The quest notice appeared on the guild board at half past the eighth bell on a Friday morning, pinned to the cork with a single brass tack and the unmistakable energy of something that had been written quickly, under duress, and with the faint hope that nobody would read it too carefully.

  It read:

  PEST CLEARANCE — INTERNAL

  Giant rats reported in basement storage level beneath Guild Hall.

  Estimated count: 20-30.

  Threat Level: Low (revised from "Negligible" following Incident).

  Reward: 5 silver pieces + materials salvage rights.

  Requirements: Level 2+, any class.

  NOTE: This quest is posted by the Adventurers' Guild regarding the Adventurers' Guild's own premises. The Guild acknowledges the irony. The Guild does not wish to discuss the irony. The Guild wishes the rats to be removed. Enquiries to Guildmaster Harwick.

  Beneath this, in smaller handwriting that belonged to someone other than Harwick — the receptionist, probably, a thin young man named Coll who had the permanent expression of a person who had applied for a different job and was still waiting to hear back — a second note had been added:

  P.S. The "Incident" refers to the events of Thursday evening, during which approximately six giant rats emerged from the basement stairwell into the common room during a Guild social function. Three members sustained minor bites. One table was overturned. The cheese board was lost. We do not speak of the cheese board.

  Levin read the notice twice.

  Ria read it once, because she read faster, and then read the postscript aloud in a voice that carried across the guild hall with the projection of someone who had spent her formative years shouting at goats across open fields.

  "'We do not speak of the cheese board,'" she repeated. "What happened to the cheese board?"

  "The rats took it," said Coll, from behind the reception desk. He had a hollow look. "The whole board. The Millhaven cheddar. The smoked gouda. The little crackers with the seeds. They took everything, and they took it together, like they'd planned it, like they'd had a meeting beforehand and assigned roles—"

  "Coll," said Harwick, emerging from the back office with a mug of something steaming and a jaw set at an angle that suggested the topic of the cheese board was, indeed, not to be discussed. "Enough."

  Coll's mouth closed with an audible click.

  Harwick crossed the hall, leaned and set his mug on the reception desk (the desk groaned; everything groaned when Harwick interacted with it, including, on occasion, the floorboards and the concept of personal space), and looked at Levin and Ria with the weary assessment of a man who had spent the previous evening explaining to three bitten guild members that the Guild's insurance policy covered "acts of deity" and "livestock-related damages" but contained no specific provision for "rats stealing cheese during a social function" and that the matter would need to be escalated to the regional office, which was in Greymarch, which was three days away, which meant the paperwork alone would take a week, and the week had not yet begun and he was already tired of it.

  "You're here for the quest," Harwick said.

  "We are," Levin said.

  "It says Level 2 plus."

  "It does."

  "You're Level 1."

  "I am."

  Harwick looked at him. The small, sharp eyes performed their calculation. The calculation took approximately two seconds and produced a result that Harwick appeared to accept with resignation. He was a man who had run out of alternatives and was now operating in the territory beyond preference, where the only question that mattered was whether the job would get done and by whom.

  "The basement is through the door behind the reception desk," Harwick said. "Stone stairs, thirty-two steps, no gaurdrails, opens into a storage level. The storage level is approximately forty feet by sixty feet, divided into three chambers by load-bearing walls. The rats are in all three chambers. They've been there for — well, we're not sure how long. The basement hasn't been properly inspected since—" He paused. "Since before my time."

  "How long have you been guildmaster?" Ria asked.

  "Nineteen years."

  "The basement hasn't been inspected in nineteen years?"

  "The basement is used for storing old records, broken furniture, and things that people put down there intending to retrieve later and then forgot about. It is, functionally, a monument to institutional procrastination. The rats moved in at some point during this period of neglect and have been, by all indications, thriving. They've eaten through four crates of archived quest reports, two chairs, a ceremonial banner from the founding of the Thornwall chapter, and—" His jaw tightened. "And the cheese board."

  "The cheese board was in the basement?"

  "The cheese board was on a table in the common room. The rats came up. Through the stairwell. During the social function. In front of everyone." Harwick's knuckles whitened around his mug. "Thirty-seven guild members and associates watched six rats carry a cheese board down a flight of stairs. The rats were organised. They had formation. The two largest rats carried the board while the four smaller ones ran interference. One of them — the largest, the one with the torn ear — actually looked back at us as they went through the door. It looked back, and I swear on every oath I've ever taken, it was smug."

  Silence settled over the guild hall.

