by Jon Evans
"You are a vile beast who should have been fed to your brothers and sisters," Zelina hissed. "You are so repulsive the moon weeps to see you, if you ever dare turn your loathsome face to the sky. You conspire with rats and reptiles, you copulate with cockroaches, and when other foxes smell you they drive you from their dens!"
Patch saw a gleam of metal from the ground between the fox and the cat, and he understood.
"Right," Talis said, "you die first."
He ran at Zelina; and a branch leapt upwards, trailing a wire in its wake; and suddenly Talis too dangled in the air, hanging from his foreleg, yowling with shock and pain. Through his own dizzying agony Patch felt a certain deadly satisfaction.
But by the time the humans came that satisfaction had long since dissipated. By then it was night, and Patch could no longer feel his own paw.
Chapter 4
The Hidden Kingdom
1. Cages
The human grasped Patch with a hand wrapped in thick material that smelled faintly of dead animal skin. Patch was too weak and delirious to struggle. He only trembled as his trapped paw was released from the snare and he was thrust into a small wire cage. Zelina and Talis were treated similarly. The humans, there were three of them, took extra care with Talis, and spoke to one another for a little while after caging Zelina.
Patch's cage was large enough for three or four squirrels. It was made of a fine mesh of strong wire. The wall that had opened to allow him entry had afterwards been clamped shut by some small human device made of metal, but it rattled a little as Patch was passed over the wire fence to another human, who in turn put Patch into the back of a sleeping death machine. The interior stank of animal pain and fear.
The cages were stacked, Zelina on top of Patch on top of Talis. After some time the death machine stirred and began to move. Patch curled around his wounded leg and licked the blood from his paw. He couldn't think, his mind felt trapped in mud, he had no sense of time or place, only of terror. A little sensation began to seep back into his paw, but that sensation was agony.
At some point the death machine stopped, its back was opened, and humans took a dozen empty cages from it. Shortly afterwards the cages were returned. Most now contained rabbits, but there were two squirrels, and one imprisoned a dog so small it was hardly more than a baby. The dog whined and bleated for the rest of their journey. The other animals remained silent.
Patch didn't so much fall asleep as fall away from the world. When he next became aware of his surroundings, he was no longer in a death machine. He was inside a huge, dim space that smelled overpoweringly of blood. There was no sky above, only metal and brick. There were dogs in the shadowy distance; their voices were terrible but he could not make out what they were saying. Patch's cage was part of a wall built three or four cages high and he did not know how long. All the cages were occupied by small animals - mostly rabbits, but amid the thick miasma of blood and pain and fear-smells, he made out the scents of at least half a dozen other squirrels. Zelina was now below him, and Talis above.
"What happened?" he whispered to Zelina. "Where are we?"
"I don't know," she whispered back. "Oh, my leg hurts so much I can't even stand."
Patch tried to stand and discovered that he could - but the pain of doing so was so excruciating that he quickly slumped back down onto his belly. He began to lick the blood from his paw and leg, trying to clean the wound.
Something moved near the cages. A rat. A big rat, and for a moment Patch stiffened, but it was not Snout.
"Soon we will sup on your blood too," the rat said to the animals in the cages, and chittered loudly with laughter.
Other rats, dozens of them, emerged from holes in the walls behind the wall of cages, and scuttled around the wall and towards the center of the room, towards the strongest blood-smells.
"What is this place?" Patch asked weakly. "What happened to the sky?"
"We're inside a building," Zelina said. "I've never been in a room this big before."
Patch gasped as he understood. He was actually inside a human mountain. Like being in a drey inside a tree. Humans had captured them, caged them, and taken them into a mountain. But why?
The answer was not long in coming. Bright lights winked on across the ceiling, lights that flickered so fast that they soon gave Patch a headache. The rats fled into the darkness, out of the immense space revealed by the sudden illumination, a hollow so big that it could have encompassed several large trees - if they had fallen, that is, for while the length and width of the room were very great, the ceiling was lower than the height of a small tree. The nearness of this wall between Patch and the sky made him even more unnerved and frightened.
