Greasy smoke hung in the air as bodies burned like stacks of cordwood. A stench of burnt hair, burnt shit, mixed with another smell uncomfortably close to roasting pork. Ash stuck to the lining of one’s throat and clogged nostrils. The smoky haze turned the sun into an angry red eyeball, blind and weeping. A reminder that whatever god or gods guided man’s destiny, they’d turned their gaze away from this place.
Rand pulled the cloak tight. Its hood fell over his eyes and a rough scarf covered the lower half of his face. Gloves sheathed both his hands. Most passersby in the street wore the same, covering themselves as completely as they could and keeping their distance from one another. Conveniently, it hid the boiled leather armour that Rand wore and which may have otherwise earned him curious looks. A leather vest and forearm guards worn over course clothing with boots that rose as high as his knees. The cloak covered a short sword at his side, his daggers, and several staves for making torches.
Wooden wheels clattered off of cobblestones. A tall, broad shouldered man wearing the look of a halfwit dragged a cart already heavy with bodies. The man had a thick cloak but his scarf hung off his face to reveal an open, sucking mouth lined with rotten teeth. The hands gripping the cart were bare. Maybe he’d dealt with so much death by this point he thought himself immune. Maybe he was right. Maybe he just didn’t care anymore, knowing death was capricious and would regularly leap over one house to swallow every inhabitant of another. Sparing fools and vagabonds while inflicting itself on those that had taken every possible precaution.
“Bring out your dead!” the corpse collector hollered. “Bring out your dead! King’s orders, ‘tis an offence to hold the bodies of the sick for burial! All bodies must be burned!”
Plague gripped the kingdom. They called it the Black Greed. It started as sniffles and a painful swelling in the joints. Soon, black veins began to rise to the surface of the flesh. Most died quickly at that point. For those that lingered, the veins grew into tumorous lumps of black flesh. And then, the symptoms from which the Greed took its name. Necrotic flesh would nibble then gnaw away the ends of fingers and toes. It chewed through nasal structures and ears and jowls until, between the rot and the swelling tumours, there would be little else left.
The rich fled to their country estates and beyond borders before they were closed to all travel. The poor had nowhere to go. Along the streets of the capital, tenements stacked on top of tenements. Businesses and churches, shuttered now, muscled for space. Folk isolated as best they could, knowing that if they left the capital they would only starve and die of exposure anyway. Or they would carry the sickness away with them to some place where there wasn’t even the mercy of a bed to waste away in and a corpse collector to burn your remains.
The only ones profiting were the rats. Rand drew to a halt to let a stream of them scurry across the street. Great hordes of rodents could be seen screaming from piles of plague victims when the torches were lowered. They filled the gutters and alleyways, darting in and out of homes where forgotten corpses or spoiled foods could be found.
Residents of the capital reacted to the rats in only two ways, with terror or with rage. As with previous plagues, the animals were widely believed to be behind the spread of the Black Greed. Thought to have carried it on ships from whatever foreign land it originated in. Although there were also rumours that the disease actually returned with soldiers from the king’s latest war of failed conquest, and the rats were only scapegoats. Either way, the kingsguard had patrols of men sweeping the streets, capturing and killing as many rodents as possible. Folk would either do anything they could to put space between themselves and the rats, or they would attack any that they saw with an almost frightening fury. As Rand hurried on, he saw one man with a broom scream and charge the swarm he’d just passed. He swept a couple into the gutter where they quickly righted themselves and ran on, unharmed. The pack disappeared into a nearby drain, some wriggling to fit their fat haunches through the bars.
Rand’s instructions were to meet the men for whom he’d be acting as a guide at a tavern called The Scurry Inn. The Scurry was closed, its doors and windows boarded, so he passed through the alley beside the building and into a stretch of old dumping ground behind it. Mouldering banks of trash shored up the sides of the square. Mixed among them were piles of ashes and charred bones, black and broken from heat. Rand had made sure to arrive early but seven men already waited for him in this incongruous place.
Unlike everyone else Rand had seen on the streets, these seven men clustered close together. Breathing one another’s air. Hoods and scarves covered their faces, leaving only slits for their eyes. Their cloaks were uniformly black and of higher quality than those Rand had seen on anyone else on his way there. At a glance, he could see the bulges and angles of weapons beneath the cloaks of six of the seven. The seventh, seemingly unarmed, was also a head shorter than any of the other six. In spite of all that, none of them carried any outward signs of their authority or where they had come from.
