Chapter 69 - Parley

We hadn’t even been there for a couple of hours, and already the fort was under attack? That wasn’t a great sign. I’d been hedging about whether I ought to use the control stone here or somewhere else. With this latest news, I was leaning hard toward somewhere else.

The rats had been fighting the goblins. They must have noticed when the goblins pulled up stakes and left town. It would have been hard to miss. Now they were—what? Trying to take the fort as their own? It wasn’t that great a base of operations. I was more than happy to hand it over to them, if they’d asked nicely.

I wasn’t about to let them just kick me out, though. Strength mattered in this world, and unless I was way wrong, the appearance of strength mattered almost as much as actually having it. I had power. I knew that. But if I let others push me around, would they believe it? Or would they assume instead that I was weak and easy to take down?

The best way to stop a bully was a punch in the nose, at least in my experience. I sent a mental command to Sue and slid down the ladder as fast as I could. The dino was already marching toward the gap we’d smashed in the wall before I hit the ground.

“Kara! We’ve got incoming!” I called out. “Those rat-people from the other night are on their way to pay us a visit.”

“Awesome. Want me with you, or on the wall with my bow?”

“Wall with your bow,” I replied. I had enough stamina crystals now that I’d be a hard target to kill. Kara wasn’t so lucky yet. I made a mental note of that… If she was going to continue working with me, we needed to get her ranked up, and soon.

I mounted up on Sue’s back while Kara was climbing the ladder I’d just come down. I had Sue hold position, because I wanted to go out at the right time. Better ‘shock and awe’ when there’s some good shock involved.

“How close?” I called out when she was at the guard post on the wall top.

“Fifty meters!”

“Holler when they hit twenty-five!”

I readied Sue to rush out through the gap we’d created. If I did end up keeping this place, I needed to get that repaired ASAP. No sense leaving a hole anyone could wander through. The fort had a gate, albeit one that was a bit small for Sue’s bulk. We’d need to change that, too… So many things to do, and too damned little time.

“Twenty-five!” Kara shouted.

That was my signal. I gave Sue a mental nudge, and the dinosaur started forward at a walk. As soon as we were through the palisade, though, Sue bounded ahead and let out a blood-curdling roar. The bound crossed a third of the distance between us and the rats. The roar stopped them all in their tracks.

The rat-people ducked down, hiding as best they could in the shrubs. It wasn’t nearly enough to conceal them. There were too many of them, for one thing, and there just wasn’t enough ground cover. Still, they cowered and backed away, obviously terrified of Sue. Their roar had that effect on people.

I paused and ordered Sue to do likewise. These creatures had showed up on my doorstep. If they twitched in a way that looked like an attack, I’d have Sue blast them with Fireballs.

But I also remembered that arrow one of them had shot into a goblin, right before it attacked me. Had that arrow saved me? I doubted my life was in real danger, but if the goblin had gotten its dagger into me a couple of times, it would have hurt, and might have been a lot worse than that. Drain Life healed me, but I could only cast it if I could concentrate. That wasn’t easy when I was bleeding.

The rat-archer had known what he was doing when he fired that shot. At the time, I figured it was an ‘enemy of my enemy’ sort of thing. But it demonstrated they were capable of more than just mindless violence.

Point is, I wasn’t sure why these creatures were here. Did they want a fight? Or something else? I waited, wondering what they’d do.

At first, none of them moved at all. They cowered, trying their best to hide. After a long pause, one of them shuffled forward slowly, spear held between outstretched arms like it was an offering. The rat-being took three steps toward me, then laid the spear down on the ground and backed away.

That wasn’t the action of someone who wanted to pick a fight.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“What are they doing?” Kara shouted from the wall. “Surrendering?”

“Looks like?” I wasn’t sure if it was surrender or parley. All the other rat-people had kept their weapons, so I was leaning toward the latter. I turned toward the one who’d laid his spear on the ground and shouted down to him. “What do you want?”

“No fight!” the rat-man replied, stunning me. They could talk? “Need help!”

Not only could they talk, they’d come here asking for help? Okay, this was getting weirder all the time. I had to admit I didn’t hate it. If humans were going to be sharing the world with all these strange creatures, we needed to find ways to make friends with at least some of them. I found that I wanted to take a chance on this.

Oh, I knew I could just blast them all into oblivion. There were over twenty rat-people out there. That would be twenty more stones for my collection, a substantial amount of loot.