There were more cages far away on the opposite side of the room. But these cages were much larger, and they contained snarling, slavering dogs, except for one that held … something else, something very large. In the middle of the room, rows of benches surrounded a circular wire fence. This fence in turn enclosed an open space from which the blood-smell rose. The blood was actually visible, smeared in dark patches on the ground.
Humans began to enter, many of them, until the benches were full. Two of them went to the dog-cages and brought out two of the dogs, holding them with leashes made of solid metal. The dogs snarled at each other as they were led to the middle of the room:
"Beg! Whimper! Bleed! Die!"
"Taste your flesh! Eat your heart! Drink your blood! Gnaw your bones!"
Once released inside the fence the dogs fought each other until one was badly hurt and the other almost dead. During the battle the humans jumped about, shouted to one another, and cried with exultation. Finally humans separated the combatants and dragged them back into cages.
Another dog was brought forth from the cages. This one was the largest dog that Patch had ever seen, as big as the two humans that conducted it into the killing space. It strutted confidently among the bloodstains, shouting, "I kill! I kill! I kill! I kill!"
And then suddenly the big dog went silent. The two humans had opened another cage door, the one that led to the strange thing that was not a dog. It was, incredibly, a cat. Patch had never dreamed that there were cats so immense in this world. The biggest animals he had ever seen were the horses that sometimes pulled humans through the Center Kingdom; this cat looked nearly as large. Its teeth were as big as Patch's head. Its fur was orange and black. As it stalked across the room with musical grace, its scent wafted through the air, a burning, feverish scent of wild rage. It was utterly unlike anything else Patch had ever smelled - except, possibly, the scent of that strange dog-thing in the Center Kingdom, on the day he had travelled into the mountains.
"Oh my goodness," Zelina breathed, below him. She was standing in her cage to see better, the pain in her leg forgotten. "Oh, he's beautiful as the moon!"
When the cat-thing entered the killing space, the huge dog whimpered and cowered onto the ground. A human touched a stick to the huge dog, and there was a crackling sound and the smell of lightning. The dog leaped to its feet, screaming with pain and rage, and the battle began. The shouts and exultations of the humans did not last long. The cat-thing tore the huge dog's throat out, settled down in the killing space, and began to eat. The humans watched this as intently as they had watched the battle.
Eventually most of the humans filed out of the room. The two that remained walked over towards the small cages, and many of the animals inside began to howl and thrash with terror, and all the cages trembled with their desperate fear. The humans took many of the cages, maybe a fifth of them, and carried them across the room, and as Patch watched with speechless horror, the smaller animals were deposited into the dog-cages. Most of the dogs wasted no time killing and eating their rabbits and squirrels, but several seemed to have learned to enjoy tormenting their victims, and drew out their deaths for some time.
The humans caught the cat-thing with steel leashes and led it back to its cage. Then they divided up the bloodsoaked rags of flesh that were all
that was left of the cat-thing's adversary, and fed those remains too to the caged dogs. After they left the room the lights went out. Patch was alone in his cage, in the dark, surrounded by the terrified whimpers of the animals around him, and the distant growls of dogs.
2. The Device
"Tomorrow you die," a rat hissed from the darkness, waking Patch from a long and nightmare-laden sleep. "Tomorrow all of you die and we gnaw on the shards of your bones."
"Shut your mouth and go away, filth-eater," Patch muttered, almost without thinking.
"You shut your mouth, squirrel. You are lucky to be in cages, or in the name of the King Beneath, we would kill you now ourselves."
"There is no King Beneath," Patch said, remembering and echoing Karmerruk's words. "The King Beneath is a myth."
Gasps of furious dismay echoed from dozens of rat voices in the darkness around the cages.
"For your blasphemy you should die of the blackblood disease!" a rat said angrily. "You should have your skin torn away while you still live!"
"The King Beneath is as real as your death tomorrow," another said cleverly, to general rat approval.
