Chapter 7
THE COURT OF NOSFERATU
When a group of armed Gehirner bundle Skotch somewhere like Goods Lift Nine—it seems to happen distressingly often—he’s used to awkward silences.
Not much to say, after all, to a trio of scar-pelted rats with spikers who are very aware that he could use them as nunchuks if it just came down to physical clout.
Of course, most of the time when this happens to him, he isn’t in company with Lulu.
Lulu never stops talking. Given she’d been talking to—or at—Skotch for a while before they reached his nook and the whole abduction thing, she’s transferred her attention to the rats.
Lulu is very interested in other animals’ lives.
Professionally so. Famous for it. And it’s hard to be famous, as a Gehirner.
They’re legion, and they live partitioned lives: armies, guilds, service contracts, territories.
Skotch—more travelled and gregarious than most—will live and die without the vast majority of the city’s non-human residents ever hearing his name, and he likewise ignorant of them.
Lulu, though: A remarkable number of Gehirner know about Lulu.
A celebrity born of an utterly unique halfway-house state between the worlds of beasts and humans.
And Gehirner tend to open up to her. Despite—or because of—her rather brash, abrasive manner, the way she wedges her beak into everybody’s business.
Perhaps it’s just that answering her questions is the only way—and even that not entirely reliable—of shutting her up for a moment.
So, there they are, five of them in one corner of the big goods lift as it rumbles downwards towards the stygian depths of the undercity, and Lulu wants to know about the rats.
What are their names? What’s it like, working for one of the Rattenkonige?
Is Mother Murnau as old as people say? When did they last get to use their spikers?
Tell, O tell me tales of your dashing criminal exploits!
At first the more junior rats bite, and the senior one—the one who’s been doing the talking—snarls at them to shut up.
Then Lulu turns her attention to him and, before the lift shudders to a halt three floors down, she’s got him reeling through some exaggerated story of braggadocio and skulduggery.
Proudly confessing to crimes: thefts, protection rackets, even murders with the mausgelt still unpaid.
Boasting of his savage villainy. His name, Skotch learns in the midst of all this Threepenny Opera stuff, is Eddi.
Give Skotch three guesses, probably he’d have picked it.
He’s known a lot of rats called Eddi—there are a lot of rats, and their species name list is limited—and well over half of them were gangsters.
The lift comes to a halt just as Eddi is relating—with relish—how he faced down the big rat of another Rattenkonig family, had the rodent begging on his elbows.
Abruptly it’s business rat again, the proximity of his superiors reminding him of just what his and Lulu’s relationship is supposed to be.
A bit of embarrassment, really, as he gestures with the spiker to get her and Skotch out of the lift.
A bit of Look, I know we’re past this, but I gotta keep up appearances here, capisce?
They step out into the darkness of the lowest city levels.
The deep roots, where a network of fungal conduits feeds nutrients to the vast greenness of the Grunstadt above, tended to by a whole host of Gehirner guilds and contractors.
Up in the grand open spaces of the canopy there are armies running their rackets over broad, airy territories.
Fielding battalions of hundreds and drilling with popguns.
Down here it’s all more intimate. The relationships between spaces are a matter of connection, not spatial proximity.
Allies are those within arm’s reach, turf is what’s within arm’s reach of them.
The racketeering down in the dark is the province of little gangs and families, individual strongman Gehirner with their immediate cronies.
And the Rattenkonige, those who rise out of that morass of backbiting and feuds, feared enough that they can live off the tribute of lesser villains.
Mother Murnau is just one such, but she’s a beast whose name Skotch knows.
Like many ambitious Rattenkonige, she doesn’t confine her operations to the obscurity of below.
He’s clashed with her people on more than one occasion.
Has a healthy respect for the sort of vicious realpolitik she’s bloody to the elbows with.
Two ways to make it big, as a rat, he’s heard.
You get religion or you go for the throat.
He and Lulu are menaced and shoved onwards, or at least a reasonable pretence of it given Lulu is now on first name terms with Eddi and it would take at least two out of the three to shove Skotch anywhere.