I just didn’t have it in me to go all murder-hobo on everything I met. Sure, that might make sense from a certain point of view, but I wanted a better world than that. Everything I’d ever known was gone, and now we were stuck building something new from the ashes. Was it going to be a Mad Max sort of world, or something better? I had a feeling which we ended up with depended on our choices.

I slid down from Sue, ordering her to hold position, but to burn them all if they tried attacking. I wanted to see if peace was possible—but I wasn’t going to be stupid about it. I pointed to the one who’d dropped his weapon. “You—alone—come inside with me.”

I beckoned with my arms as I spoke, showing what I had in mind. The rat-guy seemed to get it. He took a hesitant step forward, looking up toward Sue the whole time. I chuckled quietly, under my breath.

“Sue won’t hurt you unless you try to hurt me,” I told him. “Come inside.”

Then I did as I’d instructed him to do—I went back through the gap, into the fort.

My undead were mostly gathered just inside the gap in the wall. The archers were up on the walls, but the rest were waiting for me inside like an honor guard. I marched through them toward a fire pit where Kara had set a small blaze burning. Once I was by the fire, I waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. The lone rat-man came through the hole in the wall. He glanced back over his shoulder, clearly terrified Sue was going to eat him. Then he saw the undead inside, waiting in silent ranks, and froze. I beckoned him forward, and he did as I asked.

Once he was near the fire, I spoke again. “What do you want?”

“Help.”

That wasn’t very useful. “Help how?”

“You kill green things?” the rat asked. “Chase away?”

I nodded. Whatever he wanted, he needed to work up to it, I guess.

“They kill us. Hurt us. Thank.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied. “How’d you learn to speak like me?”

“We were small before. In cages. Grew. Got smart. Understood words we always heard.”

In cages… I remembered the building they’d been defending, out on Route Two. It was a pet store. Were these the pets from the store, changed by the magic of the Event? Okay, that was cool. It also meant my theory about many of these creatures being altered old-Earth life was probably true.

“I’m glad we can talk,” I said. “The goblins are gone. What help do you need?”

The rat looked abashed at that. “We are few. Green things—goblins? Were many. Could not win. You save us. But now, new enemy coming.”

Awesome! I’d managed to take out one threat, but apparently there was another one looming? At least these guys might be able to clue me in about who else was being a problem in the neighborhood. That was worth quite a lot.

“What enemy?” I asked.

“Like your dead-things,” the rat-man replied.

Undead? I’d heard rumors from one of Alfred’s people about another necromancer in town somewhere, but he was supposedly west of here, closer to Lake Champlain. It could be him they were talking about, but I had a feeling it was something closer at hand. Could be yet another necromancer, or it might be something different entirely. I remembered that we’d had zombies escape the lab building, back on day one. They’d infected other people outside, and those zombies had probably gone on to infect others.

I hadn’t seen any wild zombies for a while. That hadn’t made me suspicious before. Maybe it should have.

“They attack you?” I asked.

He nodded. “They live in big home toward rising sun. Attack us last night. We fight, but… They are many. We few.”

That was more than a little interesting. There was a big horde of undead somewhere near the pet store, but east, not west. This didn’t sound like the necromancer Alfred’s man told me about. It sounded like something different.

“Big building?” Kara said. She’d slid down the ladder to join me. Her bow was still in her hand, but otherwise she looked pretty relaxed. “I wonder if he’s talking about University Mall? You remember what we saw…”

“Yeah, I remember.” Boy, did I ever. We slipped past the mall in the dark, on our way back to rescue Alfred.

When we went past, it was bad. Someone had set multiple cars ablaze in the parking lot, and there was drumming, coming from the mall itself. Lots of loud drumming. Neither of us had dared get close enough to the place to see what was going on there, but it was just down the street from the rats’ pet store, and the mall was clearly a hot spot for something.

Maybe it was a hot spot for undead?

Whether it was the mall or somewhere else, though, I was inclined to help these critters out. Allies seemed like they might be useful to have, for one thing. But even more important, a horde of undead meant a heaping pile of black crystals. I needed to rank up my crystals badly, and there were only so many cemeteries in town. I’d figured on going hunting—ride Sue around Burlington, using my map to find as many graveyards as I could.

But if there were a bunch of undead all in one place, taking them down was in my best interest. If it won me some goodwill from a potential ally, too? Bonus.

I pulled out my map, showing him the lines of the roads. I pointed to the spot in the woods where the fort was, then to their pet store. “This is where we are. This is your home.”

He nodded his understanding.

“Show me where your enemies are,” I said.