  Coll stared at the wall.

  Ria's lips were pressed together very tightly, and her shoulders were doing something complicated that involved small, rhythmic contractions she was attempting to suppress.

  Levin unpinned the notice from the board.

  "We'll take it," he said.

  They returned to the tavern for supplies, which in practice meant Levin filled his waterskin and Ria packed a small satchel containing a candle, a tinderbox, a length of rope ("for what?" Levin asked; "for rope things," Ria replied, which was not an answer but was delivered with enough confidence to function as one), and three of Berta's bread rolls, which could serve as either provisions or, in extremis, projectile weapons.

  Marda watched them prepare from the kitchen doorway.

  "Rats," she said.

  "Giant rats," Ria corrected. "In the guild basement. Twenty to thirty of them. They stole a cheese board."

  Marda's expression did not change, which was itself a form of commentary. Marda's face had, over the decades, developed a resting state that communicated a comprehensive and pre-emptive disapproval of everything that had happened, was happening, and would happen, and this state required no adjustment for individual circumstances because individual circumstances were, in Marda's experience, uniformly disappointing.

  "Don't track rat blood through my common room," she said, and returned to the kitchen.

  Levin and Ria walked back to the guild hall.

  The afternoon sun sat high and indifferent over Thornwall, warming the rooftops and the road and the goats on the eastern slope, who were engaged in their daily project of testing the structural limits of Tommas's fence, a project they pursued with the methodical persistence of engineers and the moral flexibility of politicians.

  "So," Ria said, as they walked. "What's the plan?"

  "I go down. I clear the rats. I come back up."

  "And what do I do?"

  "You stay up top."

  Ria's stride shortened by half an inch. Her chin dropped by a degree. Her fingers found the strap of her satchel and gripped it.

  "I stay up top," she repeated.

  "At the stairwell door. Watching the entrance. Making sure nothing comes up while I'm down there."

  "Nothing's going to come up while you're down there. You're going to kill all of them."

  "Probably. But 'probably' is doing a lot of load-bearing work in that sentence, and if two or three rats decide that fleeing upstairs is preferable to facing me — which is, from a rat's perspective, an entirely rational decision — then someone needs to be at the door to prevent them from reaching the common room and staging another cheese-related incident."

  "You want me to guard a door."

  "I want you to hold a position. Holding a position is a fundamental tactical skill. Armies are built on it. Civilisations are built on it. The entire concept of a wall is just a position being held by masonry."

  "I survived fourteen spiders."

  "And now you're going to survive a door. The door is less likely to bite you. Consider it a rest day."

  Ria's jaw worked. Her eyes narrowed. The braid — re-done that morning, tight, combat-ready, though the term still hadn't been used — swung as she turned her head to look at him.

  "Fine," she said.

  The word contained approximately the same amount of acceptance as a castle gate contains welcome when it's being closed in your face.

  "Fine," Levin agreed.

  They arrived at the guild hall. Harwick was waiting. Coll was behind the desk, not making eye contact with anyone or anything, including the desk.

  "The basement door is unlocked," Harwick said. "There's a lantern on the hook by the stairs. The rats are most active at night — during the day they tend to nest in the back chamber, behind the old filing cabinets. If you're going down now, you'll catch them drowsy."

  "I'm not going down now," Levin said.

  Harwick's eyebrows rose. On a face with less structural fortification, this would have been a dramatic gesture. On Harwick's face, it registered as a slight upward shift in the landscape, like a hill deciding to be marginally taller.

  "I'm going down tonight," Levin said. "Midnight. When the hall is empty."

  "Why midnight?"

  "Because twenty to thirty giant rats in an enclosed space is a pest clearance. Twenty to thirty giant rats in an enclosed space with an audience is a performance. I don't do performances."

  Harwick looked at him for a long moment. The look contained several things — professional assessment, curiosity, a flicker of something that might have been amusement, and the quiet recognition of a man who understood the difference between doing a job and being seen doing a job, and who respected the preference for the former.

  "I'll leave the door unlocked," Harwick said. "And a key under the mat for the hall entrance. The mat is the one that says 'WELCOME,' which is aspirational rather than descriptive."

  "Understood."

  "Levin."

  "Yes?"

  "There's a large rat. Larger than the others. Grey, scarred, missing half its left ear. It's the one that looked back at me during the... during the incident. The others follow it. If you're going to clear the nest, start with that one. Cut the head off the snake. Metaphorically. It's a rat. But the principle applies."

  "Noted."

