Windwalker (Bedlam #1)

The Rat

BEFORE

The bad that day was a man: two legs, a large gut, and a face covered by a plague mask. He stank like me, of river muck.

My respirator, little more than a tin can filled with moss, came undone. Foul air filled my lungs. I scrambled to retrieve it, even as I threw myself away from his grubby hands. His bulk came full out of the pea soup, and he loomed over me. A hand locked on my ankle. I kicked. But runt that I was, a child with no age, I only made him laugh.

The man plucked me into the air, and that's when I felt the eel clamp around my stick-like limb. Slurp. It was a faint sound, but to my ears it sounded as loud as the thunder overhead.

"Got another!" The voice came grating from the mask, like scraping rocks.

I fought, of course. Teeth, nails, a flurry of limbs. I was a two-headed cat with seven toes. It bothered the man enough that he pressed a hand to his belt. The eel delivered a shock. It jolted over my skin like the pricks of a thousand needles, leaving me convulsing in his hand.

Mud swayed below me. I was a limp fish. I smelled piss—my own. It wasn't flowing down my leg—that would be too civil, dignified even. Upside down as I was, it dripped in my face.

"It's a rat," the catcher said. If I was a rat, he was a rock. A big, dumb one. He stomped through the river muck, squelching and sucking his way towards the embankment wall. And I had been so close to escaping.

The Rock snapped my cobbled respirator back over my nose and mouth. I sucked in a breath. This far down the river Styx the fog was toxic. My lungs felt tight, but not from the fog—that poison had wormed its way into my blood the day I was birthed. This was the tightness that fear brought. I wanted to twist, turn, anything, but my muscles had a grudge against my body. There wasn't much I could do but perfect my fish imitation.

The man squelched up to a cart pulled by a hunched figure in a cloak. With a swing, I was tossed into the cart, which was full of other unfortunate rats. My kith were as wide-eyed as me, mirrors to my pounding heart. We were the fools who were snatched and never came back.

I closed my eyes and imagined my legs, ankles, and toes.

Move, I ordered.

If the big toe, or even the little, ever obeyed, I'll never know. A tarp was tossed over us, and the cart lurched forward. Bells jangled insanely, a warning crushed by fog and thrown out only in pieces to fellow travelers. I was done in. And I had no coin for the Ferryman.

But enough maudlin talk. Back to my death.