29 – Rat Sorcery

  “I can try—” Frank started to say, but Bea stepped forward and put her hand on his shoulder. When she spoke, the usual acerbic, teasing tone that she used when talking to the old vet was gone.

  “We’re going to be fine, so don’t you feel like you have to pull off any heroics. In fact, maybe it would be best if you made your way up to let everyone else know what’s going on down here.” She looked around their little group. “Can one of you all go with him?”

  Hector stepped forward, his cudgel resting on his shoulder. “I can. I don’t have the quest you all are talking about, anyway.”

  Omar clasped his shoulder. “You fought well, man.”

  “Got two levels, too!” Hector grinned and held out a fist.

  Omar knocked his knuckles. “Hell yeah.”

  “Speaking of levels,” Andy said. “Let me look at my abilities before we go any deeper.”

  Lucy nodded, nocking an arrow. “I’ll watch the passage.”

  The two men started up the slope toward the exit tunnel, Frank limping and leaning heavily on Hector’s shoulder. Meanwhile, Andy called up his status sheet, but before he could look at it, Bea said, “I’ll take a look at that little pool of water—see if I can refill any of my potion bottles.”

  Andy frowned, following her with his eyes for a moment before calling after her, “Just be careful! Some of the rat-people were swimming in it.”

  “Don’t worry, I can purify it before I do my blessings.”

  Bella huffed, shaking her head. “I’ll keep an eye on her, but I’m gonna look for my sword. One of those little assholes was trying to use it.” She started up the slope, toward the bulk of the dead rats and rat-people, and Andy watched her for a moment before turning his attention back to his status sheet, focusing on his bound Brimstone Stalker spells:

  Improvement Points: 6

  Notable Skills or Spells:

  *Smoke Lance – Bound: 2

  *Unseen Stalker – Bound: 3

  *Ember Vision – Bound: 4

  *Smoke Cloud – Bound: 3

  *Brimstone Breath – Bound: 3

  Knowing he could push those spells past rank three, but also that he was only getting half as many Improvement Points as before, added a new level of anxiety to the whole process. How high could he train them? He wasn’t sure Ember Vision was the right spell to find out on; the spell already worked pretty damn well. There was no denying that Brimstone Breath was deadly and effective, but did he want to risk it morphing into something that he didn’t like as well, even if the System thought it was technically better?

  Smoke Lance was good—an enchantment that persisted through class changes—but it wouldn’t be the end of the world, in his opinion, if it changed into something different. He decided to improve it a bit. First, he looked at the description so he could keep track of any changes:

  Smoke Lance – Bound: By carving a volatile hybrid glyph of fire and shadow onto a weapon, you shroud its form in a corrosive haze of black shadow flames. The weapon burns without fire, striking with unnerving silence. Each wound inflicted by the weapon is plagued by shadow flames that will spread deeper with each heartbeat, eating away at armor and weakening its integrity as surely as it sears flesh.

  Additional effect: When Smoke Lance is active, you may trigger ignition on any recently inflicted wound. This will detonate the shadow flames embedded in the target, causing severe damage and creating a small area-of-effect blast. The detonation will disperse the glyph, requiring it to be reapplied. Mana Cost: 30.

  Andy stared at the description, feeling utterly stupid. He’d completely forgotten about the additional effect. How useful would that have been against the giant toad? The rat mother? Mentally shrugging, reminding himself that what was done was done, he put another point into the spell. When he examined the description again, nothing was different except the cost: it had gone up to 35 mana.

  Seeing the lackluster improvement, he questioned his plan. He had only five points left; what if the spell didn’t morph? What if it just got more costly and did a little more damage? Was it worth using precious points from his pool that would be better employed on spells like Brimstone Breath or Smoke Cloud?