“Rand, did you have any trouble getting here?” the shorter man asked. “You weren’t followed?”
“No one would have cause to follow me, m’lord.”
“Have you had contact with any of the sick?”
Rand gave a small shrug. “I don’t believe so, m’lord. But in these troubled times, it’s hard to say with total certainty.”
Sybill, the shorter man, was an advisor to King Carvell. Rand didn’t know his exact titles but imagined he wasn’t the sort of man who would normally go traipsing through alleyways and dumping grounds and sewers to do his own dirty work. Beneath the hooded cloak he was bald and clean cheeked, pallid with fear. The other six men, all kingsguard, fidgeted nervously. They were the muscle, Sybill was the brains, and Rand was the guide. Maybe the eyes and ears, to extend the bodily metaphor. He was the only one who knew where they were going and he could tell the kingsguard were already uncomfortable with that fact. They didn’t like to cede their authority to anyone. There’d been several clashes between street patrols and diseased civilians since the plague began. Kingsguard had taken to carrying polearms on their rounds so they could inflict their idea of justice on wrongdoers while keeping their distance. None of these men carried such lengthy weapons with them now, of course. They wouldn’t be much use where they were going.
“You brought what I asked for?” Rand asked.
Sybill reached inside his clock and produced two items. “One pouch of golden guilders, and a letter of pardon for all crimes past and present signed by the king himself.”
Rand took the pouch and the envelope and stowed them in his clothing. The letter of pardon was pressed inside his vest and the pouch went onto his belt.
“Very well, but why all the skullduggery?”
“The king needs people to believe he has this plague under control. Taking a step this-, unusual, would not inspire confidence.”
“I suppose I can understand that, m’lord.”
Unusual was certainly the word. To many, the Rat King was little more than myth. Certainly Rand had never laid eyes on the creature and had never hoped to. He was said to be the ruler of all rats, or perhaps just all rats within the city, it wasn’t clear if there might be other rodent kings in other kingdoms with the same role. When Rand first heard the king’s advisor planned to negotiate with the Rat King, he’d thought it was a bizarre jest. Certainly it wasn’t how the king normally dealt with his enemies. The man had been genuine, however, and agreed easily to Rand’s price for his services as guide. If successful, they hoped to convince the Rat King to help stem the disease wracking the city in exchange for a kind of peace between their species.
“You do know where you’re going, don’t you?” Sybill said.
“It’s been two years since myself and my associates used the sewers for smuggling. We started during the Laughing Plague, actually, when entrances to the city were closed to all traffic. We found them a rather convenient place to store certain goods and move around without being seen. Dangerous, at times, but convenient. I grew to know them as well as the rooms of my childhood home. We used them until one of my associates, a good friend of mine, died down there.”
Rand felt a sense of unreality casually discussing his smuggling days with a member of the royal court in front of six members of the kingsguard. Not that he was telling them anything they didn’t know. And the letter of pardon with the king’s signature sat right over his heart.
Sybill’s eyes darted nervously. “Very well, then there’s no time like the present.”
“No, and if you want to enter and move about unseen then we have a ways to travel.”
Rand led Sybill and the other men through and around the dumping ground to a steeply sloping ditch that directed runoff from the sewers. At the bottom of the ditch was a soupy morass of foul mud. Their scarves did little to block the revolting stench. Even by the standards of the plague ridden city, it was enough to make the men gag. Thick sprigs of weeds grew from the rich sustenance.
Access to the nearest tunnel was mostly dry except for a thin trickle of grey water stained with ash. Completely red-brown with rust, wrist-thick bars covered the entrance. A section along the bottom had already broken free and left a gap large enough for a man to squeeze through but that wasn’t enough to satisfy the dignity of the kingsguard. Collectively, they levered and bashed at the grate until the bars were uprooted, pulling it away and tossing it as a single mass. Bits of masonry and rust crumbled from the mountings.
“Light your torches,” Rand said. “Many of the tunnels will be single file. Don’t lose track of the man in front of you. If you fall behind for any reason, cry out. A wrong turn in here, a slip, and you could become so lost you’ll never find your way out.”
