Elysia unlocked the lock and entered her room, where she yawned with her mouth wide open. There was nothing she wanted more than to lie down on the pallet and fall asleep, since she had been working for more than twelve hours. She put the lamp down by the straw-stuffed mattress and untied the laces on her jerkin. She tried to pay as little attention to her surroundings as possible, but it was hard to ignore the loud moans of passion coming from the next room, and the chanting of the drunks downstairs.
The bedroom wasn't good enough for paying customers, but it wasn't bad for her. She had seen better; however, she had the virtue of being free. It was a right that corresponded to him as a worker, and like a minority of the employees of the old Heinz, she Elysua she decided to live in her own establishment.
The small pile of her personal belongings was in the corner, under the barred window. There was the chain mail and a small pack containing a few items, such as fire-starting utensils.
She flung herself on the bed, pulling her worn old woolen cloak around her and making sure the sword was within easy reach of hers. Her hard life on her roads had made her wary when she found herself in seemingly safe places, and the thought that the ratfolk she had recently encountered might still be around filled her with fear.
She remembered all too well the huge carcass of the rat lying at the foot of the steps of Helstaff's mansion. It had not been a reassuring sight. In a way, it wasn't surprising to her that she hadn't heard anything about the fire that had broken out in the chief magistrate's house. Perhaps the authorities hadn't found the bodies of the ratfolks, or perhaps they had brushed the matter off. At that precise moment, she didn't even feel like thinking about it.
She wondered how men could ignore stories about ratfolks. There were innumerable books dealing with elves, dwarves, and orcs, but knowledge about wererats was scant. She could almost suspect an organized conspiracy to hide them through witchcraft, though that thought was too disturbing, so she pushed it from her mind.
There was a soft knock at the door, and she Elysia lay there and tried to forget it. "Probably again a drunk guest who has lost his way and is looking for his room." She told herself.
They called again, this time more urgently and insistently, and she then rose from the bed and reached for the sword.
A lady like her was never careful enough in those dark times. Maybe out there she was stalking some assassin who thought Elysia, groggy with sleep, would be easy prey. Barely two months ago, Heinz had found a murdered couple lying on blood-stained sheets three doors away. The man had been a prominent wine merchant, and the girl was his adolescent mistress. Heinz suspected that the merchant had been murdered on the orders of his witch wife, but he also claimed that it was none of his business. Elysia had soaked her new blouse in blood when she dumped the bodies in the river. And she, too, hadn't been too excited about having to use the secret route through the sewers.
They called a third time, and she heard her whisper a woman's voice.
"Elysia."
Elysia drew the sword from the scabbard. Just because she had heard a female voice didn't mean she was just a girl waiting outside. She might have brought some beefy friends with her who would jump on her the moment she opened the door.
For an instant she thought about not opening; she would just wait until the girl and her friends tried to break down the door, and then she realized how paranoid she had become. She shrugged her shoulders. Ever since the death of Hef, Spider, and the rest of the group of sewer watchers, she had every reason in the world to be paranoid. In any case, was she planning to wait there all night? She undid the bolts, and opening the door, she saw that it was Elissa waiting outside.
He glanced at her nervously, brushing a curl from his forehead at the same time. Elysia thought that even though she was a girl too, she had to admit that she was really pretty.
"I wanted… I wanted to thank you for helping me earlier," Elissa finally said.
The cat girl thought it was a bit late for that. Couldn't she have waited until the next morning? Elysia didn't understand what was happening.
"It was nothing," she murmured, and she felt herself blush for some reason she didn't understand.
Elissa turned her head quickly to look left and right down the corridor.
"Aren't you going to invite me in? I wanted to thank you properly." She barely had to move to kiss Elysia's lips.
Elysia stood there, stunned, for a second, she had never been kissed by a girl before. The world seemed to stop, as if time had stopped flowing. Elysia's heart began to pound, her body tensed, and all of her senses heightened.
Going with her primal instincts, she grabbed Elissa's arm to pull her into her room. Then, like a wild beast, she slammed the door shut and bolted it.
That her partner was a girl was not an impediment, Elysia's wild instincts to mate were relatively easy to trigger; this was mainly due to the combination of the human side of her with the beast side of her.
