Chapter 4 – The Rat’s Jaws
Zaphyr and Zull looked from the grinning thief standing before them to his companion approaching slowly from behind.
“Don’t make a move, either of you,” the rat-faced thief snarled. “This doesn’t have to be hard. The boss wants us to make sure you both die. How you die wasn’t in our contract. This can be as painful or as easy as you make it.”
“Zull, what do we do?” Zaphyr asked in a whisper.
“I have an idea,” he told her. Reaching down slowly to not alarm the thieves, he picked up a loose piece of shale and clutched it tightly in his hand.
The rat-faced thief stared at him in obvious confusion, stepping towards the twins so that they were within reach of his knife. “What are you doing?” he demanded, snarling as he did so.
In response, Zull took the shale and swiftly made a narrow incision across the length of his palm. Zaphyr gasped, starting to realize what he was doing. The criminal, uneasy, gestured angrily with his knife. “Whatever you’re doing right now, stop it, or I’ll-”
As Zull clenched his hand into a fist, a single droplet of blood squirted from the incision as if propelled by a great force and, carefully guided by Zull’s will through the air, divided cleanly and struck the thug in both of his eyes, blinding him temporarily. The man yelled in disgust as he began frantically rubbing at his face.
“Run!” Zull yelled as he raced past the temporarily blinded thug, Zaphyr following right behind him.
“Blood in the eyes?” Zaphyr asked as they fled.
“The only thing I could think of at the moment,” Zull confessed. “If you have any better ideas, now would be an excellent time to hear them.”
“Running should do, for the moment,” Zaphyr said between gasps.
Meanwhile, the scarred criminal had finally caught up to his associate, who was still trying to rub the remainder of the blood out of his eyes. “What happened?” the scarred man asked as he looked around for the twins.
The other thug grumbled, “Blasted kid, made blood squirt out of his hand.”
“I warned you they were hemomancers,” the scarred man snapped.
“Didn’t think, as young as they were, that they could do anything like that,” the rat-faced man complained bitterly.
The scarred man sighed with impatience. “Well, this will teach you to underestimate them. Get the rest of the Plague Rats, I’ll keep following them. If the boss wants them dead, then we better make sure that they’re dead.”
The rat-faced man agreed, scurrying off to do as he had been ordered. The scarred man watched the path of the twins, who had hurried down the road a short distance before ducking into one of Varin’s many alleys, through slitted eyes.
“Annoying brats, making my job more difficult,” the leader of the Plague Rats grumbled to himself as he pulled out his own dagger and pursued the twins.
The twins, still suffering from their burns and exhausted from their lack of sleep, were unable to run for any length of time and were soon reduced to barely hobbling along between rows of nearly identical brick buildings.
“The Plague Rats know these back alleys perfectly,” Zull said. “So, we’re going to have to stay far enough ahead of them that we can reach the heart of the city, preferably the market district, and get lost among the crowds before they can catch up to us. Then, we can make our way to where the Empress is staying and deliver Gerok’s letter.”
“What happens then?” Zaphyr asked.
Zull’s thoughtful frown deepened. “I don’t know. Hopefully, the Empress will protect us.”
Zaphyr looked at her twin brother, and he saw genuine fear in her eyes. “And if we don’t make it?”
Zull didn’t answer her. Both twins heard a shout from behind them and looked back to see the scarred thug standing in the alleyway’s entrance, watching their retreat with an impatient grimace.
“Move faster,” Zull whispered to Zaphyr as he helped her along.
“I’m trying,” she said.
“You think you can get away from us?” the scarred man called. “Please, don’t make me laugh. Nobody escapes the Plague Rats, especially not in our alleys.” He then charged down the alley, dagger at the ready to strike. He moved far faster than the limping twins, in a matter of moments cutting the distance between them in half. He grinned in triumph, the smile turning into confusion as, just as he reached out to grab the twins, Zull pulled himself and Zaphyr to the side and down an adjacent alley. Carried forward by his own momentum, the thug continued past them for a moment, before skidding to a stop, spinning around and pursuing them further. When he saw what lay within, he almost laughed aloud at the twins’ predicament.
