Runt the Brave: Bravery in the Midst of a Bully Society (Legends of Tira-Nor) Read online

  Runt the Brave: Bravery in the Midst of a Bully Society

  Book one in the Legends of Tira-Nor series

  Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Schwabauer

  Published by Living Ink Books, an imprint of

  AMG Publishers, Inc.

  6815 Shallowford Rd.

  Chattanooga, Tennessee 37421

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in printed reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (printed, written, photocopied, visual electronic, audio, or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Printing—October, 2012

  Print edition ISBN 13: 978-0-89957-848-4

  EPUB edition ISBN 13: 978-1-61715-367-9

  Mobi edition ISBN 13: 978-1-61715-368-6

  ePDF edition ISBN 13: 978-1-61715-369-3

  LEGENDS OF TIRA-NOR® is a trademark of AMG Publishers

  Cover layout and design by Daryle Beam at BrightBoy Design, Inc., Chattanooga, TN

  Interior design and typesetting by Adept Content Solutions LLC,

  Urbana, IL

  Editing by Kathy Ide and Rick Steele

  Printed in the United States of America

  17 16 15 14 13 12 –V– 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book was written for Gabrielle Joy with love.

  Really and truly.

  Tamir's Prophecy.

  Chapter One The Coming of Rats

  Chapter Two The Calling of Runt

  Chapter Three Before the King

  Chapter Four Black in the Tunnel

  Chapter Five Serpent Killer

  Chapter Six In the House of Man

  Chapter Seven YuLooq

  Chapter Eight Round Top

  Chapter Nine LaRish

  Chapter Ten The Siege

  Chapter Eleven GoRec

  Chapter Twelve Horrid

  Naming of Mice

  Glossary

  Chapter One

  The Coming of Rats

  At the edge of the Dark Forest, JaRed the field mouse waited for the face of death to reveal itself. An enemy lurked there under the vast canopy of oaks and maples. He felt its presence as a cold shiver along his spine.

  He stood unmoving, his body stiff. A hot breeze rustled the tall prairie grass. All around him the droughtburned stalks snapped and rattled like swords. Dust choked the air, coated the leaves of weeds, rose in gentle swirls.

  JaRed’s nose twitched.

  He blinked back the sweat that trickled down his brow and stung his eyes.

  Though still young, JaRed had learned to trust the whisper of instinct. Its voice screamed at him now, raising the sweat-matted fur on the back of his neck.

  He stood very still for a long time.

  The mice of Tira-Nor sometimes said Death wore a different face each morning. One day it wore the face of the weasel or the cat. The next day it put on the face of the serpent. Another day it wore the pale, shriveled mask of old age. But the mice only spoke this way in macabre jest.

  They knew what Death really looked like.

  Death came from the sky. Its hands were talons, and its face wore a small hooked beak.

  JaRed knew he should not have been scavenging near the Dark Forest in the first place. But the old familiar restlessness had overtaken him, and he had made for the shadowy black trails and shifting gloom as though drawn by the magic of its vastness. One could get lost in the Dark Forest, and sometimes “lost” appealed to him.

  But now he saw something odd—something unnatural—at the forest’s edge. He thought it might be important to know just what the odd thing was. For whatever enemy waited in the dry brush of the Dark Forest, it was trying hard not to be seen.

  JaRed excelled at making himself disappear. This talent came easily to him, for he was smaller than the other mice—so much smaller he had been called Runt his whole life. Runt the flea-scratcher. Runt the Sickly. Runt the Waste-of-Air. He had always hated these names, but what could he do? Even the older mice called him Little Runt.

  Adults thought of him as a child simply because of his size.

  At some point—he could not remember when—he had discovered that being small could be useful. When others did not respect you, they tended not to see you. This had given him an idea.

  JaRed had taught himself how to move silently, how to blend into his surroundings, how to disappear virtually at will.

  After a while, he could make himself almost invisible.

  Perhaps this explained his overconfidence now.