"How do you know?" Patch asked. "Have you seen him? What does he look like? What does he smell like?"
At first there was no reply, and Patch thought he had won the argument.
Then a rat said reverently, "Lord Snout has seen him."
Patch twitched with surprise. "Snout of the Center Kingdom?"
"There is no Center Kingdom. The Center Kingdom is a myth," the clever rat said. The other rats hooted with applause at her wit. "There is only one Kingdom, the Kingdom Beneath, and its roads and rivers run beneath all of the shell you call the world. Soon our armies will rise from the Kingdom Beneath, and no squirrel will ever speak of the Center Kingdom again, for there will be none left to remember that name!"
The rats cheered. Patch fell silent and began to once again lick his wounded paw, which had healed a little overnight. There was no point arguing with rats. What he had to do was figure out how to escape. It was true that escape seemed impossible. But if he did not find a way, before long he and Zelina would be fed to savage dogs.
A little unnatural light spilled and spread into the room from the ceiling, enough to illuminate the wire mesh of his cage. One end of his cage, the end that pointed away from the wall and towards the killing space and the dogs, was slightly loose, and rattled when Patch pushed against it. This loose wall was also adorned with the small human thing made of metal. Patch pushed harder, but it was clear that force alone would not break the cage. Patch sighed and looked around for other animals. Maybe a bird would come in, a bird strong enough to carry a cage in its claws. It wasn't much of a hope. But it seemed to be all they had.
"We must find a way to open the device," Zelina said.
Patch looked up at her. "What device?"
"The device that holds the cage shut. That metal device." She indicated the little metal thing that perched on the loose wall of her cage as well. It looked just like the one on Patch's, right on the corner between two walls. "There is some way to open it. That's how the humans put us in and take us out."
Patch's paws were just small enough to fit through the cage's wire mesh. The device was like a metal loop from which a small metal bar extended. The bar was connected to one of the pipes that formed the frame of the cage, and the loop encircled part of the wire mesh, preventing the cage from opening. A tiny knob protruded from the bar. Patch prodded the device with his paws, and it moved a little, but would not detach. He sniffed it, but there was only the sharp, pure smell of metal. He didn't understand Zelina's claim that it held his cage shut, but she had lived among humans, and knew their ways.
"You will need to use both paws," said a voice from above.
Patch started with surprise and looked up. A fox's sharp, inquisitive eyes looked back down at him, and at the device on the wall of Patch's cage.
"Use one paw to hold it still," Talis explained, "and with the other paw, hook the little bit that sticks out and pull it away from the rest."
Patch didn't understand. Talis repeated what he had said, and Patch tried very hard to understand, but his brain just couldn't turn into pictures and then motions what Talis had described in words.
"You'll have to do it yourself," Patch said.
"I can't. My paws are too big to fit through the cage. Cat, do you understand?"
"Perhaps," Zelina said doubtfully.
She reached through the bars of her cage and tried to manipulate the device. There was a scraping sound, and a gap suddenly appeared in the metal loop, and Patch stiffened with excitement - but then, with a loud click, the gap vanished.
"That's almost it!" Talis said. "Once it's open, you just have to pull it away from the cage. Do it again!"
Zelina did. She did it at least a dozen times. She repeatedly managed to slide open a gap in the metal loop, but that occupied both her paws, and as soon as she tried to do anything else with the device, it snapped shut.
"It's hopeless," she said, frustrated. "Humans have ten fingers. I have only two forelegs. One holds, one opens, but I would need to grow a third leg to pull it away from the cage. There is no hope."
"Wait," Patch said.
He advanced to the front of his cage, and after several attempts, following the visual example Zelina had just set, he managed to grasp the device's metal loop with one paw, reach the other over the metal protrusion, and pull the protrusion away from the loop, opening up a gap.
"Admirably done, but now what?" Zelina asked. "You too have only two forelegs."
