Imagine a million clever rats.
Rats that don't run.
Rats that fight...
Maurice, a streetwise tomcat, has the perfect money-making scam. He's found a stupid-looking kid who plays a pipe, and he has his very own plague of rats -- rats who are strangely educated, so Maurice can no longer think of them as "lunch". And everyone knows the stories about rats and pipers...
But when they reach the stricken town of Bad Blintz, the little con suddenly goes down the drain. For someone there is playing a different tune. A dark, shadowy tune. Something very, very bad is waiting in the cellars.
The educated rats must learn a new word.
EVIL.
It's not a game any more. It's a rat-eat-rat world down there. And that might only be the start...
One day. when he was naughty. Mr. Bunnsy looked over the hedge into Farmer Fred's field and saw it was full of fresh green lettuces. Mr. Bunnsy, however, was not full of lettuces. This did not seem fair.
-- From Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure
* * *
As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.
* * *
"But you know the best thing about Uberwald? It's a long, long way from Sto Lat. It's a long way from Pseudopolis. It's a long way from anywhere where the head of the Watch says he'll have us boiled alive if he ever catches us."
* * *
"And what do governments do with money?"
"Er, they..."
"They pay soldiers," said Maurice. "They have wars. In fact we've prob'ly stopped a lot of wars, by taking the money and putting it where it can't do any harm. They'd put up stachoos to us, if they thought about it."
"Some of those towns looked pretty poor, Maurice," said the kid doubtfully.
"Hey, just the kind of places that don't need wars, then."
* * *
Highwayman: "Are there any wizards in there?"
Boy: "No?"
Highwayman: "How about any witches?"
Boy: "No, no witches."
Highwayman: "Right. Are there any heavily armed trolls employed by the mail coach company in there?"
Boy: "I doubt it."
Highwayman: "Okay, how about werewolves?"
Boy: "What do they look like?"
Highwayman: "Ah, well, they look perfectly normal right up to the point where they grow all, like, hair and teeth and giant pa.vs and leap through the window at you."
Boy: "We've all got hair and teeth. Is that any help?"
Highwayman: "So you are werewolves, then?"
Boy: "No."
* * *
"Your money and your life. It's a two-for-one deal, see?"
* * *
"We can't stay here all night," said the kid to Peaches. "He's got a point."
"That's right!" said the highwayman urgently. "You can't stay here all night!"
"That's right," said a chorus of voices from his trousers, "we can't stay here all night!"
* * *
He'd realized there was something educated about the rats when he'd jumped on one and it'd said, "Can we talk about this?"
* * *
He swaggered so much when he walked that if he didn't slow down, he flipped himself over.
* * *
Maurice clambered out of the saddlebag and stretched. The stupid-looking kid helped the rats out of the other bag. They'd spent the journey hunched up on the money, although they were too polite to say that this was because no one wanted to sleep in the same bag as a cat.
* * *
Even though he had no pockets, there was something about Maurice that made everyone want to check their change as often as possible.
* * *
Cats didn't have to think. They just had to know what they wanted. Humans had to do the thinking. That's what they were for.
* * *
A good motto in life, he'd reckoned, was: Don't eat anything that glows.
* * *
The trouble with thinking was that, once you started, you went on doing it.
* * *
"I think there's a good deal too much of this thinking, that's what I think. We never thought about thinking when I was a lad. We'd never get anything done if we thought first."
* * *
[The voice] was very polite, but it just kept going and it asked all the wrong questions. A wrong question for Maurice was one that he didn't want anyone to ask.
* * *
Maurice thought a rude word in cat language, which has a great many of them.
* * *
What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?
* * *
After a few days of this, it was amazing how glad people were to see the stupid-looking kid with his magical rat pipe. And they were amazed when rats poured out of every hole to follow him out of town. They were so amazed that they didn't bother much about the fact that there were only a few hundred or so rats.
They'd have been really amazed if they'd ever found out that the rats and the piper met up with a cat somewhere in the bushes outside of town, and solemnly counted out the money.
* * *
Maurice was only an expert on cat singing, which consists of standing two inches in front of another cat and screaming at him until he gives in.
* * *
The terrier's face screwed up in the horribly worried expression of a dog trying to have two thoughts at the same time.
* * *
"Something's going on, and when something's going on, that means someone's getting rich, and when someone's getting rich, I don't see why that shouldn't be m-- us."
* * *
"Well, when you're hungry, you'll give [the cat] away for half a slice of bread and scrape* and think you've done well, believe me."
