"Cheruk!" Vemulus howled, battering his own visor to shake away scurrying mice, and in the blurry moment before more fur crawled on his face, he glimpsed the werewolf by his trace outline under the carpet of mice, reached, fur-blind, into the furry heap, snatched the longer, shaggier pelt, and dragged the werewolf free running not only blind, but deaf, from the thick, swarming screeches of the mice-storm, and his own roaring holler, which had hammered through his howl for Cheruk until his lips were numbed and his throat hoarse and scratched.
Vemulus had never been this frightened and angry. While he prayed to tear through the Beora river by luck, at that moment, he would have run through fire or onto drawn swords, hoping to disperse the burning swarm. At the dim thought that the mice might dart away from more eyes, he screamed for help. Even his sister could only take his head, while the mice were digging their paws in literally everything.
That's when it came to him. If they felt like a sheet of fire, he would treat them like one. Hurling Cheruk to the side with as much spin as he could, he flopped onto the ground amid a chorus of shrieks, smashed the life from those trapped in his breastplate, then rolled, squeezing out more shrieks,
with the squashed-but-living scampering over the crushed in their bloody passage from his armor. Having hurled Cheruk with considerable momentum, the werewolf had hit the ground rolling, battered his cloak of mice nearly as bloody, then began rolling with zeal, grinding his swarm to a paste that stuck to his fur.
As more mice swarmed toward their falling comrades, Vemulus and Cheruk sprang to their feet, and sprinted in a limping gait as best as they could, with Cheruk's hide erasing its scratches as his hide shifted from man to half-wolf.
Come to think of it, Vemulus also started to feel better. Where he had felt the mice drawing their scratches, he had feared to see angry red wounds, but there were only fading pink welts, barely visible on his hairy forearms. It had always been this way, he realized. Having been beaten by his uncle, he rose the next day with a clear head and a smile. While his ego was still bruised from being thrashed by the Earth children, his bodily bruises had cleared by nightfall. Why had he never noticed? Being a prince, he had led a lucky life, but hardly a charmed life, for when he had not sought out mischief,
misfortune found him, even amid his excesses of fortune. Though the firstborn boy, he had never been held by his mother, nor worn his rightful crown. But whenever he had been incapacitated, whether by sickness or injury, he was on his feet within a day. While critical of others, the Regent's bullying example had taught him to be less than respectful toward himself, and he supposed it was this lack of inward observation, having not only buried feelings but an unexamined life, that resulted in his not having noticed his resilience before now.
Was this why the Regent had passed him over for Suvani? While a few minutes older, she was nonetheless a girl, and coronating her was the least popular decision of his uncle's reign, however much she went on to hoodwink the masses into tolerating her vanities, cruelties, and evil excesses.
What was he, Vemulus wondered. Was he also a werewolf? If not, why did he heal like one, if not nearly so fast? While Cheruk was already whole, Vemulus was still limping. He was glad to discover, however, in running his tongue along his mouth, that his mouse-chewed lip had filled in,
although it was a short-lived relief when his healing mouth cracked, chapped, and puffed double its size. If his body was still somewhat battered, his vigor had supercharged, and his fiery rage had rejuvenating even faster.
What a stupid magical power, Vemulus groused--why not invisibility, or god-like strength? Not only did armor and his princely rank keep him out of tough scrapes, but he was usually better at dishing it out than his opponents. During his bullied boyhood, he had often lain in bed with the lumps the Regent had rewarded his stubborn pride, and while he had never learned to like it, he had learned to live with it. How much worse could they have been without lycanthropic healing?
Having never changed, how could he be a werewolf? Had the regent cowed him so completely that his lupine nature never manifested? If he was only half or quarter werewolf, that was even stupider, he grumbled to himself. Claws and a four-legged sprint would be useful right now.
"Cheruk."
"My prince?"
"I've seen half-dwarves, but never a half-breed talking animal. Are there half-werewolves?"
"We are not only wholly wolf, but wholly human, your highness. Our lives are twofold mysteries, say our mystics."
"Shove your occult claptrap, Cheruk. Answer my question."
"Then yes, my prince. There are half-werewolves."
"Why haven't I seen any?"
"Because those that join our packs not only change like we do, but look, act, and are regarded by us as werewolves."
"And the ones that can't change?"
"The pretty ones are breeding stock. The ugly ones are a delicacy reserved for our chiefs."
"You're a chief, Cheruk. Have you tasted this rare delicacy?" When Vemulus tried to rein in his sneering smile, and couldn't restrain his macabre mirth, he stifled his laughing snort in his sleeve. Vemulus wasn't morally squeamish, but if his general was a baby-eater, it was not only revolting and vile, but so ridiculous and degrading that every dark god of Alsantia would hoot and clap at hearing it.
"No, my prince. As I said, they are rare. Lycanthropy is so persistent a strain that even one-sixteenth werewolves can change skins." Cheruk sniffed the air, growled, then whispered, "perhaps the ugly cubs don't want to change. Take cover, my prince."
Vemulus drew in his breath sharply as they squatted in the shrubs shading a transplanted Luskveld tree, a gigantic titan hollowed out to serve as a Terianan hub of industry or trade. As a pack of spotted cheetahs whipped one by one overhead, their paws so flicked the leaves that the rustling shrub's thorny interior prickled the prince and his man-hound. When the cats sprinted pell-mell down the way Vemulus and Cheruk had come, one bringing up the rear moseyed through, nosing the strewn carcasses of mice.
"Suvani's elite," growled Vemulus. "They know my scent. Why haven't they stopped?"
"Cats are lazy," sniffed Cheruk. "Lazy paws, lazy tails, lazy eyes, and lazy snouts. No doubt they do smell you, but their lazy brains haven't connected you to your scent."
"They may be lazy, but they're loyal," grumbled Vemulus. "And not to me. Suvani's definitely here."