Rand retrieved one of his staves and wound its head with a strip of cotton soaked in lamp oil. It lit easily, a ball of orange flame leaping to life. The kingsguard did the same. Sybill instead carried a small lantern, a steady flame walled behind glass. Cloaks parted to expose armour and give access to weapons.
“Stay close,” Rand said.
With Rand in the lead, the group filed inside the sewer. A fresh stench was trapped inside but it actually wasn’t as bad as the ditch. Baking in the sunlight clearly made the foulness that much worse. Rand adjusted the scarf over his face. Immediately behind him, Sybill gagged. Several of the kingsguard drew their swords and scanned the tunnel.
When Rand claimed to know the tunnels as well as his childhood home, it might have been a slight exaggeration. He knew routes. From where they’d entered, he could find his way to half a dozen different points around the city. But drop him into a tunnel, through a random manhole or drain, and he couldn’t know with any certainty where he might end up. There were too many twists and turns. Sewer tunnels had been built across different parts of the city according to different demands in different eras. Some had been forgotten, and fallen into disuse. Some had been cut off by fresh construction, or gotten clogged and never been dug out. With the plague, maintenance certainly wasn’t a top priority. And it wasn’t just sewers, there were basements and storerooms intruding into the underground world. There were tombs and cisterns and natural caverns. And in the section they were travelling to, Rand knew there were whole streets and buildings that had sunken into the marsh. They’d flooded so frequently and their foundations had become so bogged that folk just bricked them over and built on top of them. To assist him on this job, Rand had copied down some maps and stored the parchment inside his vest just in case.
“How far?” the king’s advisor asked.
“We’ve only just started,” Rand said.
The circle of light at the tunnel entrance shrank rapidly behind them. Rand kept his eyes forward but some of the kingsguard glanced back at the dwindling glow. Firelight leapt off the walls. Boots sunk into the semisolid muck that coated the ground. There was no dry space on which to walk through this particular section of tunnel. At times, they slid through jellied filth up to the ankles. Rand was glad of his knee-high boots. The lower edge of his cloak became damp.
A pack of rats fled, squealing, ahead of the men. The creatures all looked well fed, a couple of them as large as cats, covered in spiky grey, brown, or black fur. Naked tails slithered in the filth behind them. They darted deeper but a few paused at the next intersection. When Rand and the others kept coming, they bared their teeth and hissed. One of the kingsguard saw an opening to step forward with his sword raised.
“No, you fool!” Sybill said. “How do you think our negotiations will go if you start slaughtering his subjects? Do nothing unless we are attacked first.”
The bigger, younger man hesitated, blade shaking a little in his hand. After a few moments, the rats hissed and ran away.
Their path took them through tunnels old and new. Some had ceilings and walls crumbling to dirt. Some were narrow enough that they almost had to crawl and could only pass in a single file. Rand recognised alcoves where he and his fellow smugglers had once stowed stolen or otherwise illegal goods. The air varied greatly, sometimes merely stale, sometimes chokingly foul. Sometimes, invisible gases made the flames of their torches caper and leap. Some tunnels were flooded. Others led to parts of the city they didn’t want to go or to parts unknown. Tunnels had been stacked on top of tunnels or built with no sense of organisation or planning.
“What is that?” Sybill asked, hearing a dull, muffled ringing beating rhythmically through the tunnel like a heartbeat.
“It’s coming from above,” Rand said. “Probably a blacksmith.”
Drains and shafts with rusted ladders led to the surface. From time to time, they could hear noises from the outside world. The clattering wheels and cries of a corpse wagon. Raised voices, footsteps, or hooves. Passing beneath the floorboards of what appeared to be a basement, Rand distinctly heard someone weeping. But when they had moved on from those sounds, into the silence and trickling water of the tunnels, surrounded by the chittering of rats and their own echoing footsteps, they seemed to be another world away entirely.
As they moved toward older parts of the city, in the direction of the castle in fact, the tunnels got larger. Deep trenches had been dug into the earth then bricked up and bricked over, buried and forgotten. Rivers of water thick with ash and dirt and shit sifted among the lower reaches of the tunnels. Fortunately, as Rand well knew, there were narrow walkways to either side of most of the tunnels they followed.