  "And Levin?"

  "Yes?"

  "The cheese board. If you find it — or what's left of it — I'd like it back. It was oak. Hand-carved. A gift from the Greymarch chapter for our fifteenth anniversary." Harwick's voice had acquired a quality that might have been described as wistful. "It had an inlay."

  "I'll look for it."

  "Thank you."

  The hours between afternoon and midnight passed with the particular slowness that hours adopt when you are waiting for something specific to happen and the universe, sensing your impatience, decides to make each minute last approximately fifteen percent longer than usual, just to see what you'll do.

  Levin swept the tavern floor. The broom pulled left. He corrected.

  Ria made soup.

  The soup had noodles again, and this time she had added carrots, which Marda regarded with the suspicion of someone who had been ambushed by a vegetable and was not yet ready to forgive.

  They ate.

  Ria asked five questions about mana theory, which Levin answered between spoonfuls. The questions were getting sharper — less "what is this" and more "why does this work this way and not that way" — and Levin found himself, on two occasions, pausing to think before answering, which was new, and which he filed under "the soup was distracting" rather than "the student is outpacing the curriculum," because the second option had implications he wasn't prepared to examine.

  The tenth bell rang.

  The eleventh bell rang.

  Marda went to bed. The kitchen door closed. The common room emptied of everything except candlelight, shadows, and the two of them.

  "You should sleep," Levin said.

  "I'm coming with you."

  "You're guarding the door."

  "I'm guarding the door at the guild hall. Which means I'm coming with you to the guild hall. Which means I'm not sleeping."

  Levin considered arguing. He looked at Ria's face. The chin was up. The eyes were bright. The braid was combat-ready.

  He did not argue.

  "Bring the candle," he said. "And the bread rolls."

  "The bread rolls are for eating."

  "The bread rolls are for whatever the situation requires. Berta's bread has a tensile strength that exceeds most building materials. In a confined space, against a charging rat, a well-thrown bread roll is a legitimate tactical option."

  Ria picked up the bread rolls. She held one up and tested its weight. Her eyebrows rose fractionally.

  "This could actually hurt something," she said.

  "Berta's bread has hurt many things. Mostly teeth and expectations. Let's go."

  Thornwall at midnight was a different village from Thornwall at noon.

  The same buildings stood in the same places, the same roads ran between them, the same goats presumably slept on the same hillside (though goats, being goats, might equally have been awake and plotting).

  The difference was one of character.

  Daytime Thornwall was a village that existed reluctantly but openly, its mediocrity on full display. Midnight Thornwall was a village that had pulled a blanket over its head and was pretending not to be home.

  No lights burned in any window.

  The moon — three-quarters full, slightly lopsided, giving it the appearance of a coin that had been sat on — provided enough light to navigate by, which was fortunate, because the village's street lighting consisted of two torches mounted on the gate posts, both of which had gone out sometime around the ninth bell and would not be relit until dawn, because the person responsible for relighting them was the bell-ringer, and the bell-ringer had priorities, and torch maintenance ranked somewhere below "sleep" and above "nothing."

  Levin and Ria walked through the village in silence.

  Their footsteps on the packed earth road were the loudest sound in the world, which was a strange thing to think and an accurate thing to experience. Each step produced a soft crunch that seemed, in the midnight quiet, to carry for miles, bouncing off shuttered windows and closed doors and the ears of anyone who might be listening, though nobody was listening, because Thornwall went to bed early and slept with the committed unconsciousness of people who had nothing to stay awake for.

  The guild hall loomed at the end of the main street.

  "Loomed" was perhaps generous.

  The guild hall occupied its space with the same architectural ambivalence as everything else in Thornwall — it was there, it was made of stone and wood and old sheep-pen memories, and it had a door with a mat in front of it.

  The mat said "WELCOME."

  Levin lifted the mat. A brass key sat beneath it, glinting in the moonlight.

  "That's the security?" Ria whispered.

  "The security is a locked door and a key under a mat that says 'WELCOME.' The security is, in a word, aspirational."

  He unlocked the door. It opened with a creak that sounded, in the silence, like a tree falling in a library. They stepped inside.

  The guild hall at midnight was a cavern of shadows and banners and the faint smell of cold hearth-ash. The quest board on the eastern wall was a dark rectangle, its notices invisible, its accumulated desperation sleeping.

  The reception desk sat empty.

  Coll's chair was pushed in.

  The kettle on the hearth was cold.

  Levin crossed the hall to the door behind the reception desk.

