The rain was still coming down hard, as it had been for the past hour. Jack sat huddled within his tattered cloak at the base of a decent sized fir of some sort, trying to ignore the icy drip of the rain as it dribbled in through the tears in the hood, down the lip of the sallet, and down his back to soak the arming doublet and tunic beneath.
The horses looked to be faring little better, though he supposed they were probably more used to it. His own days of rainwashed, shivering misery had long since been placed behind him and, he’d thought, over for good.
He was wracking his brain trying to determine a path forward that wouldn’t see him spitted on somebody’s spear or pincushioned with arrows. He wasn’t having much luck.
To top it off, he was worrying about the animals. If he didn’t make it, what would happen to them? Sure, the bandits might find them, but they might not. So what did he do? He couldn’t just leave them out here at the mercy of wandering predators.
“Are you an adventurer?” the voice was faint, high-pitched, and half imagined.
His eyes popped open and his head came up. He looked around, but could see no one.
“Down here,” the voice came again. “Beside your right knee.”
He shook his head, thinking to clear it, wondering if he were hearing things now. Then he looked down, and was sure of it. A grey mouse, just bigger than his fist. It was wearing a green felt bycocket hat with a bedraggled feather in it, and a green coat of some rough, homespun cloth.
“Okay,” he mumbled to himself. “Clearly that guy with the mace hit me harder than I’d thought.”
“Are you an adventurer?” the mouse repeated, it’s squeaky voice rising.
“Yes?” he answered uncertainly. “Ah...”
“I am Meynardo,” the mouse informed him, standing straight, doffing his hat and sweeping it back as he bowed. Meynardo Chee-Ch-Cheep. Called Long Racer. Son of Reynardo Chee-Ch-Cheep, Called The Mouse Who Roars. Grandson of—”
“I get it,” Jack interrupted. “What do you want?”
“I need your help,” the mouse announced. “We need your help.”
“We?” he asked in spite of himself.
“My people,” the mouse clarified. “My village is besieged!”
The more the tiny creature spoke, the more bizarre the situation seemed. Then, all at once, Jack remembered where he was. Sure. Okay. Why wouldn’t an oversized mouse in a hat be asking him for help? In a language he could clearly understand? Out in the middle of nowhere in the rain?
“Ah...” he repeated.
“There is no time!” the mouse pressed. “The barrier has fallen! It may already be too late!”
Jack shook his head again, trying to clear it. Trying to shake loose the sense of unreality. He was already in the middle of one dangerous battle. The surviving bandits might find the dead guard at any moment, if they hadn’t already. And once they started hunting him en masse, he was pretty much done for. What business did he have chasing off into the night to save a mess of rodents?”
“Please!” the mouse was clasping its hands together in an all too human entreaty.
Damn! “Where,” he sighed. “And what’s attacking them?”
The mouse’s face split into a wide smile and one arm shot out to the north. “Just over a lenn in that direction!” he squeaked. "The village is beset by dire hares. I can no longer say how many. In excess of thirty remain at minimum. Possibly more by now. No matter how many we slay, more seem to appear.”
“Dire ha— you mean rabbits?” he goggled.
The mouse frowned mightily. “Rabbit-like, but no mere rabbits, rest assured.”
Erudite little bugger, Jack thought. “C’mon, then,” he ordered, holding his hand out. “You’d better ride. No way I’ll be able to keep track of you in this tall grass. Just point the way.”
The mouse scurried up his arm and perched on his shoulder beneath his hood. And yes, he smelled like a wet mouse.
Jack staggered to his feet, groaning at the pain in knees that had been crossed the last forty minutes. Leaning on FoeSmite for support, he limped to the horses. He swept the saddle of the chestnut clear of standing water and hoisted himself aboard, catching at the reins of the two riderless mounts.
“Where, then?” he asked again.
The mouse pointed, and Jack kicked the horse into motion. He still couldn’t believe he was leaving more than half a dozen ridiculously dangerous foes wandering loose behind him to go rabbit hunting with a talking mouse.
With the soggy ground and the rain, he refused to push the horses past a trot, despite the entreaties of his distraught passenger. They’d be no use to anyone if the horse went down and threw them. Still, less than five minutes later, they were approaching their goal. Jack could already see the field in his head, deciding finally that these dire hares must be the vague auras he’d been seeing out in the grass the past day or so. There were way more than thirty.