  The thing in the brush is not a skilled predator, he told himself, or it would not fidget while trying to hide.

  This puzzled him.

  He stepped forward lightly. Closer to the odd enemy, the death-thing. He moved like a ghost among the thistles, weeds, and long stalks of sunflowers, and stopped just inside the shadow of the Forest.

  “Would you look at that,” a great fist of a voice said from the gloom. “GoRec is right. A whole village of the little devils. And ripe for the plucking to boot.”

  “Shaddap,” said a second voice. “I need to think.”

  JaRed froze. He stood close now, though he still could not see the enemy through the dense undergrowth. He willed his body to relax. The voices carried a tone of familiarity, something he could not quite place. But they did give Death a shape and a size, if not a face, and this blunted the edge of his fear. The most terrifying enemies had no shape or size because one never saw them. They struck before you knew they were there.

  A single shock of white fur drooped just above JaRed’s left eye, and he brushed it back with one paw. Then he nudged aside the dry yellow grass and stepped forward into the deeper cover of the Dark Forest. Under grass, between fallen twigs, around stones. Careful not to make a sound. He would not confront the voices. He would go around them. He would watch them from the thicket to the north. He would find out what sort of threat these intruders represented. But he would not be seen or heard. Of this he was certain.

  “What was it Master GoRec wanted from us?” the first voice asked.

  “Numbers, you dolt,” replied the second. “How many mice actually live in Tira-Nor.” There was a pause, then, “Anyway, must be over two thousand.”

  JaRed slipped forward soundlessly. He moved among the shadows, through dead grass and limp twigs and empty husks of leaves, his ears alert for every word. There were at least two of them, he knew now, but there could be more. The others might be more clever at concealing themselves.

  As they continued to chatter, JaRed finally understood why they couldn’t stand still. Why they betrayed their secrecy by impatience. They did not possess the ability to wait quietly for something they wanted.

  They weren’t predators; they were something worse.

  Rats.

  But what were they doing here, outside Tira-Nor?

  JaRed inched forward, sure of himself now that he knew what he faced. Even so, his heart thudded in his chest. But he moved forward again, equally slowly, his body trembling. Beneath the wide tapered leaves of sunflowers that stretched their necks to drink the heat of the sky, two long, hairless tails like worms jutted from the foliage. One of the tails twisted slowly, coiling under a decaying leaf.

  JaRed stood behind them, close
enough to make out the brown-and-white splotches of oily fur on their backs.

  “Can you smell them?” the first rat asked. Its voice sounded like a hacksaw cutting rusty tin.

  “Smell them?” the other mocked. This one’s voice was lower, more cumbersome, like a squash bursting under the blow of a hammer. “The stink of mice is all about this place. We shall have to do something about that when we take over. Maybe we can coax a skunk into spraying Tira-Nor down for us.” The rat guffawed at its own joke, but its companion turned on it, as rats are known to do, and clapped it across the nose with one paw.

  “Quiet, you idiot! Do you want to bring their sentries?”

  The other sneered and continued to laugh. “ What are you so afraid of, Scritch?”

  Scritch looked north along the edge of the Dark Forest. His eyes narrowed into little black slits as he scanned the greenery around where JaRed stood motionless. “Do you not smell that, Klogg?”

  The bigger of the two rats turned, and JaRed saw that his face was scarred along the nose in two long, bare streaks. Klogg’s nose twitched. “Mouse.”

  “Yes,” Scritch said.

  “So what? The whole area reeks of them. Weren’t we just talking about—”

  “No, no, no,” Scritch sputtered. “Mark the direction of the wind.”

  Klogg paused a moment, blinking. “That way,” he said at last. He raised one grimy paw and pointed north, in the direction where JaRed stood hidden.

  How could I have been so stupid? JaRed thought. But there wasn’t time to berate himself further. Scritch’s eyes opened wide and his mouth curled back in a sly and wicked grin. His hacksaw voice scratched the air like a claw. “Yesss! There. The stink of ... a mouse!”

