Bernt bit down into a spicy cabbage wrap, waving goodbye to Cal as he continued on his way. Juicy mystery meat had never tasted so good. It wasn’t really that much of a mystery, of course. Maybe he should consider becoming a supplier…

  He didn’t head straight home, taking a right at the next intersection and making his way to the docks. Next to the leftmost pier was a broad set of steps leading down to the water, and Bernt climbed down them tiredly. Hiking up his robes, he unlaced his old boots and pulled them off, followed by his socks. The boots weren’t perfectly watertight, and his cleaning spell only sanitized the muck that seeped through the stitching – it didn’t remove it.

  He placed both onto the bottom step partway underwater to soak, followed by his bare feet and sighed in relief.

  He’d requested new boots from Ed, but his boss had told him not to hold his breath. The Underkeepers weren’t exactly a priority for the Count’s quartermaster, and even a basic requisition could take months to process. Not for the first time, Bernt asked himself if this job was really worth it. The pay was good – very good for someone who’d barely just graduated from the Mage Academy. He’d only been at it for just over a month, but the downsides of being an Underkeeper were already hard to ignore. The smell and the… muck was the most obvious, but the stigma was probably worse.

  Everybody knew that Underkeepers were the worst mages around – rejects from the military, mages who’d crippled their spirits, and Academy dropouts. Who else would willingly crawl around in the sewers? And they smelled. Even students looked down their noses at them.

  Bernt had been surprised to discover that most of his coworkers were actually highly skilled, both as mages and as sanitation workers. Several were full-blown magisters, and Ed was an archmage! They wouldn’t talk about exactly how they’d ended up in the Underkeepers, but it seemed that it had more to do with politics than incompetence. Dayle had let slip on Bernt’s second day that he, Ed and Fiora, another colleague, had gotten on the wrong side of someone important years ago.

  Unfortunately, their reputation for smelling like shit was well-earned. Bernt had cast his laundry-cleaning cantrip more often in the past month than the previous five years since he’d learned it. Even that wasn’t enough, though, which was why he’d started stopping by the river on his way home. At first, he’d scrubbed his boots every night in his room, but then his landlord had dropped by to complain about the smell. Apparently it lingered in the hallway, though Bernt had already been too desensitized to notice.

  He had no idea what he’d do in the winter.

  After wringing out his socks, Bernt collected his boots and headed home barefoot. He’d leave them to dry overnight by the window.

  ***

  When Bernt arrived at work the next morning, Ed called him into his office and handed him a rolled up piece of paper.

  “That’s a map of the sewers down in the southern part of the Lower District. I marked a couple of the access shafts to help you orient yourself. You’re going to want to start at the northwest corner of the Old Tanners’ District and walk southward toward the wall and start clearing rat nests. Then go back up and do the next tunnel, always going south. Systematically check every tunnel so that if any rat men see you coming, they always run south or east. If you do it right, any survivors will end up getting pushed out the drains into the river or trapped in the back corner of the neighborhood, against the foundations of the city walls where you can cook them. And keep an eye out for your mysterious predator. Hopefully it’s just a lynx or something.”

  Bernt unrolled the map and looked at it, trying to make sense of the archmage’s instructions. It wasn’t foolproof, but he supposed he wasn’t really expected to get every single one of them. As long as he wiped out the bulk of any survivors, he’d be fine.

  “Do we have to kill it?” Bernt asked. He liked cats, in general. If it really was a lynx, he’d hate to kill it. It hadn’t actually done anything wrong, as far as they knew. If anything, it was helping.

  “Afraid so.” Ed confirmed. “It’s protocol, and it might be a danger to kids. Besides, it’s probably a mutant of some kind.”

  Nodding, Bernt left the Underkeepers’ Headquarters behind and made his way down to the Old Tanner’s District. If anything, the place smelled even worse than yesterday. There were rats everywhere – the normal variety. Someone needed to do something about the piles of garbage. Where was City Maintenance? The Underkeepers’ more mundane colleagues should be coming through here every few weeks to clean out excess refuse, but it was clear that they didn’t consider the place any more of a priority than anyone else.

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  The cleanup effort was slow going. There were mundane rats’ nests everywhere, made of sticks and accumulated garbage. Sewage was dammed up in places, creating reeking reservoirs that he had to break open to restore normal flow. Thankfully, the black water he released in these instances was often enough to clear out some of the more poorly placed nests, washing them down toward the river. He torched the remainder.