  The door was wooden, heavy, and fitted with an iron latch that had been left unbolted as promised. He lifted the latch. The door swung inward, revealing a stone stairwell that descended into darkness with the enthusiasm of a throat swallowing.

  The smell hit them immediately.

  It was not a good smell.

  It was the smell of enclosed space, old paper, damp stone, rodent habitation, and the particular musty sweetness of organic matter in various stages of decomposition — a smell that communicated, in olfactory terms, that whatever was down there had been down there for a long time and had been making itself comfortable in ways that did not bear close examination.

  Ria's nose wrinkled. Her hand went to her face.

  "That's... vivid," she said.

  "Rats," Levin said. "Twenty to thirty of them, living in an unventilated basement for an indeterminate number of years. The smell is the least of it."

  He took the lantern from the hook by the stairs. He did not light it.

  Instead, he raised his left hand, and a small orb of blue-white light formed above his palm — the same steady, cool illumination he had provided for Ria in the spider cave. He flicked it gently, and it drifted to a point approximately two feet above his head, where it hung, casting a circle of pale light down the stairwell.

  The stairs were stone, narrow, and steep. Thirty-two steps, Harwick had said. They descended in a straight line, no turns, no landings, into a darkness that the light orb pushed back but did not defeat.

  "Here," Levin said. He pointed at the top of the stairs. "This is your position. The door stays open. You watch the stairs. If anything comes up — anything with more legs than you — you use the shield. Flare it. Push it back. If it doesn't go back, you close the door and put your weight against it and shout."

  "Shout what?"

  "Anything. My name. A profanity. A detailed critique of Berta's bread. The content doesn't matter. The volume does."

  Ria set her satchel down beside the door. She placed the candle on the reception desk. She held one bread roll in her right hand, testing its weight again, her fingers finding the grip.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "Be careful," she said.

  "I'm clearing rats from a basement. The primary risk is stepping in something unpleasant."

  "Be careful anyway."

  Levin looked at her. The light orb above his head cast her face in blue-white relief — the sharp line of her jaw, the brightness of her eyes, the braid over one shoulder. She was standing very straight, feet planted, chin level. The bread roll in her hand looked, in the strange light, almost like a weapon.

  He nodded once.

  Then he turned and descended the stairs.

  The basement announced itself in stages.

  First came the sound — a low, pervasive rustling, like dry leaves being stirred by a wind that wasn't there. It came from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing off stone walls and stone floor and stone ceiling, filling the space with a susurrus that was, in its way, almost peaceful, provided you didn't think too carefully about what was producing it.

  Levin thought about it carefully.

  The rustling was claws on stone.

  Dozens of them.

  Scores of them.

  The tiny, constant percussion of rodent feet moving across hard surfaces in the dark — patrolling, foraging, nesting, existing with the busy, purposeful energy of creatures that had found a place with no predators, no competition, and an apparently infinite supply of archived quest reports to eat, and had responded to this bounty by doing what rats do best, which is to make more rats.

  Second came the smell, intensified.

  The stairwell had offered a preview. The basement itself delivered the full production.

  Levin breathed through his mouth and descended the final steps into the first chamber.

  The light orb illuminated a room that had, at some point in its history, been organised. Shelves lined the walls. Crates were stacked in rows. Filing cabinets — four of them, iron and dented — stood against the far wall like sentinels who had been posted to guard something and had long since forgotten what.

  The organisation had been comprehensively undone.

  Shelves had been gnawed through at their supports, collapsing their contents onto the floor in cascades of paper, wood splinters, boxes, and the desiccated remains of things that had once been documents and were now confetti. Crates had been chewed open, their contents scattered. The filing cabinets had been climbed, scratched, clawed, and — in one case — apparently headbutted, given the dent in its lower drawer that corresponded precisely to the height and approximate skull circumference of a large rat.

  And the rats themselves.

  They were everywhere.

  They covered the floor in clusters of two, three, four, six — huddled in the corners, draped across the collapsed shelves, perched on the filing cabinets, sitting in the open crates like grotesque parodies of cats in boxes. They were large — giant rats, as advertised, each one roughly the size of a small dog, with coarse grey-brown fur, long naked tails, and eyes that caught the light orb's glow and reflected it back as paired points of red, like tiny, malevolent lanterns.

  The nearest cluster — four rats, nestled in a pile of shredded paper — looked up as the light entered the room.

  Eight red eyes fixed on Levin.

  The rustling stopped.