  He glanced around the cavern. Frank and Hector were almost to the tunnel; Lucy was still standing watch; and Omar was rooting around in the rat’s nest. Bea was kneeling before the pool of water at the cavern’s edge, and Andy could see a faint blue glow emanating from the water. Meanwhile, Bella was gathering things from dead rat-people. It was hard to see in the distance, but he thought she was collecting arrows. Sucking his teeth in frustration, he doubled down and put another point into Smoke Lance. A System message immediately appeared:

  ***Smoke Lance has morphed into Balefire Lance. Metal heats, armor yields, flesh burns. This is a personal spell and cannot be cast on more than one weapon.***

  The words hit harder than he expected. Andy’s chest tightened, breath caught halfway between dread and anticipation. Would this version really be better—or just different? He swallowed, forcing himself to open the new entry.

  Balefire Lance – Bound: By inscribing runes of fire and smoke into your weapon, you forge a lance of balefire—flame that devours without light. Its heat seeps through metal and hide alike, softening armor and biting deep into flesh. Each deliberate strike feeds the hidden blaze, spreading through what it touches until nothing remains unscorched. Mana Cost: 40.

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  It sounded good. It also felt like the System had taken his failure to ever activate the “secondary effect” on Smoke Lance into consideration when it morphed the spell. Either that, or it just happened to no longer have one. Regardless of the description, Andy was still worried he’d wasted the points; Smoke Lance sounded just as good on paper. Determined to try it out, he looked for his spear and realized he’d left it in the mother rat.

  Omar was still kicking around in the nest with his sleeve over his nose, so Andy called out, “Hey, Omar. Can you see my spear? It should be in the rat’s back.”

  “Uh, gimme a minute,” he replied, struggling to clamber through the piles of clothes, fur, bones, and disgusting sludge.

  While he waited, Andy looked at his bound class abilities again:

  Improvement Points: 4

  Notable Skills or Spells:

  *Balefire Lance – Bound: 4

  *Unseen Stalker – Bound: 3

  *Ember Vision – Bound: 4

  *Smoke Cloud – Bound: 3

  *Brimstone Breath – Bound: 3

  With lots of other abilities not associated with Brimstone Stalker, he hesitated to mess with any of his other spells. They all worked just fine, and he wasn’t exactly swimming in Improvement Points like he once was. “I wonder if—” he started to mutter, but then Omar shouted, interrupting him.

  “Got it!”

  “You guys shouldn’t yell,” Lucy hissed, her eyes still fixated on the tunnel.

  Almost as if she was taunting her, Bella cried out from deeper in the cavern, “Found it!” Andy looked and, sure enough, she was holding up the glinting metal length of her sword.

  He glanced at Lucy and shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry, Luce.”

  Feeling guilty about making him crawl through that foul mess, Andy started toward Omar, but by the time he got there, he’d jumped off the other side of the pile and walked around, extending the spear—no longer limned in shadowy smoke—to Andy.

  “Damn thing was in there!” he said with a chuckle.

  Andy took it, grinning as he stooped to pick up a long piece of tattered gray fabric. It might have been part of a shirt once, but he couldn’t be sure. “Yeah, I drove it in with everything I had.” He wiped some of the charred gore off the spear haft and blade. Concentrating briefly, he gathered mana and, using knowledge that came out of nowhere, dragged his finger in complicated patterns on the blade, inscribing the runes for Balefire Lance.

  They flared briefly with crimson light, then faded into flickering black flames that shrouded the entire length of the blade. Holding his hand over the strange phenomenon, he didn’t feel any heat.

  “That’s weird,” Omar said, eyes fixed on the dancing, shadowy fire.

  “Yeah…”

  “Where’s Bea?” Bella asked as she arrived, a little breathless. She held out a nearly full quiver of ratman arrows to Lucy, and Andy whirled, eyes scanning the distant pool. A wave of relief washed over him; he could see Bea lying on its edge, reaching down into it.

  “She’s there—lying on the edge of the pool.” He inhaled, ready to shout a question at the older woman, but then he glanced at Lucy and changed his mind. “I’ll check on her if you all watch that tunnel.”

  “Yeah, I see her there, too,” Omar said, his wolfen eyes glinting in the dying embers of the rat-people’s fire.

