Adventurers are called “rat-catchers” for a reason. Somebody is needed to clear the vermin out of the sewers and cellars across the Federation, and doing so is one of the best ways to test the mettle of the Guild’s newer recruits. While the phrase is often used in a derogatory fashion by non-adventurers, most full members of the Guild treat the nickname as a badge of honor, because they know that in many places rats can grow to the size of a small wolf and nevertheless remain near the bottom of the underground food chain.
- “Rise of the Federation, Part IV” by Anselm Avernum, historian-in-residence at the Federation Ministry of Expansion.
SEWERS BENEATH EGHEM
“Get down!”
The warning came just in time. I dropped to one knee in the muck as a glob of rotten liquified flesh flew through the space where my head would have been. I didn’t turn around to look at the bile wight that spat the thing - I had more immediate concerns, and I could see Faraday already pointing his sword, glowing golden like the sun, at the creature behind me, so I figured he had it handled.
I drew an arrow, nocked it, whispered a lightning-quick prayer, and loosed it into the oncoming cultist’s disease-ridden face in one smooth motion. At this range, though, I didn’t have the time to aim before he was on me, and it wasn’t a terrible surprise when the arrow skidded off his jaw instead of sinking into his throat. He flinched away, giving me time to stand up and draw one of my knives, but then he was back on me, snarling and raising the crude wooden club embedded with filth-covered nails that this cult seemed to be using as their primary weapon.
Seriously, what kind of messed-up god has a shit-covered spiked club as their favored weapon? And who worships that? This is why taking a job cleaning out the sewers is always a gamble - it’s never just dire rats down there. I’d been hoping for giant alligators, though, not a frenzied disease-cult. The alligators I had a chance to negotiate with, and could be skinned if they didn’t want to cooperate; these cultists didn’t have any interest in talking and looked broke as paupers.
Fight now, bitch about your luck later, I thought to myself, feinting at the idiot’s eyes to make him pull his next strike and murmuring another prayer. Hopefully, this one worked.
When a silvery mist started oozing from the blade in my hand, I grinned cheerfully at my opponent and blurred forwards, the spirits coating the knife guiding my hand and leading the blade straight into his jugular. My other hand, still clutching the shortbow, thwocked it into his wrist and knocked the club out of his hand, preventing his flailing attempt to get one last hit in. He gurgled and pawed at me as I pulled the blade free, accompanied by a gout of arterial blood and, soon after, a wet plop as he fell face-first into the sewage.
These guys were tenacious, I had to give them that. Definitely some kind of death cult, given that they had a bile wight fighting for them and they didn’t seem to fear death. While that last bit might have been admirable in other circumstances, right now it was a pain, as more of them were rushing in through the two side tunnels, uncaring that we’d already killed six of their fellows.
Faraday was now fully locked in combat with the wight, his armor glowing faintly as he deflected its jagged claws and burned away its parasite-laden bile, riposting with a gleaming strike that seared the creature where the blade touched. He looked like he had the thing under control, but we needed to give him the space to finish it off.
“Cherubix, make a wall, don’t let them surround us!” I shouted, tossing my knife at the oncoming cultists - and missing, dammit - and drawing another arrow which immediately started smoking silver as soon as I put it to the bowstring, thank the gods.
“On it!” A bright, child-like voice responded from behind me, soon followed by a loud crackle and shouts of dismay and pain that heralded a wall of lightning appearing in one of the sewer chamber’s entrances.
With a twang, I loosed the arrow, and in a streak of silver mist it embedded itself right between the eyes of one of the cultists coming from my side of the room, slamming his head back and into the muck as he crumpled bonelessly. I drew another arrow, frowning as I realized how low I’d gotten on ammunition. There were three more cultists remaining in my end of the chamber, and I had only two arrows left. Not the kind of math I liked. While I could handle myself in melee - as my last dance partner had found out - I really preferred hitting enemies from a distance.
They were getting closer, weapons raised and blood in their eyes. I nocked the arrow, feeling the rush of combat lift me up but not letting it carry me away. You had to be fast to survive, but trying to move too fast was how you ended up missing your mark and having to go two or three against one, instead of one on one. Quickly, smoothly, letting your body flow without pause but never moving too fast - that was how you made it out the other side in one piece. That fleeting, sublime moment of exaltation was better than any drug, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the gold of any world.
