Chapter 20 #2
This is Rootspace Central 75 and it’s a big nexus of paths that should have had a flow of working Gehirner passing through it with trolleys and carts.
Instead there’s a pack of Redcoats with guns, and the space to use them.
For a moment, Skotch is actually glad to see them, because he’s fighting Grays and that’s supposed to mean the Reds are notionally allies.
The Grays are scattering then, and while a couple of the Reds track them with a popgun barrel, the rest are looking right at him and the clutch of cultists.
“Hold there, Bandit!” shouts their officer, and then, to her followers, “Lock them down. Hold them till the stoat gets here.”
“Damn me,” spits Skotch desperately, because apparently, in his absence, the Reds have been taking farm coin as well. Or at least these Reds, but as these are the only Reds here and they have the guns, that’s really all that matters.
“Your paymaster’s getting the stuffing ripped out of her by a cat right now,” he tells them, hoping it’s true. “I hope you lads got a down payment for your services.”
The look in the officer’s eyes suggests that just maybe they didn’t.
There’s a fragile fraction of a second when he thinks he can talk his way out of this, but then he sees the doors slam shut behind her eyes.
She’s a soldier, she has orders—even if they don’t originate in her regular chain of command.
She’s not someone in whom creativity has been fostered or rewarded.
The shooting starts then. Skotch has one terrible moment of thinking he’s just died and his nerve endings haven’t caught up with it.
Then two of the squirrels are down and the rest are turning as a pack of rats charge out into the space.
They only have spikers, but they’re already close enough to use them.
Rough rats, scarred rats. He sees Loui there, and a couple more who were dancing attendance on Mother Murnau.
Eddi is hollering at him from the tunnel entrance they came in from.
Honestly, in all the fuss and reversals, Skotch had almost forgotten whose coin Tybelle was taking.
“Come on, Washbear!” Eddi shouts at him. “Come on, you loons!” at the cultists, who hurry towards him and the tenuous safety he represents.
“The Chapel?” Skotch asks and, “The Chapel!” Eddi confirms. Skotch risks a look back. The squirrels have recovered some of their military order and the rats are falling back. The popguns are lifting, ready to take advantage of the range.
They fire just as he’s ducking past after the last of the cultists.
He hears the solid thunk of bullets driving into the gnarled wooden tangle of the rootspace walls.
He feels a flare of pain as one skins along his flank.
He sees Eddi, mouth open, cartwheeling backwards with the force of a solid impact, the missile piercing through his thorax.
Skotch has a moment of trying to bring the rat along, but the trembling going through Eddi’s body is of a final nature, just loose discharges of muscles deprived of their central authority. The rat is dead.
Another pellet bounds back from the ceiling over Skotch’s head and bounces from his snout on the way down, its force spent. He ducks into the tunnel and runs after cultists, pelting on all fours, just an animal fleeing for its life.
It’s not so far, from Rootspace Central 75 to the Chapel, but they have a time of it.
Skotch on his own would have walked it, not even broken into a sweat.
Instead he’s got a clutch of mice—a mischief is the collective noun and they’re certainly trouble enough for it—and these mice are not rugged survivors.
Their heredity does not go back to wild scavenging vermin dodging the owl and the wildcat in a desperate struggle for existence.
They are the heirs of cage-fed pets and laboratory dwellers, used to regular meal times and indolence.
In these latter days they’ve found their niche cosying up to a cat because nine times out of ten it means they’re provided for out of their mistress’s largesse.
The other time, well … Skotch can’t quite work out what makes it worth the moments when Tybelle’s feeling in a murderously frisky mood, but perhaps they see it as some sacred way out.
Perhaps there’s some afterlife where they get to eat and groom forever if only they die in feline jaws.
Between the Separatists and the Jeffists and these cultists, religion seems to Skotch to be one of the weirder things that a Gehirner’s expanded mind can find room for.
There are plenty of squirrels between them and the Chapel, and the one thing that stops them just being held at gunpoint until Szerky can catch up is that they’re squirrels from two different armies.