Led by Rand, the group entered a cavernous but clearly manmade space. An ancient cistern filled with stagnant water of unknowable depths. Damp and moss ran from the walls, leaving the walkway slick. Stone pillars rose out of the water like great trees and braced the ceiling, holding up the world above. Wooden planks ran from the walkway to square islands surrounding the pillars. They looked rotten and sagging, some almost dipping to the water’s scummy surface.
“This way,” Rand said.
“Is it safe?” Sybill asked.
“Not really, m’lord. Only cross the boards one at a time.”
Slowly, carefully, Rand made his way across the first several boards. Sybill and the kingsguard followed one at a time. Darkness swallowed the light of the torches, making the cistern appear endless. At the edges, something shifted. Rand drew to a stop. He heard the scrape of what might have been shoe leather on damp stone. A pebble rolled and dropped into the water.
“What was that?” one of the kingsguard asked.
“There’s something in here!” another answered.
Hunting dog instincts took over. Kingsguard crowded the little island where Rand had drawn to a stop, torches and short swords bristling. Their route forward, made of crisscrossed planks, was too narrow and too precarious for them to go charging after the threat.
“Careful!” Rand warned, as the men jostled.
Kingsguard swarmed over wooden boards, sometimes failing to cross only one at a time. The makeshift bridges bowed and made crackling noises but luckily didn’t break. The men led with their torches and cast firelight ahead of themselves. Shadows retreated at the edges of the light, wraithlike but humanoid.
Suddenly, a chunk of rock sailed out of the darkness ahead. It missed, arcing past the soldiers and falling to the water. It was followed by a second, and a third. One of them clipped a kingsguard across the side of the head. It wasn’t travelling with enough force to knock him unconscious but it did send him off kilter. He slipped and tumbled over the side of a narrow bridge, entering the water with a loud splash.
“Timmons!” one of the other kingsguard yelled.
The kingsguard, Timmons, rose out of the water with arms waving, spluttering. Algae and scum covered his face and clothing. He’d lost his torch and sword. The other kingsguard hurried to help him, kneeling on one of the wooden boards. It sagged almost to the waterline and creaked alarmingly.
“Get off of there, it’s going to snap!” Rand yelled.
Timmons could barely swim. Grabbing him by the arms, one of the others dragged him away from the bridge to one of the stone islands. From there, they heaved him back onto solid ground. More rocks sailed out of the dark, a couple cracking against the nearby pillars. Mingled amongst the attack were human voices.
“Go away!”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Leave us alone!”
The voices echoed across the buried space. Rand listened. Something about them sounded choked and muffled, as if with a cold.
“Who’s out there?” another kingsguard shouted.
“We’re not here to harm you!” Rand said. “We don’t even know who you are, we just want to pass!”
“Are you sure about this?” Sybill hovered at Rand’s shoulder. “What are they?”
“People.”
“Living down here?”
“It happens sometimes. Folk with nowhere else to go.”
No response came from the people hiding in the shadows but the barrage of rocks stopped. Timmons wiped off some of the slime and huffed. A trickle of blood ran from his temple where he’d been struck. The others shielded him as they continued forward. A couple looked back for guidance from Rand. He gestured them onward with his torch.
As Rand, Sybill, and the kingsguard negotiated their way across the boards again, their torches probed the darkness. Like a curtain being pulled away, shadows retreated and the light revealed close to a dozen human figures. They’d run out of room to hide and retreated to an alcove in the corner of the cistern. Piles of trash, possible foodstuffs, and the remains of a hastily extinguished fire were scattered around their feet. They must have snuffed it when they heard Rand and the others coming.
The kingsguard bristled, ready for a fight. If anything, they were looking forward to it after stalking through the sewers feeling afraid and disgusted and out of their natural element. The sewer dwellers shied away, half-hiding their faces, arms raised. There appeared to be a mix of men and women and several children. Their bodies were wrapped in colourless rags, streaked in damp and filth.
“What should we do?” One of the kingsguard looked back at Sybill for guidance.
“We weren’t meant to be seen,” Sybill said. “They could tell others!”
Rand ignored his employer. “Stay back! Look, they’ve got the sickness!”
The Black Greed had worked its terrible ways on these people. One of the men stood in front of the others, shielding them, and raised an arm in front of his face. Black Greed had eaten away almost all of his fingers and left nothing but blackened stumps above the knuckles. Rand’s eyes swept the rest of the crowd. He could see withered fingers, hands and arms veined with black tumours. Disease had taken from their faces, leaving holes fringed in black flesh where noses and the soft flesh of cheeks had been eaten away, exposing nasal passages and teeth.