  The silence that replaced it was total, sudden, and had the quality of a held breath. Every rat in the chamber — Levin counted quickly, lost count, estimated fifteen in this room alone — had frozen. Heads up. Ears forward. Noses twitching. Tails frozen.

  They were assessing him.

  Rats were, despite their reputation, intelligent creatures. They learned. They adapted. They remembered. They had, over the course of their tenure in this basement, learned that the upstairs world contained large, slow, two-legged things that occasionally opened the door at the top of the stairs and shouted and then closed the door again without coming down, and that these large slow things were, fundamentally, not a threat.

  Levin was a large, slow, two-legged thing, with thin wrists.

  He had come down the stairs.

  He had not shouted.

  He had not closed the door.

  This was new information, and the rats were processing it with the collective focus of a boardroom receiving unexpected quarterly results.

  Levin raised his left hand.

  The Arcane Bolt formed in his palm. Blue-white. Humming. A marble of compressed force, familiar now, routine, the magical equivalent of rolling up one's sleeves.

  He released it.

  The bolt crossed the chamber in a blink and struck the floor at the centre of the nearest cluster. The detonation was small — controlled and calibrated for an enclosed space where excessive force would bring the ceiling down and turn a pest clearance into a structural emergency. A sphere of blue-white force expanded outward, perhaps four feet in diameter, and the four rats within its radius came apart in the now-familiar shower of grey-green motes that hung in the air for a half-second and dispersed.

  Four kills. Four pulses of warmth behind his sternum. Four invisible percentage points.

  The remaining rats in the chamber reacted.

  They reacted the way rats react to everything — immediately and with a total commitment to self-preservation that left no room for heroism, loyalty, or any of the other qualities that humans liked to project onto animals and that animals, sensibly, had never bothered to develop.

  They ran.

  They ran in every direction simultaneously, which produced a brief and chaotic period during which the chamber floor became a seething carpet of grey-brown fur and naked tails, all moving at speed, all heading for the gaps in the walls, the spaces behind the cabinets, the holes in the shelving, the doorway to the second chamber — anywhere that was not here, not in the light, not near the thing that had just turned four of their number into particulate matter.

  Levin walked forward.

  He walked at the same unhurried pace with which he walked everywhere — the pace of a man going to fetch water, or sweep a floor, or polish glasses behind a bar, or mop tiles. His staff tapped the stone floor in a steady rhythm.

  The light orb drifted above him, casting its pale circle.

  He entered the second chamber.

  This room was larger — the middle section of the basement, where the load-bearing walls created a space roughly twenty feet by thirty. More shelves. More crates. More Rats. A broken table that had been pushed against one wall and subsequently colonised by a family of rats who had built a nest in its upturned legs using shredded paper, cloth scraps, and what appeared to be the remnants of a ceremonial banner.

  The rats from the first chamber had fled here, joining the residents, and the combined population filled the room with a density that made counting impossible and unnecessary.

  There were a lot of rats.

  "A lot" was, in this context, doing the work of a more precise number that Levin couldn't be bothered to determine, because the precise number didn't matter. What mattered was that they were Level 1 — every tag he could see shimmered with the same designation — and that each one represented a single percentage point added to the reservoir behind his sternum.

  He raised both hands.

  He had not used both hands before. One hand had always been sufficient — one bolt, one target, one clean detonation. But the basement was enclosed, the rats were clustered, and the geometry of the space favoured a different approach.

  He cast Chain Lightning.

  The spell left his right hand as a single arc of blue-white energy — a bright, jagged line that leapt from his fingers to the nearest rat, passed through it, jumped to the next, passed through that one, jumped again, and again, and again, each jump a fraction of a second, each connection a brief, brilliant bridge of light that linked one rat to the next in a crackling chain that zigzagged across the chamber like a line drawn by someone who was very angry at a piece of paper.

  The chain found twelve rats before its energy dissipated.

  Twelve simultaneous showers of grey-green motes.

  Twelve pulses of warmth.

  Twelve moments of growth for his mana pool.

  The motes drifted and faded. The chamber smelled of ozone and singed fur. The surviving rats — those who had been outside the chain's reach, pressed against the walls, hiding behind crates — screamed.

  Rat screams were, Levin reflected, among the less pleasant sounds in nature's catalogue.

  They were high-pitched, thin, skin crawling, and carried a quality of outraged disbelief, as though the rats had been operating under a social contract that included the clause "nothing will try to kill us in our own basement" and were now discovering that the contract had been voided.

