Chapter 20
THE DIVISION BELL
What gets Skotch most is Szerky’s reaction.
Because this is what the stoat wanted, isn’t it?
Meece dead and his secret with him. That’s the end goal of all her bloodshed and manoeuvres and spending buttons like water.
All that’s left is to deal with any loose lips who know what it was that Meece was about, even if they wouldn’t be able to duplicate the work.
Lips or near-substitutes, like the ones an engineered raccoon has.
But Szerky isn’t relaxing. Doesn’t apparently feel that having it done without even having to get blood in her teeth is actually a benefit.
And Tybelle’s gloating look shows she’s on the same wavelength as the stoatweasel, leaving only Skotch between them not quite sure why they aren’t breaking out the party hats and the streamers.
“Meece … is…” Szerky says slowly.
“Meece was,” says Tybelle, “delicious.” And there’s a little snickering chorus from behind her.
Her cultists, the sycophantic rodents in thrall to her shadow, come to sing her praises in high squeaky voices.
Tybelle graciously steps back from the doorway, out into the unterroot annex that fronts onto the nooks of both Skotch and the late Ikelos.
Szerky follows her up in a furious sine wave of motion, leaving Skotch to edge after her.
Out there, Tybelle sits and licks at a paw, perhaps cleaning the very last taste of genius from it.
Probably, Skotch reckons, tastes just like the blood of any other mouse.
And she’ll pay one maus worth of gelt to the farms, and that’ll be accounts settled, and he feels very keenly the injustice that Eddi and Murnau and the others were talking about.
Because Meece was special, and could have changed the world, and Skotch only just discovered how. And now …
“Where,” Szerky demands, “is his body?”
Which seems morbid, but then she’s an obligate carnivore born to some warrior-code trumpery, and so morbidity is to be expected.
Tybelle pauses, eyeing her, pink tongue still extended. Behind her, the purple-robed rats and mice form a little crescent, gazing at her adoringly.
“I mean…” Tybelle seems embarrassed to have to say something so obvious, “you know how it is, Fraulein. When you get your teeth into something.”
Szerky is shaking, very slightly but very fast. Skotch’s brain still hasn’t quite caught up, but then she says, “I need his body, for the Club, to prove that he’s dead.”
And maybe some of the rage is being cheated of the kill, but Skotch reckons there’s the real line of warrior honour.
Nobody back at the Farm Projects is going to send off a loose cannon like Szerky on an assassination mission, and then just take her word for it that the job’s done.
She needs proof, or else she’ll go back a failure, and they’ll send someone in her place.
Tybelle yawns lazily. “Fraulein, give it a day, you can go through my litter box.”
The cultists find that hilarious, squeaking and chittering to one another.
Skotch watches them with a sense of revulsion.
Everyone knows that, in the Kit Kat Cults, votaries can find themselves redefined as offerings quickly enough, if their god-monarch gets hungry, or bored.
And yet they still sign up, desperate to shackle themselves to something strong, something with a paw in the Gehirner and the human worlds.
Skotch frowns.
“You’re coming with me to the farms,” says Szerky desperately. “You can tell them.” Sounding, for the very first time, desperate.
“Oh, well, I’d love to, obviously, but my human will be upset, and besides, that’s out of my territory.
Some of us find travel rather wearing. I’m afraid you’ll have to go all the way back to your sty and just try to be ever so convincing when you tell them I beat you to your quarry, little hunter. ”
For a moment Szerky is silent, still but vibrating with rage. Then she has the bee gun up again, and her knife in her other hand. “You will come with me,” she tells the cat, “as witness, or I will take your pelt back as a gift.”
Tybelle’s look suggests that she can try.
“Children,” she tells her cultists, “mother’s going to teach her country cousin a lesson now.
You run along to the Chapel and prepare my cushions, won’t you?
Herr Washbear”—and her eyes fix Skotch—“you’re a big Gehirner in a small space that’s about to get very busy. You clear us some room.”
Skotch nods, begins to edge around. Tybelle’s slit pupils have gone very wide and her ears are up. Everything else about her gives the impression of languid unconcern, apart from the actual tension in her muscles, which is like drawn-back rubber bands. Szerky is swaying slightly side to side.
