Chapter 7 #4
“You have a reputation, Herr Washbear,” Murnau says.
“A reputation for finding strays. You say you don’t have Meece yet.
I believe you. But you might soon. A resourceful animal such as you.
I don’t know for sure what the old shellhead at Uzco is offering you, but I’ll double it.
If you let us keep the mouse safe, rather than handing him over to your fellow Americans.
And believe me, he will be safer with us than he’d be in the jaws of Benson. ”
Skotch sees the turtle’s sharp beak in his mind’s eye.
Fit a mouse in there, easily enough. And while he doesn’t think Benson’s offering him all that Plangent and buttons just for a juicy rodent snack, he doesn’t necessarily think that Meece is going to go play on a farm upstate on Uzco’s tab, either.
“Like I say, I don’t have any mouse to offer to anyone.
The longer I’m here trading riddles, the greater the chance that stoat has her teeth in him already.
” And they don’t like the stoat, any of them.
Rats and mice both, they know when something evolved specifically to go after them.
A bitter thing to come to a human-level understanding of, that your species is at the very bottom of the pile.
Mother Murnau leans forwards again. The tubes hiss fluid in and out of her.
“I have faith, Herr Washbear, that you’ll make the right choice when the time comes,” she says. “Tybelle has faith too, don’t you, Tybelle?”
“Like a priest,” the cat mumbles through fur and fangs. “I look forward to seeing Herr Washbear do the wise thing.” Meaning, I’ll be watching.
“Eddi,” Murnau says, “our guests were just leaving.”
It takes until Goods Lift Nine gets halfway back to Skotch’s level before Lulu starts talking again.
Once she starts, though, a great deal of her former blather is back on form.
He’d thought it was too good to be true, honestly.
She’s already renewing pleasantries with Eddi.
By the time the lift grinds to a halt up top, he’s got as close as he can to actually apologising for the breach in their hospitality.
Desperate to claw his way back into her good graces.
Into the human’s—Schrieber’s—good books.
For Skotch, Eddi has less love. But maybe a bit of respect.
A certain understanding between them. Two animals on opposite sides of an invisible dividing line but maybe doing relatively similar work.
Meaning they’ll probably end up one of them killing the other, but at least it’ll happen within a common and mutually understood frame of reference.
Standing back up in the regular rootways, Skotch brushes the rat off his pelt. Turning, he catches the big round eye of Lulu.
“No,” he says.
“I will see you at the Chapel,” she tells him.
“No,” he says again.
“For when you go see the parrots,” she tells him. “I’ve just got to. I owe you, Skotch. You saved my life.”
He briefly distracted a cat, and he reckons the thread Lulu’s life was suspended from would have held or been cut by Mother Murnau’s nod, not anything he did. “It’s fine,” he tries.
“I will do everything I can to help you find this mouse,” Lulu says. “I have wings. I have good eyes. You need me.”
She has a mouth on her, is what she has. He can only hope she’s not around when he pays his next call on Saint Frances. But these days his luck doesn’t seem to be working out that kind of way.
With Lulu fluttering off to spill the beans to her patron, it’s time for Skotch to drag his feet back to Rootspace 93 and his nook.
He feels he’s already put in a day and a half of work today, in sheer hassle.
He feels the maulkrankeit creeping up on him, though the dose he had yesterday should still be in full flow.
Stress runs through the Plangent in your system more quickly.
And running short of Plangent, of course, generates stress.
The dog finds him before he gets home. No dogs allowed down in the rootspace, of course, but Sly has a way round everything. It’s one of the smallest, a tiny terrier who’d probably lose to Eddi in a bare-knuckle match.
Skotch had passed Meece’s notes to Sly, of course, in the hope the old fox could help decode what they were. Whether they were as bad as he was worried. Because he’d told Murnau he didn’t know why everyone wanted the mouse, and, true, he doesn’t know, but he sure as hell has suspicions.
There’s a little capsule at the dog’s collar and Skotch opens it and unrolls the note he finds there. Sly can’t write, but he has a speech-to-text app. The neatly printed message is simultaneously alarming and uninformative.
Skotch, we have to talk.
Tomorrow, thinks Skotch. Honestly he could get a psychic vision of Szerky with a foot on a terrified Meece’s tail and it wouldn’t keep him from his bed right now.
He needs to decompress. It’s a common Gehirner problem, all that human-level worry backing up in a brain that’s not quite adapted to process it.
Turns out the world isn’t done worrying at him yet, though. His nose is already telling him something’s off before his feet bring him into sight of his nook. It’s not empty, but there’s no living occupant. A body is sprawled there, the nip of blood in the air.
A raccoon’s body, lying on its front right where he might have been standing. It’s Fitch, of course, and from the look of it he’d been searching through Skotch’s things when someone crept up behind him and shot him neatly in the back of the head.