“Not very smart, are you?” the scarred man said tauntingly.
The alleyway was narrow, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side, with no doors along either wall. At the other end of the alleyway there stood a short wall, just barely taller than the scarred man himself, which the twins had their backs pressed against as they stared at him in fear.
The scarred man, who tossed his knife up in the air and caught it as it came down with a casual air, chuckled to himself as he stared dismissively at the twins. “What’s your plan now, huh? There’s nowhere left for you to run, and that little blood-in-the-eyes trick won’t work a second time.”
Turning away from him, Zull cupped his hands, which Zaphyr placed her foot in as a springboard to reach up and grab the top of the wall, which she began to pull herself over. Once she reached the top, she reached down and grabbed Zull’s hand, helping him up as well.
“You aren’t getting away that easily,” the scarred man growled as he stepped towards the twins. Suddenly, he felt as if the ground below him had turned to ice, and his feet slipped out beneath him, sending him sprawling onto his back. He looked down at his boots and, to his surprise, saw they were stained red.
“What is this?” he sputtered.
“A little blood we spilled on the cobblestones, which you stepped on unknowingly,” Zull said. “Gruesome, but effective.”
The scarred man scowled as Zull and Zaphyr jumped down, jumping down on the other side of the wall. Once they landed safely, Zaphyr couldn’t help but cheer. “We made it!” she said excitedly to Zaphyr.
“I wouldn’t say that,” a chillingly familiar voice said. Zaphyr and Zull froze and turned to see that the alley they now stood in, a nearly mirror image yet reversed copy of the previous one, was blocked, the rat-faced thief and a half-dozen other grinning men carrying various weapons standing between the twins and the exit that would have led to their freedom.
“Think you could outwit the Plague Rats, on our own territory? Not a chance,” the rat-faced thief said. “We’re going to skin the two of you alive and bring your hides back to the boss. He’ll give us a bonus for that, I bet.”
Zaphyr and Zull looked around for some way to escape and saw only one: a half-open door in one of the buildings making up the edge of the alleyway. The twins’ gazes flicked from that doorway to the rat-faced thief, who had spotted it as well. For a tense moment, nothing happened, then everyone exploded into motion at once, the twins charging towards the doorway, using the last of their strength, at the same time the Plague Rats did. The twins made it through the door first, which they slammed shut behind themselves. This only slowed down the Plague Rats for the merest fraction of a moment before, through the collective weight of their bodies, they toppled the door and spilled into the building’s interior.
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The building looked to be a rough collection of tenements, two sets of rooms per floor and three floors, with a narrow set of wooden stairs in the center of the building providing the only way of traveling up or down. The Plague Rats, lead by the rat-faced, excited thief, headed immediately for the stairwell. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, they stared up to see Zaphyr and Zull scrambling to the third floor of the building and entering another door.
“There’s nowhere left to run,” their leader said, gesturing to his companions, who fell into step behind him as they made their way up the stairwell and towards the twins. As they walked up the stairwell, several of the tenement’s denizens appeared, opening their doors and watching the Plague Rats pass by with a mixture of curiosity and fear.
“What are you looking at?” the lead thief growled, waving his knife about. “Get out of my sight, or I will skin the lot of you.” Everyone vanished instantly at that statement, and the rat-faced thief grinned in victory as he led his men up to the doorway, which was slightly ajar. He reached out to open the door but was stopped by one of his men.
“What is it?” he asked impatiently.
“Boss, look at that,” one of the other thugs said, pointing to a spot on the ground as he did so. Curious despite himself, the lead thief looked down and saw a spatter of blood on the ground near the doorway.
“One of those kids cut himself to get away from you, right?” another of the Plague Rats asked.
The rat-faced thief’s grin grew even wider. “He sure did. Looks like the little fool’s hand is still bleeding and he didn’t even notice it! We’ll be able to follow them now right to wherever they are hiding.”
