Chapter 8 #3
Frances looks down on him. That serene human face—and there’s something in every animal’s geneware that reacts to human faces.
Awe, fear, respect, love. A weird mélange of man-made emotions to ensure they don’t forget who they owe their intellect to.
That Frances lowers herself to scatter crumbs for them doesn’t mean she can shed the glare of that artificial halo.
“Dead?” she asks softly, or he sees her lips move and the machine makes up the difference.
“Killed dead,” Skotch confirms. “I’m sorry, sister.
Something real bad’s going on and I need to get to the bottom of it.
If I don’t, who will?” And who’s he doing it for, in this moment?
Surely not Uzco; surely not dead Fitch who he never liked, or dead Springer who was just one more gray body sent to the Separation Plant after the fight at Ferdinand’s.
In that moment perhaps he’s just doing it because he’s got his hands around a mystery, and he’s going to pry at it until he can get the meat out.
Frances looks over her shoulder—looks massively, distantly, far over Skotch’s head. He tries to follow her gaze but can’t even approach the angle. Then she’s back to her ministrations, handing out food. Grinding up a pill for a sick rat. Our Lady of the Minuscule Mercies.
Skotch sags. Soaked, tired, still hearing Lulu’s yattering but knowing she can’t keep Maria sidetracked for more than a minute longer. No pigeon’s that annoying. Then he jumps, because a stubby hand tries to yank on his ankle.
He looks down. There’s a pair of eyes. Bulbous, yellow, protruding from the water.
A single thick arm reaches for him. Three thick fingers and a wrinkled thumb.
A toad. Not just a toad. The toad. The one from Ferdinand’s, last seen holding Skotch at gunpoint.
The knot of his red necker can just be seen jutting from between folds of warty flesh.
“Herr Bandit,” says the toad, broad mouth sitting at the very meniscus of the water. “You have an urgent wish for freedom.”
Skotch is about to agree to that, and then deny it, and then guesses it’s some damn fool ideological anarchist thing the Maulers say to one another when they want to feel they’re being clever.
“You got the mouse?” Skotch asks.
“Herr Bandit is feeling larcenous perhaps,” the toad says. “Wants to steal something we have worked hard to secure. Perhaps we don’t want that so much.”
“Listen—” Skotch starts, eyes rolling left and right as he looks for Maria.
“Herr Bandit is vouched for by the Saint, though,” the toad notes. Its eyes move in towards one another as though each finds itself on a different side of the debate. “It is enough to get him in. Is it enough to get him out? Herr Fischer does not know.”
“Who the hell,” Skotch demands through his teeth, “is Herr Fischer?”
The toad regards him reproachfully. The toad is, Skotch clicks, Herr Fischer. Amphibians were a more ambitious engineering project than mammal or bird stock. They tend towards linguistic quirks and clannishness. And, apparently, anarchy.
“You got somewhere to take me,” Skotch tells Fischer, “you better lead on, or else there’ll be more to the party than you’ll like.”
“Herr Bandit is impatient,” says Fischer reproachfully.
He bobs there and, for a moment, Skotch thinks he’s about to offer for Skotch to get on his back like the old story.
Even a big engineered toad is around a fifth Skotch’s size, though.
They’d not exactly get far. Instead Fischer kicks off, startlingly swift and graceful in the water.
No anarchist water taxi arrives to collect him.
It looks like he’s in for another ducking just as he’s begun to dry out.
The toad could have lost him a dozen times in that swim, but he keeps circling back and waving his big flat feet in Skotch’s face to make sure the raccoon stays on course.
They come out at a grating, around the Chapel’s edge.
The water runs down and down, there, gurgling into the abyss of the city’s drainage and reclamation works where another dozen Gehirner guilds hold sway.
The grating’s pushed out, though, and inside there’s a ledge and the toad is squatting on it.
Narrow, but Skotch can make it if he shuffles on two feet.
He looks around. No sign of an angry possum charging over to make an unwelcome third.
And then from third to fifth wheel because a pair of squirrels—one red, one gray—loom up to shove the grating back into place.
Both of them wearing the neckerchiefs of the Maulers, neither of them associated, presumably, with their original crews.
He thinks he’s come away clean from the Chapel, but he’s not so lucky.
Just as they’re trying to lever the grating closed against the flow of the water there’s a sudden flurry of motion at its edge.
The squirrels flinch back, and into the gap that makes, a feathered body forces itself with undue enthusiasm and a paean of praise for its own cleverness.
“How was that, Skotch?” Lulu demands. “I did well, didn’t I? I made sure she didn’t see! And here I am!” And there she is, on decidedly the wrong side of the grating after the squirrels have closed it up and clasped it shut.
Skotch waits to see if any of the Maulers feel that the presence of Lulu is too much of a security risk for their secret society.
Apparently they know the pigeon’s reputation, though, and they’re not as anarchistic as all that.
More than happy to talk about overthrowing the status quo, but none of them ready to start pulling feathers.
So it is that Skotch travels to the den of the Maulers in Madparrot Alley with Lulu keeping up a constant patter of questions in his ear.