Emah spun, glaring. She had heard rats chittering and something padding through the shadows.

“Maly,” she growled. “They’re here.”

The warrior tested the grip on her sword, once her mother’s. It was a weapon without flourish, with an iron crossbar, the blade long and wide. Its leather-wrapped handle fit her palm like a natural extension of her body. She swung it out in front of her, air whistling, as she took in their assailants.

The flickering torchlight showed many sets of round, beady eyes, and small furred bodies wrapped in rags. Emah counted half a dozen in all. Each creature was the same size—that of a human child—as the corpses she’d seen upstairs, and each possessed the head of a large, brown rat, with furred arms and standing upright on legs. Their four-fingered hands and feet were tipped by black claws, and some held crudely sharpened sticks. Nothing like these rat-people existed in any tale or story she’d ever read or heard, and she was in her heart a scholar. Yet here they were… inside the inner keep walls of Oakton!

“No,” her friend Maly whispered, almost inaudibly. “No, no, no, no.”

Emah saw shock and disbelief flicker across her friend’s pale face and quickly settle on determination.  

Maly dodged to her right, dipping low, as the first rat-thing rushed by her. She extended her dagger as it passed, cutting it from armpit to belly in a shower of dark blood. The thing screamed as it fell, rolling past. A second creature stabbed out with a stick and Maly kicked it in the face. Two things Emah knew of Maly from the training yard… she was quick and she fought dirty, to win.

With a roar, Emah stepped forward, swinging her broadsword wide and effortlessly. The blade tore through two of the leaping rat-folk, and they squealed briefly before dropping lifeless to the stone floor.

Kami seemed to shake herself out of her distraction as the combat raged. She turned, face furious, and swung one of her bare fists. Her arm seemed to elongate, extending much further than it should have done. The rat creature in front of her ducked below the clumsy blow, but as her fist struck the iron bars of a cell there was a tremendous CLANG!, leaving the bars bent.

As if Kami’s swing was not remarkable enough, what happened next caused both Emah and Maly to gape. The rat continued its charge, stabbing forward with its sharpened stake. It was a clever strike and should have impaled her between her breasts, but Kami’s body… bent, flowing like a ribbon in a breeze around the stab. The creature squeaked and chittered in surprise.

Maly, clearly running on fear and instinct, had followed the rat creature and stabbed it between the shoulder blades from behind. It dropped, her dagger’s blade slick with blood, and she looked Kami in the face. Where Maly was wide-eyed and disbelieving, Kami’s face was etched in danger, eyes narrowed. Emah swung her sword left and right, snick-snack, killing the final two creatures. Their dying squeals drew the other two women’s attention.

“What is going ON!?” Maly shrieked, her voice shrill. “What are these things? What is this!?” she gestured from the bodies to the bent bars of the cell behind her and then to Kami.

“We go,” their employer said decisively, face glowering. When the others didn’t immediately comply, she rounded on Emah. “You said we must leave, yes? Let us leave, then, and quickly. We should not be here when the Watch arrives.”

Emah looked at the bent bars and then to their employer, a scowl as her mind raced. Impossible creatures followed by impossible acts from Kami. For weeks Oakton had been buzzing about seeming fable-tales occurring across the town, and now she would be adding to those accounts. She had so many questions but now was not the time. The job was to bring this woman to the jail and escort her home, that was it. They needed to get out of here, especially if more of those creatures could bubble out of the cesspit at any time.

“We go,” she confirmed with a short nod, and turned towards the staircase.

“Wait!” Maly cried. “We’re just going to leave? What are these things, Emah? What happened just now?” She was arguing to an empty hallway, however. Emah had already ascended out of view, with Kami quickly on her heels.

Emah heard Maly growled in frustration and the clatter of a sharpened stick that she must have kicked in frustration. Then Maly’s blonde head was bobbing up from the darkness in the torchlight, following them.

The three women scaled the spiral stairs, through the guard room and into the entryway. Nothing there had changed; two dead guards and an equally dead rat-thing lay upon the stone floor in pools of dark, sticky blood. Emah’s mind calculated. One of the creatures dead here, one on the stairs. That made eight total. Was that enough to kill three armed guards? It seemed unlikely, especially without more of the rat-things’ deaths. They must have surprised the guards, but the rats seemed to her like poor fighters. They would have to rely on overwhelming numbers.

“Do… do you think we were seen entering?” Maly panted, interrupting Emah’s thoughts. She blinked, frowning. Kami moved past them both towards the exit.

“I don’t believe so,” Emah frowned. “But when we leave, are we going straight to the Watch or disappearing into the crowds?”

The question was directed at their employer. Kami paused, her hand on the door latch. Emah examined the woman’s hand, thinking that moments before that same hand had extended impossibly long and bent iron bars with a single blow. Kami’s skin was as unblemished and perfect as before, the fingers long and graceful.

“We disappear into the crowd,” Kami nodded, and seemed to remember her hat and walking stick. She bent to retrieve them both, securing the hat firmly on her head. “Best to not let them detain us. I do not think the Watch will assume innocence of a madame of the Rose District and two new mercenaries with, ah, questionable reputations.”

Emah’s frown deepened. The woman had clearly done some investigating into who she hired. She liked that not at all, especially for such a simple job.

“Alright,” Emah exhaled, sheathing her sword. “Maly, come here. You have blood on your shoulder and arm.”

For the next moments, they looked each other over and cleaned themselves the best they could manage with water and the yellow cloaks of the Watch. The parts not spattered with gore, that is.

“Where are we going?” Maly asked when they were done, her voice pitched like that of a frightened child.

Kami looked back, her expressionless face made more so by the wooden mask covering half of it. “Back to the Golden Heron. Are we ready?”

Emah met her eyes and nodded.

Kami opened the door.

The Kaizukan woman walked outside, her hat lowered over her face. The clouds had given way to light rain, which had only begun to wet the cobblestone streets around the keep under the reaching branches of the Great Oak. Emah followed close at her heels, hand twitching towards the hilt of her sword. The mahogany skin of her shoulders, arms, and face glistened with sweat in the sudden light.

“Let’s go,” she whispered sharply to Maly.

The young Stone Islander woman swallowed and moved to follow, but something behind her shuffled, causing her to pause. Emah had just enough time to call out a warning as, out of the shadows, a savage, furred thing snarled and tackled Maly.

Maly and something large and furred rolled in a bundle out of the jail door and onto the street. Emah drew her sword, moving close. Her friend was screaming and beating at the thing vainly with her bare hands, but this rat-creature was larger and stronger than the others they had fought. Indeed, it was the size of Emah, with muscled shoulders and black claws each the length of her last knuckle. It snarled and chittered, tearing and ripping with those claws. Maly cried out in pain.

Emah stepped in, lunging forward with the tip of her sword and through the rat-creature’s neck. This close, it smelled powerfully of animal and sewage. The creature screamed and slumped to the side, and blood splashed across Maly’s neck and face. She scampered to her hands and knees, gaping at the now dead figure she’d escaped. Its tongue lolled from a long snout filled with jagged yellow teeth.

Emah wiped the blade on the creature’s gray rags and pulled at Maly. “Come on! Up, girl, up!”

All around them, people were pointing and exclaiming in shock and horror. Someone in green-and-yellow livery nearer the curtain wall shouted to one of the watchtowers.

Rain was pattering harder now, blurring everything around.

“We can’t run,” Kami said, voice hard and resolute. “They’ve seen us.”

Age of Wonders: Issue 1c