We watched, we waited. Argent was We now, the imperial presence that joined the minds of the Dungeon rats into one. She didn't rule by force. She had no power to bend their minds to her will. But she had a story to tell, and it went like this:

They were small. Their lives were defined by it. Too small to fight back when predators took their food, too small to claim a part of the world for their own. They were hated. The humans pushed them out, relegated them to a life in the filth of the sewers, and in a city with so much they were left chewing on scant rinds and bones in the shadows.

But they were many.

There were thousands of rats in Caltern, if not tens of thousands.

Together they could demand a place at the table. Together, they could force the human world to acknowledge them, and take their fair share.

It was a good story. It was spoken not in words but in raw emotion, stirring the dreams of rich food and resentment for days of starvation that lived in every rat's heart. The anger of seeing plenty around them while they snuffled in the gutters for scraps.

For them, tonight was a night of revolution.

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It didn’t take long for the auction to become my personal hell. I had figured out a way to steal the unicorn, yes, but not to swipe everything else up for bidding. Which meant watching an entire parade of treasures slip by without being able to claim them.

You cannot imagine the agony.

First up was an enormous slab of twisting red coral. It attracted immediate interest, bidders lifting their hands to put down first thousands, then tens of thousands. It was sold off to a fat man in a childlike mask who I swore I’d find and kill someday.

The next items were less beautiful and, consequently, of less interest to me. Oil paintings stolen from some deceased grandmaster of the arts, a lute that filled the silence with a beautiful humming melody the moment the attendant touched the strings. An enchanted sword with a baleful, bloodsoaked aura that made me shiver.

A set of china made from sphinx bones. I froze. The audience gasped, but I was simply shocked. A sphinx. Lay my hands on one piece of that set and I could have a sphinx.

It took such discipline to hold myself back from setting the plan in motion then and there. I had the best seats in the house, watching from the tops of tents and stalls. I had another vantage point as well. Down among the crowd, a strange, ragged man stood, his body seeming to wriggle as tiny movements shifted beneath his clothes. He walked oddly, clumsily, as if he had no bones.

I restrained myself as the china set was put aside, and the next lot brought up. To my surprise, it was a golem. Segmented bands and plates of black iron formed its body, the design giving it a strange mobility, the central core built into its visor as a monolithic eye.

That was when Suffi arrived. The market burst into sound around her, the guards rushing towards her company of dwarves, because none of them wore masks. Their clothing was ripped and torn, with bloody cuts beneath, one dwarf limping theatrically with the shaft of his poleaxe for a crutch.

“Immer you slime, get out here!” She roared, her personal soldiers fending off the guard and pushing the crowd apart so she could stomp to the fore. “This was an ambush!”

The crowd was already unsettled, knowing that not all of them had made it tonight. Her words were like a match tossed into ready kindling. The fires of suspicion were lit and whispers started to travel through the crowd, growing in volume in defiance of the guards.

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I had given her a role to play, and she was playing it with abandon.

“Silence in the market!” The attendant - the man in the black harlequin mask who had announced the auction to begin with - cried. “Silence from the crowd.”

“Oh shove it! Immer, get your maggot-ridden ass on stage!” Suffi shouted, hurling her axe at the clown. He dived aside and the blade slammed into the pillar of the stage behind him.

It was a disaster.

But my attention was drifting, pulled away from this delightful performance by my spies elsewhere in the market, my scurrying legion of informants.

I saw everything within the market at once. My eyes were legion.

We had found the unicorn.

My wallflower rats - the rodents I had given suckered feet to climb any surface with - and a lone webweaver vermin had crawled across the ceilings of Immer’s barge, following guards through dark undercroft of the ship to a cage. Inside, the unicorn lay. It scraped its horn against the bars in a constant rasping sound.

It was nothing like what I imagined. With its pitch black fur covered in bald patches and biting flies, it was a shameful specimen weakened to the point of death. A outcropping of white bone covered its muzzle like a natural armored helm, obscuring everything but the eye- just one, the other lost, gouged out in some catastrophic battle. A bladed spike rose from the brow, as sharp as any sword. More erupted from the ridge of its spine, making it a horse that could never be ridden, never be tamed. It had an eagle’s feathered hindquarters and claws, each talon a deadly weapon.

Captivity had reduced the beast to a sack of skin and bones, barely alive. But it was beautiful nonetheless. I could see the bearings of a proud warrior in the way it snorted and glared at the guards, hooves and claws stamping at the floorboards, and its keen single eye even caught sight of the vermin scuttling over their heads, staring curiously at my creations as they gathered over its cage.

Immer sat on a stool beside the cage, keeping personal watch. He picked his fingernails with a long curved knife and drank from a sealed bottle.

“Captain Immer, sir, Suffi Halfhand is here. Without a mask. She’s calling you out.”

“Tchh.” He hissed through his teeth, flicking his fingers at the guard to go away. “Let her.”

“People are riled up, sir. She’s saying you’ve been ambushing people on their way to the market.”

With a sigh, Immer rose from his seat. In that same moment, my jeweled spider was descending on a silver thread, steadily rappelling down to bite the unicorn. Its poison had been modified to cause brief but death-like symptoms, enough to force them to take it to the doctor without causing lasting harm.

Immer’s hand shot out and crushed it. Broken legs stuck out from his fingers, twitching their last.

Scraping his glove clean on the wall, Immer sighed. “Let’s go then. You two, bring the beast, we’ll start the sale now and put an end to this.”

I was in shock. Of course I had created a second spider, yes, but it was minutes away. My window of timing was now, before the unicorn was escorted to the stage.

Immer was walking towards the stairs, his attention turned away. The guards were more occupied with the unicorn, which was snarling and bracing to fight as they approached its cage, whinnying in anger.

There was a last chance to put the plan back in order. The webweaver vermin scuttled across the ceiling, spinning out a banner of silk that contained the words ‘PLAY SICK’.

Two words. The prayer the beast could even read.

The unicorn looked up, hesitating for a long moment as the guard unlatched the cage door. As they grasped for the bridle clamped to its jaw, it let out a sudden cry of fake pain and collapsed, body shaking the bars of the cage as it sprawled against them

Immer turned.

The tiny flag of words had already been reeled back up, my creations safely hidden among the shadows at the corners where wall met ceiling.

“Goddamnit.” He growled as he crossed the floor, kicking the unicorn in the flanks. The creature let out a weak huff of pain. “GODDAMNIT.” In a moment he had gone from assured and cruel like a cat to a madman, striking out at the guards, whipping at them with the hilt of his dagger as they lifted hands to protect their faces.

“You two! Get it to the doctor, now!” He ordered, and I could have cheered.

The pirate captain stomped up the stairs, heading for the confrontation with Suffi, where I was ready with the day’s second surprise. The two guards looked at each other and leaned down, awkwardly trying to lift the supposedly-sick horse back onto its feet and lead it towards the doctor.

And not too far away, in the dark of the passage that carried the river beneath Caltern’s foundations, oars dipped into the water. My golem-ship, my grand creation, the Serpentine, was ready to sail.