"Did I not say that already?" Being the well-trained cur that he was, no sooner had Cheruk snapped at Vemulus than he whimpered, "forgive me, my prince."
"While I had deduced that myself earlier, yes, you did tell me, Cheruk. Nonetheless, I had to see it with my own eyes. Why did she come?"
"My prince." Cheruk lowered his eyes. "Perhaps because you weren't following orders?"
"I wasn't asking you, Cheruk," Vemulus said with a scathing tone.
"Who were you asking?"
When Cheruk looked around with a confused expression, Vemulus snickered.
"Fate, my destiny, the gods, anything but you. Minions should have no opinions."
"Have I failed you, my prince?"
"Everything has failed me, General Cheruk. If I seem to hate you right now, it's not personal."
When the rearmost cheetah neither scarfed down nor looted the carcasses, proving herself not only more disciplined than Cheruk, but any other beast under Vemulus's command, it was clear that she was either Suvani's scout, or some Ephremian spy.
When the cheetah stalked toward their bush, Cheruk rocked back on his heels and shifted into his man-wolf shape, as if he meant to sprint away at a madcap pace. Vemulus laid one hand on his hairy forearm. "I don't like your chances at outrunning a cheetah, Cheruk. And are you thinking of leaving your prince in a bush?"
"When I draw the cat away, you can escape, my prince."
Likely story, mused Vemulus. He had found that werewolves, like all hounds, were cowards at heart if you hit their nose or kicked their tail hard enough, and Cheruk no doubt intended to save his own skin. But his doing so might give Vemulus his window for escape.
"Brave doggy, Cheruk. I'm touched."
When Cheruk's eyes pinched tight, Vemulus was uncertain if this was like a dog panting in pleasure from being petted, or only drowsiness, or a silent growl of bloodthirsty aggression, sizing up Vemulus into choice cuts.
"Go then," growled Vemulus. "What are you waiting for?"
"Yes, my prince," Cheruk simpered, bending to a grotesque, scraping bent no human could possibly reach, no matter how fawning, then raised to a feral crouch, drew his paw from Vemulus's hand--strange that he hadn't noticed the press of fur in his revulsion at the werewolf's uncharacteristic burst of humility--then lunged, battering aside the clashing leaves of the bush.
As Vemulus shrank in the bristling, needling core of the bush, the werewolf's simpering barreled to a savage, brutal growl, which was met by a comical, dumbfounded mew, and a scraggling gargle, gurgling so wet and piteous that Vemulus nearly lost his patience and dashed out to stamp out the dying cheetah. He found relief in gripping the punishing bark instead, which filled his fingernails with tiny, crumbling blades as he clutched and squeezed, until the hush was broken by the patter of paws, and the flicking aside of the scratching boughs of the bush.
"Quick work, General Cheruk."
While the werewolf bowed his head, his brow furrowed over averted eyes, as if something tremendously interesting lay in the massed needles at the feet of the bush. "They will be coming."
"We have a minute. Catch your breath."
"Cheetahs have better ears. They'll be slinking around to our hiding place even now."
"It's your imagination that prowls around, Cheruk." But even as he mocked the werewolf, he pushed back the branch, conscious not only of the clash and scrape of his armor, but as he barged into the sunlight, of how bright it lit his pale skin, and no sooner had he set foot on the path than he picked up his pace to a jog, not even checking over his shoulder for Cheruk.
Not a breath later, the werewolf had caught up, nosed ahead, and cocked his head each way, his eyes flashing everywhere for ambushes and spies, before hunkering back to the prince with a confiding expression.
"I don't see them, but I feel that they're there."
"I trust your instincts, General. To the harbor."
While Teriana once had a brisk riverboat trade, the Alsantian navy now cluttered the docks and burdened the water so heavily that waves licked the wharf, and sometimes washed over them, swishing not only with the ships' foul jettison--human waste, kitchen scraps, rivulets of burnt oil--but a gorier jetsam, the river-bloated bodies of Teriana's stout defenders, whom had been unceremoniously dispatched in keeping with Queen Suvani's policies, which were highly intolerant of the dead.
It had been, and still was, his sister's biggest mistake, for the living were not only sentimental toward their dead, but often downright mushy over their departed. Having never missed anyone, alive or dead, aside from a foggy, faint mist of a feeling for his nearly forgotten mother, he could comprehend neither this mawkish attachment to funeral rites nor the useless clutching of wailing spouses and children upon corpses that had abandoned them, but it was bad policy to alienate your bread and butter. Tax revenues had dipped, and never recovered, since her arrogant declaration of war on the deceased, and as there were not good, but tidy crops every year, and a flourishing commodities trade, the only reason could be that embittered citizens hoarded their money in resentment of their monarch. In Vemulus's opinion, the spoiled people of Alsantia were in need of a good scourging, but it wouldn't have been necessary if his sister had rational policies.
Now that she conspired against him, Vemulus was grateful to his sister's stupidity, and hoped she would continue to be so. While she hadn't ordered it herself, the armies' thoughtless enactment of her war on the dead had poisoned Teriana's river.
They now rushed down Cucurulain Street, named after the king who had founded Teriana. While the city was mostly wood, the first wave of humans to ally with the talking animal indigenes had erected stoneworks and sculptures here, now encrusted with lime. Cracks had whitened the gray over the centuries, until the human and animal forms had become rough, eyeless sentinels which nonetheless seemed to glare upon the Terianan traffic, lingering ominously upon Vemulus and Cheruk. Only two statues were still honored with faces, perhaps by virtue of their small scale and the nearly cartoonish line of their sculpts: a statue of a mouse which not only was intact, but polished, as if loving cared for over the centuries, and one of a bearded man who stooped low over the mouse, as if genuflecting to a king. Vemulus's couldn't tear his eyes away. He felt himself to be a common peasant, as for the first time in his life, he was rubbernecking in a crowd. It nagged at him terribly, like a puzzle with a piece missing, waiting for him to fill it. Not that it hadn't remained curiously whole over the ages, with only a fine crackling in the stone webbing the breast, back, and the flourishing tail...
