even the worms, not even the earth had noticed its passing. And if the earth had not noticed, then why must the Owl? Did ElShua even care? Then why should the Owl? What was one shrew to the Great Owl?
The shrew’s eyes opened slowly and drew joy from the air of the garden. But the Owl took no satisfaction from the soul’s rebirth.
Runt the Brave: Bravery in the Midst of a Bully Society (Legends of Tira-Nor) Page 7