The fight was short but brutal. Kind of like the rats.

I had a better time of it than Jethro. I made sweeping attacks with the Messer, catching several rats with each blow. Jethro had to kill them individually but he only had to hit each one once to finish it off.

We stood in the aftermath, surrounded by rat corpses, panting and checking ourselves for bites.

“Why didn’t you warn me there were rats around?” said Jethro. “You’re the one with the nose.”

“Sorry. I’ve been smelling rats since we opened the door. I’d stopped noticing it. I just thought it was part of the smell of an abandoned house. I’ll know for next time.”

“Did we get all of them?” said Jethro.

I sniffed deeply. “I think so. I don’t hear any more movement and all the rodent smell seems to be concentrated here.”

“Thank the Source for small mercies,” he said. He eyed the tangle of vines and roots that the rats had emerged from. “We should search the nest. There might be something valuable in there.”

“Why would there be anything valuable in a rat’s nest?” I said. I really did not want to rake through rat poop in the vague hope of a few coppers. Or even a few silvers.

“I don’t know, but there often is. That’s why it’s so common for adventurers to get their start on giant rats.”

“Really?” I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe they like collecting shiny things, like Magpies and other Corvids?”

#

I used the Messer to cut back the mess of vines and small roots that the rats had attacked from. Jethro cut back the thicker roots and the woody branches. Underneath it all were the remains of a store room from a building that seemed to have collapsed into the fissure from above.

There were crates and barrels and chests all strewn about. Many of them were cracked and split open, probably from the collapse. Some of them had been clawed or chewed open and turned into nests. There were a few that had survived the fall and that the rats hadn’t gotten into yet.

The first crate that we split open had been full of books and for a moment I thought we’d hit the jackpot but what the rats had missed the damp had taken. The books had been completely overtaken by rot and mushrooms.

We found a few pieces of ceramic and glassware that was miraculously unbroken. Jethro insisted that they were worth bagging up to take out as they were valuable from their age alone. I took his word for it and packed them into some of my net bags using the sodden books for padding.

I also found random coins and pieces of jewellery that probably weren’t there until my search skill created them.

As I searched the containers Jethro inspected the fissure and set up ropes. His TREE SURGEON skill wasn’t just glorified pruning. He knew how to make and use climbing harnesses and our plan was to rappel down into the fissure

While searching through the chests I noticed something odd in the wall. Not the wall of the collapsed storage room but near the bottom of the wall of the natural cavern behind it.

The cavern wall was horizontally striped with layers of slightly different colours. I say colours but they were really all varying shades of grey and muddy brown. All except one. There was a layer of black almost an inch thick. I picked at it with one claw and inspected the chunks of black that came away. Charcoal. Looking closer at the layer I thought I could see the dark glint of vitrified stone.

“Hey, Jethro,” I said.

He came over. “What you got there?”

“I think it’s a burn layer. I think this means that the city’s been completely razed by fire at least once.”

Jethro leant back, looking up toward the surface as if trying to measure the distance down to the layer.

“Not recently though,” he said. “This has to be hundreds of years ago, right? And you’re sure that’s a widespread fire? Not just the building that was on this spot?”

“It can’t be just one building. I’ve seen layers like this on my own world. A single building wouldn’t burn long enough or hot enough to turn the wood to charcoal, never mind vitrifying stone.”

“I suppose if it were that simple to make charcoal then Aldo and Fred wouldn’t have jobs,” said Jethro. I could see him thinking of the effort it took them to stack a pile just right, then insulate it, then make sure it burned at the right temperature for however many days it took to render most, though never all, the wood to charcoal.

#

Descending into the void on the line that Jethro had lowered felt incredibly vulnerable. It didn’t help that I didn’t really understand what I was doing. My instructions from Jethro had boiled down to do this to go down, stop doing it to stop going down. It made sense that I go down first since I was lighter and better at climbing but that didn’t make me feel any better about it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I spun slowly as I descended. It seemed an age before I touched the bottom but when I looked back up it was actually only about two stories worth of depth. What I could see of the cavern that I was in suggested it was roughly bell shaped. The ground seemed fairly steady underfoot.

I was about to call Jethro down before I remembered my mistake with the rats. I took a deep sniff. I smelled something rodenty somewhere nearby. It wasn’t more rats but it was similar. I sniffed again. The rodent smell wasn’t in that room but it was close by. There was another smell there too, something harsh and chemical. The kind of thing that would strip the membranes right out of your nose.

“Everything alright down there?” said Jethro from above.

“Yeah. Something smells vile but it’s not in this room."

Jethro talked me through disengaging from the line and then holding the rope taut so that he could descend.

He was clearly a lot more comfortable on the line than I had been because he stopped for a look around just after dropping through the hole in from the level above.

