PLATINUM 1.6: A RODENT’S ROAD

“Changes of shape can never become absolute. A bird who has forgotten it was once a mage is not a bird – it is always a bird who has forgotten it was once a mage. For this reason, all forms of the various metamorphosis spells carry a hormonal suppressant, to prevent accidental procreation and the births of mutant abominations. Woe to the druid who manipulates these forms. And woe to the untrained arch-druid, to whom such subversions come unconsciously.”

– from ‘Druidry For Beginners’, ch. 10

My heart was going ten to the dozen, feeling fit to burst. The tiny ribcage was quivering, pain lancing right through my breast. I could die of a heart attack right now, paralysed, and even if he had the magery to save me he’d probably not even know there was anything wrong with me until it was far too late.

I tried to take my time, breathe deeply, calm myself down – but everything worked differently now. Breathing through the mouth was only making the pain worse. I struggled to focus on breathing through my nose, drawing it in deeply to fill up the lungs I imagined as no bigger than the end of my thumb –

My old thumb. My human thumb.

The ride was uncomfortable. From the tip of my nose to the base of my tail I couldn’t have been more than nine inches long; my tail was shorter, and as his spell had been taking hold on my rodent flesh he’d curled both me and it into one pocketable package, more wheel-like than anything else. The pocket was big – spacious, even. But that was half the problem: the constant rocking back and forth was impossible to get used to.

Zel? Can you hear me? Are you in here?

Still nothing.

It was still too bright in this place; my eyes were too sensitive. My nostrils were picking out the fragrances accompanying his robe, a confusing jumble of fruits, flowers, body odours… My whiskers were still mobile, reiterating the dimensions of this confined space over and over as I slid around.

“Anandra,” I heard Belexor saying, “I’m off for some sleep.”

We stopped. A few moments’ respite.

“Your associate came by.” I recognised the voice of the elf-woman who’d admitted me. “He hasn’t been back past us – you did find him, I assume?”

“Of course.” Belexor sounded irritated. “He left via sorcery.”

Hearing the magister’s voice, his irritation… Second by second I felt calmer now, more like myself. The reality of the situation had hit me but I was getting used to my predicament. The shock was passing.

“He didn’t seem like a darkmage to me,” came a new, gruff voice, one I didn’t recognise. Probably the older man who’d been on guard too. “We received confirmation with regard to what you said concerning the Cannibal Six. If –”

“I was there,” Belexor replied. “He may be a champion, for now, but you can’t be too careful with the lowborn, can you?”

The old druid grunted. Disagreement, or agreement? I had none of the visual clues to help me fill in the blanks.

Either way, Belexor had probably been speaking to me there, another little dig, another jibe at my expense.

But he was the real darkmage.

We were walking again. Well, the ‘magister’ was walking – I was back to sliding. The hubbub of the streets surrounded us. The sounds and scents. Still overwhelming. I couldn’t keep track of where we were, where we were going.

But being on the move hadn’t put me back into shock. That was good. At least I could retain some semblance of my mind, think through my circumstances.

The paralysis was an interesting spell. Doubtless he could only do it to animals, just as I could do it with supernatural creatures; paralysing human targets would ordinarily be the province of an enchanter. It was interesting that he’d thought to put me into this state to enable his animal-control spells. It showed imagination, versatility, beyond that which I’d thought to ascribe him.

It meant he had to have an enchanter on hand, too. If he was going to use a spell that affected my mind rather than my body he would have to step outside druidry. One of these ‘friends’ he’d spoken of?

How right Zel had been! I was stupid. She’d told me about the shield, and she’d sounded absurd. I hadn’t trusted my advisor and I’d paid for it. Paid for it with the roof my parents had kept over our heads since I was two. Paid for it with this day, all vestige of which was apparently going to be swept from my mind the way dust was swept from a shelf.

Paid for it with my dignity. My self-respect. My cursed ego, letting me think I could charm this ingrate with my zombie horde.

And I paid for it with my advisor. She was gone, at least for now. I had to hope it was temporary, that we could put her back together again after this.

What if she died? Inside me?

I should’ve set the zombies on him! I snarled silently. Who does he think he is, sanctified as magister, pulling a trick like this? This goes beyond trickery. This is criminal. This is the sort of thing that sends people to the block.

