Elysia kicked a huge fat rat under her feet, sending it flying through the air onto a dung heap. The creature rose to its feet and immediately began devouring the muck it was standing on. The cat girl watched her with helpless disgust and despair.
The rats were everywhere and they ate everything that was edible and a lot of things that weren't. There were thousands; possibly millions. Sometimes the entire streets seemed nothing more than a seething sea of vermin. Her employer, Heinz, had heard that they began to eat babies in cribs and small children who got too close to them. Huge herds of hideous beasts ran through the streets of the city, and the dogs and cats were too terrified to hunt them down.
The only good thing was that the rats seemed to have mysteriously short lives. It gave the impression that they aged several months in a few days, but when they died their corpses littered the streets like a monstrous hairy carpet that covered the cobblestones. It wasn't natural, and in fact the whole thing reeked of ratfolk sorcery, making Elysia wonder if there was some evil purpose behind the phenomenon.
"The city of Bergheim seems to be under a curse." Elysia thought.
The air smelled of disease and human flesh burned on the great pyres erected in the plaza before the temple of Mortis. Entire residential buildings had been boarded up and turned into tombs.
Elysia shuddered to think of the corpses rotting inside, though it was even worse to think of those trapped alive, plague victims no one wanted to help.
Frightful rumors circulated of people who had recovered from the plague only to starve to death.
Even worse stories were told about cannibalism and people feeding on the flesh of the corpses of family and friends.
They were dreadful thoughts that made Elysia feel as if the gods had turned their backs on this city.
Up ahead she heard the rumble of wheels on the cobbles and the tolling of a bell, and she stepped aside to let the plague wagon pass.
The driver was dressed completely in black and his face was covered by a skull mask and a huge hood. At the back of the chariot, an acolyte of the god of death balanced a lit censer, supposedly to ward off the plague. It was like watching death itself walking through the doomed city, accompanied by her servants.
Elysia looked at the decomposing corpses that formed a large pile in the back of the vehicle; they were naked bodies, already stripped of their valuables by relatives or daring thieves. The rats gnawed on the corpses and while she watched, she saw that a specimen gouged out an eye from a body and devoured it whole.
Plague chariots moved steadily through the city; they would ring the bell to announce their presence and ask those who were still healthy and strong to bring them the bodies of those who had died. But even the plague wagons were not safe, for if they stopped for even a moment, the rats would jump on them and fight among themselves to eat the corpses.
Elysia's stomach rumbled, and she tightened her belt, pulling it a hole deeper inside her. She hoped that the others would have more luck than her in finding food. She hadn't found anything to buy that wasn't contaminated with rat droppings, and even foods that were were selling for ten times the normal price. Some citizens were getting rich off the ruin of the mighty city.
"There are always people like that." Felix thought. "That he can take advantage of even the most dire situation."
I wish Frey would give up his insane desire to stay in the city! The poet had already considered the possibility of leaving at his expense, joining those hosts of poor and commoners who had taken their few belongings and left; but he hadn't for various reasons. The first and most dignified of them was that he did not want to abandon his friends. The second was the desire to see how things would end. He suspected that before long the disastrous events would come to a head, and at least a part of him wanted to know what would happen then.
The last reason was simple. He had heard that the nobles in the area had quarantined the city and that archers were shooting at anyone who tried to leave on the public roads. Many of the barges that had left the river port in the last two desperate weeks had returned; they said that navy ships sank any vessel that tried to pass beyond the blockade zone.
Perhaps a small group moving through the night could slip past the surveillance zone, but Elysia didn't want to try it without Frey. The lawless lands surrounding the city would be even more dangerous then, when there were soldiers and road guards enforcing the quarantine, and gangs of armed men robbing any refugees they found.
Law and order had already ceased to exist in some intramural areas. At night, bands of robbers roamed the streets in search of food, taking anything that wasn't guarded by armed men. Just two nights before, a mob had broken into the town's granaries, despite the presence of several hundred soldiers. They broke down the doors only to discover that the bins were empty of grain and filled with the skeletons of rats that had gorged themselves on food and subsequently died.
A group of feral children watched Elysia with hungry eyes. One of them was roasting a dead rat on a spit. Normally he would have tossed them a coin out of pity, but twice in the last few days he had been mugged by similar gangs. They had only given up, discouraged, after she drew the sword from her and brandished it in the air with a menacing gesture.
She remembered the words that Frey told her about Osval yerónimo. The city was indeed under siege, but this was a siege of the most hideous kind. There were no siege towers, and they had not been attacked with any weapon other than starvation and disease. Despair was the enemy they faced, and there was no sword in the world with which she could fight that enemy.
Before her was The Stinky Pig, lounging outside several mercenaries who had stayed at the inn because they knew the place and the owner, and were gathered there for better protection.
Elysia knew them all and they knew her, but despite that they looked at her suspiciously when she approached her. These were tough men, who had decided that since they couldn't kill the plague, they had better sit back while they waited for it to kill them.
Emilia, the daughter of Duke Emmanuel, offered double pay to those who helped her keep the peace in the form of reinforcements for her personal guard and the sadly decimated city guard. Those men at the inn were earning extra wages.
"Some news?" asked one of them, a stocky Glacian giant known as Great Boris. Elysia shook her head.
"Have you found food?" asked another, a sour-faced man everyone called Hungry Stephan.
Elysia shook her head again and walked past them into the inn. Heinz was sitting at a table by the fire, warming his hands. Frey had sat down next to him and was gulping down a huge mug of beer.
"Looks like we'll be having rat stew for dinner again tonight." Heinz commented, and Elysia wasn't too sure she was joking. "Young Elysia has returned empty-handed."
"At least you still have beer." Elysia replied.
"If it were elven wine, we could live on it without feeding ourselves anything else." declared Frey. "I hear that it is possible to fight an entire battle with nothing in your stomach other than half elven wine."
"Unfortunately, this is not elven wine." Elysi replied dryly. Ever since she had started the food shortage, Frey had taken to constantly evoking the nourishing powers of different substances and items, and that was irritating.
"More ratfolks have been sighted." Heinz reported. "The city guard clashed with them last night, in one of the squares. It seems that they are also looking for food, or at least that's what the guard said."
"It's more likely that they want to make sure we're starving." Elysia responded tartly.
"Whatever has to happen will happen soon." Frey stated. "There is something in the air. May I smell it."
"What you smell is beer" Elysia replied.
"I heard that Lady Emilia is going to have a costume party." Heinz said, with a smirk. "Maybe they'll invite the legendary rat hunters, Frey 'the dark' and Elysia 'the black cat'."
"I doubt it." Elysia replied.
Frey had not heard from the palace since Osval had called him two weeks before to explain the burning of the Black Boat.
Of course, since then all the mansions on the hill had been transformed into fortified camps, where the wealthy and blue-blooded had isolated themselves in an attempt to escape the plague. Rumor had it that he would shoot any commoner who set foot on those cobbled streets.
"It's typical of damned human nobles." Frey said, and burped. "The city is going to hell, and what do they do? Throw a fucking party!"
"Maybe we should do the same." Heinz commented. "There are worse ways to die."
"Has anyone seen Elissa?" Elysia asked, wanting to change the gloomy direction in which she was heading the talk.
"He left early; she went out for a walk with that peasant boy… His name is Hans, isn't it?"
Suddenly, Elysia thought it would have been better if she hadn't asked.