Page 54 of Green City Wars

“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.

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.