Villages are larger than hamlets, and towns are larger than villages. Larger than towns are cities. What, then, is larger than a city? There should be something, for the capital of the Solherz Empire was far too large to be just a city.

“Is there some new word for this type of place?” Mildred asked. “It seems to have transformed unreasonably since my last visit.” She looped her scarf around her neck and pulled her new coat tight, making ready to depart the train. It was cold here.

“No. Cities that are bigger than other cities are still just called cities.” Gregor replied.

The vehicle had chugged for the whole day and some of the night before it reached the outskirts of the capital, and thereafter it had continued chugging for another hour – albeit at lower speed – until reaching the centre of the city proper. This represented an absolutely absurd scale of civilisation to Mildred, which the word ‘city’ felt woefully insufficient to describe.

Would they be attacked here? This was something Gregor needed to consider. The Worldeater had begun to source labour locally, and now they had travelled to a locale with a lot more sourceable labour. As a purely numerical matter, a few of them were likely to be significant enough to care about.

Further, there had been no storm in Harsdorf.

Whether the premonition had become entirely defunct or if it only preceded genuine threats to his own safety, Gregor had no real surety, but it was clear that the security of forewarning was no longer something he could count upon.

“Did you… dream of anything during the ride?” He asked Mildred, quite out of nowhere.

“Probably. Why?”

“Dreams are the somnambular excursions of the soul.”

Mildred fixed him with a raised brow, foregoing any attempt at interpretation. “Gregor, do you intentionally make mysterious statements that lead to nothing?”

“It is a hobby of mine.”

“Well, that one was quite good. Very baffling.”

The station they pulled into was a place of modest ostentation, and appeared rather smart in comparison to Harsdorf central. It was chic, as a visitor from the republic might say, if they could ever manage to overcome the negative affection of their national grudge.

It had high arches in stately sandstone and sensible marble tiles, and chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceilings at intervals that assured brightness. Notably, they all held electric bulbs, which were fancy enough all on their own for none of the other decorations of the place to matter. Mildred stared at these until her eyes were filled with phantom orbs.

Primarily, they had come to leave, but there was to be no night train to the republic, and there was yet more that the city could offer. For, naturally, as the capital city of a major player on the world stage, there were many embassies and consulates here. Among these, they were certain to find a diplomatic mission from the Golden Empire.

Mildred proposed to have them traffic a very important letter.

Walking out into the night, they found that it had begun snowing. Not storming, if that meant anything anymore, just snowing. It was the light kind of snow, which, though sufficient to chill and damp things, was not heavy enough that one had an excuse to stay inside. It would be dreary in the day, but not at night, with everything cast in the warmish flicker of the streetlamps.

The falling flakes caught this light and seemed to glow like fireflies as they drifted down to dust the awnings of buildings and old streetcobbles worn smooth by centuries of traffic.

Guarded from this cold by an enchanted cloak, Gregor stepped out into the weather. Mildred followed with the protection of her greatcoat and utterly normal scarf, and together they walked across the street to the battery of hotels that lived strategically opposite the station. These were each called ‘The Grand this’, or ‘The Imperial that’, and had waiting doorboys in smart uniforms, who stood ready to welcome guests and engage luggage despite the lateish hour.

“Classy.” Mildred observed, before choosing arbitrarily to enter the nearest establishment, which must receive quite a bit of business purely for the virtue of being the closest to the exit of the station.

What little luggage they had was stored portably within Gregor’s garmenture – giant hammer included – and so the lad at the steps, who reminded the wizard annoyingly of Botman, just nodded them a polite ‘Goodeven, Sir and Madam,’ and held open the glass-and-brass door.

Strutting in to the warmness of the lobby, Mildred leaned conversationally close. “Hear that? I’m a Madam. I haven’t been a madam in a while.” The interior was all dark woods and green felts with gold-looking brass fittings.

“I am not often a Sir.” Gregor replied. Not for the sake of politeness, at any rate.

Sensing the presence of guests, an immaculate concierge appeared from somewhere. “Might someone handle your coats?” Came his forward politeness. He was tailored and combed to perfection, with his hair waxed tight to his head and his moustache neat and sharp.

