“I don’t care a ferret’s shrlt for humans!” snapped Darktan. “But those rat catchers took Hamnpork off in a cage! You saw that room, cat! You saw the rats crammed in cages! It’s the rat catchers who are stealing the food! Sardines says there’s sacks and sacks of food! And there’s something else . . .”

  “A voice,” said Maurice before he could stop himself.

  Darktan looked up, wild-eyed.

  “You heard it?” he said. “I thought it was just us!”

  “The rat catchers can hear it too,” said Maurice. “Only they think it’s their own thoughts.”

  “It frightened the others,” mumbled Dangerous Beans. “They just . . . stopped thinking.”

  He looked absolutely dejected. Open beside him, grubby with dirt and paw marks, was Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure.

  “Even Toxie ran off,” he went on. “And he knows how to write! How can that happen?”

  “It seemed to affect some of us more than others,” said Darktan in a more matter-of-fact voice. “I’ve sent some of the more sensible ones out to try and round up the rest, but it’s going to be a long job. They were just running blindly. We’ve got to get Hamnpork. He’s the leader. We’re rats, after all. A Clan. Rats will follow the leader.”

  “But he’s a bit old, and you’re the tough one, and he’s not exactly the brains of the outfit—” Maurice began.

  “They took him away!” said Darktan. “They’re rat catchers! He’s one of us! Are you going to help or not?”

  Maurice thought he heard a scrabbling noise at the other end of his pipe. He couldn’t turn around to check, and he suddenly felt very exposed.

  “Yeah, help you, yeah, yeah,” he said hurriedly.

  “Ahem. Do you really mean that, Maurice?” said Peaches.

  “Yeah, yeah, right,” said Maurice. He crawled out of the pipe and looked back along it. There was no sign of any rats.

  “Sardines is following the rat catchers,” said Darktan, “so we’ll find out where they’re taking him—”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling that I already know,” said Maurice.

  “How?” snapped Peaches.

  “I’m a cat, right?” said Maurice. “Cats hang around places. We see things. A lot of places don’t mind cats wandering in, right, because we keep down the vermi—we keep the, er—”

  “All right, all right, we know you don’t eat anyone who can talk, you keep telling us,” said Peaches. “Get on with it!”

  “I was in a place once. It was a barn. I was up in the hayloft, where you can always find a, er—”

  Peaches rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, go on!”

  “Well, anyway, all these men came in, and I couldn’t get away because they had lots of dogs, and they shut the barn doors and, er, they put up this kind of, kind of big round wooden wall in the middle of the floor, and there were some men with boxes of rats, and they tipped rats into the ring, and then, and then they put some dogs in, too. Terriers,” he added, trying to avoid their expressions.

  “The rats fought the dogs?” said Darktan.

  “Well, I suppose they could have done that,” said Maurice. “They mostly ran around and around. It’s called rat coursing. Rat catchers bring the rats along, of course. Alive. That’s what’s happening to Hamnpork.”

  “Rat coursing . . .” said Darktan. “How is it we’ve never heard of this?”

  Maurice blinked at him. For clever creatures, the rats could be amazingly stupid at times.

  “Why would you hear about it?” he said.

  “Surely one of the rats who—”

  “You don’t seem to understand,” said Maurice. “The rats that go into the pit don’t come out. At least, not breathing.”

  There was silence.

  “Can’t they jump out?” asked Peaches in a little voice.

  “Too high,” said Maurice.

  “Why don’t they fight the dogs?” asked Darktan.

  Really, really stupid, Maurice thought.

  “Because they’re rats, Darktan,” said Maurice. “Lots of rats. All stinking of one another’s fear and panic. You know how it happens.”

  “I bit a dog on the nose once!” said Darktan.

  “Right, right,” said Maurice, soothingly. “One rat can think and be brave, right. But a bunch of rats is a mob. A bunch of rats is just a big animal with lots of legs and no brain.”

  “That’s not true!” said Peaches. “Together we are strong!”

  “Exactly how high?” asked Darktan, who was staring at the candlelight as if seeing pictures in it.

