The acceptance of the unacceptable was a kind of reactionary stoicism, a dynamic that dulled his feelings for these others. He could feel it within him, a growing cunning, a hyper-real focus on the here and now. It frightened him. He could not battle it head on, he could not decide what to feel and what not to feel, but he could challenge it with his actions. He could change it by refusing to behave as if it were how he felt. He abhorred his own reaction, his own feeling. It was an animal trait.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Saul could tell something was wrong as soon as he stepped into the sewers.

The sounds, the sounds he had become accustomed to walking into, were absent. As his feet hit the trickling water, he dropped into a crouch, suddenly full of feral energy. His ears twitched. He knew what was missing. He should walk into the sewers into a barely audible network of scratching and skittering, the noises of his people. He should hear them at the very edge of his rat-hearing, and subsume them within him, make them part of him, use them to define his time in the darkness.

The sounds were missing. There were no rats around him.

He lowered himself effortlessly, sliding into the organic muck. He was utterly silent, his ears twitching. He was trembling.

He could hear the constant soft drip of the tunnels, the thick trickle of viscous water, the mournful soughing of warm subterranean winds, but his people were gone.

Saul closed his eyes, stilled himself from his toes up. His joints ceased to work over each other; he banished the sound of his blood, slowed his heart, dispensed with all the tiny noises of his body. He became part of the sewer floor, and he listened.

The quiet of the tunnels appalled him.

He rested one ear gently against the floor. He could feel vibrations from all around the city.

A long way off, something sounded.

A high-pitched sound.

Saul snapped to his feet. He was sweating and trembling violently.

The Piper had come here? Was he in the sewers?

Saul raced through the tunnels. He did not know where he was running. He ran to kill the shuddering of his legs, the terror he felt.

What was he doing here?

He sped past a ladder. Maybe he should leave, maybe it was time he left the sewers and ran for it through the streets above, he thought, but damn it, this was his space, his safe haven… he could not have it taken from him.

He stopped still suddenly and cocked his head, listening again.

The sound of the flute was a little closer now, and he could hear a scratching around it, the sound of claws on brick.

The flute slid violently up and down the scale, a cacophony of quavers chasing each other in mad directions. The flute and the claws were strangely static. They did not grow nearer or further away.

There was something strange, Saul realized, about the sound. He listened. Unconsciously he braced himself against the tunnel walls, spread his arms, one above him, one to his side, his legs slightly parted, each climbing the gentle incline of the cylindrical tunnel. He was framed by the passageway.

The flute trilled on, and now Saul could hear something else, a voice raised in anguish.

Loplop. Squawking, emitting meaningless, despairing cries.

Saul moved forward, tracking the sounds through the labyrinth. They remained where they were. He wound his way through the dark towards them. Loplop still shrieked intermittently, but his cries were not pained, not tortured, but miserable. Loplop’s voice rose above the scrabbling — an orderly scrabbling, Saul realized, an unearthly timed scratching.

The sounds were separated from him now only by thin walls, and he knew he was there, around the corner from the congregation. The tremors had returned to Saul’s body. He fought to control himself. Terror held him hard. He remembered the numbing speed with which the Piper moved, the power of his blows. The pain in his body, the pain he had managed to forget, to ignore, reawakened and coursed through him.

Saul did not want to die.

But there was something not right about this sound.

Saul pressed himself hard against the wall and swallowed several times. He edged forward, to the junction with the tunnel which contained the sounds. He was very afraid. The mad piping, Loplop’s random cries, and above all the constant, orderly scrabbling against brick — everything continued as it had for minutes. It was loud, and so close it appalled him.

He looked around. He did not know where he was. Deep somewhere, buried in the vastness of the sewer system.

He steeled himself, drew his head slowly, silently around the edge of the brick.

At first, all he could discern were the rats.

A field of rats, millions of rats; a mass that started a few feet from the entrance to the tunnel and multiplied, bodies piling upon bodies, rat upon rat, a sharp gradient of hot little bellies and chests and legs. A moving mountain, replacing those that fell with new blood, defeating the urge of gravity to level its impossibly steep sides. The rats boiled over each other.

They moved in time, they moved together.

All together they pushed down with their right forefoot, then all together with their left. Then the back legs, again in time. They clawed each other, ripped each other’s skin, trampled on the young and dying — but they were one unit. They moved together, in time to the hideous music.

The Piper was nowhere. On the other side of the rat mountain Saul could see King Rat. Saul could not see his face. But his body moved on the same beat as those of his rebellious people, and he danced with the same disinterested intensity, his body stiff and spasming in perfect time.

Loplop cried again and again, and Saul glimpsed him, a desperate figure before King Rat, his fists flailing against King Rat’s chest. He pushed King Rat, tried to move him back, but King Rat continued with his stiff zombie dance.

And behind them all, something hanging from the ceiling… something emerging, Saul saw, from a shaft to the pavements above. A black box, dangling at a ridiculous angle, its handle tied to a dirty rope…

A ghetto-blaster.

Saul’s eyes widened in astonishment.

The fucker doesn’t even have to be here, he thought.

He stumbled into the tunnel and approached the seething mass. The flute was ghastly, loud and fast and insane like an Irish jig played in Hell. Saul edged forward. He began to pass straggling rats. The ghetto-blaster swayed slightly. Saul waded into the mass of rats. So many already, all around him, and he had at least six feet to walk. It seemed as if every rat in the sewer had found its way here; monstrous foot-long beasts and mewling babies, dark and brown, crushing each other, killing each other in their eagerness to reach the music. Saul pushed forward, feeling the bodies squirm around him. A thousand claws ripped at him, never in antagonism, only in the ecstasy of the dance. Under the rats he could see were layers that moved sluggishly, tired and dying; and below them were rats who did not move at all. Saul walked knee deep in the dead.

King Rat did not turn, stayed where he was, dancing at the head of his people once again. Loplop saw Saul. He shrieked and pushed past King Rat, launched himself through the living wall towards Saul.

He was ruined. His suit was filthy, and in tatters. His face contorted, rage and confusion fleeting across it.

He waded forward two, three steps, then stumbled under the weight of enthralled bodies. He went under, drowning in the seething mass. Saul ignored him, contemptuous of him, disgusted.

But he too found it difficult to move; he pushed through the rats, killing, he was sure, with each step, unwillingly but inevitably. He swayed, regained his balance. The cacophonous flute was utterly deafening. Saul went down suddenly on one knee and the rats used him as a springboard, leapt from him, tried to fly to the dangling stereo.