Skotch gets clear from between them. The cultists are already heading away, picking up speed. Rats and mice in ridiculous, ornate robes. Seven of them, he counts. And the last, the smallest, stumbling a bit over unaccustomed hems.
Szerky sees it too, just as they’re rounding the corner. Skotch hears her insane shriek of fury at being fooled. He turns, despite himself, even as the cultists flurry off ahead of him.
Szerky fires the bee gun at Tybelle, but the cat—such a big, still target a moment before—flows into motion.
Maybe one stinger finds a home in her fur, of the half-dozen in the air.
Skotch hears her myowp! of pain, but it doesn’t seem to slow her.
Then cat and stoat are dancing, leaping over one another, claws out, jaws snapping, neither one able to make contact with the other.
If he’d come to this scene cold, honestly, he’d have thought they were playing, or even going through some prearranged choreography.
Chasing one another back and forth around the space, the cat larger and stronger, the stoatweasel swifter.
Except it’s not play. They are absolutely trying to end each other, two killers at the top of their game.
Skotch goes. Whoever wins, there’s no profit for him in seeing it. Discretion is so much the greater part of his current valour that whatever’s left wouldn’t make a single mouse pellet.
The Chapel, Tybelle had said. Safe ground, neutral ground. The one place where even a fugitive from the farms might just catch a breath, in the shadow of Saint Frances.
He has no idea just why Tybelle has hired on Meece as an extra cultist, save that it’s probably not just to round out the numbers for a grooming ritual. Right then, though, working out what’s going on comes a distant second to getting the hell out.
He hears Szerky shriek from behind him, but any hope that it signifies her demise is dashed when she calls out, “Stop them! Stop all of them! I’ll pay double!” Because apparently the great huntress didn’t come alone.
Up ahead is Unterroot 90, a larger chamber that’s a hub for a half-dozen twisty dark corridors.
The cultists burst out into it, running like only rats can run, but there are Graycoats there, squirrels shouting orders, waving popguns.
Not the best weapons in these close spaces, but still enough to put a big-sized hole in a small-sized rodent.
The cultists—no fighters they—eddy back. The one at the rear, the awkward one who isn’t used to the robes, gets trodden on. Beneath a half-yanked-down hood, Meece’s wild eyes stare out.
Skotch barrels out behind and through them, scattering the cultists like skittles.
Partly it’s a kind of desperate bravery—or that’s what he wants to tell Lulu later if he gets the chance.
Partly it’s that he understands he has momentum and the squirrels aren’t quite sure what the situation is or what’s happened to their paymaster.
Partly again, it’s that he was coming out from Unterroot 93 at quite the pace and doesn’t have the traction to slow down.
He bowls into the Graycoats with furious speed and lays into them with all four feet and his teeth.
Not big, as raccoons go, but a giant in squirrel terms. A couple of the popguns go off with sharp snaps, but he’s right in the middle of them and the weapons are intended for rooftop vantages and big open spaces.
Skotch is no great fighter, honestly. A blue-collar piece of genetic engineering, intended to collect trash and fix wiring with dexterous little hands.
When he gets stuck in, it’s without any of the deadly grace of the two killers dancing it out back in ’93.
He relies on a kind of furious berserking that comes right out of his evolutionary heritage.
Clawing, spitting, biting, gouging, no blow too low and no holds barred.
Every animal will fight in a corner, and one thing the Gehirner engineering gives you is the ability to put yourself in a corner, inside your head; to trigger all that mad frenzy.
Workplace stress, basically. Another unintended gift of human meddling that an animal should never have had to deal with.
In his mind, Skotch feels the wall at his tail, the pressure of it against his shoulder blades.
The squirrels and their guns are between him and out, in his imagination, and so he tears into them.
And he’s big, and the confines are close, and that carries the entire fight forwards down the next tunnel, the squirrels fleeing frantically ahead of him, the cultists swarming on his tail.
A mad procession like a horrifying small mammal Mardi Gras.
There’s blood under his nails and in his mouth before they burst out into the next open space.