Belexor’s pace slowed as he ran into the kind of foot-traffic even a druid’s robe wouldn’t let him through. He’d brought us on the Plain Road to the Oldtown bridge – the river gave it away, gave me sure and certain knowledge of where I was. There were two bridges in the area. The other, the Lowtown bridge connecting North Lowtown to Rivertown, was too far away for us to have reached even at the brisk pace he’d used up until now. If that wasn’t enough evidence, the Lowtown bridge spanned twice the distance this one did. The Blackrush – the river between Sticktown and Oldtown which we crossed now on resounding wooden planks – was narrower. Along with the Whiteflood farther to the south-east, the Blackrush was one of the lesser two rivers, not so wide or violent as the big Greywater to the south-west which they both fed into.

Oldtown. We were heading into the original part of Mund, the place that had existed before the coming of the Five Founders and the creation of the city as it now stood. Something had existed on this site since the Golden Age, they said. Here and there – should you not be paralysed within an evil druid’s pocket – you would see ruined walls and shrines to forgotten saints, painstakingly avoided by the locals so as to not spoil these points of historical interest.

Not that the locals were actually interested in the historical value of these places; they were invested in the economic value. People who could afford to come along to study ancient places could usually afford to spend money on food, drink, even entertainment in the vicinity. By all accounts, hundreds of years back when Sticktown had still been one big forest inside the city walls, Oldtown was the poorest part of the city. Sandwiched in between Rivertown’s busy harbours and Hightown’s craftsmen guilds, Oldtown had been a decrepit crossroads with nothing to offer.

Now, things were different. The forest had been chopped down and replaced with the urban forest I grew up in. Sticktown, Hilltown, Treetown; the newer districts on Oldtown’s flanks had transformed it. Belexor carried me down cobbled streets and we left the odour of Sticktown’s filth behind. I heard the guitars of bards, the songs of child-choirs –

And then the nearby bells and yells of a town-crier caught my attention.

The sound was receding even as it began, Belexor heading in the other direction, but I could pick out the town-crier’s Rivertowner accent, his loud, rippling voice: “Gather ‘round! fair maids and gents, for I am to post notice today, that a most momentous deed ‘as been accomplished! The cruel, sinister Cannibal Six ‘ave been captured, an’ shut away! The Magisterium extends its thanks! to the new champion by whose hand all six of the sadistic criminals were apprehended! Thanks… to Feychilde!”

When he said my name, it was with the perfect amount of amusement. There were no actual cheers from what I could tell, in the crowd around the crier – but a good wave of gasping, muttering, murmuring, as almost everyone instantly set to gossiping. I wondered if my name would be repeated in those murmurs, wondered how favourably.

This was my first taste of fame – and it came while I slid about shaped like a rat in the pocket of my foe who was carrying me towards some kind of torture. Truly, it was everything I’d hoped and dreamed.

The town-crier’s voice was faint in my ears, which were probably better at picking out sounds than Belexor’s… but his senses weren’t occluded by a layer of cloth, and he might’ve enhanced his hearing to a degree where it mirrored (or even bettered) my own. Even still, I doubted he’d heard the way they were talking about me. I was glad, really. If anything, hearing the town-crier would’ve probably put him in a worse mood, and made things worse for me in turn.

The streets were getting busier and busier every minute. The sounds made by other animals, snorts and neighs and barks and meows – everything set me on edge in a way that human sounds didn’t, some signal transmitted by my animal flesh straight to my brain, inciting further flashes of panic. Market stalls would have rows of customers two-deep by this time, and Belexor’s pace slowed noticeably once more. It was like a flowing river striking a dam, having to find the little cracks and slits to seep through – the magister was doing his best to keep going forwards quickly, but it was necessitating a lot of twists and turns that bumped me around, impotent to do anything but roll and slide in this gods-forsaken pocket. Half the time it felt like he was trying to slide through a gap in the crowd but then had to jolt to a stop as someone got in his way, throwing me around even more violently than usual.

If I could say one thing for this experience, it was giving me some perspective. How many times had I used my powers to stop something in its tracks, command its subservience? I mean, mostly they were hellspawn of the worst kind, but still. I’d gotten over the shock, but being frozen this way, the helplessness… this wasn’t pleasant.

No wonder eldritches seemed so angry all the time. Maybe they weren’t so different from us, in certain ways. Maybe in hell you’d find a fiend complaining to his neighbour over the black-iron fence about the latest eternal heatwave, inflation in the price of souls, and those pesky humans who kept summoning them to Materium to perform ridiculous tasks…

Time passed. My paralysis didn’t let up and Zel didn’t respond to me.