  JaRed turned and ran. Even as he took his first desperate steps, he heard the crunching of dry grass and fallen leaves that meant the two rats were giving chase.

  When threatened, a mouse of Tira-Nor would usually bolt for the cover of the closest of the city holes, which they called gates. Mice were fast, and most of their enemies would not risk Tira-Nor’s booby traps. It was common knowledge the city’s entry tunnels were well secured.

  But JaRed was not close to a gate. He had been scavenging at the eastern border of the underground city’s territory, which ran from the Houses of Men, past the hill they called Round Top, and all the way to the Winding Cliffs of the Dark Forest. The closest gate lay well beyond his reach now.

  There was, to be sure, one gate not far from here, and though not all the mice knew of it, JaRed did. Its tunnel ran in a line all the way from the Commons of Tira-Nor to the edge of the Dark Forest near where JaRed had first spotted the rats.

  But JaRed could not use it. That hole was one of the ancient defenses of Tira-Nor, to be used only in the event of dire need. It was an escape route from the city, not into it. JaRed would rather have died than reveal that secret to the rats. Tira-Nor had its faults, but it was still home, even if he did dream of escaping to a new life somewhere beyond the known world.

  So he ignored the half-buried crevice in the bottleshaped limestone that marked the hole, and instead ran through the Dark Forest. Farther from safety. Farther from home.

  After what seemed a long time, he stopped, exhausted, and pushed himself under the cover of a fallen log. The bottom of the log lay just above the earth and formed a narrow cave-like crevice backed by dirt. He could not have asked for a better hiding place; the opening was much too small for a rat to shove through. He curled his tail around his heaving body, his chest pressed low to the damp ground, and sniffed at the pungent odor of rotting tree bark. He did not suppose he would have to remain hidden for long. The rats had probably given up by now and would leave him alone.

  He was wrong.

  From his position underneath the log, JaRed stared at the fat legs and dirty paws of the two rats. With their keen sense of smell, Scritch and Klogg had followed JaRed’s trail all the way to the fallen log. Had they been in a hurry, they might have left him alone. But rats as a general rule could not resist chasing anything that runs. And JaRed had run.

  Scritch lowered his head to the ground and peered into the darkness with one eye. “What have we here?”

  “It’s a mouse,” Klogg said.

  “Of course it’s a mouse. But what was it doing spying on us?” Scritch spat his voice into the dark hole. “Well? What were you doing, mouse?”

  “Yes,” Klogg burbled. “Why were you spying on us?”

  “You were the ones spying,” JaRed said. “Go away.”

  “Go away, is it?” Klogg’s scarred and bulbous nose appeared at the opening. “We live here now. This is our part of the forest and you’re trespassing. I’ve a mind to give you a good beating, I do.”

  “Get up on the log,” Scritch commanded.

  Just visible beneath the black roof of the log, Klogg’s eyes narrowed to half-moons. “What?”

  “Get up on the log, you walking garbage heap. Jump up and down.”

  Klogg raised up on his hind legs, then peered again underneath the log. He raised up again and lowered himself once more. A slow, happy smile worked itself across his snout. “Ohhhhh. I see.”

  He leaped up on the log, and his voice came woodenly from above. “Well? Whaddaya think, mouse?” The log shuddered once, twice, as if from a great weight thundering down on it. “How does this feel, mouse? Or this? Or this?”

  JaRed heard panting. But the log wasn’t moving, for it was connected to the trunk of the tree by a thick section of folded wood fiber. JaRed felt the vibrations through the fur of his back, but he still had room enough to breathe.

  Scritch looked in. “Give him another go. Flatten him.”

  Klogg jumped and threatened some more, but his voice sounded tired.

  Finally the pounding stopped.

  “Let that be a lesson, mouse,” Scritch growled. “No more spying on us. And if I ever catch you near Tira-Nor again, I’ll feed you to Klogg one whisker at a time. That is, if you’re lucky. If I’m especially angry I might introduce you to the Master.”