Vemulus's eyes flashed back to the bearded profile. This was no man. This was a werewolf. The realization made his heart skip a beat.
When Vemulus was younger, the Regent had halfheartedly asked him along to Alsantia's far reaches, promising to fill in the prince's understanding of his realm, but when he did not repeat this offer, Vemulus stayed home with his horses, drilled with his weapons, and stewed in his implacable resentment of his uncle. While the Regent had brought him lavish souvenirs of this tour, as they were more suited to a boy half his age, those scorned relics of his childhood were now all but forgotten, save six wooden soldiers and animals from Teriana. While also fit for a toddler, these marvelous toys, despite seeming carved from one piece of wood, were not only fully articulated, but through some Terianan charm, had a repertoire of motions and actions, with the stag charging across his mantle at sunrise and sunset, the monkey climbing everything that touched its hands, and a strange, hairy man that, when touched on its back, morphed into a hound.
Had Vemulus heeded his bullying uncle, Cheruk might never have made general, for here stood another monument testifying to an ancient collusion between Teriana, once the enemies of High Alsantia, and the werewolves, ever its loyal dogs--were his predecessors so blind as to not see the work of history with their own eyes? Surely someone should have suspected before now. Or was he only paranoid, Vemulus wondered. After all, this historical monument need not reflect current politics. Or did it?
"What do you know of this place, Cheruk?"
"Of Teriana, my prince?"
"Not Teriana, you twit," spat Vemulus. "This district."
"It's only a thoroughfare, my prince. Cucurulain is quite small."
"I can see that it's small, you cur," grumbled Vemulus. "I said tell me what you know."
"I don't know much, my prince. Only that Teriana once signed an ancient pact here."
"My senile tutor taught me that. You're holding something back."
"My prince?" Cheruk's timid scowl seemed genuine.
"Save me the textbook answer, Cheruk. Just five years ago, weren't you talking animals one happy family? Before you signed my sister's accord, you were one of them, Cheruk."
"A talking animal?" Cheruk looked aghast at the thought. "One of them, my prince? You must be joking. Werewolves have true change."
"Talking animals change. Some do, anyway. I don't see the difference."
"Did I not say, just minutes ago, that we are both wolf and human by the mystery of our kind?" While Cheruk, in his fervor, had forgotten to lavish Vemulus with a 'your highness' or a 'my prince,' the prince pretended not to notice, for he wearied of the constant toadying and fawning; a General should have pride and self-respect.
"Talking animals don't know true change, but swap skins, trading in one nature for another." Cheruk shuddered. "This unnatural exchange of their true nature for a false one is abomination, and the main reason we rebelled against the Noble Pelt. While we had allowed this unholy trasde as an oddity of our kings, when True Alsantia played with being false, we could not bear it."
Vemulus snickered. "So your prince--and your queen--have truer hearts than your animal kings?"
"No one knows the heart, my prince. We only say that your faces are true."
Vemulus smiled grudgingly, as he could not deny that he never pretended to be anything but what he was. "Good to know, Cheruk, but that's not what I wanted. Cat got your tongue? Or should I say a mouse?"
"My prince?"
"You never told me your ancestors were so beholden to the mice."
Vemulus's eyes seemed to recede into beady mouse eyes, which flicked here and there, as if scurrying to hide. "My prince!"
"Speak, knave, or..."
"Cover yourself!" Cheruk brusquely forced Vemulus into a shanty that seemed to lean on its shallow hill, but once they had shoved inside, went way back inside the hill, a kind of storefront for a general store, with bushels of apples, pears, peppers, onions, beans, boots, teas, herbs, spices, sheaves of rolled paper or linen, ink bottles, and even more. On a long table of rough wood hatched with the scratchings of many knives rested many loaves of aromatic bread, and its rising scent not only kindled the prince's appetite, it fanned the fires of his anger anew, bringing all his nasty and bitter thoughts to a new vitality.
"Hands off, dog!" Vemulus dug his feet in the dirt floor and shook free the werewolf's paws so vehemently that Cheruk tumbled into a bushel of onions, snarling and slashing through wicker and onionskin.
Where was he? Having been dragged at least a hundred feet underground, Vemulus was disoriented, and snapped, groggily. "What's the meaning of this?"
"They saw us, my prince."
"This is no better," Vemulus said patiently. "Seeing as they see us now." Vemulus tipped his head in scorn, waving his hand at the gathered shoppers, whose burlap sacks rested idle on the floor, and whose jaws were even slacker in staring at the Alsantian prince. While his sister's face was on the coins and the flags, Vemulus was a famous personage, easily recognizable from the many news sheets and proclamations that heralds, envoys, and town criers disseminated throughout the realm.
As they barged through the slackjawed crowd and the clapping back door, Vemulus elbowed Cheruk's furry ribs, grinned maliciously at his general's yelp, then doubled-down by stomping on the werewolf's toes.
On a loading dock, talking beavers and a squat, balding man shoved stacked crates inch by inch to a wharf, where a jetty bobbed on the swollen river, sloshing with jetsam.
"Hey! You're not allowed here," barked a wizened badger with white eyebrows and a curling, thickened fur around his mouth and chin, suggesting a wispy, wizard beard. As Cheruk growled, his face fur thickened, his half humanity ebbed away, and with a lunging step, he nipped so sharply at the shortened space between them that the badger darted behind his slouching underlings, who lurched up, their hands and paws milling before them as they stumbled into each other, until two of the beavers splashed in the river.
"Down, my prince." Cheruk growled with such authority that, for a moment, Vemulus thought the cur commanded him to sit and beg, as if he was the dog and it the master, until his eyes followed the outstretched paw, pointing to the water-slopping craft rocking on the river.