  Burning unidentified garbage in a sewer, as it turned out, wasn’t an optimal solution either. Slower fires tended to choke the tunnels with smoke, but when he resorted to using full-powered fireballs to vaporize the damp piles, the entire tunnel heated up so much he had to cast a heat barrier to protect himself and wait for it to dissipate.

  He spotted rat men twice, but they escaped further down the tunnels both times. It was nearly time to stop for lunch when he ran into his first corpses. More rat men lay scattered around a small mound – probably a new nest that they’d started to build.

  The mutant rats had been badly mauled, with claw marks tearing vertically downward as if something had held onto their heads and then disemboweled them with its legs – not unlike how cats fought.

  It was gross, but it made Bernt hope again that it might be a cat of some kind. It would have to be small – much smaller than a lynx – to kill the rats in this manner. Rat men were larger than normal rats, but still no more than knee-high standing up. If the thing killing them were bigger than that, it wouldn't be able to pull that maneuver.

  He wasn’t going to kill it, he decided. Cats could see well in the dark, get through tight spaces, and apparently cut through rats like a scythe. He couldn’t imagine a better familiar to help him with his duties down here. He wouldn’t need to spend half the day trudging through the sewers if he could just send a familiar down instead.

  Bernt had always wanted a familiar, from the moment he’d learned of the concept at the Mages’ Academy. Supposedly they’d been common in Besermark a few generations ago, but they’d fallen out of fashion for the most part. The mental link was supposed to take some getting used to, but the real trouble was when the creature inevitably died. Being literally inside each others’ heads, mages and their familiars tended to develop a very strong emotional attachment. When the familiar died, it could be… difficult. You didn’t just lose a close friend. In most cases, you directly experienced their death through the bond.

  It was the sort of thing that, according to Bernt’s professor for that particular class, could drive a mage to suicide. That was ostensibly the reason that both the Mages’ Guild and the Beseri military actively discouraged the keeping of familiars.

  But Bernt knew it was worth it. He’d experienced grief before, and he knew that it could come to you at any time. The possibility – or even likelihood – of future pain was never an excuse to avoid something potentially great. He’d begun researching to find the perfect familiar almost immediately.

  Initially, he’d wanted something exotic. A forest sprite, an elemental, or maybe even a baby drake, assuming he could find one. They would live longer than mundane familiars, and they’d be incredibly useful for an adventurer. But they were also extremely impractical – he had no way to actually find any of them, never mind keeping them still long enough to cast the spell. His friends had laughed at him, but he’d never quite given up the idea.

  A cat wasn’t anything like a baby drake, but they were useful, good company, and they blended in in the city. Who knew what the City Guard would do if he actually turned up walking the streets with a monster in tow?

  Bernt nudged the corpses together into a heap with his boots and incinerated them. No sense in letting them all rot here. Casting a torch spell to light his way, he made his way onward, toward the city’s outer wall, where he found another access shaft.

  He was halfway up the ladder when he heard a rustling sound to his left, followed by a loud hiss, a few squeaks and the scratching of claws on stone. With a minor mental effort, Bernt sent the ball of flame that he used as a light out toward the sound. There was a bright spot of blood on the ground, but nothing else.

  Well. That had certainly sounded like a cat. But he wasn’t going to go running after it right now – he was starving.

  Bernt left the torch spell there to fizzle out on its own and climbed out into the street. Maybe it would help keep the rats that he’d been corralling toward the river from immediately spreading back out the way he’d already been.

  He cast a cleaning cantrip to sanitize his robes and reduce the smell to a more acceptable level and looked around, trying to orient himself. There weren’t any street vendors here, despite how close they were to the docks. He’d have to try up by the Lower District’s main street, or maybe head down to the docks to find something.

  ***

  Dzhorianath eyed the odd ball of fire warily. It just hung there in mid-air. Cautiously, she approached, dragging the food-thing she’d just killed behind her by its long tail. It was warm and bright. Pretty.

  Plopping down directly underneath it, she sank a claw down into her dinner’s flank and slashed down. The creatures here were covered in hair, which tasted awful and tickled her throat. She dug her long fingers in and tugged back the skin, pulling it back to reveal tasty flesh. This was as good a place to stop for a meal as any she could think of. At least she wouldn’t be too cold.