Breathe in, pull the string back, aim, murmur a prayer on the exhale, loose.
As a cultist stumbled and fell with an arrow through her heart and I drew the last one in my quiver, I felt a bloom of heat from behind me and heard an impact on the far end of the chamber, accompanied by a very brief shriek as someone got lit on fire. A splash of stinking water hit me from behind, followed by a joyous “Wheeeee!” as Cherubix’s voice dopplered away from me. I could tell when she landed by the new sounds of fire and screaming cultists.
Brownies, man. Don’t ever give one a magic sword if you’re not sure it’s on your side.
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“So, what’s the total?” I asked.
“Three silver, eighty-seven copper,” Faraday grunted. “One profane driftwood and bronze idol, which we’ll not be getting anything for directly but might boost our reward by a bit. One amulet that the Light is telling me very clearly needs to be consecrated and destroyed. A dozen…” he coughed, “befouled spiked clubs which nobody in an actual fighting force would be caught dead with, even if they weren’t cursed by whatever god these poor souls were worshipping. Assorted clothes, most of them either burned or fouled-”
“Dibs!” Cherubix chirped from where she was diligently scrubbing away at the area around the blood- and shit-stained idol. I didn’t see the point, given that the filth was literally an inch thick, but there are few more futile things than telling a fey creature to ignore one of its most basic urges. “I can cleanse them, then use them as rags!”
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Faraday and I exchanged a glance, shrugged simultaneously in mutual agreement, and proceeded further down the loot.
It wasn’t much, frankly. Most of these guys had been destitute when they got here, looked like, and the cult had just made them into maddened scavengers. Some loose change, some more copper amulets that were just ugly, rather than cursed, a few cheap daggers, and the idol. That thing I wasn’t even sure was worth carrying to the surface, given how heavy and bulky it looked, but Faraday seemed relatively sanguine about carting it, and since he was our group’s current pack mule I wasn’t going to tell him he couldn’t. He probably just wanted to make extra sure the cult didn’t have a chance to start up again, what with the whole “paladin” thing.
The real pity here was that the bile wight wasn’t on the loot list. Normally, the undead worms infesting one of them could be harvested and sold to disreputable alchemists in the wrong part of town. When the creature had finally stopped moving, though, Faraday had promptly seared the remains with holy fire, leaving nothing but a smear of charred filth on the stone tiles. He insisted that it was necessary to prevent the parasites from escaping and infesting a new host, and he wasn’t wrong, but still - that was perfectly good money that just went up in smoke!
Ah, well, it’s a small price to pay for running with him, I thought to myself. There were times when I wished he weren’t quite so self-sacrificing, but he certainly wasn’t the ‘lawful stupid’ that I’ve heard a couple of others referred to. And oh man was he useful in a pinch.
I glanced once more at the idol. “Okay, big guy, if you’re willing to hump the thing, I’m all for it.” He nodded, already digging in his pack for rope. “Cherubix, you good? Anything else you want from these guys before we light them up?” I nudged one of the corpses with my boot. Faraday had been insistent on seeing they had last rights done, evil-deity-worship be damned. So we’d piled them all together after rifling through their mostly-nonexistent pockets, and were going to ensure their bodies weren’t available for the next death cult to use for parts.
The brownie grinned, child-like but with disturbingly big teeth and eyes. “Nope! If we’re not staying around here to clean up, I’m good to go!” She glared at the bodies. “Serves em right for letting this place get into such a state. Don’t you think, Walter?”
“Oh yeah, definitely, these guys were jerks,” the sword at her hip - actually a dagger, but compared to her two-foot-tall frame it looked like a longsword - emanated in a dull voice. Walter was a Soul Blade, a weapon imbued with a mortal’s soul. Cherubix had apparently acquired him through an auction after the Feds raided the illegal manaforge where he’d been created, and they’d been fast friends ever since. I still wasn’t sure whether his personality was a side-effect of having his soul ripped out and welded into a sword, or if he’d had the same extremely flat affect when he was still alive. Either way, the contrast between the two - the hyper and always-chipper brownie and the monotone voice coming from her weapon - always served to lighten the mood.
Smiling slightly at their byplay, I drew one of my knives and started scraping a ritual circle around the corpse-pile. The layers of filth caked onto the stone actually helped with that, alleviating the need for chalk or salt. Seven sticks of incense were lit and placed in the appropriate sub-circles, Faraday and Cherubix were instructed to stand in their own circles, and then I began to chant an ancient Sylvan prayer for peaceful sleep.
