Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

When the door opened the light was searing, although it was no more than a dim walrus-oil flame. Isiq recoiled, a cave-creature himself. Holding the light was the same quick, wiry Arquali youth who had clubbed him down with the flask months ago; Isiq recognised the small wart at the corner of his mouth, only visible when he parted his lips to speak. For once the man looked him in the eye.

'Talking monsters!' he laughed. 'That would be you this past week, Admiral. You're chatting with the statues, aren't you?'

Isiq was unsettled. 'Never mind them,' he said.

The guard shook his head. 'That deathsmoke powder's turned your brains to dairy curd.'

'If you'll but listen-'

'Go to the Pits.'

He slid Isiq's dinner into the room with his toe. But before he could slam the door Isiq lunged forwards and caught his wrist.

'Please,' he said, 'they'll kill me.'

The man cursed and wrenched his hand away, then wiped it on his pants as if he had touched something noxious. 'It's rats, you filthy sod, just rats! Calm down and eat if you want to live. And if you ever touch me again I'll see you get nothing but weevils on your plate from here to springtime.'

The door slammed, and for an instant the statues guffawed. Isiq whirled, furious, daring them to continue. Of course they didn't: he had shown them what he was capable of. He bent and found his dinner, wolfed the old bread, drank the sour and mysterious soup, glaring at his unseen foes. He was not sure whether or not they could see him. But he was certain they wanted his food.

He was sucking his fingers when he heard a new and desperate wriggling sound from the pit. At the same time a thought struck him, like a blow from a club. The rats. What had Ott's bit of parchment said? The Nilstone killed all who touched it, save the littlest vermin, who first suffer grotesqueries of change.

Little vermin, he thought. Like fleas, maybe? And hadn't he been chewed alive by fleas, even on the wedding day? They were strangely large, and vicious: he had dug one out of his hair, and the thing had bloodied his thumb. Could the fleas he bore from the Chathrand have bred in the hay-strewn compartment where the Shaggat resided, holding the Stone?

From the pit, the wriggling sound grew louder.

And where had they gone from him, those unlucky fleas? Where else could they go, if they tired of his old thin blood, but to the rats? Hadn't he scrabbled among the rats, right here, day after day, fighting over the littlest crumbs?

What if those creatures were not what had devoured the rats, but rather what the rats had become?

It was then that the wriggling stopped, and he heard a creature scrabbling in the pit.

His hand groped first for the axe-shaped stone. But where had he left it? By the kiln, Rin spare him, he'd dropped his stone by the kiln!

The creature was at the rim of the pit, snuffling. 'Penny for a colonel 's widow? ' it said.

Isiq dropped to his hands and knees, sweeping the floor with his fingers. After a moment he found the shallow groove he had scratched with the edge of the plate, and began a slow, creeping shuffle towards the kiln.

The creature loped into the room, yowling its eternal question. From the sound of its breath Isiq pictured an animal roughly the size of a sheepdog. Every few yards it would stop talking and take a sharp, deliberate sniff. Isiq raised the metal plate and held his breath.

From the pit came a sudden crescendo of digging, and a muted sound, as of many voices shouting behind an earthen wall. Then Isiq heard the creature paw at the door of the chamber.

'Penny for-'

The creature broke off, snuffling again. Then it gave an ear-splitting caterwaul and lunged straight at him across the chamber. Isiq flung the plate against the far wall. At the clattering noise the beast wheeled around, confused, and in that moment Isiq plunged towards the kiln. As soon as he did so the thing heard him and pounced. But Isiq's hand had found the stone, and he swung into the monster's leap with all the force of the blow he had intended, months ago, for Sandor Ott.

The stone connected with a fur-covered skull. A heavy, short-legged animal smashed into his chest; a drooling mouthful of flat incisors rasped against his head, tore through his right ear and fell sideways. Isiq raised the stone and struck a second time, only grazing the creature, and then it was on him again with tooth and claw, and he was fighting to keep it from his throat. It snarled its question between snaps of its jaws. Finally he threw it down, but this time Isiq kept his left hand locked in the fur, somewhere near the thing's mangy shoulder. Now he had a target. He brought the stone down, a crushing blow on the other side of the animal's head.

' There's your penny! And there's another!'

It fought on. He struck it again and again. Only when the voice at last fell silent did he realise that someone was talking to him.

'Look out, Isiq! They're coming! They're here!'

The statue spoke the truth: the creatures were erupting from the pit, howling and braying as though maddened by pain. There was no hope whatsoever in fighting. He could not survive an attack by two of them together, let alone more.

Like a spreading stain the creatures fanned out from the pit. He backed against the wall of the kiln. He heard their claws on the legs of statues, their teeth grinding fragments of the fallen woman. A great boil of misery burst inside him — time to go, time to join her — and then his hand fell upon the iron bar, propped against the kiln and forgotten for days.

Something like an electric shock passed from the bar to his mind. He thought at once of the door of the kiln, the iron fire-door with the bolt he had wrenched free. Isiq groped for it, dragging the bar. Instantly the creatures heard him and rushed towards the sound.

Here was the door. Isiq clawed at it, wrenched. It was hinged so as to swing up and inward. What lay within he could not begin to guess. Beside him a creature leaped, a statue fell with a crash, a schoolboy's voice wailed once and vanished like a candleflame, and then Isiq had the door open and was rolling into the kiln.

There was a cast-iron grate for a floor. Isiq was dragging the pole in after him when the creatures pounced. Flat on his back, he held the door down with one foot while the other stomped at the teeth and claws thrusting in at him. The pole at last slid into the kiln, and he pushed the door shut with both feet. But an untold number of the creatures were pushing back, and more were joining them by the second, and Isiq knew that if the pole was too short he would die.

It was not too short. He had it in place now, one end against the door and the other, higher, propped on the opposite wall of the kiln.

'Now you're in for it, you Pit-spawned scum!'

He stood, gripped the upper end of the pole and brought it down with all his might. The creatures shrieked in agony. Those who could wrenched free; others felt their bones crushed. The iron door was closed, and His Supremacy's ambassador to Simja fell back beside it and wept for Clorisuela, his shattered bride; and for Thasha, his darkened star; two angels who might have redeemed the world if he had loved them better, if he had not felled them with his addiction to Arqual, torn the wings from their bodies, if he had forgotten the Empire and lived in their light.

Children were forbidden to play in the rubble of Queen Mirkitj's palace, but older youths were often seen to skulk there at twilight, throwing dice and swallowing a few vile, illicit gulps of grebel, just enough to feel careless and warm. There were a number of such boys about on the evening of 19 Freala, the rainclouds having blown offshore, and they were the first in the city to hear the screams. Appropriately horrified — the voices seemed to come from under the earth — they spat out the liquor and groped for iron knuckles and pocketknives.