"I'm not boarding that! Even if you think me a coward, I'd sooner dig my own grave than hop in that waterlogged coffin!"
"We're not fleeing." While Cheruk bowed his head, his averted eyes smoldered, a smothered flame kindling a strong discomfort in Vemulus's own belly. Perhaps it was fear, Vemulus reasoned, then laughed at his own foolishness. While he had known anxiety, he had never feared death, trusting to his rank, reputation, and armor. No one had ever dared stand up to him, even those children who had abducted him, and this werewolf surely wasn't growing a backbone now. "Every river or ocean vessel has a garrison of rats, my prince. Did you not want a rat army?"
While Vemulus was too arrogant to share his wants with a talking beast, he was not only curious, but intensely desirous of a rat army. As Suvani had the throne, the kingdom, and the armies,
he must level the playing field. He needed something that would give pause even to a queen.
"Come my prince." As the rats scurried on the prow and bowed low, this gloating tone piped up from one with dead black fur, darker than night, whose eyes twinkled to deep, glinting depths, like a pit yawning open for Vemulus. The rat's gesturing claw seemed to unravel him, swallowing not only his height but his bulk as the deck expanded into a cavernous chasm of hulking, glossy lumber, and Vemulus tripped on a knothole grown bigger than he was, a long, ragged gash of splinters, like a grave hewn for him in the wood--then the dizziness swam over him, and he collapsed in the wooden crevice, while Cheruk, more accustomed to transformation, seized his prince's heel and dragged his shrunken prince across the floor.
As Vemulus came back to himself, his woozy eyes saw endless grooves running to the hull collecting motes of dust, crumbs of bread, and beads of the resinous stain that had finished the deck, still gummy after the days, weeks, or moons since it had been treated, as well as a thin sheen of white and black hairs so strewn that the winding clumps grimed his hands and snaked around his dangling locks of hair, until the entangling jungle of rat hair drew taut, snapping some of his strays out by the roots.
The rat wizard had shrunk him, Vemulus realized, not with a shock, but the echo of one. As the day's strain took its toll, his trembling eyes latched on the desk lamp, now as distant as a sun and engulfed in blackness, for in dwindling nearer to nothingness, the prince had fallen into the shadowy reaches of the room. When Chruk, following their hosts, dragged him through a gaping concavity in the hull, it snuffed the light. If he stood on the deck at his full height, his eye would no doubt pass over this unsightly knothole, but to his new, ratty perspective, its ugliness was as terrifying as a tornado or a whirpool--a murderous vortex torturing the wood.
Having tugged the prince to a landing atop a spiral of stony and glossy steps, like so many bones, Cheruk paused.
No, not bones, Vemulus realized, but polished, monstrous teeth embedded in the stairwell, the fangs of some giant cat.
Vemulus groaned in exhaustion. Why had the werewolf paused? Was he seriously considering dragging him step by step, bump by bump, and bruise by bruise, all the way down the dark, snaky stairwell?
Cheruk cocked his head back, eyed his woozy prince, then stooped, shifted to human form, and dug his hands in Vemulus's armpits to hoist him to his feet.
"How do you do it?" Vemulus asked.
"My prince?"
"Even at Eldryn size, you switch back and forth from wolf to man."
"It's like growing my pelt, my prince. I neither think it nor wish it. It just happens."
"Are you snapping at me?"
"No, my prince." But having sighed wearily, the werewolf's slouch slumped even deeper as they trudged deeper down the dark stairwell, until the shadows pinked with a roseate glow, reddened to amber, then yellowed harsher than bold daylight.
While the stairwell had buzzed with a distant tinkling, as the light whitened, it mellowed to a ringing before flaring to a din of wheezy howls and a constant patter.
The first sight was so astonishing, Vemulus forgot where he was and fell into a distant memory, a time when he felt even more underfoot and out of sight than he was now. He must have been no more than five years old, his reign of mischief interrupted by the arrival of Eintuliu the storyteller, whose puppets, animated to a near-perfect semblance of animal life despite having an identical four-fingered anatomy (the puppeteer having lost a finger to an infant disease, it was rumored), acted out the ancient myth of four rat kingdoms contesting a stream bordering miles of citified mounds and hollowed hills, which could not have been any more urbanized than the keel of this warship.
For in the bottom of one of the prince's own ships of war, the rats had constructed a veritable city, subsisting not on trade, but on industrialized, systemic theft: here a terraced restaurant was built on the steel slopes of a scale breastplate; there a public bath was made of a tower shield; and here were potatoes, onions, and apples no doubt liberated from his ships' galleys. And these were only the outskirts. The loathsome splendor of the rat city stretched from prow to stern.
As they passed through the ruby-eyed horde, a fruitseller offered rotten fruits on an equal footing with fresh; sourer smells wafted from a bar and restaurant cobbled together inside a coffin with a broken lid; and, bedraggled workers staved off the ocean with a constant smear of grease spread by brush, then tamped in hard-to-reach crannies by tongue. Despite the grim, nasty necessity of their daily toil--which, if they had ceased for an hour, would result in the entire city getting swept away and drowned--these puny rats were often muscled aside, or even yanked by the tail for a laugh.
Vemulus scowled. On a warship, this entire city was contraband, however much it elicited an involuntary whistle of wonder. Had these vermin compromised his entire fleet? Not his fleet, he reminded himself. The realization hit him hard, with an undercurrent of disbelief. Had the shrinkage also dwindled his power to think and remember? As his enchanted diminishment compounded his feelings of powerlessness, self-loathing swelled, and as he strove to regain his composure, anger and resentment for Suvani surged. His sister had not only taken the reins of his armies and navies, but his freedom and pride, until he had less to hope for than a Terianan badger.
