Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

The rat's bite was deep; its jaws had locked onto his flesh with a starved thing's ferocity. 'Damn you! Damn you! ' Isiq had rolled away from the pit with the creature still attached to his hand, swung it writhing and squealing over his head, slammed it down on the stone floor beside him. Again. And again. Only on the fourth blow had it released his finger, slashed to the bone by the rodent's teeth. Even then it had refused to die, but had leaped on his stomach and thence back into the pit, splattering him with his own blood.

For two days he had urinated on the wound: Dr Chadfallow's field trick for avoiding infection. Miraculously it had worked; the cut was painful but clean. Gangrene in this festering hole would be certain death.

That night as he pawed at his food, a flaky substance met his fingers. Ashes? Not quite. A herb, sprinkled on his half-raw potato? He touched it with his tongue. And dropped the plate in a panic. And squatted, and scraped together what food he could. And flung it down again, howling in rage and hunger. They were the beasts, his jailkeepers. They had dusted his meal with deathsmoke.

A time came when he knew he must enter the pit. He realised that Ott could not have left such an obvious means of escape; he knew also that the rats came from the pit, and that he risked being gnawed alive. Somehow none of that mattered. A sense of the physical space around him was one of his few holds on sanity, and the pit was a blank spot on the map.

He swept each foothold with his boot. There was a great smell of dung. He eased himself down and felt the air grow fouler; a mould-heavy dampness bathed the walls. Far-off noises, drips and splashes. After twenty footholds his boot met the ground.

An ovoid pit; a low-roofed passage; a shattered door. And then rubble. He knelt and groped. Big rocks, sand, masonry, utterly filling the corridor. A large part of the ceiling must have collapsed.

He felt every inch of the rubble-mound before him, and met with no rats at all. Near the top of the mound, however, he located the fist-sized tunnel by which they surely came and went. He plugged the hole with the largest stone he could lift, but the earth was soft around it, and he knew it would not slow even a single animal very long.

But for many days the rats did not come.

He flexed his finger: it was almost healed. He had an idea that this was his twentieth day among the statues. He had a pair of weapons, now: an iron bar and a vaguely axe-shaped stone, both of which he had pulled from the detritus at the bottom of the pit. The bar had not been worth the trouble: it was too heavy to swing, too thick to pry into cracks. Since heaving it up from the pit he had found no use for it at all.

But the stone was another matter. He swung it experimentally, thinking again of the blow he had not landed on Ott's face, when the arrogant old killer sat beside him. Maybe what Ott said was true, and the attack could only have failed. Or maybe that was pride: perhaps there had been a window between his inspiration and Ott's awareness of the danger, when he might have struck. Why do we wait? thought the admiral, suddenly on the point of tears. For his daughter's face had risen before his eyes.

What had they done with her body? They were not going to Etherhorde, so Thasha would never lie beside her mother in the family plot on Maj Hill. The best he could hope for was that she had been buried at sea, with honours, like the soldier another world might have let her become.

Sudden noise from the middle of the chamber. Clanging, rasping — the same horrid mix. Isiq left the dancer and shuffled towards the central pillar, taking his time. He did not much want to see what awaited him there.

The pillar was six or eight feet in diameter. It was made of heavy brick, not soft stone like the rest of the chamber. Gaps the size of half-bricks had been left intentionally, and from them crept a smell of ancient coal. The pillar also had a great iron door.

It was unmistakably a fire-door, of the kind installed on furnaces. It had a small square window that must once have been glazed. The door was rusted shut, the heavy bolt and staple fused with age into a solid thing, but there was no lock his fingers could detect. For several days he had struggled to open the door, to no avail. Then, on the third day after the rat bite, the noises had begun.

Isiq bent his ear to the window. Crashing, hissing, scraping. All from below — the pillar must have contained a shaft of some kind — and blurred by echoes and distance, but soul-chilling nonetheless. He was hearing the rage-stoked violence of living creatures, battering and biting whatever they could find. And speaking. That was the true horror of it. Most of the voices (he had noted at least a dozen) spoke only gibberish, a snarling, whining, moaning, murderous barrage of nonsense sounds. They suggested some horrible perversion of babies trying out their vocal cords for the first time — but the throats that made those sounds must have been larger than a grown man's.

And some were using words. Simjan words; he caught no more than the odd interjection. Mine! Stop! Egg! Isiq was cross with himself for not following the meaning — he was ambassador to Simja; he had been tutored in the tongue — until he realised that the words were not arranged in sentences. At most, two or three were strung together and repeated endlessly, with a kind of agonised inflection. Hagan reb. Hagan reb. Hagan hagan hagan REB! Reb reb reb reb reb-' The words broke off in screeches of lunacy.

All save one. A nattering, sorrowful, sharp-edged voice. Penny for a colonel 's widow? Just those words, gabbled and blurted and wept. Penny for a colonel 's widow? The voice appeared never to tire.

'Rin's mercy, what do you mean?' groaned Isiq.

At once he clapped a hand over his mouth, silently cursing. He had never uttered a sound near the pillar. The creatures fell absolutely silent. Then they all began screaming at once.

'Hraaaar!'

'Egg!'

'Penny for a-'

'Mine!'

Sounds of spittle and claws. The thrashing grew so crazed that the pillar actually shook. Then, beneath the pandemonium, his ears detected a tiny squeak. Putting out his hand, he found that the great bolt had at last broken free of the rust. It would move. With a bit of a struggle he could slide it free.

But why open the door? What if they could climb? Nothing but this slab of iron would stand between him and them. Fortunately the door was mighty, the bolt despite its rust still massive and intact. This was where they stoked the fires, Isiq realised suddenly, this is what turned the prison into a kiln.

Futile to fight on. Damn it, that was the truth. Already the things were scratching open the little tunnel at the base of the pit.

He was sweating again. Those things must have devoured the rats. How is it that they speak? What will they do when they find me? Where is my suit of stone?

He stumbled away from the pillar, holding his forehead, trying not to moan aloud. Almost at once he collided with a statue, his faithful sentry, the woman choking on the dark. She toppled; he tried to catch her but her weight defeated him; she struck the floor with a muffled boom.

'Oh my dear madam, forgive me-'

He found pieces of her in the blackness. Various digits. Her forehead, shattered on the stone. He felt the sting of other eyes, the focused hate of all the statues, that frozen family, that congregation of the damned.

He would have to watch himself.

4 Freala 941

113th day from Etherhorde

In a way unimagined by even the most superstitious crewmembers, the Great Ship had become a ghost ship, living but presumed deceased. The effect this had on those aboard her is difficult to pinpoint. At first there was bravado, and much talk of the cleverness of Rose and their Emperor. The gang leaders, Darius Plapp and Kruno Burnscove, led the cheering: they were competitors in patriotism (or what passed for it) as in every other sphere. 'We've a right to be proud,' Burnscove declared. 'Arqual's going to remake the world. A world without the Black Rags, a world of straight talk, straight deeds, and Rin's Ninety Rules taught to every wee baby with his mother's milk. And don't we know that means a better world?'