“No.” Gregor took stock of the man, finding himself now slightly paranoid. “You might instead find us a room.”

“Brilliant, Sir.” He responded, clasping his hands with significant animation and an amiable smile. “I am proud to claim that we do rooms just as well as we handle coats.” He spoke as he walked, leading them to the service desk. “How long might you be wishing to stay?”

“Two nights,” Lied Gregor for no particular reason.

“A single bed, or two?”

“It does not matter.”

“Splendid.” The concierge remarked, and instructed the clerk, “Karl, three-oh-two, I think.” Who then obtained two set of keys from a pigeonhole marked ‘302’, and noted the names of the occupants and the duration of stay.

Gregor wasn’t so worried about concealing their identities, because the enemy obviously had ways and means which exceeded whatever protection mundane subterfuge might offer, but prearranged traps were a fresh concern.

“Give us a different room.” He instructed, his paranoia demanding that he not take the first thing he was handed.

“…Certainly sir. Did you have something particular in mind?” The concierge asked, almost unflappable. Only slightly flapped.

“No.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Well, Karl, is three-oh-four ready?”

“Yes sir.”

Gregor raised no objection to this, and so they went with that.

“Before you retire, Sir and Madam, might you like to join the other guests for dinner? Tonight-”

“We’ll take it in our room.”

“Not so hasty, Gregor.” Interrupted Mildred, putting a hand on his shoulder. She looked down at the concierge, who wasn’t short, but who they both towered over. “You have a restaurant here?”

“Better than that, Madam, we have a dining lounge and a bar, as well as tables for baccarat and craps. Meals and cigars are complimentary.”

Mildred and Gregor shared a look.

“Gregor, I need it. I might die without it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You’ll die?”

“Very possibly.”

Gregor was aware that Mildred wanted to enjoy herself. This was a normal desire, especially after the harsh conditions of her journey, with all the rough living and poor eating and never really resting, and running and fighting and the constant stressful threat of having to do any combination of these things at once, as well as the surety of suffering unknowable additional discomforts.

It was normal to crave luxuries after a trip like that, and he needed to humour her demands for exactly this reason, despite his very reasonable paranoia – her normality was at stake.

Normality was like a living thing, requiring regular sustenance to persist, and this brush with class was the sole meal of worth that it had encountered in quite a long time. Possibly even longer than he knew; Mildred had been pursued for a while prior to her petrification.

The trip wasn’t close to done. They still had part of an empire to cover, and then a whole republic, and a sea, and then another part of another empire, and then an unknowable amount after that. Her normality was to be further abraded in the future. If she didn’t receive an infusion of normality-nutrients now, when it was possible and they were plentiful, she’d likely starve.

“Then we shall dine in the lounge.”

Essentially, Mildred had asked Gregor to dinner, and he had accepted.

“Marvelous.” Said the crisp concierge. “Do follow.”

***

The meal was monkfish paired with some concoction of pinot noir, which the wine steward had hinted might soon become scarce. As if afraid that it would become scarce immediately, Mildred had stowed it away in her stomach for safekeeping. It was good that she did, because the bottle was empty when next she looked!

Peeved at this circumstance, Mildred put down the silver goblet that Gregor had insisted she use, and looked around, taking stock of the room.

There were other guests here – not many, but not few – and all of them had glanced quite gratuitously at the odd pair. Mildred knew why they looked. She was underdressed.

Her greatcoat, which was only fairly nice by the standards of the regular person, had come off in the presence of the lounge’s fireplace, and underneath she wore only the modest clothes of a traveller from seventy years ago, wizard-laundered, but wrinkled and war-torn. She wasn’t exactly dressed to the standard of fashion set by the other guests, who were expensively clad in the slightly strange trends of today, and looked as if they purchased new clothes for every outing.

Though, she didn’t care too much. She had a wizard as an accessory, and they did not. He was magnificent attire for any occasion.