Shock had long since passed, but I began to feel despair settling on me.

I’d arrived at the Giltergrove a little past half eight, but after that I was uncertain. How long had it taken getting rid of the Body Brigade, getting over the bridge, getting to the middle of Oldtown? Somewhere close to an hour, I guessed. What I really needed to know was how far off noon was. I had to effect an escape soon or my life was going to turn upside down, and I had zero tools at my disposal.

I would’ve been shaking, if the spell let me.

I heard the sounds of Firenight Square, the trumpets of the arena and the squealing of children. Jesters juggled song-globes, ensorcelled to produce sounds like a jolly chorus of voices as they flew. I heard (and smelled) chained-up beasts – there were usually nightlions, bicorns and cerberi, but I couldn’t distinguish their roars in all the clamour.

The Square was the very centre of Mund. The Hill Road ran from Rivertown Gate in the south-west wall of the city to Hightown Gate in the north-east wall; the Plain Road ran from Sticktown Gate in the north-west wall to Treetown Gate in the south-east; together the two great roads formed a giant ‘x’ shape, and Firenight Square was where they crossed each other.

Belexor took a left, heading north-east, towards Hilltown and Hightown.

It was this centralised location that made Firenight Square a common target for trouble – word spread fast from here. I’d only witnessed a darkmage-attack once myself, but my parents had ushered us away in moments; I’d only gotten a glimpse of a building on the edge of the Square being torn down.

We didn’t make it this far too often these days. Jaid and Jaroan were too big for it now anyway, and got bored easily by the attractions you didn’t need to spend silver to enjoy. I was working off old, dusty memories.

I needed help.

Zel, are you there? Can you hear me?

I didn’t think the lack of response was due to the paralysis spell – this was the shapeshift. It had done something to the internal mechanisms that had allowed me to subsume her in the first place. I hadn’t ever read about the joining that we’d undertaken – Zel had simply told me what to do, getting me to squash her into my chest. I could remember watching her disappear into my body like she was merely disappearing beneath the surface of a pool of water. I didn’t know anything more about how it worked than she’d told me, and she’d never directly answered any of my questions about what would happen if something went wrong. She’d given me herself and withheld her instruction manual.

The fairy had her secrets – I had been honourable, refused to command her to divulge more than she was willing – and now those secrets might have doomed her.

No. I couldn’t blame her. She played her role, told me the things I needed to know. The fault was all mine.

I couldn’t hang my head in shame. Could only stare forwards.

This was all the lead-up, the interminable wait before the horror actually began.

I realised the mess I was in. Nausea, a purely psychological feeling, with no connection to my stomach. I couldn’t be sick, paralysed as I was. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to get out, be free, move, run far, far from here…

But I couldn’t despair. This kind of situation didn’t demand despondency, giving up, letting the worst come to pass. I had no tools at my disposal, except my mind. He hadn’t been able to take that. I would have to use it, and praise the gods he wasn’t an enchanter.

Have to do something, before he finds one and pickles my brain.

Maybe Zel would’ve been able to protect me from that, when she couldn’t from the shapeshift. She’d implied as much, once or twice. But now, with her voice gone from my head… I held out little hope her powers would guard my mind if I’d been bound in another form.

I waited-out the nausea, letting it pass over me eventually in waves, diminishing each time it returned until my thoughts settled. I also settled into my locked-up rodent body; like it or not, I was stuck with it. I’d better get used to it. I couldn’t actually move the muscles right now but I knew they worked; before the paralysis spell I’d been able to manoeuvre to bite my captor. I couldn’t flex any of them with my brain – or I could try, but they didn’t react. It was like trying to move an arm you’d fallen asleep on, unmoving and unresponsive no matter how hard you strained.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

So instead of settling in and doing a workout, I settled in and planned. I’d have to trust the rat-shape to do what I told it when the time came.

* * *

I endured. Endured, as my day was wasted.

He went shopping in Hilltown. Shopping, with me in his pocket, just as though he’d forgotten I existed. He’d beaten me at my own game. Turning me into a rat? It was the kind of thing I’d feel tempted to do, in his shoes. And he had the courage that came with having no standards, no boundaries beyond which your own actions would begin to disgust you. Not even any fear of reprisal. He had the chaos on his side.