“By the gods,” Sybill said.
Although a significant gap lay between the sewer dwellers and them, the kingsguard shuffled backward and adjusted the scarves over their mouths. The plague victims shied away as if ashamed, hiding their ravaged features from the light. Women and children started crying.
“Leave us alone!” the man who seemed to be in charge said.
“This is what happens when those infected linger too long without dying,” Rand said. “They must have feared being killed or separated from their families when they were quarantined, so they quarantined themselves down here instead.”
“What should we do?” Sybill said.
“We don’t need to do anything. Our path lies down that tunnel there, we leave them be,” Rand said, and he raised his voice to speak to the others. “We’re sorry to have disturbed you! We mean you no harm, we are simply passing through!”
“They hit me!” the kingsguard named Timmons protested.
“If you would like to go over and arrange some sort of recompense from them, go right ahead,” Rand replied.
Timmons wrapped his arms around his wet trunk, looking sullen. Rand moved up, brushing past the kingsguard with Sybill following him. The sewer dwellers stayed where they were and on guard. In the flickering light, they looked like shades. Already dead.
Rand led the way across several shaky bridges to a gaping tunnel leading out of the cistern. The mouth of the stormwater tunnel was above the water level of the cistern, damp, dank, but not running with water at that moment. It followed the course of some ancient waterway. The sewer dwellers watched them retreat.
“We weren’t supposed to be seen!” Sybill complained.
“I couldn’t exactly predict we would run into them down here, m’lord,” Rand said. “And who are they going to tell? They’ll all be dead before long. I think it’s fair to say they’ve lived too long already.”
“Yes, I mean, if there was something to be done-,”
“There’s nothing more to be done for them unless you want to deliver them some food and clothing. Make them comfortable in their last days. Or deliver them a swifter death. But you can possibly do something for others like them if we find our way to this Rat King of yours.”
Sybill looked disturbed but said no more as they continued down the tunnel. Along the way, they refreshed their torches. While Timmons had it the worst, all eight of them were cold and damp, sick with the foulness of it all, and getting impatient. As the tunnel changed shape, Rand sensed movement ahead. Not more people. Small movements, but teeming.
Rats. Dozens of them waited at the edges of the torchlight. Dozens and then scores and then hundreds. Shrieking, some fled ahead of the light to clear a path but others stayed and watched. Batches poked their heads out of adjoining tunnels. Filthy ranks lined the sides of the walkway. Others arranged themselves across shelves of rock at head height or greater, glaring with red eyes that caught the torchlight.
“We must be getting close,” Sybill hissed.
“I should hope.”
Rand was careful where he placed his feet. The rats made a path but in some places they massed so heavily that he risked treading on a paw or a tail with every step if he didn’t take extreme care. Brown and black and grey and albino white, or covered in cowlike patches. Fur spiked from damp. Most had bodies about as long as Rand’s hand from the wrist to the tip of his longest finger. Many were bigger. Some grew as big as cats or small dogs, brutish warriors, long lived, covered in nicks and scars. Hissing, they exposed curved fangs that could easily puncture through clothing. Enough of them could probably eat a man down to the bones in minutes. Hooked claws extended from the ends of their paws.
“Give them no reason to attack!” Sybill told the kingsguard.
Hundreds of rats turned into thousands. Rand glanced back and saw the animals stretched out behind them beyond the reach of the torchlight. It was hard to believe there were so many rats in all the world let alone simply existing in the tunnels beneath their capital. And this was after a campaign by the kingsguard to exterminate as many of them as they could. Their care to avoid aggression wasn’t just about keeping the Rat King happy before their audience. If the rats attacked now, thousands of them in this enclosed space, the men would have no hope of fighting them off with only swords and daggers to defend themselves.
The path descended until scummy water began to rise. It climbed until it almost reached the tops of Rand’s boots, soaking the bottom of his cloak. Rats clamoured for higher ground. Rand knew where they were but it wasn’t a part of the sewers he would have dared venture into on any other day.
