She nodded.
“And once I pushed your little pony-trap out of a mudhole. There were three of us, but my love for you was strong and I pushed the hardest. Do you remember that, as well?”
She nodded again.
“I never wanted to be a part of this, I swear to you, Princess. Will you let me go, in memory of the old days, when you were a child and Lilimar was fair?”
She nodded that she would indeed let him go, and plunged her dagger up to the hilt into one of his upstaring eyes.
6
There was no electricity in the apartment today, but the scarred man—Jeff, or maybe he spelled it Geoff—had turned the gaslights partway up so he could see to do his dirty work. My guess is he hadn’t expected five of us, or for us to know where he was lying in wait. Not to mention the Snab, a cricket buckaroo riding on my dog’s back.
Eris found the little brass lever that controlled the gas and turned the jets up to full. We found Kellin in the next room, lying on an enormous canopied bed. The chamber was dark. His hands were clasped on his chest. His hair was combed back and he was wearing the same red velvet smoking jacket he’d had on when he interrogated me. A faint blue haze hung around him. It looked like eyeshadow on his closed lids. He didn’t stir as we approached and stood around his stolen bed. Never had an old man looked so dead, and he soon would be. I didn’t know if there was running water in the toilet cubicle I saw to the left of the room, but there was surely a pump. I thought my old friend the Lord High could use a good bath.
Jaya and Eris spoke at the same time. Jaya: “Where’s the Snab?” Eris: “What’s that sound?”
It was a mix of chattering and squeaking, punctuated by quick, sharp hisses. As the sound approached, Radar began to bark. Did I notice how pale Iota had become when I turned toward the living room to see what was coming? I think so, but I’m not sure. Most of my attention was on the bedroom doorway. The Snab entered in two springy leaps, then jumped aside. What followed were the hidden denizens of the palace’s walls and dark places: a flood of enormous gray rats. Jaya and Eris both screamed. Leah couldn’t, but she backed away against the wall, eyes wide and hands raised to the scar of her mouth.
I had no doubt the Snab had summoned them. It was, after all, the lord of small things. Although most of the rats were bigger than it was.
I stepped back from the bed. Iota stumbled and I grabbed him. He was breathing rapidly and I should have known then that something was wrong with him, but I was watching the rats. They swarmed up the dangling bedclothes and onto the body of the Lord High. His eyes flashed open. They were almost too bright to look at. The aura around him changed from pale blue to a deeper, purer shade. The first wave of rats were fried when they entered it. The stink of cooking meat and burning fur was atrocious, but they didn’t stop. Fresh troops squirmed over the bodies of their dead comrades, chittering and biting. Kellin struggled to throw them off. An arm rose from the boiling rat-pile and began to beat at them. One was clinging to his thumb, swinging back and forth like a pendulum, its tail wrapped around his bony wrist. There was no blood, for Kellin had none to give. I could see blue light giving occasional blinks through the rats covering him. He screamed, and a rat the size of a full-grown tomcat tore off his upper lip, exposing his gnashing teeth. And still the rats came, pouring through the bedroom doorway and surging up the bed until the Lord High was buried beneath a living, biting blanket of fur and tails and teeth.
There was a thud beside me as Iota collapsed in the corner of the room, across from where the three women cowered and Radar barked. Leah was holding Rades’s collar with both hands. White foam was coming from the corners of Iota’s mouth and dripping down his chin. He looked up at me and tried to smile.
“Poi…”
For just a moment I thought he was talking about the Hawaiian delicacy. Then I understood the word he couldn’t finish.
There was a muffled explosion and a flash of light. Rats—some on fire, some only smoldering—flew in all directions. One hit me in the chest and slid down my tattered shirt, leaving a trail of guts behind. The women who could vocalize screamed again. I heard the Snab’s wings start making that distinctive cricket sound. The rats obeyed at once, reversing direction and flowing back the way they’d come, leaving hundreds of bodies behind. Kellin’s bed was littered with guts and soaked with rat blood. Kellin himself was a disassembled skeleton below a grinning skull lying askew on a silk pillow.
I tried to pick Iota up, but he was far too heavy for me. “Eris!” I shouted. “Eye’s down! Help me! It’s bad!”