An hour, maybe two slipped by. He only bought two items, both trinkets of some kind – necklaces, or brooches perhaps – and spent nearly a hundred gold in total, just for them. That was two years’ rent for my apartment! For a brief time I considered whether he was doing this just to irk me. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the realisation that this was just the kind of creature he was. Not just a highborn, but the most stereotypical highborn I could’ve conceived of ever meeting. I knew a million stories, every one different, every one the same.

Everything handed to him. Probably dressed by servants as a child, men and women who were barred from looking their little master in the eye on pain of instant dismissal. Education at the Maginox, career in the Magisterium, everything laid out in front of him, a path he had to but walk that would lead him to a position of power. Folk like him were cut in the perfect mould to one day sit in the Arrealbord, the Council of the High Lords, the governing body of the whole Mundic Realm.

I wondered how many of them were as sadistic as him.

The light outside my little pocket-world seemed brighter than ever. I had to assume it was close to noon by now, and the paralysis spell still held me, just as firmly as it had at the start – I kept testing it, not straining but trying to move a foreleg, trying to flex a claw. Nothing.

Belexor took me uphill, away from the hustle and bustle into the backstreets that climbed towards Hightown. The next place he entered wasn’t a posh shop, stinking of polish and the subtle metallic smell of jewellery. No, it was a posh tavern.

I could tell from the scent of the wine they served, a completely different aroma to that which pervaded Sticktown establishments – where I’d grown up at least fifty percent of the slop they served ended up on the floor, and the rancid odours of the alleys clung to the majority of the patrons. Here there was the clink of glass on coasters, the soft lapping of a harp in the perfumed air, a musician employed even at this early hour. I’d never been in a place like this before. Even the laughter and boorishness exhibited by these patrons was elevated, as though they’d taken classes in highborn-school for this very occasion. Crude jokes were delivered with pompous accents that would’ve themselves been the joke back in Sticktown, and their audiences couldn’t snort or bray their amusement; they tittered, with the occasional chortle, and murmured responses like “how very droll” and “my oh my, whatever happened next?”

I shuddered. Tortures I’d imagined came nowhere close to this. Stick pins in me, whatever, but don’t make me keep the company of these prats.

“Ho, Belly,” someone rumbled, and from the way Belexor’s stance straightened I could tell it was addressed to him. The voice was that of a barrel-chested man, like Soulbiter but younger, and even more well-spoken, urbane.

“Uthon,” Belexor hissed, pulling a chair out from a table and sitting in it.

He even hates his own friends…

“You look like drop, dear fellow,” someone else commented, on my left, the voice of another rich-boy.

“Only got a few hours sleep.” Belexor shrugged, then, turning a little, raised his voice and called, “Saleb! A bottle, Onlorian red.”

“Well I hope she was worth it,” the same rich-boy commented, with a touch of wry humour. “If you took her fancy looking even half as bad as you do now, I doubt she was.”

No way do they get to wipe my mind of this memory, I promised myself.

“No girl,” Belexor replied, “this time.”

“You’re insufferable, Belly.” This was a young woman, on my right. She already had a bit of a slur. “Here comes your drink; you had better catch up.”

“To you?” the druid replied sardonically.

“True,” she admitted, then laughed, a sound somehow throaty but cold, like an uncaring, delighted cackle.

Belexor didn’t pay for the wine when it arrived. He probably had a tab.

He might’ve joked about not catching her up, but he seemed to drink his first glass at a single quaff, and took what must’ve been a serious chunk out of the second before he spoke again.

“Actually, I’ve been up most of the night getting a gift for you, Jargrin.”

“Oh, really.” It wasn’t quite a question but rather a sarcastic retort, from the rich-boy who’d insulted him about his appearance, Jargrin.

“A subject for a full mind-wipe. One day.”

“I’m… interested,” Jargrin replied.

Zel? I really need you, partner!

“Hey!” the barrel-chested, urbane man across the table interjected.

I felt a momentary rush as someone challenged this idea of destroying my memories.

“Why don’t I get one?” the barrel-chested man finished.

My heart sank.

Two enchanters?

“Remind me, Uthon,” Jargrin purred, “which of our fathers is the Lord Malice to the Fourteenth Seat, again?”

This went completely over my head. I assumed he meant, my daddy is super-powerful, so he’s kissing myass rather than yours, but the words themselves meant nothing to me.