Although, for Elysia, this would be the first time that she would share a bed with a person of the same gender.
♦ ♦ ♦
When her trusted aide, Queg, reached twelve on the muttered count, Chang, she wrinkled her nose and listened to the scents of the night.
Strange, she thought. "So similar to the stench of the cities of the Far East, and yet so different." She could smell the beef, turnips, and roast pork. In the East, it would have been pickled cauliflower, rice, and chicken. The food smelled different, but everything else was the same. There was the same smell of overflowing sewers, of many people living close together, of incense and perfumes.
She pricked up her ears as she had also taught him how to make the master of hers. She heard temple bells tolling and the rattle of carriage wheels on the cobblestones. She heard the chants of the drunkards and the voice of the night watchman announcing the time. All that did not bother him, because he did not allow himself to be distracted. If she wished, he could shut out all the extraneous noises and listen to one voice in a crowd.
The ratfolk's eyes searched the darkness. He had keen night vision, and down below he saw silhouettes of men and women leaving taverns arm in arm for brief bouts of lovemaking in alleyways and squalid rooms of boarding houses. Chang didn't care in the slightest about those humans. Both of his targets were in the building the humans called a tavern.
He did not know why the honorable Black Magician had selected those two out of all the lesser souls in the city, to his inevitable death. He only knew that his duty was to facilitate the passage of their two souls to the afterlife. He had already made an offering of two incense sticks and had promised to deliver the immortal essence of both to the realm of death. He could almost feel sorry for the two damned, though not quite.
They were in that tavern that had the sign that said The Stinky Pig, and they did not know that his doom was coming. They wouldn't even know, because Chang had trained for years in performing silent kills. Long before he left his original nest to serve the new Council made up of the vast majority of the clans, he had been schooled to perfection in his clan's ancient art: stealth assassination. When he was still a cub, he had been made to run barefoot over beds of hot coals, and steal coins from blind beggars' bowls in human cities. Already at that early age he had learned that beggars were often far from blind, and sometimes malevolently skilled in martial arts.
By the time of his initiation, he had already achieved great proficiency in all forms of unarmed combat. He was a third grade expert in Crimson Claw techniques and had a black belt in the Path of Deathpaw. He had spent twelve long months training for silent infiltration, and one month in fasting and meditation atop Mount Yellow Fang, with nothing but his own excrement to eat.
Since then he had killed and killed again. He had killed Khijaw of Clan Gulcher when the powerful Warlord had conspired to overthrow the great Ratfolk alliance.
Chang's list of wins was long, and tonight he would add one more. His duty was to kill the armored warrior Frey and his lover Elysia, and he did not see how he could fail.
What chance did a human warrior and his foolish non-human lover have against a powerful ratfolk trained in all the arts of murder? Chang was sure that he could take down those two. He had been almost insulted by the Black Magician Dhalthar's insistence that he take the entire herd of ninja with him.
No doubt the dire rumors being heard about this armored warrior were exaggerated. There was no way he could have single-handedly wiped out an entire unit of elite warriors. And it seemed utterly unbelievable that he could have killed the rat-troll Bonebreaker without the help of a whole party of adventurers. And, of course, there was no way he could be the same armored warrior who had defeated the Rat King Gritch in single combat a few months ago.
Chang let out a long, controlled breath. Perhaps the Black Magician was right, since, in the past, he had often proven himself right. It was a simple matter of prudence to assign the assassination of the armored warrior to Slitha. Chang could finish off the female, and if any trouble arose, he could run to help his junior's squad, though he didn't think any trouble would arise.
Queg stopped counting when he reached a hundred and touched an arm on his upper one. Chang wagged his tail once to show that he understood. Slitha and his team, with the clockwork precision characteristic of all assassination operations, would already be in position at the entrance to the tavern. The time had come to proceed.
He dropped the swords into their scabbards, made sure the blowpipe and throwing stars were within clawed reach, and whistled the advance signal.
Like an oil slick, the pack of ninja ratfolks poured onto the roof. The blackened weapons were visible only as shadowy outlines in the moonlight. Not a single one tinkled. Not a silhouette was visible…; well, almost none.