[Footnote: You scrape the butter on, Then you scrape the butter off. Then you eat the bread.]
* * *
Hamnpork: "I am the leader. It's my job to say, 'Let's get organized'!"
Peaches: "Yes, sir. How would you like us to be organized, sir?"
Hamnpork: "Just... get organized. Don't bother me with details! I am the leader."
* * *
The shop had been for humans, true, but surely even humans wouldn't make a [children's] book about Ratty Rupert the Rat, who wore a hat, and poison rats under the floorboards at the same time. Would they? How mad would anything have to be to think like that?
* * *
You had to be a certain kind of rat to last a long time in the Trap Disposal Squad. You had to be slow, and patient, and thorough. You had to have a good memory. You had to be careful. You could join the squad if you were fast and slapdash and hasty. You just didn't last very long.
* * *
He tried to make a face that said Don't be a complete twerp, okay? --which is quite hard to do with a cat head.
* * *
[The milk] oozed rather than gushed, but Maurice was a street cat and would drink milk so rotten that it would try to crawl away.
* * *
Someone giving you food was always correct.
* * *
"And have you got a name?" she said. "You're not the third and youngest son of a king, are you? If your name starts 'Prince,' that's a definite clue."
* * *
"Gosh, really," said Maurice, wondering if there were any more fish heads and, if there were any more fish heads, whether they were worth all this.
* * *
People could tolerate rats in the cream, and rats in the roof, and rats in the teapot, but they drew the line at tap dancing. If you saw tap-dancing rats, you were in big trouble.
* * *
One miraculously whole plate rolled past Keith, spinning round and round and getting lower on the floor with the groiyoiyoiyooooinnnnggg sound you always get in these distressing circumstances.
* * *
Malicia: "How come a cat knows a word like that?"
Maurice: "Everyone's got to know something."
* * *
Maurice: "You get locked out of your room as a punishment?"
Malicia: "Yes. It means I can't get at my books."
* * *
The other trainees laughed in the nervous, tittering way of people who've seen someone else attract the teacher's attention and are glad it isn't them.
* * *
Malicia: "Are you two up there or not?"
Keith: "Yes."
Malicia: "Didn't you hear the secret knock?"
Maurice: "It didn't sound like a secret knock."
* * *
Malicia: "I know -- I'll shout 'It's me, Malicia!' and then give the secret knock, and that way you'll know it's me and you can give the secret knock back. Okay?"
Keith: "Why don't we just say, 'Hello, we're up here'?"
Malicia: "Don't you have any sense of drama?"
* * *
"Of course, it would be more... satisfying if we were four children and a dog, which is the right number for an adventure, but we'll make do with what we've got."
* * *
"...the trouble is, see, that he thinks everyone else is like him. People like that are bad news, kid. And our lady friend, she thinks life works like a fairy tale."
"Well, that's harmless, isn't it?" asked Keith.
"Yeah, but in fairy tales, when someone dies... it's just a word."
* * *
"What do you think happens to you after you're dead?" said a rat slowly.
"You get eaten. Or you get an dried up, or moldy."
"What, all of you?"
"Well, people usually leave the feet."
* * *
"And being dead is like being asleep, isn't it?"
"Not exactly like asleep," said a rat uncertainly, glancing at the fairly flat thing formerly known as Fresh. "I mean, you don't I all blood and bits sticking out."
* * *
"When you die, where does that bit that's inside you go?"
"What, the green wobbly bit?"
"No! The bit that's behind your eyes!"
"You mean the pinky-gray bit?"
"No, not that! The invisible bit!"
"How would I know? I've never seen an invisible bit!"
* * *
"They say there's Big Rat Deep Under the Ground who made everything, they say. So it made humans, too? Must be really keen all us, to go and make humans too! Huh?"
"How do I know? Maybe they were made by a Big Human?"
"Oh, now you're just being silly."
-- Rat religion
* * *
"Life's bad enough as it is without having to worry about invisible things you can't see!"
* * *
"The face looks familiar. Apart from the bulging eyes and the tongue hanging out, that is."
* * *
He didn't like to come across unknown things. You found out what unknown things were when they killed you.
* * *
"Look, this is me, okay? A cat? Who talks? How will you recognize me? Shall I wear a red carnation?"
* * *
She thought animals were just people who hadn't been paying enough attention.
* * *
"I don't do clothes," he said. It wasn't much of a line, but it was probably better than saying "I think you are a loony."