As he looked on the rat sprawl, he wondered at the extent of their reach. While allying with the rats might not give him the leverage he needed against Suvani, it at least gave him back his fleet.
The cacophany of the boisterous rats was so profound that the lapping ocean waves could only be felt, not heard, in tremors rocking the keel. This verminous din only diminished as they came nearer the only house not stolen from their Alsantian hosts, a veritable manor constructed painstakingly from choice lumber, discarded tin and cast-off iron kitchenware and weaponry.
While hulking guards flanked the double doors fashioned from the leather binding of some ancient folio, they were hardly stationed there, having barely the patience to stand guard, as they scampered up and down the walkway like hounds bounding to greet their guests, which they did no less than six times before Vemulus and Cheruk were escorted to the gate.
"Humans!"
"Not humanses!" The taller of the two rats intoned his sloppy Alsantian so proudly that he surely knew who he had the pleasure to address. "A prince...and his dog."
"Have a care, rat!" growled Cheruk. "I'm a werewolf, and your better even at this enchanted size."
"What a quaint idea." The other, uglier brute's inflection and articulation were so near perfect that Vemulus suspected him of having an education much too good for him. "Do you know how many of my betters have passed through my gullet, on the way to the sewage left in this ship's wake?"
Having gathered the gist of this parable, the taller rat snickered. "Inferiors, too--we're not prejudiced." Bending low, this looming brute whispered to the prince. "If I was a snob, I'd not know that there's no sweeter meat than my own kind."
"Trolvik, you embarrass yourself; worse, you embarrass me." Screwing up his irate face and quivering whiskers, the hulking rat grumbled, "now bow to your prince, and take him to the king."
"The ordering of that sentence bothers me," scowled the tall rat. "Are we to honor this interloper more than our own monarch?"
"We are. He's not only the prince of everything, but one day the king."
Vemulus's ears perked up. As far as he knew, no Alsantian had entertained the thought of Vemulus being king since his uncle had coronated Suvani. If the rats were still rooting for him, he suddenly liked them a whole lot better. He could find someplace in his realm for this many small stomachs to feed, surely? A moment later, Vemulus was snickering to himself, for he had already begun to scheme. While he still wasn't satisfied, and, for that matter, had never really been happy, at least he felt like himself.
As he warmed up to the idea of an alliance with the rats, one thought still nagged at Vemulus.
"Cheruk."
"Yes, my prince."
The tall rat led them down a long concourse paved with corks still fragrant with the aging bouquet of their wines.
"How did you know to bring me here, Cheruk?" Vemulus carefully emptied his voice of all its angst, but couldn't quite inject a cheery note. While a goodwilled conspirator might not be a traitor, if Cheruk was a plotter, Vemulus must take pains either to isolate the werewolf, to ensure he could do his prince no harm, or to enlist these talents for his own gain.
Under its trace of fur, Cheruk's face grew cherry red, as if giving the lie to his assurances. "Do you remember that statue?"
"Do you mean the mouse...or your treasonous ancestor?"
"They were different times, Prince Vemulus. Times and interests change. What hasn't changed is that werewolves prefer not to be schemers or policy makers, but doers."
"So you delegate your sneakiness to outsiders. When you were inclined to be loyal dogs, it was the mice, and now that your hearts and skins have turned, the rats..."
"We're always loyal dogs," barked Cheruk. "Loyal to who is all. Right now I'm loyal to you."
"Only right now? Was that a threat?" seethed Vemulus.
Cheruk only scratched his ear and neck. Having never been so disregarded by a minion, Vemulus felt himself deflate, as if his sagging spirits had burst at last, spilling his prince's power until he felt as small as the rats. No, feeling had nothing to do with it. He was as small, and the most ordinary man could lord it over him now. When the truth struck home, his head pounded, and he rubbed his eyes. As the hull seened to pinch tight around him, his breathing rasped and quickened. Not only was he as small as the vermin, he could no longer be distinguished from the teeming masses. He was no longer an individual, but part of a murmuring swarm; even if restored to his proper stature, he had lost his voice. The fear of Cheruk leaving--his last faithful dog--loomed large over Vemulus. What was a prince without followers? Having lost his bark, he would be nothing without his bite. He tamped down his desperation, for a werewolf would not heel for a weak hand; in the next few moments, one or the other would go for the throat.
His burning roar dropped to a low grumble: "Are you skinchangers or turncoats?"
"Humans turn tail so fast that they'd live inside out if it meant another day of life."
"And even half a man masters turns of phrase and double-talk."
"Was that meant to apply to me?" growled Cheruk.
"Maybe I'm not satisfied with your explanation, or lack thereof," Vemulus snarled back.
"Is it not good to have allies with ears close to the ground?"
"Precisely. Had you mentioned your rat friends prior to this, I might not be in this situation."
"Until today, they were on friendly terms with your sister, and perhaps even now scheme how best to use us as political capital with the Queen. You must win them over, my prince. How they treat werewolves is of little relevance as to how they treat you." Cheruk sighed. "Do this right, my prince. Get what you came for. I've enjoyed playing your lapdog, however little you deserve me. You're much more entertaining than your sister."
"I liked you better when you didn't yap so much." Vemulus scowled. Anger brewed, coalescing around the faithless faces of all who had betrayed or mistreated him: not only his disloyal generals and lieutenants, many of whom he had handpicked, and the interlopers from Earth, but his awful family, from his unworthy sister and cruel uncle to the mother he had never known. While her face was blank in his memory, it was darkened by angry shadows now. While he could not know how his mother might have guided Alsantia, had she lived, this choice would not be his.
Why had Suvani sent him to head her armies? Was she so smug in her wise instinct for wickedness as to have predicted the way the dominos would fall: captured by their enemies, baited into a siege, the power-lust and thirst for revenge having gone to his head?