  “What?” said Peaches and Maurice together.

  “The wall . . . how high, exactly?”

  “Huh? I don’t know! High! Humans were leaning their elbows on it! Does it matter? It’s far too high for a rat to jump, I know that.”

  “Everything we’ve done, we’ve done because we’ve stuck together—” Peaches began.

  “We’ll rescue Hamnpork together, then,” said Darktan. “We’ll—”

  He spun around at the sound of a rat coming along the pipe, then wrinkled his nose.

  “It’s Sardines,” he said. “And . . . let’s see, smells female, young, nervous . . . Nourishing?”

  The youngest member of the Trap Disposal Squad was trailing after Sardines. She was wet and dejected.

  “You look like a drowned rat, miss,” said Darktan.

  “Fell in a broken drain, sir,” said Nourishing.

  “Good to see you, anyway. What’s happening, Sardines?”

  The dancing rat did a few nervous steps. “I’ve been climbing up more drainpipes and along more clotheslines than is good for me,” he said. “And don’t ask me about krrkk cats, boss—I’d like to see every last one of ’em dead. Savin’ yer honor’s presence, o’course,” Sardines added, eyeing Maurice nervously.

  “And?” said Peaches.

  “They’ve gone to some kind of stable right on the edge of the town,” said Sardines. “Smells bad. Lots of dogs around. Men, too.”

  “Rat pit,” said Maurice. “I told you. They’ve been breeding rats for the rat pit!”

  “Right,” said Darktan. “We’re going to get Hamnpork out of there. Sardines, you will show me the way. We’ll try to pick up anyone on the way who looks halfway sensible. The rest of you should try to find the kid.”

  “Why are you giving orders?” said Peaches.

  “Because someone has to,” said Darktan. “Hamnpork might be a bit scabby and set in his ways, but he’s the leader and everyone smells that and we need him. Any questions? Right.”

  “Can I come, sir?” asked Nourishing.

  “She’s helping me carry my string, boss,” Sardines explained. Both he and the younger rat were carrying bundles of it.

  “You need all that?” asked Darktan.

  “You should never say no to a piece of string, boss,” said Sardines earnestly. “It’s amazing, some of the stuff I’ve been finding—”

  “All right, so long as she’s useful for something,” said Darktan. “She’d better be able to keep up. Let’s go!”

  And then there were just Dangerous Beans, Peaches, and Maurice.

  Dangerous Beans sighed.

  “One rat can be brave, but a bunch of rats is just a mob?” he said. “Are you right, Maurice?”

  “No, I was . . . look, there was something back there,” said Maurice. “It’s in a cellar. I don’t know what it is. It’s the voice that gets into people’s heads!”

  “Not everyone’s,” said Peaches. “It didn’t frighten you, did it? Or us. Or Darktan. It made Hamnpork very angry. Why?”

  Maurice blinked. He could hear the voice in his head again. It was very faint, and it certainly wasn’t his own thoughts, and it said, I will find a way in, CAT!

  “Did you hear that?” he said.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” said Peaches.

  Perhaps you have to be close, Maurice thought. Perhaps, if you’ve been close, it knows where your head lives.

  He’d never seen a rat so miserable as Dangerous Beans. The little rat was huddled by the candle, staring unseeing at Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure.

  “I hoped it would be better than this,” said Dangerous Beans. “But it turns out we’re just . . . rats. As soon as there’s trouble, we’re nothing but . . . rats.”

  It was very unusual for Maurice to feel sympathetic to anyone who wasn’t Maurice. In a cat, such sympathy is a major character flaw. I must be ill, he thought.

  “If it’s any help, I’m just a cat,” he said.

  “Oh, but you are not. You are kind, and deep down, I sense that you have a generous nature,” said Dangerous Beans.

  Maurice tried not to look at Peaches. Oh boy, he thought.

  “At least you ask people before you eat them,” said Peaches.

  You’d better tell them, said Maurice’s thoughts. Go on, tell them. You’ll feel better.