* * *
Although, he thought a few minutes later, no cats ever moved like Malicia. She obviously thought that it was no good looking inconspicuous unless people could see that you were being inconspicuous. People in the street actually stopped to watch her as she I sidled along walls and scuttled from one doorway to another.
* * *
Malicia: "I knew it would work. It worked in the fairy story 'The Seventh Wife of Greenbeard,' where she broke out of his Room of Terror and stabbed him in the eye with a frozen herring."
Keith: "That was a fairy story?"
Malicia: "Yes. Right out of
Maurice: "You've got some bad fairies in these parts."
* * *
Hamnpork: "You want it trailing around eating our food and messing things up? It can't talk, it can't think..."
Peaches: "Nor could we, not long ago! We were all like her!"
Hamnpork: "We can think now, young female!"
Dangerous Beans: "Yes. We can think now. We can think about what we do. We can pity the innocent one who means us no harm. And that's why it can stay."
* * *
Malicia: "Look, cat, there's two types of people in the world. There are those who have got the plot, and those who haven't."
Maurice: "The world hasn't got a plot. Things just... happen, one after another."
Malicia: "Only if you think of it like that."
* * *
Malicia: "There'll be a secret passage, of course! Everyone look for the entrance to the secret passage!"
Keith: "Er... how will we know it's the entrance to a secret passage? What does a secret passage look like?"
Malicia: "It won't look like one, of course!"
Maurice: "Oh, well, in that case I can see dozens of secret passages."
* * *
"Actually, I was just being flippant," said Maurice. "But I can do sarcastic if you like."
* * *
"Everyone knows you never find the secret passage by looking for it! It's when you give up and lean against the wall that you inadvertently operate the secret switch!"
* * *
"Of course, it'd help if there was an ornate candlestick," said Malicia. "They're always a surefire secret-passage lever. Every adventurer knows that."
"There isn't a candlestick," said Maurice.
"I know. Some people totally fail to have any idea of how to design a proper secret passage," said Malicia.
* * *
"Hur, hur, hur," said Rat Catcher 2. He probably studied to get a thug laugh like that, Maurice thought.
* * *
Keith looked up. His eyes narrowed. He got to his feet.
Here it comes, thought Maurice. He's going to leap forward with superhuman strength because he's so angry and they're going to wish they'd never been born....
Keith leaped forward with ordinary human strength, landed one punch on Rat Catcher 1, and was smacked to the floor again by a big, brutal, sledgehammer blow.
* * *
"It's 'them kids,' not 'those kids.' Get it right. How many times have I told you? Rule Twenty-seven of the Guild: Sound stupid. People get suspicious of rat catchers who talk too good."
* * *
"It's cruel, tying people up. And they're only kids, after all."
"So?"
"So it'd be a lot easier to take 'em down the tunnel to the river and hit 'em on the head and throw 'em in. They'll be miles downriver before anyone fishes 'em out, and they prob'ly won't even be recognizable by the time the fish have finished with' em."
Maurice heard a pause in the conversation. Then Rat Catcher 1 said: "I didn't know you were such a kindhearted soul, Bill."
* * *
It was another cellar. And it was full of water. In fact, what it was full of was not exactly water. It was what water eventually becomes when rat cages drain into it, and gutters up above drain into it, and it has had a chance to sit and bubble gently to itself for a year or so. To call it "mud" would be an insult to perfectly respectable swamps all over the world.
* * *
Trying to give a cat orders? It was easier to nail jelly to a wall.
* * *
Stinking mud oozed off him. Even his ears were full of mud. He went to lick himself clean, and then stopped. It was a perfectly normal cat reaction, licking yourself clean. But licking this off would probably kill him--
* * *
"One rat can think and be brave, right. But a bunch of rats is a mob. A bunch of rats is just a big animal with lots of legs and no brain."
* * *
It was very unusual for Maurice to feel sympathetic to anyone who wasn't Maurice. In a cat, such sympathy is a major character flaw.
* * *
What good was a cat with a conscience? A cat with a conscIence was a... a hamster, or something.
* * *
"And you know the worst part? I'm a cat! Cat's don't go round feeling sorry! Or guilty! We never regret anything!"
* * *
Look at those little pink sad eyes, said Maurice's Own thoughts in Maurice's Own head. Look at those little wobbly wrinkly noses. If you ran out on them and left them here, how could you look those little wobbly noses in the face again?
