Dodger

them, slammed his boot on them or even tried to shoo them away. He left them alone and so they left
him
alone. Besides, he didn’t know how he would stand with the Lady if he was nasty to her little subjects. Grandad had been very firm about this, saying ‘Tread on a rat and you’re treading on the Lady’s robe.’ Dodger whispered to the silence and said, ‘Lady, it’s Dodger again. About that luck I mentioned? If you can see your way clear, thanking you in expectation, Dodger.’
    And up there in the darkness, there was the scream of a stricken rat . They were capable of dying quite noisily, and there was another squeal, and even more rats were pouring past him, surrounding him.
    There, suddenly, barely visible in the grimy light, was the intruder, crawling with commendable stealth along the sewer, actually passing Dodger in his stinking hideaway, since Dodger was clearly invisible, being the same colour and certainly the same stink as the sewer itself. The rats were running over the intruder too, but he was hitting out at them with something – Dodger couldn’t quite see what – and the rats were screeching, and most certainly the Lady would be listening.
    Now, in his hand Dodger had – yes! – Sweeney Todd’s razor; he had brought it with him not so much as a weapon but as a talisman: a gift from fate that had changed his life, just as it had changed that of Sweeney Todd. On a day like this, how could he have left it behind?
    In the darkness, Dodger’s dark-accustomed eye saw the gleaming stiletto dagger in the man’s hand. It was an assassin’s weapon, if ever he had seen one. No decent murderer would use something like that. The thought came to him fast and all at once: he had nothing at all to fear down here. It was his world, and he could feel the Lady helping him, he was sure of it. No, the person who ought to be afraid was the man stealthily crawling along the drain just where Dodger could see him . . . and Dodger jumped on him, pinning him down immediately, and assassin or not it is hard to use your dagger when you are splayed in the muck of a sewer with Dodger sitting on your back.
    He was a wiry boy, but he held the man more or less fixed to the ground as if he had been nailed to it, and pummelled every bit of the man that could be pummelled. Even as the man struggled, Dodger pressed cold steel to his throat and whispered, ‘If you know anything about me, then you know that pressed to your neck is Sweeney Todd’s razor – wonderful smooth, so it is, and who knows what it could cut off?’ He allowed the prone man to at least lift his mouth and nose out of the muck for a moment, and added, ‘Upon my word, I was expecting rather more of an assassin than this. Come on, speak up!’ Dodger grabbed the stiletto and flung it into the darkness.
    The man below him spat out mud and a piece of what might once have been part of a rat and tried to say something that Dodger couldn’t understand, so Dodger said, ‘Come on, what was that again?’
    A voice – a female voice – said, ‘Good evening, Mister Dodger; if you look carefully, you will see that I am holding a pistol, quite a powerful one. You will not make a single move until my friend here stops throwing up so unpleasantly, whereupon I expect he will wish to do unto others that which hath just been done to him. In the meantime, you will stand where you are and I will pull the trigger if you move so much as an inch. Later I will kill your young lady friend . . . By the way, I can’t say I like that gentleman very much, not the best assistant I’ve ever had. Oh dear, oh dear, why is it that everybody assumes that the Outlander is a man?’ The owner of the voice stepped nearer and Dodger could now see both her and her pistol.
    There was no doubt about it. The Outlander was attractive, even in this gloom, and Dodger could not pinpoint the accent. Not Chinese, certainly not European, though very fluent in English. He had Sol’s pistol strapped in his boot; that had been for use later, for the plan which was now of course in tatters, and so he said, ‘Excuse me, miss, but why do you want to kill Simplicity?’
    ‘Because I will then be paid quite a considerable sum of money, young man. Surely you know that? Incidentally, I have no particular quarrel with yourself, although Hans – once he can stand up straight – almost certainly would quite like to have a brief, very brief, conversation with you. We just have to wait for the