The guy who rumbled was Uthon, then?

“This is the way things are done in high society,” Jargrin continued, airily; “you had better catch on, butcher’s boy.”

“You wound me,” Uthon muttered. “My father’s as rich as yours.”

“No richer than mine,” Belexor cut in.

“Quoth the one still wearing last year’s boots,” the woman said with a giggle. “Poor druid baby.”

“Money is nothing,” Jargrin said. “Power. Reputation. Fear. Lineage. These are things worthy of respect.”

Belexor laughed a little.

“You have heard of Feychilde?”

I went cold.

“Of course,” Jargrin responded at once, unruffled at this swerve in the conversation.

“The new archmage,” the druid continued; “he has power, yes?”

“I’m no less interested, magister.” Jargrin’s voice was cold now. He was telling Belexor to get on with it; and ‘magister’ was said with contempt, as though he were telling Belexor that the truly prestigious wouldn’t need to stoop to such a role, even if temporarily.

More importantly, he was telling me that he had some concept of what was going on – and he wasn’t put off. Quite the opposite. He relished the idea of screwing with Feychilde.

“Reputation and fear, but no li… lineage, Belexor,” the woman cut in. “Who is Feychilde?”

“I know who he is. You’re right, of course. A lowborn rat, like so many of them. I have him.”

Belexor drained his glass, poured himself another. The others must have been regarding him in silence.

The harp’s music, clinking of glasses, murmurs and crowing from other tables.

It was coming. Soon. Soon, it would happen.

Zelurra, faerie queen, bondswoman, I command you to awaken and heed my call!

I was getting desperate, now that it came down to the moment I would be exposed to these foul highborn mages.

“When you say, ‘have him’…” Jargrin began.

Belexor spoke over him, confidence in his voice. “Did you cast a precognition spell this morning, Meneda?”

“Orlways, darling.”

“Are you –”

“Senshing danger?” She spent a few seconds in silence, and it dragged on, until – “No.”

Meneda, the drunk diviner, rounding out the quartet. At least I knew who my opponents were, now.

I didn’t let her dismissal dissuade me. I prepared myself.

Belexor reached into the pocket, gripping me by the midriff, then put me in front of him on the table, facing the others.

I felt the smooth wood under my claws and furred body, my tail still awkwardly wrapped around me.

But my rat eyes moved, whiskers following along, scanning these darkmages quickly.

On my left, Jargrin, thin-faced with high cheekbones and stubble, long blond hair. Elvish descent, almost certainly – the ears a little too pointy and the eyes a little too narrow to be a hundred percent human. His robe was a rich, deep blue, with white fur at the cuffs and seams.

Across from me, Uthon, Jargrin’s diametrical opposite. Not fat, but big and burly, with a nearly-shaven head and long, braided blond beard. He wore a dark pink or fuchsia robe embroidered with silvery eye-like shapes, some open, some closed.

And on my right, Meneda, an overweight but alluring-looking woman with dark hair and eyes, her lips on the edge of her glass. Her robe was a similar grey to my own, but like the robes of the others hers was rich cloth in a cut designed for her body, a red trim and little red spider-like patterns completing the look.

Everything past the table was a bit blurry, even in the dim light, but I got the impression that the room was huge – far, far larger that I’d supposed when shut away in the pocket. A high ceiling of black beams, black wooden furniture draped or upholstered in silver and gold, huge candelabra each sporting dozens of candles and red-glass lanterns carefully arranged to provide as much light as possible; the windows were all curtained-off.

There were probably about fifty tables, but less than half were occupied, going off the sounds and smells, and only half of those had more than one person sitting at them. Many patrons were simply reading, studying magical texts while they sipped their wine. But other patrons were clearly doing shady deals, hoods up, voices lowered, gold and small packages slipping into pouches hidden inside opulent garments.

Taverns – they were all the same, even deluxe, darkmage taverns.

Uthon and Meneda seemed baffled at Belexor suddenly producing a rat, but Jargrin had caught on.

“You brought him here,” the rich-boy whispered, almost incredulous.

“You’ll wipe his mind… He doesn’t know where we are, anyway.”

“I don’t mean that.” Jargrin’s brow furrowed in sudden concentration.

That guy terrified me. Might he have other plans for me than just letting me go at sunset?

“You mean that this –” Uthon blurted.

