25: Vermin

“Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,” counted Telloran as he placed silver coins into Maripor’s hand. “Sixteen sails up front, with the remainder to be paid on completion of the job.”

“That’s more than fair,” replied Maripor. “You can count on me.”

“I hope so,” replied Telloran. “Those vermin are costing me a great deal of money.”

“How goes the repair effort?” asked Maripor.

Telloran’s spice shop had been half-destroyed during the dragon attck, and when he had tried to go back to reclaim it, he found that the shop had been occupied by a pack of huge rats. They hadn’t eaten much of his stock of spices, but they had broken into his storage containers and scatered his wares all over the floor. Regardless, a building full of rats was no place that people wanted to buy foodstuffs from.

He needed someone to go in and exterminate the rats so that he could move back in and start cleaning up. Meanwhile, he had hired a builder to perform some of the easier maintenance work.

Maripor had offered to exterminate the rats for a tidy sum of thirty silver sails. He had successfully negotiated for half-plus-one as a down payment.

“Not good,” said Telloran. “There’s a story going around amongst the workers that the rats have grown to a huge size. They’re frightened – can you believe it?”

Maripor chuckled. “Trust me,” he said. “I’ve seen some pretty big rats in my time. I’ll get the job done.”

“I hope so. I’m relying on you here.”

Maripor clapped a filthy hand onto his shoulder and grinned. The man’s breath was ghastly, but in truth there was no other rat-catcher still in business.

Maripor returned to the hovel which served as his home – a shack in one of the most run-down areas of the River District. Filthy it may have been, but there were absolutely no rats.

After stashing the sixteen sails in an old sock that he hid beneath the rush-filled bag that served as his bed, Maripor gathered the tools of his trade – several traps, cages, and most importantly his rat-spear, which he could stick into holes and crevices to impale the critters. The spear had a barbed point so that the rats could be drawn from their lairs and easily bagged. Rotting corpses left in place tended to leave a bad smell, and Maripor was nothing if not thorough.

It was mid-morning when he set out for Telloran’s shop in the merchant quarter. It was a pleasant enough day, if you didn’t count the destruction and the near-constant smell of smoke. He had to make several detours from what he would consider the ideal route. Once because a building had collapsed into the street, cutting it off to foot traffic. Another time he was forced to skirt a crowd of people who had gathered to protest something or other. None of his business, but they certainly seemed angry about something.

Once, he was stopped by the City Watch.

“State your business,” they said.

“I’m a rat catcher,” he replied.

“Where are you headed?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve been employed by the spice merchant Telloran to rid his shop of vermin.” There was a slight pause while the watch officer considered this. “It’s legitimate business,” Maripor added. “May I proceed?”

The watchmen muttered amongst themselves for a moment. Maripor held up his traps and his rat-spear pointedly.

“All right, all right,” said the watch officer. “Move along,” and he wrinkled his nose.

“I thank you, sirs,” said Maripor with a sneer. What was all that about? The Watch had never concerned themselves with his business before. He figured that it must have had something to do with the dragon. He shrugged and moved along.

After about half an hour, he arrived at the shop. There were a few workers repairing the window in front, but Maripor could see that it was cosmetic only, and there was significant structural damage that had not been addressed.

“Is it safe to go inside?” he asked one of the workers, who looked him up and down.

“You’re the rat catcher,” the man said. Maripor nodded, holding up the traps and rat-spear again. “Yes, it’s safe, structurally speaking. Everything that was going to fall down has already done so. But I still wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

Maripor raised an eyebrow. The worker stopped what he was doing.

“Rats. Really big ones.”

“Really,” said Maripor sarcastically.

“Yeah. Like you’ve never seen.”

“I assure you, I have already seen the biggest rats that there have ever been.”

The man shook his head. “Not like this,” he said. “These rats ain’t natural.”

Maripor laughed and turned from the obviously superstitious and fearful man. The dragon clearly had him spooked.

He pushed open the door to the shop, and was immediately assailed by the strong smell of spice. He inhaled deeply, seeking the musky scent that signalled the presence of rat. It was there, hiding beneath the overtones of cinnamon and pepper.

He moved through the shop. There were sacks of grains and seeds that had clearly been gnawed open. He followed his nose. Behind the counter there was a slight floral scent, and just a brush of something that reminded him of clean seawater that he had once smelled in his youth. He’d never smelled it in the city though. Under it all, the rat-stink was getting stronger.

There were two large terracotta pots that had once held brightly-coloured powders tht were now all over the floor. One was broken and the other had simply been tipped over. He pushed that one with his foot. Heavy. Clearly too heavy to have been tipped by a rat. It must have happened during the dragon attack. He couldn’t see how, but that explanation made a lot more sense that the idea that it had been tipped over by a rat. Maybe it was one of that superstitious worker’s “unnatural” rats. He laughed at that thought.

There was a large hole in the wall behind the tipped-over pot, much too large to be a rat-hole, but that was where the rat-stink was strongest. He kneeled down and peered into it.

Quick as a flash the rat-spear darted out, and when he withdrew it from the hole, it had a dying rat impaled on its barbed tip.

He pulled it off and stashed it into his bag. It was a normal rat, not giant at all. Those stupid construction workers. Typical of their kind to be frightened by rats.

He speared three more rats through that hole, all of them perfectly normal. Standing, he looked for a way to reach the back room. There was clearly a cavity between the walls, but he’d get a better angle from the other side.

There was a door, but it seemed jammed. He gave it a good shove with his shoulder. There was a crack and he stumbled into the next room – clearly a storeroom. Again, his senses were assailed with the scent of spice. But the rat-stink was even stronger now. And there was another smell as well – fainter, drifting beneath both the strong spice smell and the subtler smell of rat. He was quite familiar with it – there were several outets from the town’s sewer system near his home where the wastes of thousands of humans were disgorged into the river. But there should have been no direct conection between the sewers and a high-class shop in the merchant quarter. Other than the obvious, of course.

He could see the hole that led to the wall cavity – larger on this side, and he skewered four more rats that weren’t fast enough to escape. But that wasn’t the source of the sewer-stink.

He listened carefully, and afer a few moments he heard the distinctive scrabble of rat claws in the far wall. There was a rat over there for sure, climing the beams behind the wall panel.

The light was dim here – filtered through old windows and now holes in the ceiling, but it looked like the bottom panel was a bit loose.

He set his spear down beside him and gripped the edge of the panel with both hands. He leaned back, putting his weight behind him, and was rewarded by the panel completely breaking off and exposing the beams beneath. He was also rewarded with an overwhelming stink of the sewer. He smiled. This was where they had been getting in.

It looked as though the floor basically ended at the wall. A yawning gap which ordinarily would have been concealed within the wall led down into what was clearly a sewer tunnel.

As he watched, a rat poked its nose up through the gap and sniffed.

Okay, he thought. That’s not an ordinary rat.

Its whiskers were longer than his forearm. The rat that this snout belonged to had to be at least three feet long in the body.

Startled, he shuffled back, but the nose withdrew after a few seconds. Maybe there was something to what the workman outside had said after all. Reflexively he grabbed for his rat-spear.

A squeal and a scrabble of rat-claws heralded the attack.

It came from behind him – from the cavity and hole that he had been looking at earlier. The huge rat sunk its razor-sharp incisors into his right arm, and he screamed.

Outside, the workers heard the screams and the noisy commotion, dropped their tools, and fled.

Later, the man the rat-catcher had spoken to before entering that accursed shop returned to Telloran to advise him that they would not be returning to work.