Whether or not the Last Hand was done, some things would continue, and the most important, according to Hodge, was his routine. So while the rest of London stirred itself from its various beds and began to think about breakfast, Charlie was deep beneath the north end of the White Tower listening to Jed yipping in unprecedented excitement. Hodge was not with them, having decided Charlie would learn more by ratting on his own, while he boiled the tea and fried the bacon in his quarters, claiming the very blurry shapes he was just beginning to be able to make out through his less ruined eye made this not only possible but “good practice”.
Charlie and Jed had patrolled the usual corners and crannies, and found nothing but a dead pigeon that had somehow got stuck in the cellar stairwell. And then, just as Charlie had decided it was time to go and see if Hodge had remembered to save him any bacon, Jed went mad.
The normal excited barks had quickly changed to something Charlie hadn’t heard before–a fiercely rising crescendo of sharp, high-pitched yips–and then, as he bent and peered forward beneath the low roof, pushing the bull’s-eye lantern ahead of him to try and see the dog, the noise stopped.
“Jed!” he shouted. “Jed!”
The sudden silence was the nastiest thing he had yet encountered while underground in the dark. It made his heart race.
“Jed!” he shouted.
More silence answered him. Silence from the darkness beyond the light of his lantern.
Charlie didn’t hesitate. He liked the dog, and more than that, they were a team. He didn’t really need to think at all. He was on his hands and knees, crawling forward as fast as he could and somehow he had managed to draw his knife and hold it between his teeth, ready for whatever had silenced the terrier. The floor rose towards the roof as he went, pressing down on him and turning his crawl to a squirm, and then just as he thought he could go no further, a growling, screaming ball of something hurled out of the darkness ahead. It hit him and scratched and bit its way around his body, knocking the lantern from his hand and extinguishing it, and in the moment before his world went black he saw a nightmare fragment of rats–giant rats, wrong rats–and teeth and tails and fangs and fur fly past.
He stayed there stunned, scrabbling for the lantern. He felt wetness and glass. The lens was shattered, the fuel was spilled. Trying to relight it would start a small fire that would burn or asphyxiate him.
He heard a terrible noise of howls and snarls and screams interspersed with a brutal sound of metal bashing against stone from the void behind him. Again he froze, trying to make sense of what he was hearing.
And then something grabbed his ankle.
He lashed out with his boot.
“Hoi!” said a familiar voice. “Less of that!”
It was Hodge. He dragged Charlie free of the cramped squeeze-point and they both scrambled back into the cellar. Hodge had left his lamp on the floor and in its light Charlie saw three things.
A blood-stained shovel. A nearly as gory Jed, lying panting on the stone flags, covered in bites and scrapes, but wagging his tail proudly. And in front of him, in a spattered puddle of blood, the rats, seemingly laid out in a circle.
And now they were dead Charlie could see what was wrong with them. As they had gone past him, he had snatched a glimpse of some running forwards and some seeming to run backwards. That’s what hadn’t made sense. Now he could see why: they were more than twenty in number and their tails were snarled together, twisted and plaited and glued in place by their own droppings and dried blood and filth. It was a wheel of rats.
“What is it?” said Charlie.
“It’s a fucking harbinger is what it is,” spat Hodge.
Charlie had never heard him swear before. It was the second most shocking thing he had experienced today. It was almost as bad as that horrible silence in the dark.
“Pardon my French,” said Hodge. “But that’s a Rat King, and Rat Kings mean bad trouble’s coming sure as a gunshot means a bullet’s on the way. Sluaghs walking the iron rails, the Last Hand threatened and now a f—a bloody Rat King for breakfast. Batten down the hatches, Charlie, cos there’s an anvil dropping out of the sky and it’s got our name on it.”
He spat at the Rat King.
“Let’s get Jed patched up and then we’ll go and tell everyone the lovely news and see how they take it.”
Because they had been underground, muffled by rock, earth and masonry, they did not hear the explosion. The first they knew of the new disaster was when they saw the dark smoke pluming into the sky to the east.
Jed spotted it first and barked.
And then they ran.