Chapter 62 - Rat Claw, Part 3

Elysia expected a jagged bladed sword to plunge into her back at any moment. She heard someone try to shout behind her, but couldn't. Her throat was gurgling and gasping, and her breathing was terribly labored, as if her lungs had filled with fluid.

"It's the gas." Elysia understood. Frey had told him of the exotic weapons used by some individuals, the alchemy products created by creatively twisted minds, combined with a warped and inhuman imagination. She knew that just one breath of that foul-smelling air meant death, but she also knew that she could not hold her breath indefinitely.

Think, she told herself. "Find a place where the air is clean. Keep moving forward. Get away from the deadly cloud. Don't be panicked. Don't think of that being as a huge rat that sneaks up on you in the dark with a drawn sword. As long as you stay calm, you will be safe." Slowly, one twisting inch after another, her lungs bursting with the need for air, she forced herself to safety.

And then she fell on him that weight. Silver stars danced before her eyes, and all the air escaped from her lungs. Before she could stop him, her chest was filled with stinking fluid. She lay in the dark, gasping, and little by little she realized that she wasn't dead, she wasn't drowning, and she didn't have a knife stuck in her back either. She tried to move, but she couldn't. It was as if she had an enormous weight on her, and then terror flashed through her mind. Perhaps he had broken his spine and was paralyzed.

"Is that you, Elysia?" she heard Rudi whisper, and she almost laughed with relief. The weight that oppressed her was her enormous companion.

"Yeah... where are the others?"

"I'm fine," she heard Hef say.

"Me too, brother." It was Spider.

"Frey, where are you?" There was no answer. Had the gas killed him? It seemed impossible. The dark hero could not be dead. Nothing as insidious as a gas could have killed him. It would not be fair.

"Where's the sergeant?"

"Does anyone have a flashlight?"

Flint flashed, a lantern flame came to life, and Elysia saw something bulky moving slowly toward them out of the shadows on the ledge. Instinctively, she reached for the sword, but it was not where she should be. She had dropped it when she was knocked over. The others remained standing, tense, waiting.

"It's me," Frey said. "The damned human managed to escape."

"Where's Gant?" Elysia asked.

"Go see for yourself, cat girl."

Elysia walked past the dark hero and went to see what he found. The gas had dissipated as quickly as it had appeared, but she had accomplished her mission with Sergeant Gant, who lay in a pool of blood. His eyes were wide open, staring, and threads of red trickled from his mouth and nostrils.

Felix examined the body, which was already getting cold and had no pulse. Surely he was dead.

"How did he die, Frey?" Elysia had knowledge of magic, but the fact that a man could be killed without leaving any mark made her mind dizzy.

She "She drowned. She drowned in her own blood." Frey's voice was cold and furious.

"Is this how he deals with fear?" Elysia wondered. "Turning it into anger?" When the dark hero approached the ratfolk's corpse and started kicking it, the catgirl noticed her presence. The short sword thrown by Frey had split her skull.

♦ ♦ ♦

Exhausted, Elysia stretched out on her straw-cushioned bed; which she shared with Frey and stared at the cracked ceiling; she was too tired to fall asleep. From the floor below she heard the noise of Lisabette's shouting match with one of the men who were part of the seemingly endless stream of her clients.

Elysia wanted to pound the floor and tell them to shut up or get out, but she knew that would cause more problems than she would solve. As she did every night, she determined that the next day she would look for another boarding house, but she knew that by night she would be too tired to get down to it.

Ideas ran over each other like rats frolicking in the cavern of her brain. She was in that state where her exhaustion made her thoughts seem strange even to herself. Odd conjunctions of images and labyrinthine chains of reasoning were forming in her mind from nowhere to nowhere. She was too tired even to be angry at the fate of Sergeant Gant, killed in the line of duty and destined to lie in a pauper's mass grave on the fringes of the cemetery at the behest of an overly bored guard captain. to pay close attention to reports of monsters inhabiting the sewers. Gant had no family to mourn him, no friends, except his fellow watchmen, who were now toasting his memory.

Gant was a cold corpse then. "And the same thing could have happened to me." Elysia thought, if she had been in the wrong place when the sphere exploded, if Frey hadn't told them to hold her breath, if the dark hero hadn't pushed her away from the gas; yes, yes, yes… Too many yes.

In any case, what was she doing? Was this how she intended to spend the rest of her days? Hunting monsters in the dark?

Apparently, her life no longer made sense. She kept moving from one violent episode to another.

A small black rat scuttled through the rafters on the roof. When she first saw that penthouse with her only small window, she had thought that at least she would be free of the rats that infested all the buildings in the New Town. She had deluded herself into thinking that the rodents would have a heart attack from the effort of climbing all those steps; but she was wrong. The Newtown rats were daring and adventurous, and they seemed better fed than many of the humans in the area. She had seen some of the biggest ones chase a cat.

Elysia shuddered, and she wished she hadn't started thinking about rats, for it brought to mind the mysterious aristocrat and ratfolk they found in the sewers. What would have been the purpose of that clandestine meeting? What profit could any man derive from dealing with such monstrosities? And how was it possible for people to revel and whore through the teeming streets of Bergheim without knowing that evil things lived and moved and nested less than twenty feet below their feet? Maybe they just didn't want to know.