“Quietly,” Belexor hissed.

“– this is Feychilde?” he finished, less-rumbly.

“K-K-K-K-”

A clicking in my mind, suddenly.

“Saleb!” Belexor shouted. “Bring me a glass bowl.”

“K-K-Kas?”

Zelurra?

“What-t-t-t hap-p-p-pened?”

Oh Zel, I thought I’d got you killed! We’re, well, we’re –

“We’re a r-r-r-rat.”

It hadn’t taken her long to figure it out.

“K-k-keep t-telling your-s-s-self…”

I’m so sorry, Zel. I meant it. I missed you. And not just because I went and got myself in a life-or-rat situation.

I saw Saleb this time, a stubble-free, middle-aged man wearing a neat, clean doublet and hose in black. He approached with respectful mannerisms and a polite smile on his face. In his hands was a decorative bowl.

In my head I begged him to do something, interrupt somehow. Say that they don’t allow rats on the tables, say that they don’t allow torture on their tables – something, anything…

Belexor snatched the bowl from him without ceremony, and the man sidled away with a murmur of “m’lord,” his expression unchanging.

For drop’s sake, Saleb, you had one job.

The druid moved me to the middle of the table and angled me so that I faced him directly, before settling the glass dome over me. The bowl was etched with a monochrome floral design, but only in patches – not so much that I’d be obscured in the centre.

Belexor gnashed his teeth at me, but this time he wasn’t chattering on in rat-speak. He sounded more like a bear. It was different, a more generic, dispelling-type incantation: I could feel the bonds of the spell beginning to loosen.

He finished but I still wasn’t moving.

“You’ve ki-killed it,” Meneda whispered huskily. “Don’t immolate the envoy, and all…”

That wasn’t what I was going for – he’d felt my heart beating in his hand just a minute earlier, and he’d seen my eyes moving.

No. I was going for the dispel failing.

I let my eyes continue to rove around as I focussed on maintaining position and relaxing at the same time, like the mornings when I had to pretend to be asleep to avoid getting embroiled in a twin-feud. I felt my tail trying to stir, did what I could to hold myself under the spell, imagine I was still trapped…

“I c-can see your plan-n-n. It’s-s-s not going to work. The d-d-diviner isn’t th-that drunk.”

I have to relax.

“I have a bet-t-ter idea-a.”

“He’s not dead,” Belexor snapped at the drunken diviner, sounding frustrated. “I’m…”

“No longer sober enough?” Jargrin finished for him, slightly amused.

Are you okay, Zel?

“No t-time. Listen-n…”

As my eldritch explained her ‘better idea’, Meneda giggled. “Belly killed the new sh-shampion.”

“Shut up, Meneda!” the druid growled.

“Perhaps, the barrier…” Jargrin mused.

A deep frown on his face, Belexor reached out and removed the glass bowl, setting it between himself and Meneda.

The drunken diviner had been quite right, no matter how sozzled she was – she shouldn’t have been sensing danger, then. I hadn’t intended to hurt anyone. At that point.

Either way, I was glad he’d placed the bowl near her. I wasn’t planning on making my escape past her.

“Permit me to attempt something,” Uthon said.

“No,” Belexor hissed, and closed his eyes briefly, probably recalling the incantation, going over it one more time before trying again.

The explosion from motionlessness into ferocious haste took him – took them all – by complete surprise.

My rodent body writhed, tail uncoiling as I twisted and rolled and straightened, all in the space of a split-second.

I was clear – I hurtled off the table, aiming for the space between Belexor and Jargrin, just to my right.

A long-fingered hand caught me about the hindquarters, trapping me in mid-air.

Meneda turned me around, bringing me closer to her, and I could see that she had stood from her seat, a warped smile on her lips.

“Reaction shpell,” she said, and laughed again, that awful, callous sound.

Now! I cried at my passenger.

This plan hadn’t been formulated when Meneda last consulted her danger-sense ability, and the ‘reaction shpell’ she employed was found wanting. As it was, the diviner had no way to predict or dodge as a six-inch tall faerie queen in a tiny glacial-blue dress burst from my body.

Zel’s blonde pigtails streamed as her gossamer wings propelled her forwards, what looked like a bronze knitting needle twelve-inches long in her miniscule hand.

And proceeded to skewer Meneda in the throat.

Chaos reigned, even if only for the span of a few heartbeats.