  He cast again.

  Another chain.

  Eight rats this time — the survivors were more spread out, harder to link, and two of them were running along the wall at a speed that made targeting difficult. The chain caught six of the eight. The remaining two vanished through a gap in the wall into the third chamber.

  Six more pulses.

  Levin lowered his hands. He stood in the second chamber and breathed. The air was thick with ozone and motes and the settling dust of a room that had just experienced a localised electrical event of considerable intensity.

  Twenty-two rats. Twenty-two percentage points. The reservoir pulsed — a steady, golden throb behind his sternum, like a second heartbeat that had been turned up by a fraction of a notch.

  He walked into the third chamber.

  The third chamber was the deepest, the darkest, the most infested, and the most thoroughly colonised. It was here that the rats had built their central nest — a sprawling construction of shredded paper, cloth, wood chips, and stolen goods that occupied the entire back wall and rose nearly to the ceiling in a mound that resembled, depending on one's imagination, either a very large bird's nest or a very small landfill.

  The remaining rats had gathered here. Eight of them, by Levin's count, huddled at the base of the nest mound, pressed together in a tight cluster. Their eyes — sixteen red points in the blue-white light — were fixed on the doorway where Levin stood.

  And in front of them, between the cluster and the door, sat the large rat.

  Grey. Scarred. Missing half its left ear.

  It was, as Harwick had described, bigger than the others — not dramatically bigger, but enough that the difference was visible, the way a slightly larger tomato is visible among other tomato, except that this tomato had teeth, and claws, and an expression that communicated something more complex than the simple fear-and-flight response of its companions.

  The tag above its head shimmered: Level 2.

  The large rat sat on its haunches. Its remaining ear was forward. Its whiskers twitched. Its eyes — red, bright, and fixed on Levin with an intensity that suggested it was performing calculations of its own — did not blink.

  It was, Levin realised, the rat that had looked back at Harwick during the cheese board incident. The one that had been smug.

  It did not look smug now.

  It looked like a creature that understood, with whatever portion of its brain was devoted to understanding, that the thing standing in the doorway was categorically different from the large, slow, shouting things that had previously opened the door and then closed it again.

  This thing had come down.

  This thing had stayed.

  This thing had not screamed or shouted.

  This thing had turned twenty-two of its kind into dust, and it was standing there with light in its hands and no expression on its face, and the large rat's options had narrowed to a set that contained exactly two entries: fight or die.

  The rat chose fight.

  It launched itself from its haunches with a speed that was, for a creature of its size, genuinely impressive. It crossed the six feet between them in less than a second, claws scrabbling on stone, teeth bared, tail snapping behind it, a grey-brown missile of fur and desperation aimed at Levin's left shin.

  Levin stepped to the right.

  The rat sailed past his leg, claws raking the air where his shin had been a quarter-second earlier. It hit the ground, skidded, turned, and launched again — faster this time, adjusting its angle, aiming higher, going for the knee.

  Levin raised one finger.

  A single Arcane Bolt — small, the size of a pea — left his fingertip and met the rat at the apex of its leap. The bolt was gentle, by his standards. A tap. The magical equivalent of pressing a button.

  The rat came apart mid-air.

  Grey-green motes scattered in a brief, silent cloud, drifting through the blue-white light like ash from a fire that had burned very hot and very fast. The motes settled on the stone floor, on the nest mound, on the fur of the seven remaining rats, who sat in their cluster and watched with eyes that had gone from red to something darker, something that contained the particular stillness of creatures that had just witnessed the death of the largest and most capable among them and were now recalculating their position in the food chain with urgent and unfavourable results.

  Levin looked at them.

  Seven rats. Seven percentage points. Level 1, all of them. Small, frightened, huddled together in the ruins of their nest, surrounded by the motes of their fallen leader.

  He raised his hand.

  He paused.

  The seven rats stared at him. Fourteen red eyes. Twenty-eight whiskers, twitching. Seven naked tails, curled tight against seven trembling bodies.

  He thought, briefly, of the sling goblin in the hollow.

  The one he had let go.

  The one that had looked back with something that might have been gratitude.

  Rats were not goblins. Rats did not have gratitude. Rats had teeth, and hunger, plague, and the blind biological imperative to eat, breed, and occupy any space that wasn't actively trying to kill them.

  Letting them go would mean they'd return.

  They'd breed. They'd rebuild.

  In six months, the basement would be exactly as it was now, and Harwick would be posting another quest, and another cheese board would fall.

  He released the bolt.