  “Well, that’s a relief. Andy, go get her! I want to train a couple of skills,” Bella said, giving him a push.

  Andy jogged over, skirting the bodies of rats and rat-people, and when he came to the pool, he saw that Bea was lying on the stone so she could reach down into the pool and fill her little bottles. “Almost done?”

  “Yep—last one.”

  “I take it this wasn’t the ‘corrupted’ water you had to cleanse?”

  “Well, it was definitely foul, but no, I didn’t get any sort of quest update.” She grunted, clambering to her hands and knees, then sat cross-legged as she screwed the little cap onto the vial. She picked up three others—all former food coloring or cooking extract bottles—and cupped them in her hands. “Just a minute while I bless these. I’ll be low on mana for a while afterward.”

  “All right.” Andy watched intently. Nothing much happened, as far as he could see. He felt a surge of mana, the bottles shimmered briefly with a blue-tinted light, and then Bea slipped them into her coat pockets.

  She held up a hand. “Pull me up, kiddo.”

  He grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet, then they walked back to the others together. As they approached, Lucy lowered her bow but left her arrow nocked.

  “We ready?” she asked.

  “Ready,” Omar said, hefting his spear. Andy hadn’t noticed before, thanks to his sepia-tinted vision, but the tip of it flickered with flames.

  “You can make your spear do fire damage?” Andy guessed.

  “Yep! Other people’s, too. I did some of Lucy’s arrows. I figured your spear…”

  “Yeah, it’s already enchanted.”

  “Go ahead and scout, Andy,” Bea said, heading off further weapon-enchantment talk. “Just don’t go charging into fights; we don’t have a time limit anymore.” She smiled at Bella. “Our people are safe.”

  “Right.” Andy started for the tunnel, casting Unseen Stalker as he went. A thought occurred to him, and he checked his mana: 312/465. “Damn,” he grunted, wishing he’d dropped Ember Sight so he’d regenerate faster. Even so, he figured he had enough mana for the moment.

  The tunnel had a downward slope, but not a steep one. Right away, he noticed the damp; the walls and floor were coated in a sheen of moisture, and the air was cooler than the big cavern’s. He didn’t get far before he noticed another smell—rank and sharp, similar to the rat refuse room up above, but with a kind of chemical tang that made his eyes water. A few more steps took him around a bend, and he saw an opening ahead.

  The unmistakable sounds of rats came to him. Behind their chittering and squeaking, he heard the clear sounds of syllables—vowels and consonants; there were rat-people talking down there. Andy slowed his steps, creeping closer to the opening, and then a macabre scene unfolded before his eyes.

  Half a dozen rat-people were in the next chamber—a large, rectangular stone room—and they were working strange machinery. Two of them cranked wheels that looked to be made from scrap metal. The wheels were hooked to ropes, which were hung through gears and pulleys, and then attached to rope baskets. The baskets were full of rat babies that squealed and squirmed and, while Andy watched, one of them was lowered into a huge copper cauldron.

  “What the fu…” Andy hissed, scanning the rest of the room. There were two other cauldrons, and further back, some scrap-metal cages. The first held a dozen rats—adolescents—that writhed and twitched, visibly changing. They held their limbs out stiffly, and Andy thought he could see them elongating. Worse, their snouts were compressing into faces—they were becoming rat-people!

  Something squeaked loudly, and Andy jerked his gaze to another cage, this one containing an enormous rat—about halfway between one of the dog-sized giant rats and the monstrous mother-rat in size. As Andy stared, mouth agape, one of the ratmen walked to yet a third pen, this one filled with regular-looking giant rats. The ratman reached over the top and collected a smallish one—about the size of a border collie—and while it squealed and thrashed, he carried it over to the huge rat’s cage and threw it inside.

  Andy didn’t stick around to watch the young mother rat cannibalize one of its cousins. He didn’t need to see any more of the weird rat…sorcery. He turned and hurried back to the others; they needed to finish the job they’d started.