That was King Rat’s blood. Saul would not listen to it. I am what I do, he thought, furiously.

There was a long silence between the two of them.

‘You know what?’ said Saul finally. ‘I think you should come too. I think you will.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Squadrons of rats spread out across London. Saul harangued them in foetid alleys, behind great plastic bins. He raged to them about the Piper, told them that their day had come.

The massed ranks of the rats stood quivering, inspired. Their noses twitched; they could smell victory. Saul’s words broke over them like tides, swept them up. He communicated with them by his tone; they knew they were being commanded, and after centuries of furtive skulking they became brave, puffed up with millennial fervour.

Saul ordered them to prepare. He ordered them to search out the Piper, to bring Saul information, to find his friends. He described them, the black man and the short woman being kept hostage by the Piper. The rats did not care about the people being held. They represented nothing except a task set by Saul.

‘You are rats,’ Saul told them, sticking out his lower lip and jerking his head back like Mussolini. They gazed at him, a shifting mass of followers, peering out from all the nooks and crannies of the building site which they had congregated. ‘You’re the sneakers, the creepers, the rat-burglars. Don’t come to me afraid of being seen, don’t come to me with fears of the Piper’s revenge. Why will he see you? You’re rats… if he sees you you’re a failure to your species. Stay hidden creep in the spaces in between, and find him, and tell me where he is.’

The rats were inspired. They longed to follow him. He dismissed them with a wave and they scattered hr short-lived bravado.

Saul knew that beyond the range of his voice, the rats’ fear would quickly return. He knew that they would hesitate. He knew they would slow down as they scaled walls, look around anxiously for him to shout them on, and that they would fail. He knew: they would slink back to the sewers and hide until he found them and urged them out again.

But maybe one would be brave or lucky. Maybe one of his rats would scale the walls that divided the Piper’s sanctuary from the outside, and pick a way through the barbed wire, scamper along the pipes and the cables, cross the wasteland, and find him.

Somewhere, squeezed into the air-conditioning housing on the top of a financial building in the heart of the City, or in a bitumen-sealed hole under a sub-urban railway bridge, or in a room with no windows in an empty hospital beyond Neasden, or in the high tech vaults of a bank to the west of Hammersmith, or in the attic above a bingo hall in Tooting, the Piper was holding Natasha and Fabian, waiting out the week before Junglist Terror.

Saul suspected that the Piper would avoid the gaze of rats and spiders and birds. He was not afraid of his adversaries, but there was no point advertising his presence. He had issued his challenge, had told them the night that they would die. The Piper had issued them with invitations to their own executions.

It might be that he was only concerned with Saul, with the half-and-half, the rat-man he could not control, but he must suspect that Anansi would be there, too, and King Rat, and Loplop. They were not brave or proud. They were not ashamed to turn down challenges. But they knew that Saul was the only thing that the Piper could not control, that Saul was the only chance they had, and they knew they must be there to help him. If he did not survive, they could not.

The rats spread throughout London.

Saul was alone amidst the rubble and the scaffolding.

He stood in the centre of a wide ruined landscape, a blitzed corner of London that hid behind hoardings, in easy earshot of Edgware Road. A forty-foot by forty-foot square, carpeted in crushed brick and old stone and surrounded by the backs of buildings. On one edge of the square a rough wooden fence hid the street that flanked the site, and above the fence towered the old brick walls of ancient shops and houses. Saul looked up at them. On that side the windows were surrounded by large wooden frames, rotting but ornate, designed to be seen.

On all other sides the walls that enclosed him were vulnerable. They constituted the buildings’ underbellies, soft underneath the aesthetic carapace. Out of sight of their facades, he was ringed by great flat expanses of brick, windows that spilt at random down featureless walls. Seen from behind, caught unawares, the functionality of the city was exposed.

This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as for the city. It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. But the city did not like to be found out. Evens as he saw it clearly for the product it was, Saul felt it square up against him. The city and he faced each other. He saw London from an angle against which it had no front, at a time when its guard was down.

He had felt this before, when he had left King Rat, when he had known that he had slipped the city’s bonds; and he had known then that he had made off it an enemy. The windows which loomed over reminded him of that.

In the corner of the square lurked obscure building machines, piles of materials and pickaxes, bags of cement covered with blue plastic sheeting. The looked defensive and overwhelmed. Just in front them stood the remnants of the building that had been pulled down. All that remained was a section of its front, a veneer one brick deep, with gaping, glassless holes where windows had been. It seemed miraculous that it could stand. Saul walked over the broken ground towards it.

There were lights on in a few of the rooms that overlooked him and, as he walked silently, Saul even caught sight of movement here and there. He was not afraid. He did not believe that anyone would see him; he had rat blood in his veins. And if they did, they might be surprised to see a man striding by lamplight in the forbidden space of a nascent building, but who would they tell? And if someone were, unbelievably, to call the police, Saul could simply climb and be gone. He had rat blood in his veins. Tell the police to call Rentokil, he thought. They might have a better chance.

He stood under the free-standing facade. He stretched his arms up, prepared to scramble over the city himself, to join his emissaries in their search. He did not believe that he would find Fabian or Natasha or the Piper, but he could not fail to look for them. To acquiesce in the Piper’s plans would be to abrogate his own power, to become collaborator. If he were to meet the Piper on the ground the Piper had specified, he would be dragged there, he would be unwilling. He would be angry.

He heard a noise above him. A figure swung into view in one of the empty window-frames. Saul was still. It was King Rat.

Saul was not surprised. King Rat followed him often, waited until the rats had left, then poured scorn on his efforts, ridiculed him in agonized contumely, incoherent with rage at the behaviour of the rats who had once obeyed him.

King Rat grasped his small perch with his right hand. He crouched, his left arm dangling down between his legs, his head lowered towards his knees. Seeing him, Saul thought of a comic-book hero Batman or Daredevil. Silhouetted in the ruined window, King Rat looked like a scene-setting frame at the start of an epic graphic novel.

‘What do you want?’ Saul said finally.

In a sinewy sliding movement King Rat emerged, from the window and landed at Saul’s feet. He bent his knees on landing, then rose slowly just before him.

His face twisted.

‘So what silly buggers are you playing now, cove?’

‘Fuck off,’ said Saul and turned away.