  Chain Lightning. One cast. Seven links. Seven showers of motes.

  Seven pulses.

  The third chamber was empty.

  Levin stood in the silence. The light orb drifted above him, casting its pale circle on the nest mound, the scattered motes, the stone walls, and — half-buried in the base of the nest, visible now that the rats had dispersed — a flat, rectangular object made of oak, with an inlay along its edge that caught the light and gleamed.

  The cheese board.

  He pulled it free. It was gnawed at the corners and stained in ways he chose not to investigate, but the inlay was intact — a pattern of interlocking leaves, carved with a skill that suggested the Greymarch chapter's fifteenth-anniversary gift budget had been generous.

  He tucked it under his arm.

  He walked back through the three chambers, stepping over the remnants of nests and the archaeology of decades of institutional neglect. He climbed the thirty-two stone steps. He emerged into the guild hall.

  Ria was sitting on the floor beside the basement door, her back against the reception desk, the bread roll still in her hand. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was slow and even. Her braid had come partially undone on one side, and a strand of brown hair lay across her cheek.

  She was asleep.

  The candle on the desk had burned down to a nub, its flame a tiny, guttering point of orange in the blue-white glow of the light orb that still hovered above Levin's head.

  He looked at her for a moment.

  She had stayed. She had held her position. She had guarded the door against an enemy that had never come, and she had done it until sleep had taken the decision out of her hands, and the bread roll was still gripped in her fingers with a firmness that suggested her subconscious was maintaining combat readiness even while the rest of her had clocked off for the night.

  He set the cheese board on the reception desk. He extinguished the light orb with a thought. He sat down on the floor beside Ria, his back against the desk, his staff across his knees.

  The guild hall was dark and quiet.

  The banners hung in their rows, invisible.

  The quest board rustled faintly in a draught from somewhere.

  The warmth behind his sternum hummed.

  Thirty-one rats. Thirty-one percentage points. Five hundred and eight had become five hundred and thirty-nine. The reservoir had grown by a fraction — a cup of water added to a lake, as always — but the cup was warm, and the lake was patient, and the hum was, tonight, fractionally louder than it had been yesterday.

  He closed his eyes.

  He did not sleep. He sat, and he listened to Ria's breathing, and he counted to one hundred and seventy six, and he thought about clouds and certain lazy cats, and he waited for morning.

  Morning arrived at the guild hall in the person of Coll, who unlocked the front door at seven minutes past the eighth bell (the bell-ringer having been, once again, approximate in his duties), stepped inside, and immediately tripped over Levin's outstretched legs.

  Coll went down with a yelp that woke Ria, who sat up with a gasp and threw the bread roll.

  The bread roll struck Coll on the shoulder with a sound — a dense, meaty thock — that confirmed everything Levin had ever said about Berta's baking and its potential applications in close-quarters combat.

  "OW," said Coll, from the floor.

  "Sorry!" said Ria, from the floor.

  "Morning," said Levin, from the floor.

  Coll sat up, rubbing his shoulder. He looked at Levin. He looked at Ria. He looked at the bread roll, which had bounced off his shoulder and rolled under the reception desk, where it came to rest against the cheese board.

  He looked at the cheese board.

  His mouth opened. It stayed open for approximately four seconds, during which time his brain appeared to be processing several pieces of information simultaneously and finding that the queue was longer than the processing capacity could handle.

  "Is that—" he began.

  "The cheese board," Levin said. "It was in the nest. Third chamber. The inlay's intact."

  "The nest — you went down? You cleared the—" Coll scrambled to his feet. He crossed to the basement door, which was still open, and peered down the stairwell. The smell that rose from below was different now — still musty, still damp, still offensive, but missing the sharp organic edge that had characterised it previously.

  The rustling was gone.

  The silence that replaced it was the silence of an empty room, which is a fundamentally different silence from the silence of a room full of things pretending to be empty.

  "They're gone," Coll said. He turned back to Levin. "All of them?"

  "All of them."

  "When?"

  "Last night. Around midnight."

  "You cleared thirty rats from the basement. At midnight. By yourself?"

  "Ria guarded the door."

  Ria, who was still sitting on the floor with her hair in disarray and the slightly dazed expression of someone who had been woken by her own bread roll, looked up.

  "I guarded the door," she confirmed. "Nothing got past me."

  "Nothing tried to get past you," Levin said.

  "That's because I was guarding the door. Deterrence is a valid tactical outcome."

  Coll looked between them.