I hadn’t been expecting the sheer breadth of the changes that swept over me as Zelurra exited my body. Sight, hearing, smell, even tactile sensations – she’d been augmenting everything. The clamour of Belexor’s roar of shock, Meneda’s gurgle, chairs scraping back, other patrons raising their voices – every sound surged over me, thrumming through my fur. I’d gotten used to Zel’s help in my human body, never mind my rat one, and now I was piloting the rat body without her assistance for the first time, in what could prove to be a life-or-death situation – if the look of focus that’d come over Jargrin’s face earlier was any indication.

Either way, instinct seemed to propel me just as well as experience. The distraction of the neck-puncture was perfect – I easily slipped from the diviner’s grasp, repeating Zel’s instructions to myself over and over: Move under the table, head to the wall, go behind the curtain, use the gap in the board obscured by the heavy cloth to move down towards the basement, she’ll find me there inside the wall…

I used the edge of the table nearest the aghast diviner to hop down to the ground, even as she pressed her hands to the squirting hole in the middle of her windpipe. Under the table, Uthon grabbed for me – I slipped his clumsy attempt to grasp me around the body, and managed to pull my tail out of his snapping fingertips – I darted from beneath Jargrin’s chair to the chair at the next table, then the next, using everyone’s surprise to reach the wall… only then did I chance a glance back.

Belexor had leapt out of his seat to patch Meneda up, his eyes trying to follow me under the tables even as his green-glowing hands were on the diviner’s neck and his lips moved in a healing-spell; Jargrin stood from his chair and stalked towards an internal doorway on the other wall, the part-elf’s disappointment and scorn oozing palpably out of him.

Where is Zel?

For the first time in weeks, I was alone in my own skull. Really, truly alone. Taking part in these adventurous antics without my partner… it was suddenly much more intimidating.

No one to share it all with.

No one to pull my ass out of the fire.

I tried waving my claws about to grip the threads of sorcery, the ley-lines that fractured into shapes at my bidding. My rodent fingers really were remarkable – each of my paws was like a little hand. It felt as though it should’ve worked, but there was no resulting crackling green foam, no otherworld-doorway opening up at my gesture.

At least none of them seemed to be archmages, here in this tavern. There might’ve been druids amongst the crowd, but the spells of a mage took time to cast, and preparation too. Other people had got up from their chairs to assist in searching for me but by the time they realised what they were doing I had entered the crack Zel’s clairvoyance had identified for her, working my way under the floorboards.

The black hole I entered was inviting, not disconcerting. I liked the darkness, the closeness. I was darkmage enemy number one, but at least I was free.

Dusty cobwebs, the husks of spiders, the sounds above me…

“Where has the little dropstain gone?”

“What in the name of the Five is happening, lad?”

“The rat, sir! We’ve got to find the rat, on the double!”

Somewhere in here, there were the sounds of other rats, too – the scents of other rats…

I got under the floorboards and stopped. Impulses wracked my weird little muscles. There were scents that made my stomach rumble… scents that made me want to huddle up with other rats for warmth and comfort… scents that scared me and made me do a little rat-wee.

Now I was glad Zel wasn’t currently onboard.

Despite the strange urges I was feeling, the spell hadn’t actually rescinded my willpower or control, and I followed the route she’d outlined. There was another gap – here, through some chewed-out gypsum plaster…

“My lord.” It was Jargrin’s voice, through the wall – he was in the basement too. The door he’d used from the main room must’ve led him down some stairs or a ladder. Was he trying to cut me off? Did he know where I was?

“We do not appreciate this interruption, boy.” A woman, her voice fainter.

“It’s urgent, my lady.”

“Let the boy in, Rissala.” A man. Deep-voiced, like Uthon. “This is Zanedar’s son.”

“I do not care. I wish to –”

“With all due respect, my lady, this cannot wait,” Jargrin implored.

“Come in.” The man again, commanding, confident.

I heard a footfall, and now Jargrin’s voice faded slightly, matching theirs in volume: “My lord, there is a good chance Feychilde is loose in the building.”

“Feychilde!” the woman growled.

“That abomination,” the man muttered. “Here! How?”

No.

Not him. Not them.

I reeled a little bit, for a moment. Uthon’s voice had made me think of him, in the first place.

Suddenly Jargrin’s shock and opportunism made sense. Jargrin knew.

He knew Soulbiter and Screamsong were here all along.