He brought the horse to a splashing halt well clear of what he assumed to be the battleground, although he couldn’t see much between the darkness and rain. “Hang on,” he warned the mouse before leaping from the saddle. He hit the ground with his own splash and went to a knee, sliding nearly a foot along the rain-slicked grass, grounding FoeSmite before him to stop his progress.
The vague shapes out in the darkness had stopped moving at the approach of the horses, but apparently a lone man afoot and down presented a much more favorable target. As a single entity, they charged forward, leaping and bounding in his direction with a speed he found alarming. Damn, they were big. Like German hare big. Like highland terrier big.
The first of them was upon him almost before he could bring FoeSmite up and to bear. It was no contest, and the hare vanished in a cloud of fur and blood. That didn’t seem to slow the others, and before he could more than bring the staff back on line, they were on him. They had teeth like dogs, too.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
The mouse was tucked deep into his cloak, literally crouched inside his collar for purchase, and from the edge of his peripheral vision, Jack caught a sliver of movement flash past him. One of the hares snapping at his throat froze for an instant and then began convulsing, falling clear a moment later.
He didn’t have time to wonder much. He was desperately struggling to stay alive. Another was at his throat. Still another was gnawing on his leg, making short work of his pants. One hit was enough for any of them to go down, but they were all over him, and the fleeting thought came that, if he let them take him down, he’d have one hell of a time explaining to Saint Peter with his head held high how he’d survived three tours in the desert only to be killed by evil bunnies. He smacked the hungry hare away from his upper leg, feeling its teeth gouge out a chunk of flesh as it was ripped clear by the blow.
The mail was doing its job, fortunately, keeping his vitals safe. As long as he kept them off his arms and legs, he wasn’t taking too much damage. As long as. He punched and slammed and swung FoeSmite in short, sharp arcs right up against his own body, curled in tight to keep his extremities safe. There was no footwork, no masterful display of agility. Just bashing. Once he’d dismounted and gone to a knee, he’d had no chance to regain his feet. He fought them from the ground, struggling to remain upright as they battered him from all sides.
Meynardo and his bow took care of a couple more who might have torn out his throat; in one case sticking his bow hand nearly between a pair of gaping jaws before loosing his shaft.
And then they were gone. The last two of them had broken finally, and were loping away. The mouse raced out onto his shoulder, and now he saw the bow. A small, toylike recurve with a tiny, four inch arrow nocked. The mouse let fly, and a second later, one of the retreating hares was kicking its life out in the mud.
“None must escape,” the mouse warned breathlessly as he reached into his nearly empty quiver. “They breed like—”
“Rabbits?” Jack finished for him. But he took aim and hurled FoeSmite into the remaining hare’s body even as the mouse was nocking a fresh arrow.
“Let me down, now,” the mouse ordered. Without thinking, Jack knelt and held out his arm. The mouse scurried down it and vanished into the muddy grass.
Jack recalled FoeSmite before limping after, sticking the catch now that he was getting the hang of it. It was still coming straight in at him — at his middle rather than his hand. As though he was more target than master, and that was worrying.
Now that he had a minute, Jack took in his surroundings for the first time. Weathered upthrusts of sandstone pierced the prairie before him. Dozens of them, rising in some cases to more than waist height and stretching out into the darkness for who knew how far. It was difficult to make out much more than their general shapes in the gloom. He couldn’t imagine what sort of event had led to their formation.
The rain had let up some, but it was still coming down, and the moon remained obscured. Or moons, he supposed, looking up into the fast moving cloud cover. He still hadn’t got the hang of the phases, so he had no idea whether one or both were out. Some faint glow pierced the clouds, casting a wan light and it was slightly easier to see than it had been. Probably moons, then.
Leaving off his examination of the sky, he looked once more to the ground. The whole place was littered with dead rabbits. There must have been hundreds of them, even beyond those he’d slain himself. He crouched down to examine a few as he moved forward. While some of the carcasses looked fresh, many were stiff and cold, like they’d been dead for a couple of days. He whistled low under his breath. Siege was right.