When they run into Graycoat checkpoints Skotch leads his ragbag of rodents into Red territory, and vice versa.
They cut a zigzag through the rootways beneath the city, and leave half a dozen shoot-outs behind them as Reds and Grays cross invisible boundaries and end up in each others’ faces.
And through it all, he keeps the hapless cultists out of the firing line.
Or, rather, the six cultists and their new addition, the one just wearing the impractical clothes.
He wants to stop and speak to Meece, to the good doctor.
There’s no moment when he has the breath for it, between ’75 and the Chapel.
And Meece isn’t volunteering. Meece, of all of them, can run.
He ran all the way from the Farm Projects, after all, and halfway across the unfamiliar territory of Neuwien before Skotch first saw him in Franz-Ferdinand’s.
With one more fur-flying skirmish at their heels, they pile into the Chapel.
Two things become apparent to Skotch then, as they skitter out onto the rubble, and to the water’s edge. One is how crowded the place is, the other how empty.
When he was here last, the place had only a skeleton crew of idlers and fugitives crouching in the Saint’s shadow.
He recognises now that this was because the armies were moving in, and a lot of the Chapel’s regular malcontents are of a mobile breed.
When a place gets hot, that kind of Gehirner packs up and moves on for as long as necessary.
No sense holding out in a war zone. And there’s always a war in Neuwien-Grunstadt, because Eddi was right.
The armies are just bigger gangs, players in a game where numbers and main force lend legitimacy.
Skotch heard from some high-minded rat once that official power always devolves to the control of force.
And that isn’t really true in the Gehirner world, or if it is, it’s in the shadow of human power, which is a force so far beyond animal comprehension that it skews all the scales.
But Skotch reckons that the equation is a two-way street.
Control of force makes you official, if you can hold on to it for a generation or two.
Mother Murnau is a gangster and a criminal, oppressing the weak and breaking all the rules around the edges of the Gehirner way of life.
But if she had not thirty rats under arms but three hundred, she’d be a statesrat, a general, and people would talk about her wisdom and dignity.
So now there’s a war on, and while all the transient Gehirner have cleared out, the regular working Gehirner couldn’t or didn’t.
When their places were filled with armed squirrels with itchy trigger fingers, those who weren’t actively working at keeping the human city running have come here.
Come for the safety of the Chapel, until the Reds and Grays settle just who it is gets to call this territory theirs, and demand tithes and taxes from the locals.
Skotch sees a fair cross-section of all the guilds that call this part of the city home.
Waste collectors, electricians, plumbers, cleaners, botanists, apiarists, haulers, all the different trades whose entire existence goes towards making sure that the needs of the human populace of Neuwien are met.
Who only exist because humans decided those needs should be met, and wanted an eco-friendly and sustainable way of ensuring they were.
Because the armies and the Rattenkonige and even random freelancers like Skotch, they’re parasites, really.
They’re evidence that the humans wrought well when they engineered the Gehirner system.
Built in enough spare flesh and redundancy that just this many animals can carve a living by doing something other than providing essential services.
Because the humans never really thought that the animals they were gifting intellect and speech to might not just be happy trudging along the ruts they were designed to.
Despite the fact that the Divine Jeff is always depicted as that smiling, reclining human, humans never really understood his simple four-word mantra.
That living things are going to push the boundaries, just as humans have always done.
So the Chapel is busy today. Dozens, scores, hundreds of Gehirner who’ve abandoned their nooks and guilds to come here and keep out of the way of the fighting.
Whole families of rats and moles, half-blind infants curled close to their parents.
Frogs, newts, even some birds and bats from up top who fled here as the armies descended towards the roots.
A handful of loose freelancers who haven’t run.
Old Tekki the ratsnake coiled into a knot on one small island.
A grim-looking owl. A pair of scarred badgers.
None of them anybody’s good neighbours under normal circumstances, but right now everyone has bigger worries.
And yet one obvious absence. Because Saint Frances isn’t here. The pillar of this particular community, in whose presence rests the only actual sanctuary the Chapel can offer, and she’s gone.