I wondered what the hell he was up to until he focused the light from his lantern to a tight beam and played it on a dark stripe in the cavern wall. Another burn layer a few feet below the one I’d found.

“At least twice,” he called down.

“I see it.” I said.

He dropped slowly towards me, stopping every couple of feet to check for more burn lines. He didn’t find any but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. The lower cavern widened out enough that the light from the lantern didn’t illuminate the walls well, even when he refocused it.

“Is there a Guild of Archaeologists?” I said, as Jethro disengaged from the line. “If not, we should start one.”

“I don’t think so,” said Jethro, looking thoughtful. “Scholars don’t usually do guilds.”

“If the Scholars complain we can call it the Guild of Amateur Archaeologists. They can’t argue with that.”

“I think they probably can,” said Jethro. “We’re being paid, for one thing.”

“But we’re not being paid for Archaeology. We’re being paid for Salvage. Documenting layers, mapping things out, noting the positions of finds. That we are not being paid for.”

“We’re not doing any of that,” said Jethro.

“Not yet, I literally just thought of it. I’m coming back with a notebook, a compass and a tape measure.” I was suddenly aware of how manic I sounded.

Jethro was looking at me like he thought I might be about to break out into crazed laughter and deliver a short monologue on the subject on how they would all pay.

“How about the Guild of Hobby Archaeologists?” I said, trying to reel in the crazy.

“I will definitely come along to drink at the guild house but I make no promises about measuring burn layers in my spare time,” he said.

#

Searching the chamber we found ourselves in revealed absolutely nothing of interest except for a couple of openings in the wall that might lead somewhere. Shining the beams of our lanterns through the openings didn’t reveal anything so we picked the wider one to explore first.

The wider passage was just a crack in the wall of the cavern. It looked like it had started narrow and opened up through a combination of weathering and instability. The edges had eroded and then the weakened areas had collapsed. There was rubble underfoot, testament to where at least some of the material had gone.

A few steps in I became aware that the weird chemical smell was getting stronger. A lot stronger. “Something down here smells really bad,” I said.

“Bad how?” said Jethro. “Is it more rats?”

“No. Well, I don’t think so,” I sniffed again. “There is a slight rodent smell but it doesn’t smell like the rats did. I can barely smell that for this other smell. It’s acrid. It smells kind of like a badly cleaned privy and kind of like that travelling Alchemist that hung out with Agnes for a couple of days.”

Jethro sniffed. “I smell it a little. It reminds me of something. Not sure what.”

We pressed on, now moving more slowly. Whatever was causing that smell I did not want it on my skin. I did not want it on my clothes and I had absolutely no desire to step in it and have to pick it out of my toe claws and foot hair.

I heard something. Not the skittering of rats. Something else. A cry of some kind. It was very high-pitched. Similar to the squealing of rats and squirrels but more purposeful.

“Do you hear that?” I said.

Jethro stood still for a moment, eyes closed, concentrating. “Not a thing,” he whispered.

“Maybe the sound is too high for your ears?” I said.

“Bats maybe?” said Jethro.

We kept going, moving quietly, looking up in case there were bats roosting above us. We saw nothing until another cavern chamber opened up ahead of us.

The beams of our lanterns raked across a sea of furry bodies and leathery folded wings hanging from the cavern roof. The bats were huge. Bigger than any bat I had seen before. Bigger than the fruit bats I’d seen photographs of. They reacted to the sudden light by making more of those high-pitched cries and turning away from the light.

The bat colony must have been roosting there for a while because on the ground beneath them was the source of the acrid smell. A massive mound of guano, almost as tall as I was. The smell was now so powerful that my eyes were watering with it.

“We have to go back,” I said. My eyes and nose were running and my breath came in wheezing gasps.

Jethro did not immediately agree. He was staring, transfixed, at the mound.

“What?” I said.

“Is it just me or is the guano moving?” he said.

I focused the beam of my lantern on the surface of the mound. It did seem to be moving, though I couldn't be sure if it really was the guano or if I was just seeing things because my eyes were watering so much.

Jethro crept closer. I didn’t. I inched back in the direction we had come from, telling myself that someone needed to cover our escape route.

Jethro suddenly stiffened then hurriedly backed away from the mound. He overtook me and reached the passage back to the bell shaped cavern in front of me.

“What?” I said, following him.

“I’ll tell you when we’re on the surface and not before.”

#

Some time later, on the surface, the door of the abandoned house safely locked behind us, then Jethro agreed to tell me.

“The whole surface of the mound was moving,” said Jethro, “because it was all creepy crawlies. I saw beetles, and spiders, and scorpions, and centipedes. When I went in for a closer look I saw a centipede the length of your arm eating a baby bat.”

“I don’t think the Mayor is going to be happy to know he’s got that under his city.” I said.

“Could go either way,” said Jethro. “There is a lot of money in guano.