There was no way for him to determine the bounds of the village, or even locate it under these conditions. There wasn’t anything he could see anywhere that looked as though it might have been deliberately constructed. Dead rabbits, scattered stones, and trampled grass was all there was. Wasn’t there?
Something laying in the debris had caught his eye. Brightly colored and oddly out of place. Taking a knee, he picked up what he’d mistaken initially for a tangle of crushed flowers. Bringing it close, he could see that, rather than flower petals, he was holding twigs. They had been fashioned in some way into a solid piece and planed smooth. Roughly oval, around the size of a credit card. It was painted a cheerful blue and decorated with barely visible yellow and white flowers. Halfway along one edge a tiny handle protruded from its surface.
It struck him then that this was a door, ripped from its moorings somewhere by sharp claws. In its upper center was a small opening, like a window, with filmy wisps of tattered and sodden cloth dangling from it. Curtains, or what was left of them. He closed his hand around the small panel, looking up, straining to scan his surroundings more thoroughly. This had been torn from someone’s home.
Suddenly, then, they weren’t just mice. Suddenly, he wasn’t kneeling in a muddy field in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, where he was kneeling was another shattered village in a line of them that was far too long.
There were no bodies other than the rabbits. At least none he could see. Those incisors the rabbits —No! Dire hares— were sporting would explain that. No herbivores, these. Any bodies to be found would be found inside the corpses of the hares. It took him a moment to wrap his head around that. His gut couldn’t decide whether it was better or worse that the village’s inhabitants had been eaten alive rather than tortured or raped to death, or had their heads lopped off for a video camera and internet propaganda.
He looked around for his tiny companion after a bit, his mind swimming up out of the old misery. He found him finally by virtue of the clods of mud and spray sailing clear of a deepish hole dimly seen at one end of one of the taller stones. Meynardo was down in the hole, digging frantically with his bare hands, hurling the doughy soil up between his hind legs.
Jack eased up to the edge of the hole, crouching low. He couldn’t see anything. Between the rain, the clouds, and the shadow of the upthrust, the inside of the hole was inky darkness. Reluctantly, he fished one of his little cree emitter flashlights out of his belt pouch. He’d been husbanding the batteries ruthlessly as there’d be no replacements probably ever. But this situation desperately needed a little illumination. He tapped the tail switch for low and shined the beam into the hole.
The mouse spared him a fleeting glance before going back to his digging. “The... the inner refuge!” he sent. “Some of them... at least, have... managed to reach it. I... I can hear the young ones wailing.”
Some good news, at least. “How many?”
Meynardo seemed to flinch. “I... I do not know,” he admitted a second later. “The young ones are terrified. All they send is darkness and death fear. I have been trying to tell them we’re coming....” he paused in his digging to swipe at his brow. “I cannot tell if they’ve relayed any of what I’ve been telling them to the adults. Perhaps yes, perhaps no.
“In any case, the main entryway at the top of the rock has been collapsed. There is no way through. This was an alternate of sorts. You see the mark?” he indicated a painted slash in the rock face. “If we... I... dig here at an angle of forty five degrees, I should be able to open a way.”
“You’re sure?” Jack wasn’t.
Meynardo shrugged and went back to digging. “Luciandro made the calculations, and I trust his math. If any of the adults survive and know we’re coming, they should be digging up to meet us.”
Right, Jack thought. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Keep watch," Meynardo cautioned. "The blood may yet draw larger predators, and the wards are a shambles.”
“We’re alone,” Jack assured him. “For a good half, uh, lenn, at least.”
Meynardo stopped digging again and stood straight, turning to frown up at him. “And how would you know that?”
Jack shrugged. “Some facet of one of my classes, I suppose,” he said. “No idea what it is or which it’s from.”
Meynardo opened his mouth to ask one of the thousand questions that had just popped to life in his head, but instead turned back to his digging. There was far too much in that short statement for him to try to unpack with so much urgently to be done.
Jack, meanwhile, couldn’t help but notice that the hole was filling with rainwater at a worrying rate. He doffed his sallet and held it over the hole with the hand holding the light, juggling the flash to keep it shining into the work area, while blocking what rain he could.
He didn’t fail to note that the water dripping from that hand was tinged red. He wondered if rabies was a thing here.
With his other hand, he began scooping mud out of the space behind the mouse, gouging out a sump to channel water away from the rescue operation.