Inside, the manor was more of a palace, being surprisingly long, and comprised of loot stolen from ships' holds--such as hollowed lamps, balustrades, rune-inlaid statues carved from wood, horn, tusk, and dragon scale, tapestries sliced to patches, then distributed to curtain the rat palace, so that here and there, faces peeked from the rich weave, or more incongruent picture fragments: a hand holding a rein; a tail protruding from a horse's fanny; or. the unsightly birthmark on a beautiful woman's cheek; all raised from their intended verismilitude to fuzzy points of focus by the shredding of one artistic perspective into a hundred different points of view.
A dozen of these tiny draperies lined a hall leading to another book cover of opulent hide, perhaps ancient scaled leather cut from an extinct dragon, before which slouched a half-dozen bulging rats a head taller than the door guards, packed with ugly, protruding muscles like clumps of prunes, and clutching sharp pole-axes.
Despite rippling muscles so tense that it seemed a pinprick might flood the corridor with surging brawn, these guards shied from Trolvik as he neared the door. When the tall rat whispered a low-toned order from the corner of his snout, some took in sharp intakes of breath, then all stood as erect as a hunkering rat can manage, saluted, and bowed, scraping near the cork flooring before they raised their eyes forward again, glancing so far over Vemulus's shoulder that they seemed to stare into his shadow. At first the prince thought it was eye contact they feared, like commoners making way for a prince, but as their whiskers and chins quivered, he realized that wasn't it--they feared all of him, head to toe.
"Rah rah rah rah!" Perhaps these were distinct syllables in rat, but to Vemulus, their brutal cheer sounded like the roars of bears or lions. When their roars droned on, jarring with what he thought he knew about the tiptoeing vermin that skulked in walls, Vemulus realized these harsh growls would be squeaks to full-size ears.
"That's enough." Tetchily elbowing the brutes, Trolvik headed for the door. "Come, my prince." His voice dripped scorn. "And be of good cheer. Any bag of bones can wear a crown. Or be a carcass in a larder--so there's that, if it doesn't work out. Everyone has a purpose." As he stepped through the door, the door guards melded back into formation.
"Wait for us!" When Vemulus stepped forward, expecting to stiff arm the brutes, they fell to each side, letting him through the door.
His eyes went so white that his hands flew to his face, rubbing away the blinding brilliance. The light had lanced to the back of his skull, transfixing his eyes like butterflies, the pain fluttering through a head fogged red by the piercing dazzle and his grinding palms. Eyesight throbbed back slowly,
revealing a harshly lit chamber, and the lanky rat, who gave him a scornful, sidelong glance, holding a finger to his lips as he led them further into the blinding light.
Cheruk slunk alongside him as Vemulus stepped into a gleaming opulence: pearl, mother of pearl, and gemstones, collecting a white radiance stemming from a glass chandelier layered like a tulip, with petals pink, violet, scarlet, and clear.
Vemulus instantly understood it. Just as humans feared heights, but their kings and queens perched on high thrones overlooking storied mountaintop castles, the kings of light-fearing rats clutched at light, the better to cultivate an atmosphere of fear and respect in their subjects. In the increasing illumination of their approach to this scintillating throne room, the rats quivered from the gradual trepidation, like a human planned his groveling as he ascended steep slopes, then steps, to his king.
"Why do we have so many steps," young Vemulus had griped, then picked himself off the floor
where his uncle had clouted him.
"Crawl a little and see," the Regent had rebuked him, and Vemulus had learned this lesson well,
observing that those petitioners not short of breath were often short on courage by the time they had made the ascent. While their complaints were just as petty in the city below as at the foot of the throne, a gruelling climb tended to give one perspective, and so it was with the rats, accustomed to shadow, who were gradually scoured by the amplified light of the rat king's palace.
"Well met, Vemulus."
The prince's rubbed-raw eyes flicked around the chamber, alighting on the peculiar throne,
fashioned from some princeling's circlet so layered with many-colored silk handkerchiefs that it looked like a vague reflection of the chandelier flowering from the ceiling. Inside this plush ring lay an immense white rat shaggier than a long-haired cat. While its maned and bearded head was regal and proud, its lazy body was swimming with clumped fat that threatened to slosh over the silk-lined circlet.
"I don't have the honor of knowing your name," said Vemulus. A questionable honor, he thought, as he tipped his head in the merest sign of respect one might offer fellow royalty.
"I'm not surprised," chuckled the rat king. "As we have many kingdoms, so many vie for the title of King Rat that it waters down my rightful recognition."
"Your majesty, no one knows more than me the way pretenders covet crowns and thrones. My twin and I have only known peace for nine months, in our mothers' womb, and Suvani has inherited what is rightfully mine."
"I had heard you clutched her heel on the way into the world, not the other way around."
"I would not be such a fool as to dispute that." As the heat rose flush to his throat, Vemulus's breastplate became a strangling weight. "But my natural father would not have railed against tradition."
"You mean that human relic called primogeniture."
"Call it antique if you will, but it has been customary for millenia in Alsantia."
"Don't get me wrong, your highness. I have no ground to criticize. Our instincts are even more hackneyed than your customs. We pick a corpse to the bone without realizing what we do." He grinned a fat, fatuous smile, revealing harsh yellow teeth which contrasted garishly with the gleaming room. "My great-grandfather loved your uncle, you know. Not that they met, but he loved him for his policies, which juiced the realm full of vice and excess which benefitted the strong. No doubt the weak rabble remember him differently, as a spiteful, cruel creature, prone to fixing petty whims as law."
"I remember him better..."
"Of course," the slug-shaped rat king hastened to interject, sloshing in his silk-lined circlet, "I hadn't meant to suggest..."
"...and such a description, from one who never spoke to him, is uncannily accurate." Vemulus forced a flat smile as his eyes narrowed with irked amusement. "Quite a devastating portrayal."
"Let us not cut to it, my prince. Unnecessary speaking is unnecessarily abject for those of our powerful rank."