The tunnel opened into a ramshackle labyrinth. Bits of broken buildings, brick walls, rotting timbers, eaves still covered in slate tiles, even a few rusting street signs. They were under the oldest part of the city. Whole buildings had sunken into the marsh, homes and inns and stables. The city’s founders had built more on top of them, more on top of those, and bricked over the streets. All of the structures were busted and flattened but some doorways and windows and rooms remained intact. Streets could be picked out amidst the crooked, dog legged tunnels. During the rainy season, everything would be underwater, it would flush everything out and then drain when the rains stopped.
The maze of buried buildings was flooded, like most of the sewer, by more stagnant water with black depths. Walkways ran around the edges, however, and bridges ran between islands of jagged rubble that jutted above the waterline. The planks of wood appeared to have been placed for the benefit of the rats and scores of rodents crossed them forward and back. The bridges looked narrow yet in better condition than the ones in the cistern.
“Which way?” Sybill said.
“From here, m’lord? I have no idea,” Rand said. “I’ve never had an audience in the court of the Rat King before.”
Even as Rand said it, he noticed how the rats ahead of them cleared certain branches of the walkways. Larger rats stopped at the corners, rising on their haunches.
“There, this way,” Rand said.
Torches raised, the eight of them continued along the path. Rand didn’t know this part of the sewer but the route they needed to take was fairly obvious. He wouldn’t be doing his job as guide if he didn’t continue to point it out though. Rats massed behind them, cutting off their exit. The chittering and sounds of them bathing or merely brushing past one another filled the space. Rand’s heart leapt in his chest. The scarf seemed to stifle his breathing.
There were no drains in this section of the sewer, or any other obvious passages to the surface. Yet as they carried forward, Rand saw light ahead that didn't come from their torches. They turned a corner and saw fires burning in iron baskets to either side of a crooked doorway. The building behind the doorway looked like it might have once been a church or monastery. Black scum covered the walls but Rand could make out ornate carvings underneath it and a couple of broken gargoyles flanked what passed for the corners of the roof. The upper limits of the sewer had crushed whatever steeple or roof once belonged to the ruin.
Rats led the humans up to the crooked portal and flanked them like an honour guard. Stagnant water lapped the stone steps underfoot. More firelight burned inside the ruin. Rand had done his job but curiosity drove him ahead of the others. Sybill failed to take the lead and the kingsguard stuck close to their rear.
More torches lined the entryway. Rats crowded the tops of bits of rubble and broken furniture. The interior of the building seemed shockingly complete although more moss and high water marks covered the walls. Other strange objects filled the space, artworks, an incomplete suit of armour, a dressmaker doll wearing a huge, chunky necklace. And bones, human skulls and other large bones, ribs and femurs, arranged in almost ritualistic patterns.
The entry hall opened into a much larger space. A mix of ruin and natural stone walls tunnelled out of the underground. Rubble had been arranged like plinths with bones or strange junk on top of them. Deep wells of shadow danced between the light.
Across the cave, a vast, bearlike shape straightened from behind a sprawling tabletop. Spikes of fur bristled like quills from shoulders as round and heavy as boulders. It lurched toward them on its hind legs. Rand felt his pulse quickening until he thought he might be sick. The kingsguard stiffened, swords raised. From between the creature’s humped shoulders emerged a pointed head, like a dog or a wolf, topped with two slender ears and some kind of pointed structure. A crown. Rats sprinted circles around the room and converged around their king.
“This is your part, m’lord,” Rand whispered to Sybill. “Say something.”
Sybill swallowed hard as he pulled the scarf away from his mouth. “Your majesty.”
Rand had known enough to expect a giant rodent but he hadn’t anticipated the Rat King’s size. He’d expected a dwarfish figure, larger than any rat had rights to be but smaller than a man. Perhaps man-sized at most. The creature tottered over with its upper body thrust upright. It was head and shoulders taller than Rand and must have weighed as much as a horse. Its body was huge and bulky, back hunched forward. What looked like some kind of cloak was cinched around its humped shoulders by scabrous claws. Ratty holes had been eaten in the material. Tassels dangling from its ends showed the cloak had originally been a set of velveteen, purple drapes. Red eyes gleamed above a long snout lined with teeth. Balanced on the creature’s brow was a badly tarnished crown, like something used up and thrown away but with a number of precious stones pressed into its surface.