  The oldest story any mouse could remember told of a Great Owl—as white as the moon and as silent as a shadow—that swooped for its prey from a hole in the sky. The hole was made by ElShua’s finger the day he pushed the world deep into the soil of heaven, for the hole was both a window and a doorway into that other world.

  According to the story, the Owl swept through the skies of ElShua’s garden. He carried in his beak that trouble-making rodent, Wroth. ElShua had grown tired of Wroth causing mischief for the other animals. So he sentenced it to exile, and he gave the job of enforcing that punishment to the Owl. “Take him to the White Desert and leave him beyond the farthest dune,” ElShua commanded. “There he will find no creature to torment except himself. Perhaps the loneliness of that place can remake his soul, for even Wroth must eventually tire of his own voice.”

  And so the Owl flew and flew. Away from ElShua’s palace, over mountains, beyond rivers and valleys and plains, until he came to the edge of the great garden, the velvet fields bursting with the green hope of new worlds and new life. And all the while Wroth protested and screamed and cursed the same thing over and over: “You’ll regret this!”

  The Owl grew so weary of hearing his prisoner’s complaints, he felt he could bear it no longer. In despair, he began to look for some way to rid himself of his burden. After all, it would be many weeks before he arrived at the White Desert, and he didn’t think he could stand Wroth that long.

  An idea occurred to him. The Owl saw that he flew directly over freshly turned, black-and-green fields. He saw the crisp rows, the infinitely perforated furrows like great lumps of dark bread studded with seeds. And he thought, in all this vastness surely one rodent would not make any difference. For the rows were endless, and once Wroth had been planted he would never get out.

  Down the Owl flew—faster than the wind—and into a hole chosen at random, a hole made by ElShua’s finger, a hole smaller than a pine needle and wider than t
he sun.

  Inside the hole he found the newly made Earth. Newly made skies opened up around him, and below him a new sea crashed against new rocks.

  “You’ll regret this,” Wroth shrieked again.

  But the Owl opened his beak and said, “Who?”

  Released from the Owl’s grip, Wroth fell. He fell for three days and three nights before he hit the waves, which is why rats fear both heights and water to this very day.

  But when the Owl returned to heaven he found ElShua waiting for him. And ElShua’s face blazed with anger, for He did not intend His new world to suffer the presence of such evil.

  “Do you know what you have done?” ElShua asked.

  “Who?” said the Owl. He had never been one to accept responsibility for his deeds.

  “You,” said ElShua. “You have brought evil into my new world. Therefore, you will be the one to take it out. Here is your punishment: every day, for as long as the Earth blooms in my garden, you will bear its sorrow to my side.”

  Then they both wept, and ElShua stopped planting new worlds.

  That is how the Great Owl came to be the bearer of souls.

  JaRed believed in ElShua. He believed in the Great Owl, though he never said so out loud. His brothers would mock him endlessly if they ever found out. Especially HaRed, whom everyone called Horrid. Horrid said it didn’t really matter what you believed about life, about death.

  Beneath the log, JaRed felt strangely cold. Remembering the ancient stories usually gave him a sense of warmth and peace. Instead, he felt more alone than ever.

  JaRed waited all through the afternoon before he dared leave the safety of the log and begin the long journey back to the city of Tira-Nor. By then the sun had set, and the cloudless void was empty of everything but pinprick stars and the barest sliver of a moon bleeding light into the world.

  People sometimes supposed field mice lived in a world of open spaces and sunshine, of wide horizons and blue sky. This was not so. The world of mice was one of darkness and shadows. To a mouse, a field of prairie tall grass was a jungle of green blades and prickly weeds. Life was secured by bolting from safety to safety, from bush to rock to tree. The sun and the moon were uncertain allies, for a mouse’s eyesight during the day was inferior to that of the hawk, the badger, and the weasel. And during the night it was no match for the owl’s.