"You're doing a whole lot of speaking now. Forgive me for not holding up my side of this lumbering discussion."
"So long as you hold up your end of our coming bargain, I could care less what you say." One eye leered between the polished points of the circlet throne, giving the fat rat king the momentary appearance of a hungry caged beast, "It is a license I grant those beasts lucky enough to come into my presence. 'Granting audience' we call it--heeding verminous pleas, and granting snips from our largesse." The rat king's greasy lisp hissed largesse until the word loomed large, like a roly-poly boa constrictor, sleeping off an elephant calf it had just inhaled. "If I don't allow their rude manners, we'll spend all day standing on niceties. And niceties might be fine to look at, but as shoes, they're cruel, and you can't stand on them for long."
"Oh good," laughed Vemulus. "I've been wanting to call you a silly little rat since I laid eyes on you. Now that's out of my system, let's deal."
"And I've wanted to call you a pompous little prig since your swelled, blowhard head tottered in, sucking up the air until you made an old rat feel claustrophobic." The rat king's yellow-grimed grin was smug. "Now that's a kingly insult, my prince."
If Vemulus held his sword in hand, he might have skewered the rat king, making Vemulus a miniature corpse at best, or more likely, in rat bellies by dusk. While Vemulus had a quick draw, the instant it would take gave him pause, until he bottled his anger and rocked on his feet, literally rattling in his armor. Was he so brittle as to be taunted by this rat? Being not human, but an animal of the lowest sort, no matter how much it pretended to kingship, it didn't own its petty words but had stolen them like a magpie from the mouths of its betters.
"Sorry, my king," said Vemulus. "A cat got my tongue, and with all the rats, the flea-sized-werewolf, and all the other filth, I almost couldn't find it."
"You don't approve of my decor? You might at least learn my name before insulting my hospitality."
"I'm much bigger than a flea," sulked Cheruk.
"I had asked your name, mighty rat king."
"Mightier than you know," the rat king said tetchily, "and it's Gorgius. King Gorgius."
Apt for a rat who had fattened past the point of dignity, mused Vemulus. "Then no, King Gorgius, your spread is too meager for my taste. Suvani having raided tombs and mausoleums to stock our windowsills with rich burial caches, I scarcely know how to be modest anymore. Every day I knock over a dead lord's urn."
"Are you of similar tastes?"
When Vemulus realized he was being appraised by the king's discerning look, he cloaked his stabbing instincts in a cheeky smile. "Quite the contrary, King Gorgius. I would do things much differently if my head bore the crown."
"That's the thing about heads," the lolling rat tittered. "How do they roll. If Suvani's head blocks yours from occupying that toothed ring of gold, we'll tease it into biting hers off. The surest, most fatal illness for royalty is unpoularity, my prince."
Indolence and blubber are what do you in, thought Vemulus. "While I was the peoples' choice two years ago, I am not so popular now."
"On the contrary." Everything the lolling rat said was so rich and throaty, infused with so much chin-waddle vibrato, that Gorgius always sounded like he was gloating. "We rats see everywhere: as disgruntled Ghulmarqueans curse your name, and Terianans are too cowed to look you in the eye, the rest of Alsantia cheer your progress. What do you think drove your brooding sister from her roost? She could care less about Ghulmarque or Teriana, so long as they pay their tribute. In the southern and eastern empire, they are so hungry for your exploits that they compose lyrics based on idle rumors, and when they have run out of gossip to mill, set lies to song." Gorgius's face inflated to a pink-gummed, yellow-toothed grin. "All flattering, I assure you. Your sister isn't jealous of your exploits, but your renown."
"If you mean she antagonizes our enemies out of envy, not even Suvani is so vain."
"Unlike your uncle, the Regent, whose prudence was as legendary as his spite, her wisdom was never more than an accessory. When she lost her mirror, she lost all perspective. She went from having three eyes to being blind in an instant."
"She lost the Albatron?" Vemulus was incredulous. "Then how...I assumed she had never stopped spying on me. So I could have done just as I liked, without fear of discovery?" Vemulus scowled. "It only means she's smarter than you allow, Gorgius, if she beset me on all sides without it."
Gorgius giggled, a fatty tremble jiggling his entire body, from bulbuous snout to chunky tail. "Yes, it's cowardice any rat would admire. And who said she stopped spying, my prince? She only lost her magical eye. As that artifact was ever silent, she has always had a swarm of ears feeding on whispers and rumors, spies that now double as her distant eyes."
Vemulus fumed. Despite being obvious from the facts, he could not believe any of his followers, whether the meanest galley scullion or the proudest general, would have the gall to rat him out to his sister, as if they were, well...as if they were rats...just how many had swarmed to the other side, he wondered? How had he gone from being the popular choice to unloved dupe in two short years? She was to have been his figurehead, not resented his influence. How had Suvani become so confident that she cast aside not only her twin, but her magical ally, the Albatron, calling the shots, not only without his support, but blindly, without its all-seeing wisdom? If he was never her right hand, he had been a useful left hand, doing much of the dirty work of her reign, and until late, she had used the Albatron to target where Vemulus was to strike.
"Knowing so much of the traitors about me, you likely know me as well. And you can guess why I've come."
"If we did, my prince, we would never presume to speak for you."
"We? Does even a rat king think of himself as a swarm, or was that the royal we?" When Gorgius flinched, Vemulus smiled to see him so provoked, but when the overflowing rat surged from his rumpled silks toward the prince, he took a step back, and looked warily at the trembling king.
"What was that?" Despite being a king secure in his bedchamber, lined with hulking guards, Gorgius's voice had lowered to a hoarse whisper. When he shook this time, he looked askance toward the shaking wall.
"The king!" As this guard lumbered forward, shouting, the others surged behind him, pole axes tipping back until their polished blades were whitened by the bright light.