"I wouldn't have to," said Maurice, out loud. "That's the point!"
* * *
"The moment I saw you, I thought: He's got some amazing power that will probably manifest itself when he's in dire trouble, I thought: No one could really be as useless as that unless it was a disguise."
* * *
There was silence for a while, and then Malicia said, "You know, in many ways I don't think this adventure has been prcperly organized."
"Oh, really?" said Keith.
"This is not how people should be tied up."
* * *
Malicia: "If you don't turn your I life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story."
Keith: "And what if your story doesn't work?"
Malicia: "You keep changing it until you find one that does."
* * *
Keith: "And what am I in your story?"
Malicia: "I know it's not going to be the romantic interest."
* * *
Malicia had never been very interested in other people's feelings, since she'd always considered that her own were a lot more interesting...
* * *
Dogs were tied up around the walls, barking at one another and at the universe in general in the mad, l'm-going-to-do-this-forever way of all dogs.
* * *
Jacko's eyes crossed. A piece of Jacko that was very private and of interest only to Jacko and any lady dogs he might happen to meet was suddenly a little ball of pain.
* * *
Malicia: "I'm sorry, I find it terribly embarrassing to... talk to rats."
Keith: "I suppose that's understandable. If you've been brought up to hate them because they--"
Malicia: "Oh, it's not that. It's just that it's so... childish. So... tinkly-winkly. So... Mr. Bunnsy."
Peaches: "Mr. Bunnsy?"
Keith: "What about Mr. Bunnsy?"
Malicia: "Oh, some books some silly woman wrote. Stupid stuff for ickle kids. There's a rat and a rabbit and a snake and a hen and an owl, and they all go around wearing clothes and talking to humans, and everyone's so nice and cozy it makes you absolutely sick. D'you know my father kept them all from when he was a kid? Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure, Mr. Bunnsy's Busy Day, Ratty Rupert Sees It Through... he read them all to me when I was small, and there's not an interesting murder in any of them."
* * *
"There's no subtext, no social commentary," Malicia went on, still twiddling. "The most interesting thing that happens at all is when Doris the Duck loses a shoe -- a duck losing a shoe, right? -- and it turns up under the bed after they've spent the entire story looking for it. Do you call that narrative tension? Because I don't."
* * *
Humans, eh? Think they're lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever see a cat feed a human? Case proven.
* * *
"I'm unreliable! I'm a cat! I wouldn't trust me, and I am me!"
* * *
Rat Catcher: "Please, young sir! Have mercy! If not for me, please think of my dear wife and my four lovely children who'll be without their daddy!"
Malicia: "You're not married. You don't have any children!"
Rat Catcher: "I might want some one day!"
* * *
Rat Catcher: "I can feel things happening!"
Keith: "That's just your imagination!"
Rat Catcher: "It is?"
Keith: "Yes. Don't you know anything about the poisons you use? Your stomach won't start to melt for at least twenty minutes."
Malicia: "Wow!"
Keith: "And after that, if you blow your nose, your brain will-- well, let's just say you'll need a really big handkerchief."
Malicia: "This is great! I'm going to take notes!"
* * *
"This is inhuman!" shrieked Rat Catcher 2.
"No, it's very human," said Keith. "It's extremely human. There isn't a beast in the world that'd do it to another living thing, but your poisons do it to rats every day."
* * *
Keith: "What was it you really put in the sugar?"
Malicia: "Cascara."
Keith: "That's not a poison, is it?"
Malicia: "No, it's a laxative."
Keith: "What's that?"
Malicia: "It makes you... go."
Keith: "Go where?"
Malicia: "Not where, stupid. You just... go. I don't particularly want to draw you a picture."
* * *
Keith: "And you just happened to have it on you?"
Malicia: "Yes. Of course. It was in the big medicine bag."
Keith: "You mean you take something like that just for something like this?"
Malicia: "Of course. It could easily be necessary."
Keith: "How?"
Malicia: "Well, supposing we were kidnapped? Suppose we ended up right down near the sea? Supposing we were captured by pirates? Pirates have a very monotonous diet, which might be why they're angry all the time. Or supposing we escaped and swam ashore and ended up on an island where's there's nothing but coconuts? They have a very binding effect."
Keith: "Yes, but... but... anything can happen! If you think like that, you'll end up taking just about everything in case of anything!"
Malicia: "That's why it's such a big bag."
* * *
Keith: "How much [Cascara laxative] did you give them?"