She was wrong, of course. They were looking because she and Gregor were a pair of hard looking people. Weathered, steeled, tall and imposing. They seemed newly returned from some excursion into a territory where might was all that mattered, victorious and full of money to spend on expensive hotels and nice wine, like pirates fresh into port. They were people who quieted rooms and drew eyes, and whatever feelings they aroused in others were entirely fashion-agnostic.

The quiet diners knew for certain that Gregor was a killer, because all wizards were, but they couldn’t quite figure Mildred. She was an oddity. A graceful giantess who kept the company of a murderer, though who herself seemed somehow genteel. She had the feel of someone who lived proactively.

A dangerous woman, most of the men concluded, and thus she instantly became an object of great interest, owing to the irrational proclivity of men to be fascinated with dangerous women.

She was thus invited over to join a bar-side game of craps by a brave association of man-guests, who evidently came here often enough to be acquainted with each other. Miraculously, it was a game that she knew, though she wisely acted as if she didn’t.

Wives and ladyfriends of the men thus also felt compelled to approach and converse, and the primary occupation of the place shifted shifted from quiet dining to social gambling, with Mildred at the centre.

Gregor abstained, but sat in a plush chair at the nearby fireplace, brooding recreationally and reading his grimoire, occasionally lifting a scathing eye to the group, which was a great distraction from the game for everybody except Mildred. They all correctly interpreted him to be the less domesticated of the pair.

Naturally, they plied her with questions, and she found quite a bit of wine-fueled fun in answering.

“I am called Pantagruel,” she began, and fed them a vast quantity of fanciful half-truths about her many daring exploits. “… and I once saw him cut a rock with a door,” she finished, some time later and a few bottles deeper. She hadn’t been successful with the gambling despite the favourable conditions, but that wasn’t really much of a concern.

***

There came a squeaking from the dumbwaiter. Not of hinges and pulleys, but of rats, and Gregor felt Randolph stir in his robe.

They were in their room, which was pleasantly trap-free, and Mildred was sleeping after enjoying her night of normality, the highlight of which had been a subsequently tipsy elevator ride, which she had found to be another type of room that was also a vehicle.

Gregor read his grimoire by darkvision while Mildred slept, trying to noodle out a solution to the problem of his eye. If he wanted the thing complete in a timely manner, it was looking more and more necessary to bypass the optic nerve entirely. Brains were a little more difficult to work with than he had expected, and he would certainly need proper ritual hardware to complete his original design.

The squeaking continued, and Gregor spied a fuzzy little head nudging its way out from between the unlatched doors. Randolph squeaked in response.

A fat rat squeezed out, and a second head took its place.

“Friends, Randolph?” He remarked as he rose to hobble over.

The second rat popped out, joining the first in waiting on the little ledge that protruded from the wall, and a third head appeared between the doors.

Gregor magicked open the dumbwaiter, revealing the body of the third rat, as well as two others. At this, Randolph crawled up and out of Gregor’s robe to his shoulder, then scampered down his arm to jump over to the party of new rats. He landed, strutted over to them, reared up on his hind legs, and began squeaking quite sonorously.

Gregor supposed this to be an assertion of status, as befitted Randolph the Rat, who was very certainly a rat among rats.

Thus began a very conversational series of squeaks which most people would assume rats incapable of producing, being that they aren’t meant to be that intelligent.

“Gregor?” Mumbled Mildred, who had apparently woken up. She still sounded sloshy. “There’s ratspeak. Are you killing people that speak rat? Killing’s no good, you know.”

“I think Randolph is being propositioned.”

“Oh? Good for him. He’s a good rat.”

“Go back to sleep Mildred.”

“Mhm. Sure. You’d be a good rat too, if you were a rat. I’m on a bed.”

“What?” He turned to ask, but Mildred had somehow already fallen to sleep as commanded, and could no longer be made to clarify her mysterious statement.

After a short exchange, Randolph squeaked something to Gregor, tapped the ledge a few times with his tiny little claws, and then followed his cadre of new friends off to do whatever it was that rats did when they went out in the night. Cheese heists or pantry raids, Gregor assumed, or perhaps organised warfare against the local cat population.

He went back to his perusal of Kaius’s notes on body-artifice, hoping to find a solution in the work of his master.