"Your majesty?" Vemulus shivered in spite of himself. Despite his deep scowl and boiling anger, his legs quivered so much that he could barely keep his feet. "It was only a joke."
"It's not that, my prince." Gorgius shook so hard that he fell down on all fours, and his guards had to rescue him from this abject position, pulling him upright.
Something was wrong, Vemulus reasoned. Fear didn't make you lose your footing, it made you run. The boat was shaking! "I feel it now."
"Feel it!" shouted Gorgius. "The roar's making me deaf!"
"Roar?" When Vemulus turned to Cheruk, his general was doubled over, paws clutching his long-haired ears as if to wring the inaudible noise away.
When the shivering dropped to a hush, then roared to a sizzling, screeching buzz, Cheruk curled in a ball, and the squealing rats scampered out, nudging and tugging their lumpish rat overlord.
Having dropped to one knee to seize Cheruk by the nape of his neck, Vemulus very nearly lost his hand, when his general nearly bit the hand that had raised him up from a lapdog to a true dog of war.
"Get it together, Cheruk!"
"It's agonizing!"
"It's nothing!"
"Far from nothing," the werewolf whimpered. "Zalgynes."
"Zalgynes! Then get up! We'll be bombarded!" When Cheruk settled into a heap, Vemulus shook the werewolf. "You've heard the machines before."
"In air it's just a whine. Magnified by the riverbed, the water, and this hull, then collected in these tiny ears, it's killing me."
"Get up!" hollered Vemulus. "It's noise, not swords! I need your nose right now, not your ears. Find the sorcerer!"
Once ordered, Cheruk did as he was bade, but pattered out of the royal chamber hunkered over the whole way, his head buried in his shoulders deeper than anatomy seemed to allow, making Vemulus wonder if the werewolf's skin-changing now accommodated his itch to hide his wounded ears.
As they battered through the ancient book cover, its tatters flapped left, then drooped to the floor. In scuffling down the makeshift corridors, the ornamental bridge, then the meandering streets of the keel city, they jostled white, black, and brown rats, all gone so white or yellow with fear that they only rebounded from the collision with doubled force, ratty streaks flung left and right, or scurrying far ahead on the momentum, soon leaving the streets so barren that the silence in their wake creeped over Vemulus, flooding him with a palpable fear that chilled his spine and quickened his steps.
"He's swarming just ahead," said Cheruk. "At the base of the stairs."
"If he reaches topdeck, we're stuck this size. All fours, Cheruk. Run."
The werewolf had scampered only a few rat lengths when the ceiling crunched, stoved down by a plummeting force that punched a ragged hole in the floor, spraying splinters, then cold river gushing in, drawing Vemulus towards the gurgling hole until he pitched to one side and clutched the hull. At rat size, the wood grain was so deeply grooved that his fingers found easy handholds, which he held fast now as the rats rolled in brackish balls of sopping, furry riverwater around the jagged, watery rift.
"Cheruk!"
There was no answer.
"Cheruk! Save me! To your prince!"
The creeping silence had fused to the gurgling water, so that as it rose to the ceiling of the keel city, a hush fell, broken only by bobbing rats, either half-drowned, bedraggled, and squeezed around their last gasp of air, or all-drowned, blue-faced, bulging-eyed, and dead. While their mangy lives had been stolen, piece by piece, from his ship's stores, Vemulus felt a twinge of regret at seeing the whirlpool of rats flutter around the deluged hole. The vermin would have made excellent spies.
When the murmuring river rose again, pressing their noses to the sliver of air trapped by the ceiling, the next blob of fur emerged, his bulging eyes so fixed on the gushing hole that at first Vemulus thought this one was dead too. When the groggy, bleary sorcerer couldn't seem to shake himself back in focus, its eyes drifted along the rising surface of the water, its claws dug in the ceiling and it dragged itself toward the flooding breach.
Vemulus seized the rat by the neck. "Look at me, damn you!"
"We're all damned," growled the rat, its eyes suddenly screwing toward Vemulus. "If I'm damned to drown, it may as well be with a mouthful of prince."
Vemulus vised its lunging snout with a twist of his muscular hand, then clenched harder with the other hand, until he found a wheeze deep in the bedraggled rat wizard. "Change me back!"
"You'll be crushed," the rat wheezed.
"Better that than drowned in rat soup," growled Vemulus. "Change me back! I want to die a man! I want to die a prince!"
The rat sputtered the gurgling water, gasped, then clutched Vemulus with one claw to steady itself, and climb a little higher into the shrinking pocket of air. When it leaned its sopping head on the prince's shoulder and droned the spell, Vemulus cringed and shuddered, choking on his noseful of wet rat and shaken by his earful of sorcery.
Perhaps the spell was sluggish from the rat's weakened will, or perhaps spells that flashed in air
only seeped in water. When it didn't take hold right away, Vemulus drew his eyes into a menacing scowl, and curled his clutching fingers into a stranglehold. When the water surged over his ears, he tipped back his head, pressed his nose to the wet wood, drew in the last bubble of air, and then felt the telltale shimmy of magic.
At the touch of the change, Vemulus, knowing he had only moments, spun in the water and kicked off the ceiling toward the hole, feeling his accelerating expansion as a quickening slither toward, then through the breach, now the size of a child, scrambling and flailing in river spray, then a man, the pierced hull pinching his boot, which he thrashed free of, wrenching his ankle as he did so, his face still pouched tight around the last breath his lungs fought hard to expel, as he clawed, scratched, and slashed at the water. Just when the river lightened to a glassy, sunny smear--only inches to go-- he couldn't stop the gasp, drawing in air swimming with river water, choking, hacking, and gasping, wiping his mouth with something soft and streaming that scratched back as he dog paddled in lurches until his toes took hold, he staggered onto shore, and collapsed to the river bank, where his head struck something hard and wet, his furry handful droned arcane tones, and the prince trailed off into unconsciousness.