A man who kills rats for his bread learns to read a city the way a doctor reads a tongue, and I will tell you what the tongue of Kormor Kirak has been saying since the spring, since the red star came up over the Eastern Tower and would not go down. The rats are leaving. Not dying. Leaving. There is a difference and it is the whole of my trade to know it, and I am the only man in this city paid to know it, so listen.
I am a ratcatcher. I work the underneath, Terra Sotto and the runs that feed it, the wet brick veins beneath the Kereskedo where the market's leavings go down and the rats come up. Thirty years I have set my traps and twisted my wires and carried out my little grey dead by the dozen for the tally-man at the Grand Square, who counts the tails into my hand at a Groat the score and never once looks at my face, because nobody looks at the face of the man who keeps the vermin off their bread. That suited me. A ratcatcher who is looked at is a ratcatcher who has done something wrong. I did my work in the dark and the dark paid me and we were square.
A rat is an honest animal. I want that set down before the rest, because the rest is not honest and you should know I am, or was. A rat wants to live and eat and breed and it is afraid of exactly the right things, which is everything bigger than itself, and a man who studies that fear can put his hand on the whole secret machinery of a city. When the river was going to rise in '88 the rats knew it a day before the watch did, and I sold that day to the warehousemen on Marrow side and they blessed me for it. When the Pits had their bad fever, I knew it from the runs going quiet before any crier called it. The rats are the city's nerves. They feel the thing coming up through the foundation that the people on the street feel only when it has already arrived.
So when they began to leave, I knew it was bad. I did not know how bad. That part I had to be taught, and the teaching cost me everything I had to lose, which I will own was not much, but it was mine.
It started at the deep ends. The lowest runs, down past where the Sotto stalls give out and the brick goes to older stone, stone with no mortar, stone that was laid by hands that are not in any of Eppy's stories because Eppy will not tell that far back. Those runs had always been my richest. The deep dark breeds rats the way still water breeds flies. And one week in the spring I worked three nights down there and my traps came up empty, and not the clean empty of a worked-out run, but the wrong empty, the empty of a place a rat will not enter. I found the droppings going one way only. Up. All of them moving up, toward the light, toward the cold streets a rat hates, and not one coming down. They were climbing out of the underneath as fast as their feet would take them, past my traps, past me, out into a city that would poison and stamp and drown them, and they were choosing it. They had felt something come up through the old stone that was worse than every bigger thing in the world at once.
A wise man would have climbed out behind them. I have never been called wise. I went down to see what they were running from, because thirty years of trade had made me proud, and pride is the ratcatcher's only disease, since nothing else down there will have him.
I did not get far. The cold came up to meet me, the wrong cold, the cold the grandmothers paint the red ochre against, and that spring the ochre on every doorframe in the city had gone to powder and stopped its work, so there was nothing between me and the cold but my own skin. I got down to where the old stone starts and I heard the water in the deep drip with a sound I did not like, too slow, too even, like something keeping a count, and I turned around and came up. I am not ashamed of it. The rats are never wrong. When they leave, you leave.
But a man must eat, and a run with no rats in it pays no Groats, and that is where the trouble found me, in the shape of a soft word and a heavy purse.
His name was Rozito Vallikozo and he runs the market, which is to say he runs the part of the market the Market Master does not see, the way a man's liver runs the part of him his face does not. Everyone in the Sotto owes Rozito or is owed by him. He found me at the tally-stall counting my poor week's tails and he stood too close and smelled of grave-earth under his good Terrassian scent, and he said he had heard my deep runs had gone quiet, and was that not a shame, and how would I like to be paid not for dead rats but for live ones.
Live ones. A Krone the sack. Silver, the Queen's own profile cold in my palm, twenty times what the tally-man gave for the dead. I was to take them alive, no easy thing, you must wire a soft trap and check it hourly or they chew their own legs off, and I was to bring them in a sack down to the deep stalls, to a door past the last lamp that I would know by the smell, and leave them, and ask nothing, and be paid. He said it the way you say a thing that is not a question. A ratcatcher with empty runs and a winter coming does not make it a question either.
I told myself a hundred clean things about it. That a great house wanted them for its serpents, the Terrassians keep serpents. That a physic wanted them for his black studies, the way physics will. That it was no business of mine what a man did with vermin once the silver was in my hand, since the whole world had agreed for thirty years that it was no business of mine what became of the rats, alive or dead. I told myself all of it and I took the silver and I caught them alive, and that is the part I cannot put down anywhere but here, to a stranger, where it can do no more harm than it has already done.
