“I—I—I” the man stuttered. “Stop it, I—I—I don't want to—” Tears ran down his face. “We—I made a rat king Stop it, stop it… stop it…”
“And it's still alive?” said Malicia.
Keith turned to her in amazement. “You know about these things?” he said.
“Of course. There's a lot of stories about them. Rat kings are deadly evil. They—”
“Antidote, antidote, please,” moaned Rat-catcher 2. “My stomach feels like there's rats running round in it!”
“You made a rat king,” said Malicia. “Oh, dear. Well, we left the antidote in that little cellar you locked us up in. I should hurry if I was you.”
Both of the men staggered to their feet. Rat-catcher 1 fell through the trapdoor. The other man landed on him. Swearing, moaning and, it had to be said, farting enormously, they made their way to the cellar.
Dangerous Beans' candle was still alight. Beside it was a fat twist of paper.
The door was slammed behind the men. There was the sound of a piece of wood being wedged under it.
“There's enough antidote for one person,” said Keith's voice, muffled through the wood. “But I'm sure you can sort it out—in a humane sort of way.”
Darktan tried to get his breath back, but he thought he'd never get it all, even if he breathed in for a year. There was a ring of pain all around his back and chest.
“It's amazing!” said Nourishing. “You were dead in the trap and now you're alive!”
“Nourishing?” said Darktan, carefully.
“Yes, sir?”
“I'm very… grateful,” said Darktan, still wheezing, “but don't get silly. The spring was stretched and weak and… the teeth were rusted and blunt. That's all.”
“But there's teeth marks all round you! No-one's ever come out of a trap before, except the Mr Squeakies, and they were made of rubber!”
Darktan licked his stomach. Nourishing had been right. He looked perforated. “I was just lucky,” he said.
“No rat has ever come alive out of a trap,” Nourishing repeated. “Did you see the Big Rat?”
“The what?”
“The Big Rat!”
“Oh, that,” said Darktan. He was going to add “no, I don't go in for that nonsense”, but stopped. He could remember the light, and then the darkness ahead of him. It hadn't seemed bad. He'd almost felt sorry that Nourishing had got him out. In the trap, all the pain had been a long way off. And there had been no more hard decisions. He settled for saying, “Is Hamnpork all right?”
“Sort of. I mean, we can't see any wounds that won't heal. He's had worse. But, well, he was pretty old. Nearly three years.”
“Was?” said Darktan.
“Is pretty old, I mean, sir. Sardines sent me to find you because we'll need you to help us get him back, but—” Nourishing gave Darktan a doubtful look.
“It's all right, I'm sure it looks worse than it is,” said Darktan, wincing. “Let's get up there, shall we?”
An old building is full of pawholds for a rat. No-one noticed them as they climbed up from manger to saddle, harness to hayrack. Besides, no-one was looking for them. Some of the other rats had taken the Jacko route to freedom, and the dogs were going mad searching for them and fighting with one another. So were the men.
Darktan knew a little bit about beer, since he had gone about his business under pubs and breweries, and the rats had often wondered why humans sometimes liked to switch their brains off. To the rats, living in the centre of a web of sound and light and smells, it made no sense at all.
To Darktan, now, it didn't sound quite so bad. The idea that, for a while, you could forget things and not have a head buzzing with troublesome thoughts… well, that seemed quite attractive.
He couldn't remember a lot about life before he'd been Changed, but he was certain that it hadn't been so complicated. Oh, bad things had happened, because life on the tip had been pretty hard. But when they were over, they were over, and tomorrow was a new day.
Rats didn't think about tomorrow. There was just a faint sensation that more things would happen. It wasn't thinking. And there was no “good” and “bad” and “right” and “wrong”. They were new ideas.
Ideas! That was their world now! Big questions and big answers, about life, and how you had to live it, and what you were for. New ideas spilled into Darktan's weary head.
And among the ideas, in the middle of his head, he saw the little figure of Dangerous Beans.
Darktan had never talked much to the little white rat or the little female who scurried around after him and drew pictures of the things he'd been thinking about. Darktan liked people who were practical.
But now he thought: he's a trap-hunter! Just like me! He goes ahead of us and finds the dangerous ideas and thinks about them and traps them in words and makes them safe and shows us the way through.
We need him… we need him now. Otherwise, we're all running around like rats in a barrel…
Much later on, when Nourishing was old and grey around the muzzle, and smelled a bit strange, she dictated the story of the climb and how she'd heard Darktan muttering to himself. The Darktan that she'd pulled out of the trap, she said, was a different rat. It was as though his thoughts had slowed down but got bigger.
The strangest bit, she said, was when they reached the beam. Darktan made sure that Hamnpork was all right, and then picked up the match he'd shown to Nourishing.
“He struck it on an old bit of iron,” said Nourishing, “and then he walked out along the beam with it flaring, and down below I could see all the crowd, the hay racks and the straw all over the place, and the people milling around, just like, hah, just like rats… and I thought, if you drop that, mister, the place will fill with smoke in a few seconds and they've locked the doors and by the time they realize it they'll be caught like, hah, yeah, like rats in a barrel and we'll be away along the gutters.”
“But he just stood there, looking down, until the match went out. Then he put it down and helped us with Hamnpork and never said a word about it. I asked him about it later on, after all the stuff with the piper and everything, and he said, ‘Yes. Rats in a barrel.’ And that's all he said about it.”
“What was it you really put in the sugar?” said Keith, as he led the way back to the secret trapdoor.
“Cascara,” said Malicia.
“That's not a poison, is it?”
“No, it's a laxative.”
“What's that?”
“It makes you… go.”
“Go where?”
“Not where, stupid. You just… go. I don't particularly want to draw you a picture.”
“Oh. You mean… go.”
“That's right.”
“And you just happened to have it on you?”
“Yes. Of course. It was in the big medicine bag.”
“You mean you take something like that out just for something like this?”
“Of course. It could easily be necessary.”
“How?” said Keith, climbing the ladder.
“Well, supposing we were kidnapped? Suppose we ended up at 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 there's nothing but coconuts? They have a very binding effect.”
“Yes, but… but… anything can happen! If you think like that, you'd end up taking just about everything in case of anything!”
“That's why it's such a big bag,” said Malicia calmly, pulling herself through the trapdoor and dusting herself off.
Keith sighed. “How much did you give them?”
“Lots. But they should be all right if they don't take too much of the antidote.”
“What did you give them for the antidote?”
“Cascara.”
“Malicia, you are not a nice person.”
“Really? You wanted to poison them with the real poison, and you were getting very imaginative with all that stuff about their stomachs melting.”