He kicked the door open and stepped into the tenement, followed closely by the other Plague Rats. The tenement looked for the most part abandoned, a table flipped upside down leaning against the wall in the corner and several other pieces of furniture scattered about at random, lined with a thick coating of dust and cobwebs. A trail of small blood droplets led across the floor and out the other side of the room.
Following the trail lead the Plague Rats to an adjoining room, one with a small window overlooking the adjoining street. The trail of droplets terminated at the bottom of that window. Aside from that and a closed closet, there was nothing of interest in the room.
“Boss, you don’t think…,” one of the thugs said.
“Shut up,” the rat-faced thief shrieked at his minion. “I’m thinking.” He looked around the room, his gaze settling on the remaining door.
“Isn’t that just a closet?” one of the thugs asked, confused.
“Maybe. Or maybe not,” the lead thug said as he walked over to it. He threw the door open and was mildly disappointed to see it was as empty as the rest of the tenement. “I guess they really did go out of the window,” he said sadly. He walked to the window and looked down. The outside of the building was flat and slick, leaving nothing but a steep drop to the cobblestone street below, where a small stain of blood could just barely be made out from the Plague Rat’s vantage point. The lead thief growled in anger, stalking away from the window as he considered his options.
“They must have gone out through the window, but there’s no body,” he said aloud.
“Those scrawny kids couldn’t have survived that fall!” one of the thugs protested.
“And yet, they aren’t in here, so they must be out there,” the rat-faced man said. “Get down there, all of you. We need to find them, or else the boss will have our skins instead.” He stared at them for a moment. “Well? Get moving! Find them!”
The Plague Rats practically scrambled over themselves to run back down the stairwell and out of the building, quickly combing the surrounding area.
The rat-faced man stood there in the tenement taking one last look around, before growling in frustration and leaving as well. Once he had left, there was silence in the tenement for a short minute. After that, Zaphyr and Zull crawled out from beneath the table leaning against the far wall, breathing heavily as they did so.
“I didn’t think they would ever leave,” Zaphyr said, shaking her head as she did so.
“That was a smart idea you had, using my blood to leave them a false trail like that,” Zull complemented her.
Zaphyr waved off his compliment with a dismissive hand. “It was nothing. Just what I could think of at the time.” She looked around, hugging her burned arms against her chest as she did so. “What do we do now?”
Zull sighed. “Stay quiet and stay out of sight. The Plague Rats will be searching the immediate area for the moment, but as they widen their area of search, we have a better chance of slipping past them, undetected.”
Zaphyr idly tapped her arm, wincing as she did so. “What then?”
Zull considered. “Keep trying to reach the Empress, I suppose. The Plague Rats will move away from this part of the city sooner or later, and when they do, it will finally be safe for us to come out. We can probably stay here safely until sunup, at the very least. After that, we will need to keep moving. Eventually, it’s going to occur to the Plague Rats to come back and search here again.”
“Ugh,” Zaphyr said. “I hope it takes them as long as possible.”
Zull smiled slightly. “I feel the same way.” He walked over to the window and peered down, seeing two of the thugs standing over the blood stain and looking around for him and his sister. He looked back to Zaphyr, who was huddled up in the corner, still suffering from her arm burns. She had been burned far worse than Zull, and they both knew it.
He waked over to her and kneeling besides her, said, “Hey, listen, it’s going to be alright. We’re going to live through this. Tell you what, let’s look at what we have working for us. We’ve lived in this city our whole lives, and we know it just as well as the Plague Rats do. We know in essence where they are, and they have no idea where we could be hiding. What’s more, we can use hemomancy, which they can’t.”
Zaphyr, huddled up in the corner, sniffled slightly. “There’s also at least a half-dozen of them, and probably more elsewhere in the city. And everyone one of them is bigger, stronger, and more vicious than us.”
“That’s…a fair point,” Zull admitted.
Zaphyr took a deep, shuddering breath, then, forcing a smile, said, “We should probably get some sleep. If tonight was anything to go by, we are going to need it in the next few days.”
