Page 53 of Green City Wars

Szerky knocks again and snickers. “Why your friend sounds quite hollow, Herr Skotch. Perhaps he’s out. And the problem with leaving your home empty is that little vermin will sneak in.” She darts another look at the shell, her neck snaking to let her look at the seam where plastron meets carapace. The catch there is hidden, but she sees it. He sees the satisfied flick of her ears.

He goes for her. He didn’t particularly intend to, but that smug little movement cues him. And, because he didn’t intend to, he gives her no warning. Is on her even as she’s turning back to him. She jabs the gun at him but he gets an arm in the way. A handful of stingers spit out across Ikelos’ nook and rattle at his screens and wiring, eviscerated insects ejecting from the breech to get trampled underfoot. But Skotch actually has hands on her, digging in with his claws, using his greater strength and bulk. She writhes in his grip like a serpent. Her teeth snap at his eyes and he leans back. He’s trying to smash her against the wall but she won’t keep still for it. It’s like trying to hold on to an eel. There’s a flash of pain: she has a blade out, cutting at his thumb. He flails her at the floor like a whip and she actually shrieks with outrage and—he hopes—pain.

Something snaps in him and he goes for her with his teeth. It’s what fights between Gehirner always devolve to. The thin veneer of civilized engineering rubs off mighty fast in a scrum. Her fur, her blood in his mouth, her own vise jaws closing about his arm. For a moment they both hold fast. Then she’s raking her little knuckle-knife at his face and he lets go. They break, both bloodied. Her eyes shine like gems. The fight is something she feeds off, while Skotch is drained by it. Maybe she’s right about the whole warrior thing.

The bee gun is lying on the ground. Skotch goes for it, hoping that she’s hopped up enough on bloodlust that she’s forgotten her ranged options. She’s a second behind as he begins his lunge, a second ahead as he ends it. They both get hands on the weapon. He feels the uncomfortable vibration of its living contents. It’s made too small for his hands to close about it properly, though, and she twists it from his grip, ends up with it practically shoved up his nose. Breathing fast, eyes wide, as excited as if this was courtship.

“Why, Herr Skotch,” she hisses delightedly. “Who would have thought you had such exertions in you.”

He waits for the shot, the brief but savage agony of a lethal anaphylactic reaction. Instead she coils back from him, every part of her in sinuous motion save the hand that holds the gun.

“Let us at least have an audience for your execution, Herr Skotch,” she tells him, and flicks the catches of the shell.

Ikelos of Santorini’s cenotaph of a shell hinges open smoothly. Inside there are empty water bottles, SLG wrappers, scraps of crumpled paper written over with alchemical notation. No mouse.

“What?” Szerky demands. Skotch can only echo the sentiment. The mouse was right here. They spoke not so long ago. He’d been waiting for Skotch. That was the plan.

The little squeaker ran out on me. And maybe he shouldn’t blame Meece for not trusting one raccoon’s personal Damascene conversion, but in that moment he’s still absolutely furious at being outmanoeuvred by a mouse. Every bit as much as Szerky. And she looks to him, jabbing the gun, but obviously reads his reaction as genuine. Meece has pulled one over on the both of them.

Or maybe not. Because, from beyond the open door to Ikelos’ sanctum rings a single high, clear note.

Tybelle leans her head into the doorway. The sound of her bell slowly fades into the growing silence.

“Aw,” she says to Szerky, mock solicitous. “What were you expecting to find in that shell, Fraulein Stoat?” Luxuriously licking her lips. “Meece’s pieces?”

PART

FIVEBATTLE LINES

20THE 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.