One verse in, I flicked a finger at Faraday, and he began his own prayer, channeling divine power into the circle, causing the lines and the bodies within to glow with a faint golden light.
With every verse I chanted, the spirits I was calling gathered, forming a shroud of faint silvery mist over the bodies, their eldritch song growing in volume in my ears. Their voices teased and coaxed the restless ghosts within the corpses, drawing them out and onwards to their final slumber. Faraday was holding up his end, too, as the glow increased in intensity with each word he spoke, until it was as bright as day within the chamber. When I was almost at the end of the seventh verse, I looked at Cherubix and nodded as I went into the final refrain.
With a quiet fwoosh, Walter was wreathed in fire, and when Cherubix touched the blade to the circle the flames quickly spread through it and onto the corpses like they were coated in oil. The fire flickered silver and gold, and the bodies within were swiftly reduced to ash, leaving the grime beneath untouched by the heat. A plume of silvery ectoplasm rose up to the chamber’s ceiling and quickly dissipated, as the collected spirits - the ones I’d summoned, as well as those of the poor schmucks we’d just killed - went on to the other side of the Veil.
Not a bad day’s work, all things considered. Admittedly, we’d probably run into yet more dire rats on our way out, but since those were what we’d come here to kill in the first place, I wasn’t going to complain. Might even get some gators too, if we were lucky.
EGHEM, SEWER ENTRANCE
Sweet heavens, but it felt good to see the sky again. All three of us reeked of the filth that we’d been trudging through for the last few hours, and I wanted a bath desperately. Faraday had a cleansing prayer that should keep any diseases from sinking their claws into us, and Cherubix had a faerie spell for magicking our gear spotless and stench-free, negating two of the worst consequences of delving into sewers, but it would take at least an hour of soaking and scrubbing for me to feel clean again.
A pulse of disgust from above let me know that Ko was entirely in agreement. My friend launched himself from where he’d been perched on a nearby tenement, circling downwards slowly. He was a gorgeous bird, though I’m obviously a bit biased - a goshawk with a striped brown-and-cream front, copper-colored wings with spots of white, and piercing golden eyes above a small but viciously hooked beak. Not seeing any part of his customary perch on my shoulder that wasn’t covered in gross, he instead alighted on the stone arch we’d just walked out of.
I shrugged, trying to ignore the squelching that emanated from my leathers at the motion. “Nah, we’re good. Walked into some sort of cultist den, but other than an undead minion they were just a bunch of untrained and underfed goons.” I jerked a thumb at Faraday, who was currently shifting under the weight of the idol he’d strapped onto his pack, reaching for the flask of tubeh he kept at his hip. “Big guy’s got their altar or whatever; we need to make a stop at the nearest temple to a Good God to have it purified. You know of any nearby?”
He cocked his head in that way only a bird of prey can, wracking his memory of Eghem’s layout. Since he literally had a birds-eye-view, we’d long since made it a habit for him to be the party cartographer. Even if he couldn’t actually draw us a map, his memory for landmarks was nearly infallible.
I snorted at the last bit, sending a pulse of agreement back along our link, and relayed what he’d said to the others. We set off, with Ko flapping from rooftop to rooftop and offering color commentary on how glad he was that he had the sense not to tramp through a city’s worth of excrement, and how us two-leggers had such awful taste in gods, with a few notable (avian-aspected) exceptions. I regaled Faraday and Cherubix with the best of my friend’s wit, which brought an occasional smirk to the paladin’s normally stoic expression and sent the brownie into gales of laughter.
The temple was, in fact, home to a priest with enough magical talent to cleanse the idol, and we finally got a name for the fucked-up deity the cult had been worshipping: Inemis, “the rotting worm.” Classy-sounding fella. Gods, but I hated dealing with local pantheons, they got so weird out here in the sticks. I know there’s a metaphysical reason for the more distant worlds to have more varied cultures and divinities, but keeping track of the different gods and goddesses who ran these places gets tiring after your first dozen hops along the Bridges.
Regardless, after depositing the idol and the amulets, both cursed and mundane, and getting a writ from Milos’ head priest saying that we’d done the city a good service by clearing out the cult, we made the half-hour-long trek back towards our inn, and a dearly-needed bath.