Rand shrank behind Sybill, now feeling he was the one out of place and out of his depth. The room, large and dank and draughty, felt too warm and too close. The Rat King’s musk filled the air. Animal heat radiated off of him.
“Thank you, I want to thank you, for agreeing to see us,” Sybill stammered.
“The pleasure is mine,” the Rat King rumbled. “I trust it was no trouble to find your way to my domain?”
The Rat King’s voice was thick and inarticulate. The human syllables sounded foreign in his mouth, gnashed, chewed up, choked out, but coherent.
“Not at all, our guide is very knowledgeable of these sewers.” Sybill seemed grateful to turn some of the Rat King’s attention off of himself and onto Rand.
“I was happy, as I expressed in my communications, to come to you.”
“Thank-, thank you, your majesty, perhaps sometime in the future? For now, my liege, King Carvell, would like to keep things discreet.”
“I have visited the royal palace in the past. Unseen, unheard, leaving nothing behind to speak of my presence. You could count on my discretion.”
The cloak fell open. Furry lumps tunnelled through the pelt of dark brown hair covering the Rat King’s body. Every so often a head would emerge belonging to another rat of more conventional dimensions. It would hiss or squeal, baring yellow fangs, and then disappear back into the surrounding fur. Rand couldn’t tell if they were a part of the Rat King or separate creatures. And if they were separate, were they his subjects or maybe his children?
“Please, join me at my table,” the Rat King said.
“We wouldn’t want to intrude on your hospitality,” Sybill said.
“Join me.”
The great rat swivelled. His naked tail dragged on the rough floor behind him like a dead and flayed python. Sybill followed and, for the lack of any better ideas, Rand did as well. The kingsguard should have fanned out but they were crowded by the hordes of rats filling the entryway and moving into the court.
The Rat King’s table looked like a dining table scavenged from some old and noble home that had fallen into disrepair. Perhaps it had been buried along with the ruins that now filled the sewer tunnels. One leg was missing and its surface was badly chipped and scarred. In one corner of the cavern was a grand piano in similar repair. Food lay across the table that also looked like it had been scavenged from the world above. A gnawed leg of greasy ham, other greyish meats and rotting vegetables and loaves of mouldy bread. Dusty jars from forgotten basements, their contents indistinct. Supplementing the human goods was food harvested from the sewer itself, strange fish or things that might have once been fish, served raw, and mossy greens scraped from the brickwork. Rand’s stomach turned at the thought of being forced to partake.
Drawing his cloak and naked tail around himself, the Rat King settled into a throne of a chair. The sides had been broken away to accommodate the regal monster’s bulk and its base had been sloppily reinforced. Other rats squirmed and screamed inside his fur, possibly inside his flesh, as he adopted a kingly pose with his chin resting on one paw.
“Please, help yourself.” The Rat King gestured with his other paw.
“Provided it does not offend your majesty, King Carvell is most anxious to receive an answer to his proposal. If it pleases you, I would like to explain it without delay.”
The Rat King made a noncommittal gesture. From within his clothing, Sybill withdrew a scroll of parchment.
“As I’m sure you are aware, the people of this city are beset by a disease known as the Black Greed. Your, subjects, have been wrongfully implicated in the spread of this disease by an ignorant populace. Rightly or wrongly, it would be fair to say your subjects have become more visible during the events of the plague.”
“My brothers and sisters have been predated on by your people in great numbers, but there is nothing new in that.”
“Yes, and I carry the king’s apologies for any such misunderstandings. My liege has a proposal that he hopes will both reassure his own subjects while freeing you and yours from inequity.”
Hunting out a clear space on the table, Sybill unravelled the scroll. Heat and musk rolled off the Rat King as he leaned forward. On the paper was a map focused around a lake and riverlands outside the capital.
“There is an unoccupied island out here on Lake Idina, about a league on its longest side. There are no natural predators, and many trees, caves, and hollows. An untouched paradise. King Carvell would like to offer you and your subjects, all of them within the city limits, as many of you as possible, passage to this island. Once you are there, we can arrange regular shipments of foodstuffs or whatever else might need to be arranged.”
It was an audacious offer, Rand thought. To rid a city of its rats just by asking. Placing them all on an island where they would be unable to return. Once they were there, they could hardly make their way back in force or do much in protest if the promised shipments failed to appear. He sensed the Rat King had the same reservations and he worried what would happen if the creature took offence. None of them might leave alive.
