The Tides of Avarice (34 page)

But the pursuing pirates had, though.

“See that?” said a voice from the end of the alley.

It wasn't the voice of the groundhog, alas. This was someone who sounded much brighter. And soberer.

“It's where they put the trash out from the pub,” said a companion of the first speaker.

“And those horrid little hamsters just went full pelt, hell-for-leather into it, din't they?” said the first.

“That's my guess too. You got a lantern?”

“Naw. Here's Toadsbreath with one, though. Hiya, Toadsbreath.”

A glimmer of light crept into the end of the alley. Sylvester could just make out a tangle of furry limbs that he assumed must be Viola, Mrs. Pickleberry and himself.

And what looked like a ten-year accumulation of rotting food and empty bottles and cans.

“We're not hamsters,” he muttered angrily under his breath. “I keep telling you, we're lem—”

“Shut up, you halfwit,” said Viola hotly in his ear.

The three of them stayed very, very still.

Disconcertingly, the garbage stayed rather less so.

Maggots.

Sylvester prayed Viola wouldn't realize that's what those clammy little movements were.

“You going in after them, Toadsbreath?”

“How stupid d'you think I am?”

“You want the long answer or the short one? Oof!”

For a moment the lantern's beam darted here and there all over the alley walls, and then it steadied again.

“Now listen, Viola,” said Sylvester as quietly as he possibly could and still let it be possible for her to hear him.

“What?” she answered in the same, almost silent tone.

“I'm going to create a diversion.”

“You're what?”

“Create a diversion, so the pirates all start chasing me. In the confusion, you and your mom'll have a chance of making good your escape. Okay? On the count of—”

“Don't be such a complete gormless lamebrain, Sylvester Lemmington, you hear me?”

This wasn't quite the reaction he'd been anticipating. “My hero, my hero, my hero, pardon me while I swoon,” had been more the sort of thing he'd had in mind.

“Now you listen to me, Sylvester Numbnuts,” Viola was saying. “We're all three of us in this together. There's going to be no heroic sacrifices. Got that?”

“But—”

“No buts.”

“Ess zere somepatin ze matteur?” said a squeaky voice that was totally unknown to any of them.

Sylvester was the first to recover his wits.

“Huh?” he said.

Well, some wits, anyway.

“You een need of a little sanctuary from ze big bahd piratical goons, yes?”

“You could say that.”

“I jus' did, mon ami.”

“No, what I meant was—”

“Stop messing around, Sylvester,” said Viola. “If this person can help us lose Rustbane and his louts we should listen to him. He probably knows this island and we don't.”

“Yes. We'd be glad of your help,” said Sylvester.

“Zen follows me.”

“How can I do that?”

“Well, all you needs to do, mon ami, is put ze one leg in fronts of ze other one and—”

“No,” Sylvester whispered urgently. “What I mean is I can't see you. If I don't know where you are, I don't have much of a chance of following you, do I?”

“Ah, yes. How silly of moi. 'Ere, Mr. Lemming. You take my paw and I will guide you.”

The paw that slipped into Sylvester's was small, hardly larger than that of a newborn lemming. Sylvester wondered if it could possibly be a child who was trying to save them. But no, that didn't make sense.

For his own part, he took Viola's paw. He could feel her adjusting herself so she could grab Mrs. Pickleberry's.

“Iss we all set now?” said the perplexing, heavily accented little voice out of the blackness.

“As ready as we'll ever be,” replied Sylvester.

“Good, mon ami. Then 'ere we go.”

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

Later, Sylvester did his very best to forget the nightmarish journey they took from the darkened alley to something approximating safety.

The journey didn't last long and it didn't take them very far, not in terms of sheer physical distance, anyway, but it left deep scars upon his soul.

He'd expected their invisible savior to lead them farther back into the alley, or perhaps to one side of it or the other. Sylvester wouldn't even have been too surprised if their route took them upwards, perhaps to a high window concealed from the ground by the angle of the wall.

Instead, though, the route led down.