Perhaps it was true that, as some philosophers claimed, the end of the world was coming and it was best to indulge in all the pleasures one could find. Maybe she should also enjoy the worldly pleasures you should from time to time.

Elysia reached out her hand to the place where Frey should be, but she found it empty. Her partner was saying goodbye to his fallen partner with a night of beer. Frey declared that since Gant died in the line of duty for him, the gods would hopefully reward him by sending him to Valhalla.

She was intrigued by Frey's curious style of honoring the dead. Usually funerals were a sad and gloomy event, but it seemed that for Frey a funeral was an event worth celebrating; where food and drink could not be missing.

Closing her eyes, a thought invaded Elysia's mind. What would Frey do if she died? Would he do the same ceremony to honor her death or would it be different?

Raising her hands to her face, Elysia shifted restlessly on the lonely bed in an attempt to clear her mind of such a dark subject.

♦ ♦ ♦

Fritz Helstaff, head of the Bergheim secret police, was sitting among his files and meditating. That damned black-armored adventurer had nearly caught him, and had actually tried to get his filthy hands on him. He had come very close to undoing all his painstaking work. A single blow would have been enough for Chaos and darkness to fall on the city Helstaff had sworn to protect.

He reached out a hand and picked up a cut-glass pitcher. The water was still lukewarm. The servant had boiled it for exactly eleven minutes, as he had ordered. It deserved a compliment. Helstaff poured some into a glass and inspected it. He held the glass up to the light to see if there was any sediment or anything floating on the surface. He didn't see anything. It did not have any contamination.

Corruption could occur with great ease; he was everywhere. Sensible people knew this and used that knowledge to their own advantage. Corruption could take many forms, and some were worse than others. There were relatively benign forms, like the ratfolks…and also the poisonous malignancy of mutation.

Helstaff knew that the ratfolks just wanted to be left alone to rule their underground kingdom and carry on their own form of civilization. They were intelligent and sophisticated, and you could get along with them. If one had what they wanted, they negotiated and kept the agreements. It was true that they had their own plans, but that made them understandable and controllable. They were not like mutants: vile, insidious, and evil beings, lurking everywhere, hiding in secrecy, and manipulating the world.

"We could easily be puppets pulled by the disgusting strings of mutants," he thought. "Therefore, we must remain vigilant. Enemies are everywhere and more and more are spawning all the time."

The commoners were the best fertile field for that, since they engendered an infinite series of ragged bums who were good for nothing. Most mutants were born into the common people. It could be said that it made a certain sense, albeit disgusting, since they constituted the largest group and were famous for their immoral, lecherous and licentious character.

The thought made him stiff with horror. He knew that mutants preyed on the stupidity of the mob. They were very clever, and they used these lazy, uneducated oafs: they filled their heads with seditious nonsense, they fed their envious anger against their superiors, they incited them to rebellion, pillage and destruction. One only had to see how his poor father had been ruined, how his estate had been burned to the ground in one of their bestial uprisings, when his father had been the kindest, kindest man he had ever met.

Well, Fritz Helstaff wouldn't make the same mistake. He was too smart and strong for that, and he knew how to treat revolutionaries and upstarts. He would keep his guard up and protect humanity from the threat of mutants. He would fight them with their own weapons: terror, cunning, and ruthless violence.

That's why he compiled the files, even though Duke Emmanuel's daughter laughed at them and called them her secret pornography. Within those lovingly detailed and carefully cross-referenced files lay a kind of power, for information was power. He knew who all the potential revolutionaries were, and his network of spies and agents kept him informed. He knew which nobles secretly belonged to the Dark Cults and kept them under constant surveillance. He had agents who could penetrate any meeting place, and whom no one would ever suspect.

It was part of his deal with the ratfolks. They knew many things and could find out many more. The little spies of the wererats were everywhere, unnoticed. He used their dark wisdom and made deals with the lesser of two evils to prevent greater anarchy.

He picked up the small framed portrait that the future Duchess Emilia, daughter of Duke Emmanuel, had given him, and licked his thin lips. He thought of the word he'd chosen to refer to the files: pornography.

He was shocked that she had used such a word, that she even knew what it meant. He had to be because of that brother of his! Leos was a bad influence, since Emilia was too good, too pure and immaculate to have taught herself such a word. Maybe he should have them spy on her, just to be on the lookout for her…

No, she was his duchess! Everything he did for her, he did for her, and though the future duchess couldn't comprehend the value of her actions at the moment, one day he would realize it.

To have them spy on her would be to cross a limit that he had set for himself. Besides, he sometimes suspected that the lies he heard about her might contain a grain of truth, and finding out what she really was like would be too painful for him.

He put the portrait back on the desk. He had allowed himself to get away from the main issue; that is, the guy in black armor and the sewer guards. Was it possible that they had recognized him? And if so, what was he to do about it? They were simple men doing simple work. Like himself, they fought to keep corruption at bay, but could they understand the need to do what he did? In the event that he was not like that, perhaps they would understand that it was necessary to ensure his silence forever.