“Your king’s offer is very generous,” the Rat King said eventually. “But rather than accept immediately, I first have another proposal for him.”
“Oh, another proposal?” Sybill looked uncertain.
“One I would like for you to take to the king before this matter can be negotiated further. You see, for generations my kind has been relegated to the shadows. To the sewers, to the undergrowth. The places underfoot and in between. And while your people may have tried to exterminate mine at times, I am not going to argue that those actions are entirely without cause. We have inflicted wounds on one another, unthinkingly.”
Sybill did not know how to respond. His face looked even paler. Rats squealed amidst the Rat King’s rolls of flab and fur while others circled the room. Some were now comfortable enough to scamper right over Rand and the other men’s feet.
“We are not so different, your kind and mine. My kind have prospered from yours since time immemorial. Now, however, I believe we can find a way to prosper together.”
“In what fashion is that, your majesty?”
“By employing my subjects in the service of your king. Your king desires conquest, does he not? Imagine, if you will, a hidden army that could move through the shadows to strike without warning. Saboteurs that could target an enemy’s crops or supply lines then slip away unseen. Imagine a spy in every court, in the house of every enemy noble, in the quarters of every general. I could make such a thing happen.”
Sybill’s mind turned slowly. “That certainly sounds like an attractive proposal, your majesty. I could take this to my liege, but what would you require in exchange for such a valuable offer?”
“I desire legitimacy. To be recognised by your king and your people, and to bind the fate of our two great houses together into perpetuity.”
“Specifically, your majesty, how do you believe such a thing might best be achieved?”
“Traditionally, I believe the best way to bond two houses is through marriage. Your king has several unwed daughters, does he not?”
If possible, Sybill paled even further. Rand and the kingsguard held their breath.
“Your offer is generous and most intriguing. I will have to go to my liege before I can offer any kind of response, however.”
“As a show of good faith, I will withdraw my subjects to the sewers until I have received an answer. We will see through this plague and then look to the future, together.”
xXx
The Black Greed ran its course. The kingdom gradually came alive again, mourned, and moved on. Tenement dwellers emerged, blinking in the sunlight, from isolation. Embarrassed nobles came slinking back to the capital, assuring King Carvell that they always knew he had things under control. Still, it was strange to see so many people out in the open and together again. Lining the streets and massing in the square before the city’s largest church.
In spite of Rand’s role in making this day happen, he had not received an invitation. Instead, he lingered alone on one of the rooftops overlooking the church. There wasn’t just a hidden world beneath the city, his smuggling ways had brought him familiarity with the passages above it as well, across the city rooftops. The sun beat down out of an almost cloudless sky. The bell in the church’s steeple began to toll as the doors swung open. Flower petals and cheers, enforced by ranks of kingsguard who also arrayed themselves along the streets, filled the air. After a few moments, the royal couple appeared at the church’s exit.
Huge, shambling and bearlike, the Rat King tottered forward on his hind legs. His golden crown now gleamed in the sunlight along with his glossy, writhing fur. His ragged drapes had been replaced by a fine purple cloak tailored to his shape and trimmed in ermine. At his shoulders, he wore the polished skulls of two more of his kind like pauldrons. Old rivals or honoured ancestors, Rand couldn’t say. Dozens of the king’s subjects swarmed at his feet. What passed for a fierce grin crossed the giant rat’s features.
Walking next to the Rat King, his bride looked less cheerful. One of the king’s daughters, Princess Golda, resplendent in her long, flowing, white dress. Behind her veil, her face appeared solemn but poised. Following the newlyweds, the king and queen, their retinue, guard, and members of the royal court, all wore a mix of unreadable emotions.
Talk of fresh conquests on the horizon was abuzz. No one was quite certain what was planned but rumours swirled about the need for colonists and a draft that would build the king’s army to levels never before seen.
Rand had a purse full of guilders and the king’s own letter of pardon. He could do almost anything, go almost anywhere. But for a man like himself there could be opportunities in warfare and conquest. Working in the shadows, moving underground, underfoot, in places in between. Maybe the Rat King was right, maybe they weren’t so different after all.
======
Sean: If you enjoyed this story, check out my website for more fantasy, science fiction, and horror short stories!
seanebritten.com