Down through layers of wriggling maggots, putrescent meat, vegetables liquified by rot, more maggots …

And those were only the identifiable bits.

The unidentifiable bits were worse.

They smelled a lot worse, anyway.

“Where are you taking us?” Sylvester began to say to the insistently pulling guide beneath him, but he got only as far as “Where are you gwish schwabble bleeuch” before his mouth filled up with some lukewarm, jelly-like substance he resolved to take particular care never to taste again.

A few moments later he could hear Mrs. Pickleberry, who'd been muttering away in a semi-audible stream of complaints and curses, getting a mouthful of the stuff as well, which silenced her, so the news on the jelly-like goo front wasn't altogether bad.

By now, the four creatures had shifted themselves so that each, with the exception of the stranger with the bizarre accent, was reaching out with one paw to grab an ankle of the person in front. With their free leg and free arm they sort of half-hauled themselves, half-swam down into the squishily resistant filth.

After a minute or two, Sylvester discovered to his surprise he no longer especially noticed the stench of the garbage. He'd never have believed he could become acclimatized to it. Then abruptly they were falling out of the greasy embrace of the slick refuse and into open air.

Luckily, the drop wasn't a long one.

Sylvester lay on his tummy on an earthen floor, heaving a long sigh of relief that against all the odds he was still alive, when a sudden enormous impact in the middle of his back told him he should have had the presence of mind to roll over out of the way of Viola.

“You darling,” she said quietly, sounding a little winded. “You lay here to break my fall.”

That was when Mrs. Pickleberry landed on top of her.

“We iss all apresenta and correcta, yes?” said the small voice.

“I think so,” said Sylvester, extricating himself from under the two Pickleberries. He reached gingerly upwards and discovered that the ceiling of wherever they were was quite low. Standing would be out of the question, and it would be wise to be cautious about sitting up too impetuously.

From above, he could hear the muffled noises of some very heavy somebodies rootling around clumsily in the spilled garbage. Also from above, but off at an angle, there were the sounds of drunken revelry: out-of-tune singing, shrieking, perhaps a fight. The Monkey's Curse was obviously doing a whale of a business this evening. Sylvester hoped it'd carry on doing so once Rustbane's mob of ruffians invaded the premises in search of three fugitive lemmings. The Shadeblaze's crew would be certain the runaways must be hiding somewhere among the motley crowd of drunks and could waste hours before becoming convinced otherwise.

Misdirection, thought Sylvester, listening as his breath grew easier and more regular. It'll be the second time tonight we'll have used it to our advantage.

Unless, of course, we're nuts to be doing that.

We don't know who it is who's brought us here.

Frying pans.

Fires.

Out of one and into another.

Hope not.

Just then there was a faint gleam of light, and for the first time Sylvester was able to clap eyes on the person who'd led them out from under the very noses of the pirates.

A mouse.

He stifled a laugh.

Among lemmings, mice were generally considered the lowest of the low. Put it this way, for a lemming there isn't generally a way to look at the rest of the rodent brotherhood that isn't up. Rabbits and groundhogs and beavers are bigger, way bigger, and in the archives at the Library in Foxglove Sylvester had read of rodents called coypus that made even rabbits, groundhogs and beavers look pretty paltry. Rats and squirrels are quite a lot smaller than lemmings, but they're also generally regarded as quite a lot cleverer and more resourceful. Rats in particular have a streak of cunning ruthlessness that makes lemmings seem positively benign. So, if a lemming wants to look down the not terribly impressive length of its coarsely haired nose at anyone, who of the rodent persuasion does it have left?

Mice.

That's about it.

And chipmunks, of course.

Except chipmunks, damn them, are so damned cute.

And they're bright too, the little stinkers. Bright enough to run rings round the average lemming.

So that just leaves mice.

For a lemming brought up in a conventional household, as Sylvester and Viola and Daphne and, in fact, every other lemming he'd ever known had been, the prospect of being rescued from seemingly inevitable death by a mouse ranked about as low on the scale of ignominious circumstances as you could ever dread reaching.