They duck under doorways that the rats just dart past. They squeeze into gaps that the rats just shrug through.
Other rats are constantly turning up to see what smells out of place.
Other family soldiers, strutting, spikers shoved in their supers or on straps about their long bodies.
Unarmed rats who look once, then slink away.
Rat children, weeks, days old, staring with newly opened and infinitely wide eyes at these prodigies from the world above.
Then they drop into a space that was the interior of a metal barrel once, but the rats have wedged it here on its side and cut a dozen circular holes in it, for the coming and going. Holes for rats, and holes for bigger things than rats. And there, at the far end, is Mother Murnau.
She’s enthroned, sitting on her haunches in a tin cup with a cutaway side that makes a kind of bucket seat for her, high up at the back wall of the barrel.
Not a huge rat, as Skotch had expected. Certainly not a whole nest of them with twisted-together tails like you see in some pictures.
An old female rat, dark fur gone grey, gone white at the tips.
Missing a couple of fingers, a couple of toes, the end of her tail.
Very old, and rats don’t get old, really.
Eddi has probably seen his second birthday and, without a career of violence, might just make it past his fourth.
Longer life than a wild and unengineered rodent, but Skotch will outlive him by years, all things being equal.
Lulu will outlive the pair of them; will outlive Eddi’s great-great-grandkids, assuming her mouth doesn’t get her killed.
Mother Murnau is, according to rumour, going to be celebrating her eighth birthday soon. The equivalent of a human still running the family firm at the ripe old age of two hundred and twenty-five. Skotch wonders if he was supposed to bring a present, maybe a brightly coloured hat and a streamer.
The high-set seat shudders, and then lowers down from the far top end of the barrel, coming so that Mother Murnau is still able to look down on the pair of them, but not quite so distantly.
Her throne is on a hinged arm, and maybe there’s some super-silent piece of mechanics involved, but Skotch would put buttons on it being a team of rats acting as counterbalance.
Still, the effect bristles his fur a little.
You have to hand it to her for showmanship.
The pipes and tubes in her, that’s not just showmanship.
They run through gaps in the wall, and Skotch’s heard the rats have a whole med-unit back there, human-grade preservative tech stolen or bought off the actual human black market.
The Rattenkonig family, bartering what it skims from the Gehirner into human capital to allow it to creep up out of the animal world.
Online bids on the dark web, and the crooked human sellers never knowing what species they’re dealing with.
All against Rule One, or it would be if any human ever found out.
Maybe that’s Rule One (A): Don’t get caught.
Liquid passes in some of those tubes, departs through others.
The stuff going in’s noticeably cleaner than the yellowish stuff coming out.
Telomerase, someone once speculated. Just brute-forcing longevity by having every scrap of DNA simply swimming in it.
And if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.
Humans would be doing it. But then—for not entirely happy reasons if you’re of the species concerned—there is a vast library of medical research about the effect of experimental procedures on rats.
It’s almost like Mother Murnau has the entire human med-research industry working to her order.
Mother Murnau hunches forwards, juts her quivering snout at the pair of them.
Her incisors maybe stopped their incessant rodent growth some time back, because they’ve been replaced by gleaming metal prosthetics.
Her eyes are lenses—maybe replacements, maybe just fit over the originals.
The glassy, blind-seeming stare is discomfiting, to say the least.
“So,” she says, “Herr Washbear. Where is the mouse?”
That’s bad, Skotch reckons. Bad for a number of reasons. Bad for how well-informed they are, that he’s after a mouse. Bad for how badly informed they are, because apparently he’s supposed to know where Meece actually is. Which, despite a few leads, he really doesn’t.
He opens his mouth to at least earn the buttons Benson’s paying him with a few stock denials.
Murnau has given Eddi a nod, though, and the rat bruiser whacks a stick across Skotch’s toes.
Pretty much the part of him most vulnerable to a bit of bruising given their relative sizes and Skotch’s thick pelt.
He hisses in pain, hopping back. Eddi shows him the stick—just a knotted length of root, hardened and polished—then swaps it for a knife.
The message is simple: That time we didn’t break the skin.