“Not a bad idea,” Zull agreed. The two of them laid down on the dusty floor of the tenement and swiftly fell into a restless sleep. When they awoke again, the sun was high in the sky and climbing towards noon.
Achy and eyes itching, Zull crawled to the window and looked out. To his disgust and annoyance, there were still several members of the Plague Rats standing on the street below, although they appeared to be different ones than those that he had spotted before.
“Ironic. The Plague Rats don’t even know we’re here, and they’ve effectively got us trapped as their prisoners,” Zull muttered. He looked over to Zull, who was also slowly waking up, and said, “It’s not safe to leave yet. It looks like we’ll have to stay in here for a bit longer.”
“Great,” Zaphyr said, scratching at her arms, which were beginning to peel from the burns. Zull winced as he watched, trying to resist the urge to scratch at his own itchy, peeling shoulder and neck. “Don’t scratch, Zaphyr, it’ll only make it worse.”
“I know,” she said miserably. “But there isn’t really anything else to do, either.”
Zull had to agree with her there. “Come on, we can make it easier by focus on something else.”
“Like what?” Zaphyr said bitterly. “Gerok is dead, the people who killed him are looking to kill us as well, and we have no idea why they did any of this!”
Zull pulled out of his robe’s sleeve the letter which he was still carrying, and both of them looked at it, curious.
“It would be so easy to open it,” Zull admitted, fingers twitching.
“We shouldn’t,” Zaphyr said with emphasis. “Teacher made us promise to deliver that letter, unopened, to the Empress. He made us swear!”
“I know,” Zull said, still looking at the letter longingly. “But don’t you want to know why this is happening? What our enemy really wants?”
“Yes,” Zaphyr answered truthfully. “But not badly enough to break my word.”
That stung Zull, who hastily returned the letter to his sleeve, wincing as he did so. “True enough, Zaphyr.” He settled down against the wall of the abandoned tenement besides her, hunched forward so his injured shoulder and neck wouldn’t be in direct contact with the wall. “We’re going to need food and water soon.”
Zaphyr nodded her head vigorously. “My mouth already feels as dry as a bone.”
Zull peered at the window, mentally noting the time of day. “We’ll have to move out around sunset, even if the Plague Rats are still in the area. Waiting here any longer would be just as dangerous. We’ll get some food and water, and then head right to the Empress’ palace.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Zaphyr said, smiling slightly.
Zull sighed, looking down at his hand and the half-healed cut he had made just a few short hours ago. “Nothing to do now but wait,” he said.
The two of them waited once more, the time draining by at an interminably slow pace until at last the sun fell beneath the horizon and darkness settled over Varin once more. Satisfied that they could safely leave the building, Zull woke up Zaphyr, who had fallen into a fitful slumber once more, and said, “It’s time to move.”
The twins crept out of the tenement and down the stairwell as quickly and quietly as possible, trying as hard as they could to avoid making any noises that could alert the other residents of the building. Having safely reached the bottom, they stepped out into the alley beyond, and saw to their relief that no one was in sight.
The twins exited the alley, spotting one burly Plague Rat leaning against a wall, never taking his eyes off the tiny blood stain the twins had created on the street, as if standing guard over it. Ironically, he was so focused on this task that the twins were able to creep down the street past him without him ever even suspecting their presence. Once they were safely out of his line of sight, they sighed and walked a little easier, making their way through the shadowed streets and avoiding any groups of people just to be as safe as possible.
“Well, we’ve made it this far,” Zaphyr said. “To be honest, I didn’t think we would.”
“Me neither,” Zull admitted. “But we’re so close that we can’t quit now.”
He and his sister looked down the mist-filled street, the buildings on either side seeming almost to loom over them menacingly. In that mist-wreathed darkness, the other passer-byes on either side seemed little more than ever-shifting shadows and illusions, their appearances impossible to determine. In this miasma stood Zaphyr and Zull, wandering alone against a city of thieves and killers.