Malicia: "Lots. But they should be all right if they don't take too much of the antidote."
Keith: "What did you give them for the antidote?"
Malicia: "Cascara."
* * *
He wasn't exactly lost, because cats never get lost. He merely didn't know where everything else was.
* * *
"And will he come back like Darktan did?" asked someone else.
"If he does, he'll get really mad if we've eaten him," said a voice.
* * *
Sardines: "Look, what I'm saying is, you're the leader, right? So you got to act like you know what you're doing, okay? If the leader doesn't know what he's doing, no one else does, either."
Darktan: "I only know what I'm doing when I'm dismantling traps."
Sardines: "All right, think of the future as a great big trap. With no cheese."
* * *
"There's a preserved rat king in a big jar of alcohol in the town museum."
"A dead one?"
"Or very, very drunk."
* * *
"It's just like crop circles. No matter how many aliens own up to making I them, there are always a few diehards who believe that humans go out with garden mowers in the middle of the night--"
* * *
"Every word you utter is a lie. If there is a Big Rat, and I hope there is, it would not talk of war and death. It would be made of the best we could be, not the worst that we are. No, I will not join you, liar in the dark. I prefer our way. We are silly and weak sometImes. But together we are strong. You have plans for rats? Well, I have dreams for them."
* * *
"I am not so blind that I can't see darkness."
* * *
"But this is real life," said Malicia.
"I thought it was an adventure," said Keith.
"Damn! I forgot," said Malicia.
* * *
Keith: "You mean you haven't got anything in your bag to fight rats? This is a rat catchers' lair! You've got plenty of stuff for pirates and bandits and robbers!"
Malicia: "Yes, but there's never been a book about having an adventure in a rat catchers' hut!"
* * *
He was being held by another figure, much taller, human size, but with the same style of black robe, a much bigger scythe, and a definite lack of skin around the face. Strictly speaking, there Was a considerable lack of face about the face, too.
* * *
Maurice: "Can I ask a question, sir?"
Death: YOU MAY NOT GET AN ANSWER.
Maurice: "I suppose there isn't a Big Cat in the Sky, is there?"
Death: I'M SURPRISED AT YOU, MAURICE. OF COURSE THERE ARE NO CAT GODS. THAT WOULD BE TOO MUCH LIKE... WORK.
* * *
One good thing about being a cat, apart from the extra lives, was that the theology was a lot simpler.
* * *
"Cats know about people. We have to. No one else can open cupboards."
* * *
"A good plan isn't one where someone wins, it's where nobody thinks they've lost."
* * *
He was a sergeant, he told himself, which meant that he was paid more than the corporal, which meant that he thought more expensive thoughts.
* * *
"They say that in Porkrhinz the council didn't pay him, and he played his special pipe and led all the kids up into the mountains, and they were never seen again!"
"Good, do you think he'll do that here? The place'd be a lot I quieter."
* * *
Sgt. Doppelpunkt: "You think something might have happened to her, sir?"
Mayor: "No, I think she might have happened to someone, man! Remember last month? When she tracked down the Mysterious Headless Horseman?"
Sgt. Doppelpunkt: "Well, you must admit he was a horseman, sir."
Mayor: "That is true. But he was also a short man with a very high collar."
* * *
Mayor: "And then in September there was that business about the-- the--"
Sgt. Doppelpunkt: "The Mystery of Smuggler's Windmill, sir."
Mayor: "Which turned out to be Mr. Vogel, the town clerk, and Mrs. Schuman, the shoemaker's wife, who happened to be there merely because of their shared interest in studying the habits of barn owls..."
Sgt. Doppelpunkt: "...and Mr. Vogel had his trousers off because he'd torn them. On a nail..."
Mayor: "...which Mrs. Schuman was very kindly repairing for him."
* * *
Corporal Knopf was standing next to him like a schoolboy who has just turned in a nasty piece of work and is waiting to be told exactly how bad it is.
* * *
Malicia: "Let me ask this stupid-looking kid, who I've never seen before: Are you an orphan?"
Keith: "Yes."
Malicia: "You know nothing about your background at all?"
Keith: "No."
Malicia: "Aha! That proves it! We all know what happens when a mysterious orphan turns up and challenges someone big and powerful, don't we? It's like being the third and youngest Son of a king. He can't help but win!"
* * *
She looked triumphantly at the crowd. But the crowd looked doubtful. They hadn't read as many stories as Malicia, and were rather more attached to the experience of real life, which is that when someone small and righteous takes on someone big and nasty, he is grilled bread product, very quickly.