  Maurice tried to tell his thoughts to shut up. What a time to get a conscience! What good was a cat with a conscience? A cat with a conscience was a . . . a hamster, or something.

  “Um, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” he muttered.

  Go on, tell them, said his shiny new conscience. Get it out in the open.

  “Yes?” said Peaches.

  Maurice squirmed.

  “Well, you know I do always check my food these days. . . .”

  “Yes, and it does you great credit,” said Dangerous Beans.

  Now Maurice felt even worse.

  “Well, you know how we’ve always wondered how come I got Changed even though I never ate any of that magical stuff on the dump.”

  “Yes,” said Peaches. “That has always puzzled me.”

  Maurice shifted uneasily.

  “Well, you know . . . er . . . did you ever know a rat, quite big, one ear missing, bit of white fur on one side, couldn’t run too fast ’cos of a bad leg?”

  “That sounds like Additives,” said Peaches.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dangerous Beans. “He disappeared before we met you, Maurice. A good rat. Had a bit of a speech . . . difficulty.”

  “Speech difficulty,” said Maurice gloomily.

  “He stammered,” said Peaches, giving Maurice a long, cool stare. “Couldn’t get his words out very easily.”

  “Not very easily,” said Maurice, his voice now quite hollow.

  “But I’m sure you never met him, Maurice,” said Dangerous Beans. “I miss him. He was a wonderful rat once you got him talking.”

  “Ahem. Did you meet him, Maurice?” said Peaches, her stare nailing him to the wall.

  Maurice’s face moved. It tried various expressions one after another. Then he said, “All right! I ate him, okay? All of him! Except for the tail and the green wobbly bit and that nasty purple lump, no one knows what it is! I was just a cat! I hadn’t learned to think yet! I didn’t know! I was hungry! Cats eat rats, that’s how it goes! It wasn’t my fault! And he’d been eating the magic stuff and I ate him, so then I got Changed too! Know how that feels, seeing the green wobbly bit like that? It doesn’t feel good! Sometimes on dark nights I think I can hear him talking down there! All right? Satisfied? I didn’t know he was anyone! I didn’t know I was anyone! I ate him! He’d been eating the stuff on the dump and I ate him, so that’s how I got Changed! I admit it! I ate him! It wasn’t my faauulltt!”

  And then there was silence. After a while Peaches said, “Yes, but that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  “What? You mean have I eaten anyone lately? No!”

  “Are you sorry for what you did?” asked Dangerous Beans.

  “Sorry? What do you think? Sometimes I have nightmares where I burp and he—”

  “Then that’s probably all right,” said the little rat.

  “All right?” said Maurice. “How can it be all right? And you know the worst part? I’m a cat! Cats don’t go round feeling sorry! Or guilty! We never regret anything! Do you know what it feels like, saying, ‘Hello food, can you talk?’ That’s not how a cat is supposed to behave!”

  “We don’t act how rats are supposed to behave,” said Dangerous Beans. And then his face fell again. “Up until now.” He sighed.

  “Everyone was frightened,” said Peaches. “Fear spreads.”

  “I hoped we could be more than rats,” said Dangerous Beans. “I thought we could be more than things that squeak and widdle, whatever Hamnpork says. And now . . . where is everyone?”

  “Shall I read to you from Mr. Bunnsy?” said Peaches, her voice full of concern. “You know that always cheers you up when you’re in one of your . . . dark times.”

  There was a nod from Dangerous Beans.

  Peaches pulled the huge Book toward her and began to read.

  “‘One day Mr. Bunnsy and his friend Ratty Rupert the Rat went to see Old Man Donkey, who lived by the river—’”

  “Read the bit when they talk to the humans,” said Dangerous Beans.

  Peaches obediently turned a page. “‘“Hello, Ratty Rupert,” said Farmer Fred. “What a lovely day it is, to be sure—”’”

  This is mad, thought Maurice as he listened to a story about wild woods and fresh bubbling streams, being read to one rat by another rat while they sat beside a drain along which ran something that certainly wasn’t fresh. Anything but fresh. To be fair, though, it was bubbling a bit, or at least glooping.