I was good at it. God forgive me, I was the best of them, the only catcher in the Sotto who could bring a full live sack down hour after hour without losing a third to the wire. Rozito gave me more sacks. The door past the last lamp took everything I carried and asked for more, and I never saw who took it, only a hand in the dark and the smell behind the hand, and the smell was the deep cold and under it something I knew and could not place for weeks, until one night I placed it, and it was the smell of my own catch. The smell of a great many rats kept close and living in the dark. They were keeping them. Down there past the door they were keeping every live one I brought, all of them, alive, in the cold the rats had fled, and a rat will not stay in that cold, a rat would die before it stayed, so something was making them stay.
I followed a sack once. Not mine to follow, but I had walked the underneath thirty years and there is no run in it I do not know, no crack a man can put his shoulder through that I have not, and I went around by the old stone with no lamp at all, by my hands and my count of paces, the way only a ratcatcher in this whole city can go, and I came up behind the door past the last lamp and put my eye to the gap in the old dry joint.
There were lamps in there, the bad green ones the Lich Cult burns, the light that does not warm a thing. And there was a wall that was not a wall. It went up past the lamplight and it breathed. I will not dress it for you. It was the dead. It was the city's dead, the unburned poor that go down the chutes instead of out to the Hallaset terraces, knit together into one great mass the size of a barge, a Necrotic Bulk the Cult men call it, I have learned the word since, and it hung on the old stone and it was wet and it moved and it was studded all over, all through it, with my rats. The live ones. Threaded into the dead meat alive and kept alive, their small hearts going, hundreds of small living hearts beating inside the great dead thing, and where each one beat the dead flesh around it twitched and warmed and took, and I understood the trade at last, the true trade, the one Rozito had bought from me a Krone the sack.
The dead do not animate easily. The Cult learned that the hard way and the comet would not wait for them to learn it slow. They had found that a living spark threaded through dead meat will teach it to move, will start it, the way you bank a live coal in cold ash to carry fire across a wet night. My rats were the coals. Every live sack I carried down was a hundred more beating hearts banked into that thing to keep it warming toward whatever night they meant to wake it whole, and I had carried more of them than any man in the city, because I was the best, because I was proud, because the underneath was the one place I had ever been the better of any man.
I went home and I was sick for two days and on the third day Rozito's man left a sack of silver at my door, and a new wire-trap, good steel, and a single word folded in with it. More.
I did not go back down. I want that on the record too, against the rest. I sat in my room over the gutter in the Marrow with the river of silver Rozito had paid me and I did not catch one more live rat, and I thought, in my pride, that I had got out, that a man can stop a thing by simply ceasing to do it.
That is the part I did not understand, and it is the thing I am setting all this down to tell you, so that you understand it before it is your turn, as it will be everyone's turn before the red star is done.
They did not need me to catch any more. They had what they had wanted from me from the start, and it was never the rats. A man can find rats anywhere. What they wanted, what no Cult man and no raised corpse and no necromancer with grave-earth under his scent could buy at any price, was the map. The roads of the underneath. Every crack a man can put his shoulder through, every old dry joint, every wet brick vein from the deep stone up to the cold streets where the bread is. I carried that map in my feet. Thirty years of it. And for a winter I walked it, sack after sack, down past the last lamp and back, over and over, teaching the road by the wearing of it, laying a track of my own scent and my own passage from the breathing wall to the surface as plain to that thing as a paved high road, because the dead do not need eyes, the dead follow the warm and the worn, and I had worn them a road from their cradle to the open city and salted it the whole way with the smell of living men.
The wards are powder. The comet sits below the rooftops now where no comet goes. And these three nights past I have heard them in the runs under the Marrow, under my own room, coming up, not running, the slow even drip of a thing keeping a count, and they are not coming up the chutes and the drains the watch could block. They are coming up my roads. The good ones. The secret ones a ratcatcher dies without telling, and I told them with my feet for a Krone the sack, and tonight the smell that comes up through my own floor is the deep cold and under it a great many small hearts beating, my catch, my coals, my honest grey animals threaded living into the thing I walked to the door of my house.
The rats were never wrong. They felt it come up through the foundation and they left, every one of them, out into the poison and the cold, because the poison and the cold were the better choice and they were honest enough to make it. I was not. I read the whole tongue of the city and sold the one thing on it that mattered and called it vermin, and now there is no run left in the underneath that does not lead up, all of them moving up, toward the light, toward the cold streets, and not one thing coming down. Leaving, I would have told you a season ago, and known exactly what it meant. Listen at your own floor tonight. You will hear it leaving too. It is only that this time the city is the rat, and there is nowhere left above the underneath to run to, because the man who knew every road out already walked them all the wrong way.