* * *
"'Cos the thing about turning people into badgers and all the rest of that stuff is this: It never happens round here. Most of the people in these mountains never go more than ten miles away in their lives. They'll believe just about anything could happen fifty miles away."
* * *
"The fancy clothes, the bullying... charging a lot is part of the whole thing. You've got to give' em magic, kid. Let' em think you're just a fancy rat catcher, and you'll be lucky to get a cheese lunch and a warm handshake."
* * *
How the crowd yelled when rats erupted from every hole and drain! How they cheered when both pipers danced out of the town, with the rats racing along behind them! How they whistled when the rats plunged off the bridge into the river!
They didn't notice that some rats stayed on the bridge, urging the others over with shouts of "Remember, strong regular strokes!" and "There's a nice beach just downstream!" and "Hit the water feet first -- it won't hurt so much!"
* * *
"Did that cat just speak?" asked the major.
Maurice looked around. "Which one?" he said.
"You! Did you just talk?"
"Would you feel better if I said no?" said Maurice.
* * *
"Here's what I suggest," he said. "You pretend that rats can think, and I'll promise to pretend that humans can think, too."
* * *
"Are you saying we should bribe the rats?" asked the mayor.
"Cheaper than pipers. Cheaper than rat catchers," said Maurice.
* * *
Now he had the slightly hunted expression of anyone who'd been talked at by Maurice for any length of time. It said, "I'm going where I don't want to go, but I don't know how to get off."
* * *
"So what you're saying," said the clockmaker, "is that if we-- that is, if the lucky town had a special big clock, and rats, people might come to see it?"
"And stand around waiting for up to a quarter of an hour," said someone.
"A perfect time to buy tooth-crafted models of the clock," said the clockmaker. "At very reasonable prices."
* * *
"Maurice, this isn't right," said Dangerous Beans. "Surely it is better to appeal to the common bond between intelligent species than--"
"I don't know about intelligent species. We're dealing with humans here," said Maurice. "Do you know about wars? Very popular with humans. They fight other humans. Not hugely big on common bonding."
* * *
If it was a story, and not real life, then humans and rats would have shaken hands and gone on into a bright new future.
But since it was real life, there had to be a contract.
* * *
"Can... you... un-der-stand... me?" he said, pronouncing each word very carefully.
"Yes... be-cause... I'm... not... stu-pid," said Darktan.
* * *
"Look," he said, "I think it might work, if that's what you want to ask me."
The mayor brightened up. "You do?" he said. "There's a lot of arguing."
"That's why I think it might work," said Darktan.
* * *
"You could have poisoned our wells. You could have set fire to our houses. My daughter tells me you are very... advanced. You don't owe us anything. Why didn't you?"
"I asked myself that, too," said Darktan. "And I told myself: What good would it do? What would we have done afterward? Gone to another town? Gone through all this again? Would killing you have made anything better for us? Sooner or later we'd have to talk to humans. It might as well be you."
* * *
Darktan: "The last leader gave me some advice just before he died, and do you know what it was? 'Don't eat the green wobbly bit'!"
Mayor: "Good advice?"
Darktan: "In his world, yes. But all he had to do was be big and tough and fight all the other rats that wanted to be leader."
Mayor: "It's a bit like that with the council."
Darktan: "What? You bite them in the neck?"
Mayor: "Not yet, but it's a tempting thought, I must say."
* * *
"To be a leader you have to learn to shout! But after you've learned to shout, you have to learn not to!"
"Right again," said the mayor. "That's how it works."
* * *
"I suppose that means there will be tiny signs in human language in the rat tunnels?"
"I hope not," said Keith.
"Why not?"
"Because rats mostly mark their tunnels by widdling on them."
* * *
There's a town where, every time the clock shows a quarter of an hour, the rats come out and strike the bells.
And people watch, and cheer, and buy the souvenir hand-gnawed mugs and plates and spoons and clocks and other things that have no use whatsoever other than to be bought and taken home. And they go to the Rat Museum, and they eat Rat Burgers (Guaranteed No Rat) and buy Rat Ears that you can wear and buy the books of Rat poetry in Rat language and say "how odd" when they see the street signs in Rat and marvel at how the whole place seems so clean....
And then most of them go back to their own towns and set their traps and put down their poisons, because some minds you couldn't change with a hatchet. But a few see the world as a different place.