  Everything’s going down the drain, and they have this little picture in their heads about how nice things could be. . . .

  Look at those little pink sad eyes, said Maurice’s own thoughts in Maurice’s own head. Look at those little wobbly wrinkly noses. If you ran out on them and left them here, how could you look those little wobbly noses in the face again?

  “I wouldn’t have to,” said Maurice, out loud. “That’s the point!”

  “What?” said Peaches, looking up from the Book.

  “Oh, nothing.” Maurice paused. There was nothing he could do about it. It went against everything a cat stood for. This is what thinking does for you, he thought. It gets you into trouble. Even when you know other people can think for themselves, you start thinking for them too.

  Of course, humans were useful. They could open doors and provide fish. He groaned.

  “We’d better see what’s happened to the kid,” he said.

  It was completely black in this cellar. All there were, apart from the occasional drip of water, were voices.

  “So,” said the voice of Malicia, “let’s go over it again, shall we? You don’t have a knife of any kind?”

  “That’s right,” said Keith.

  “Or some handy matches that could burn through the rope?”

  “No.”

  “And no sharp edge near you that you could rub the rope on?”

  “No.”

  “And you can’t sort of pull your legs through your arms so that you can get your hands in front of you?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t have any secret powers?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? The moment I saw you, I thought: He’s got some amazing power that will probably manifest itself when he’s in dire trouble. I thought: No one could really be as useless as that unless it was a disguise.”

  “No. I’m sure. Look, I’m just a normal person. Yes, all right, I was abandoned as a baby. I don’t know why. It was something that happened. They say it happens quite a lot. It doesn’t make you special. And I don’t have any secret markings as if I was some kind of sheep, and I don’t think I’m a hero in disguise, and I don’t have some kind of amazing talent that I’m aware of. Okay, I’m good at playing quite a few musical instruments. I practice a lot. But I’m the kind of person heroes aren’t. I get by and I get along. I do my best. Understand?”

  “Oh.”

  “You should have found someone else.”

  “In fact you can’t be any help at all?”

  “No.”

  There was silence for a while, and then Malicia said, “You know, in many ways I don’t think this adventure has been properly organized.”

  “Oh, really?” said Keith.

  “This is not how people should be tied up.”

  “Malicia, do you understand? This isn’t a story,” said Keith, as patiently as he could. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Real life isn’t a story. There isn’t some kind of . . . of magic that keeps you safe and makes crooks look the other way and not hit you too hard and tie you up next to a handy knife and not kill you. Do you understand?”

  There was some more dark silence.

  “My granny and my great-aunt were very famous storytellers, you know,” said Malicia eventually, in a strained little voice. “Agonista and Eviscera Grim.”

  “You said,” said Keith.

  “My mother would have been a good storyteller, too, but my father doesn’t like stories. That’s why I’ve changed my name to Grim for professional purposes.”

  “Really . . .”

  “I used to get beaten when I was small for telling stories,” Malicia went on.

  “Beaten?” said Keith.

  “All right, then, smacked,” said Malicia. “On the leg. But it did hurt. My father says you can’t run a city on stories. He says you have to be practical.”

  “Oh.”

  “Aren’t you interested in anything except music? He broke your pipe!”

  “I expect I’ll buy another one.”

  The calm voice infuriated Malicia.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something,” she said. “If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.”

  “And what if your story doesn’t work?”

  “You keep changing it until you find one that does.”

  “Sounds silly.”

  “Huh, look at you. You’re just a face in someone else’s background. You let a cat make all the decisions.”

  “That’s because Maurice is—”

  A voice said, “Would you like us to go away until you’ve stopped being human?”

  “Maurice?” said Keith. “Is that you? Where are you?”

  “I’m in a drain, and believe me, this has not been a good night. Do you know how many old cellars there are here? Good job you two kept arguing,” said the voice of Maurice, in the blackness. “Peaches is bringing a candle in. It’s too dark even for me to see you.”