Yet that was exactly what had just happened to Sylvester and the Pickleberries.

They were going to have to learn a different way of judging those around them, that was all.

Sylvester didn't mind the prospect of philosophical readjustment. He'd read enough in the Library to know that whoever judges others by outward appearance is doomed to a sticky and well-deserved end.

He wondered how Mrs. Pickleberry was going to react to the notion.

Mrs. Pickleberry reacted to the notion by waddling straight up to the small black mouse who'd saved them, picking him up and planting a great big slobbery kiss on the little creature's cheek.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she breathed. “If ever I needed a hero, that was the moment, and you came along just in the nick of time.”

So much for preconceptions, thought Sylvester wryly.

“What's your name, you sweetheart?” Mrs Pickleberry was asking the mouse.

“Zey calls moi Rasco,” said the little black mouse, cleaning his whiskers with an industrious paw. “Zat is because it is my, 'ow you say, nom?”

“Love that accent,” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

“Mo–om,” said Viola.

“You're called Rosco?” said Mrs. Pickleberry, ignoring her daughter.

“Rasco. An easy enough mistake to make. Mon Papa 'e was so delighted when myself and my seventeen siblings were born, 'e went out and drank 'imself a 'ole glass of cognac before going down to ze offices to register us. 'E was trying to call me Rosco but it came out as Rasco, so Rasco is ze name I 'ave to zis day, no? 'Ave pity on my little bruzzer, 'oo was supposed to be called Farthing.”

Sylvester decided it was about time he made a contribution to the conversation.

“I think all three of us would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

The mouse bobbed his nose in friendly fashion, giving Sylvester a narrow-mouthed grin. He was wearing a shirt and shorts dyed in such garish, clashing colors that, even in this dim light, it made Sylvester's head hurt to look at them. On his rear feet were sandals that seemed designed to show off his claws to best advantage. The fur on his pate had been elaborately coiffed into a ball so big it looked almost like an ancillary head.

“You could not have found better zan to find yourself in the embrace of ze famille des Roquettes,” he said.

“We couldn't?”

“Would you like a little more light?”

The three lemmings nodded. Lemmings have rather poor vision at the best of times. The weak glow down here in what Sylvester was becoming increasingly convinced was an earth cellar was making their heads hurt.

“It iss, 'ow you say, easy enough to do.”

Rasco stepped over to the wall and drew a little farther open what Sylvester realized was some kind of a curtain. There was a crack there, a crack that ran along the bottom corner of a wall in one of The Monkey's Curse's bars and, correspondingly, along the ceiling of the earth cellar. Someone, one of Rasco's ancestors if not Rasco himself, had rigged up a curtain on a high rail so that the crack could be used as an adjustable source of illumination.

And as a way of spying on whatever was going on in the bar of The Monkey's Curse.

You couldn't see much through the crack, of course, except people's feet and the occasional spittoon that might float within eyeshot.

But you could hear plenty.

What the three lemmings and the little black mouse could now hear was the incursion of a half-dozen or more of Cap'n Rustbane's cutthroats into the midst of the convivial crowd of The Monkey's Curse.

“You scurvy knaves seen anythin' o' a bunch o' lemmings?”

There was the sound of breaking glass, followed almost immediately by the sound of someone landing very heavily in the street.

“You, ahem, fine gentleman noticed anyone entering within the past few minutes?”

A sophisticated ear could have told that the glass broke less violently, but the impact of a body on the street was, at best, undetectably lighter.

“Free drinks, anyone?”

The last was Rustbane's voice, and it drew instant cries of approval.

Rasco looked worried.

“Zey are my friends, up zere,” he said. “But zey are like anyone else in 'Angman's 'Aven outside ze Roquettes and zeir closest relations.”

“You mean—” said Sylvester.

“Zat's right. Any one of zem could betray our presence 'ere at any, how you say, moment. It is best we move ourselves away from here as vitement, I mean fast as possible.”