Patch answered by waving his long, proud tail. Then he curled up his body as much as he could, arched his tail over his head, and just barely, shuddering with the strain on his tail muscles, he managed to use the tip of his tail instead of his paw to hold the metal loop in place.
"Excellent!" Talis cried out.
Patch opened the loop with one paw, and reached out with the other - but did not know what to do with it. He could see the device where it was, and he could imagine it where he wanted it to be, outside the cage rather than with a strand of wire mesh caught in its loop, but he could not picture the required motion.
"I don't know what to do with it," Patch wailed.
Talis said, "Close your eyes."
Patch did so.
"Now pull the device back a very little. That's it. Now to the left. A little more. Now push it forward."
Patch lost his grip on the device, and it snapped back shut, and he cried out with dismay as he opened his eyes -
- and his cage door yawned open.
"Oh, Patch, well done!" Zelina cried.
And then, all around him, dozens of voices gasped with surprise, hope, and anticipation. Many of those voices belonged to the animals in the cages. Many more belonged to the surrounding rats.
3. Oaths of Freedom
The light was so dim, and the animal and blood-smells so thick, that Patch could not count the number of rats around the cages; but he knew it had to be dozens, and perhaps more, perhaps an entire rat army. The opening of his cage door no longer seemed like a brilliant victory. Rats could not climb like squirrels or cats, but given time they would find a way up and into the open cage. And if Patch tried to escape, or if he descended to open Zelina's cage, they would swarm him and eat him alive.
"Release me, squirrel," Talis said, "and I will protect you."
Patch looked up at the fox above him. Talis was crammed into his cage. He was as big as a small dog, and had a predator's sharp teeth. It would take a brave group of rats indeed to charge a fox, and rats were not known for their courage. But it would take a very stupid squirrel to release a fox that had already tried to kill and eat him.
"Swear by the moon that you will protect me," Patch said. "And that you will never attack a squirrel again."
"That's outrageous!" Talis cried out.
"Or a cat," Zelina suggested.
"Or a cat," Patch agreed.
"I wil
l not swear that or anything else by the moon!" Talis said.
"Then the dogs will have you."
"Then the rats will have you."
"They will have me anyways if I let you go without a moon-oath," Patch said.
Talis frowned. Patch said nothing. It took considerable self-control to say nothing, as several rats had already clustered outside Zelina's cage, immediately beneath his, and were chittering as they probing at the wire mesh, trying to find a way up into Patch's open cage. Fortunately they were still mostly getting in one another's way, but Patch knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out how to reach him.
"You're a sharp bargainer, for a squirrel," Talis said.
"Thank you."
"I don't even know your names."
"My name is Patch son of Silver," Patch said, "and my friend is Zelina, Queen of All Cats."
Talis sighed, long and loud.
Then he declared, "I swear by the moon that I, Talis, shall protect Patch son of Silver and Zelina Queen of All Cats." His eyes shone and his body shuddered as he spoke, and all the animals in the cages, and even those rats surrounding the cages, and even the dogs across the room, fell silent and stopped moving. "And I swear by the moon that I will never again attack a squirrel or a cat."
It was Patch who broke the awed silence. "Then let's get you out of here."
He pushed his cage door open and climbed the wire mesh onto Talis's cage door. He had to brace himself with his hindlegs, and the pain from his wounded paw made him whimper, but with desperate strength Patch managed to open the device that sealed Talis's cage. Patch very nearly fell off the door when it swung open, but regained his grip and managed to scrambled up off it and onto the top of Talis's cage. His wounded hindleg ached like fire.
Talis burst out of the cage like water erupting from a fountain, and the air filled with the terrified squeals of rats as the fox began to maraud among them, killing with fangs and claws. If the rat army had worked together, they could have swarmed Talis and reduced him to a skeleton in heartbeats - but the first wave of assailants in such a swarm would have been killed by the fox before Talis was overwhelmed, and no rats were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of their companions. Instead they fled into the walls, into the hidden crawlspaces and tunnels of the Kingdom Beneath.
