Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

… Dr Belesar Bolutu has championed an odd alternative, namely that rats (and human beings, for good measure!) are in fact transplants from another world, grafted like exotic fruits onto Alifros' tree of life. This alone, he argues, can explain why the minds of both are so unlike those of any other creatures of our world. We hardly need add that the good doctor has this conviction all to himself.

9 Teala 941

88th day from Etherhorde

The man with the gold spectacles touched the eyelids of Thasha Isiq. The girl's sleep was restless, busy. He could feel the eyes dart this way and that under his fingertips, mice beneath muslin. Her bed resembled something tossed about in a cyclone. She slept curled on her side in a jumble of sheets, shawls, blankets, pillows, notebooks, discarded clothes. A nest, as it were. The man with the spectacles couldn't have been more pleased.

Thasha's brow furrowed; her lips made sudden twists and contractions. She is reading, he mused: reading a dream text, one that requires all her attention.

In the outer stateroom he found the lamps extinguished. On the bearskin rug, beside the cobalt mastiffs, Pazel slept in a pose quite similar to Thasha's. For that matter, so did the dogs themselves: spines curved, limbs folded, heads drawn down to their chests. And below us, thought the man, rats by the hundred are curled up almost the same. How our differences diminish, once we are still.

As he watched, Pazel's hand rose and gently pinched the skin at his collarbone. A curious, barely audible sigh escaped his lips. Neeps lay under the gallery windows, snoring.

The boy made an unusually feral grunt and woke Suzyt, the female mastiff. She raised her groggy head and looked around. Her eyes settled uncertainly on the man in spectacles.

'Go back to sleep, friend,' he said aloud. 'It's only your Felthrup. Going out for a midnight stroll, a meandering, is that the word I'm looking for?'

The dog made no response whatsoever. Felthrup's voice grew anxious.

'Don't look at me with those accusing eyes. A dozen lashes! Men stroll about when the mood takes them. They perambulate. Go to sleep!'

Suzyt growled low. Felthrup turned quickly and slipped out of the stateroom.

He felt a faint electric shock as he stepped through the invisible spell-wall. The mage will notice that. He will not be long in coming.

On these dream excursions, Felthrup sometimes inhabited a Chathrand as gritty and material as the waking ship. On other nights he turned corners and found himself transported, felt himself rise suddenly on a gust of wind into the high rigging (ghastly, wonderful) or felt the boards melt beneath his feet so that he sank abruptly to the deck below.

This was one of the latter nights. He should have been on the upper gun deck after passing through the spell-wall. Instead he was back in his old netherworld, the hold. He felt an immediate desire to flee, to wriggle into the shadows, out of sight. But that was his rat-self thinking.

I am a man. All things fear me here. I am six feet tall.

He was on a catwalk, a narrow path of planks that jutted from the sloping hull. Beneath him yawned a canyon of shelving and stanchions, wooden crates, grain sacks, lead ballast, sand ballast, tar drums, timbers, barrels of potted meat. He should not have been able to see the hand before his face, but somehow on his dream-walks the dim shapes of things were always visible.

In that time of terror and loneliness before Ramachni (bless him now and for ever) brought him half-drowned to Thasha's cabin, Felthrup had feared the hold most of all. The darkness was often total, and never fully dispelled. Enemies lurked in even more hiding places than on the mercy deck above, where the ixchel had nearly murdered him — and where prisoners in the brig were sometimes given rats to eat, out of malice or pity. Most of these rats were caught in the hold, in razor-toothed iron traps. Others, succumbing to temptation, nibbled at the plates of savoury mush that Old Gangrune the purser set out, telling themselves that perhaps this one, just this plate, would fail to be poisoned…

Felthrup stepped out onto a flying catwalk, one of the flimsy bridges that spanned the depths of the hold. Traps and poison were no use, of course: day by day the rats multiplied, and any fool could see why. Chathrand was provisioned for a voyage across the Ruling Sea. She lacked vegetables, maybe, and certainly limes and pap-root against the scurvy. But she was literally bursting with dry foods, and the rats took their share. More importantly, they were led by a woken rat. Not a cowering, emotional creature like Felthrup: Master Mugstur was fearless and obscenely strong, and ruled his warren in the forward hold with savage efficiency. Mugstur was also a true believer. He claimed to take orders directly from the Angel of Rin, but Felthrup had difficulty believing that the 'Benevolent Bright Spirit' really wanted him to slaughter humans and eat the captain's tongue. I should like to find Mugstur tonight, he thought. To dig him from his nest and fling him to Jorl and Suzyt, if only in my dreams.

Where was he going? He never knew until he arrived. The marvellous thing, though, was that the more he walked, the longer it took Arunis to find him. But I must never run. If he thinks I'm avoiding him his wrath will be hideous. Everything in balance, Felthrup my dear.

'Fall back! Fall back! Mission aborted! Kalyn, Sada, Ludunte!'

The voices were sweet and faint, like the piping of swallows from somewhere deep in a barn. But they were not birds, they were ixchel, and suddenly they were flowing past him, sprinting for their lives, more than he had ever seen in one place. There were archers and swordsmen, spear-carriers, and some with tool cases lashed to their backs. They ran in diamond formation, over and around his calfskin shoes, oblivious to his presence. Some were bleeding; one young woman ran with a groaning man slung over her shoulders.

Where was Diadrelu? It would have been a comfort to see her, even though they could not speak. But of the dozens of ixchel Felthrup saw just one face he recognised — that of her nephew Taliktrum, who paused at the bridge's centre and urged his people to greater speed.

The others shouted as they passed him. 'Ambushed, m'lord! They knew we were coming! What shall we do?'

'Kill them, but not today,' said Taliktrum. 'Get to safety, run!'

Soon all the little people were gone into the shadows — all save Taliktrum. He stood foursquare in the centre of the bridge, sword in hand, looking through Felthrup, waiting for something. It was not normal ixchel behaviour, to stand still in the open. Nor did Taliktrum look certain that he should be there, although he had struck a courageous pose for his kinsmen. Felthrup bent down: the young man's bright-penny eyes were full of rage, and some fear, but most of all agonizing doubt. He gritted his teeth, cut the air before him with his sword. What had led him to this pass? Felthrup wondered. And where in Alifros was Diadrelu?

Rat! Where are you?

Arunis' voice burst like a thunderclap in his skull. Felthrup shot to his feet — too quickly. His head spun. He fell, his flailing hand missed the rail, and he only just managed to seize the catwalk itself as he tumbled. And dangling there over the depths, two feet from the grim-eyed Taliktrum, Felthrup realised that he was about to betray the little people to the sorcerer. The ixchel were geniuses at avoiding detection — but how could you hide from a dream figure you couldn't see? And while Arunis prevented Felthrup's waking self from remembering any of what occurred in the dream-time, the sorcerer had made it clear that he remembered everything.

Rat! Answer me!

The mage would be here in seconds. And in the morning he would tell Rose of the 'infestation.' They would seal the lower decks, smoke the ixchel out. And murder them all.