  His shoulder was still smarting from the bread roll. His brain was still processing. His morning, which had been planned around the simple activities of unlocking the door, lighting the fire, and sitting behind the desk until something happened, had instead begun with a trip, an assault by baked goods, and the discovery that the guild's most embarrassing ongoing problem had been solved overnight by a Level 1 mage and a girl with a bread roll.

  He sat down behind the desk.

  He picked up the cheese board.

  He held it in both hands and stared at it with the expression of a man reuniting with something he had given up for lost.

  "Harwick is going to—" he began, and then stopped, because the front door had opened and Harwick was already there, filling the doorway with his considerable dimensions, mug in hand, beard freshly combed, and the general bearing of a man who had arrived at work expecting the usual routine and was about to discover that the usual routine had been pre-empted.

  Harwick looked at Coll, holding the cheese board.

  He looked at Levin, sitting on the floor with his staff across his knees.

  He looked at Ria, sitting on the floor with bread crumbs in her hair.

  He looked at the open basement door.

  He inhaled through his nose. The smell — or rather, the absence of the smell — registered.

  "You did it," Harwick said.

  "Last night," Levin said. He stood up, brushed dust from his trousers, and reached into his pocket. He produced a small leather pouch, which he set on the reception desk beside the cheese board.

  The pouch clinked.

  "Rat teeth," he said. "Thirty-one. Proof of kill. I wasn't sure what the standard evidence protocol was, so I collected teeth. If you'd prefer tails, I can go back down, but the tails are attached to motes at this point, so the collection process would be more philosophical than practical."

  Harwick set his mug on the desk. He opened the pouch. He looked inside. He closed the pouch.

  He picked up the cheese board. He turned it over. He ran one thick finger along the inlay — the interlocking leaves, still intact, still gleaming.

  His face did something complicated.

  It began at the jaw, which unclenched by a degree. It moved to the eyes, which softened. It spread to the forehead, which released a tension that had been living there since Thursday evening, when six rats had carried this very board down thirty-two stone steps in formation while thirty-seven guild members watched in paralysed disbelief.

  "The inlay," Harwick said.

  "Intact," Levin said.

  "You found it in the nest?"

  "Third chamber. Base of the mound. They'd been using it as a foundation. Structurally, it was the most important piece of their entire operation. Good oak."

  Harwick held the cheese board for a long moment.

  Then he set it down on the desk with a care that bordered on the ceremonial.

  "Five silver," he said. "As posted. Plus salvage rights on anything in the basement you want, which I suspect is nothing, because everything down there has been chewed, soiled, or both." He reached into his vest and produced five silver coins, which he counted onto the desk with the precise, deliberate motions of a man who believed that financial transactions deserved the same respect as sword maintenance.

  Levin pocketed the coins.

  "There's one more thing," Harwick said.

  He reached into the drawer behind the reception desk — the same drawer that had produced Levin's bronze disc — and withdrew a small wooden box. He opened it. Inside, on a cushion of faded velvet, sat a bronze medallion.

  It was slightly larger than the adventurer's disc, and more ornate. The Guild's sword-and-staff-and-shield emblem was embossed on one side. On the other, in small, precise letters, were the words: COMMENDATION FOR OPERATIONAL MERIT.

  "This," Harwick said, "is a Guild commendation. It's awarded for service above the standard requirements of a quest. Clearing a thirty-rat infestation from the Guild's own premises, at night, without supervision, without complaint, and with the recovery of Guild property—" He glanced at the cheese board. "—qualifies."

  He picked up the medallion.

  He turned to Ria.

  Ria, who was still sitting on the floor, looked up at him with an expression that cycled rapidly through surprise, confusion, a brief detour through "is this a joke," and arrived at a destination she clearly hadn't packed for.

  "Me?" she said.

  "You held the position," Harwick said. "Topside watch. Operational support. Without a secured exit point, the quest operator—" He glanced at Levin. "—would have been working without a safety margin. You provided the margin. That's commendable."

  "I fell asleep," Ria said.

  "The commendation doesn't specify wakefulness. It specifies presence. You were present. You were at the door. The door was held." Harwick extended the medallion. "Take it."

  Ria stood up. She brushed bread crumbs from her dress. She pushed her half-undone braid behind her ear. She reached out and took the medallion.

  It sat in her palm — small, bronze, warm from the box. She turned it over. She read the inscription. She looked at Harwick. She looked at Levin.

  Levin's face offered its usual inventory: calm and the face of a man who had killed thirty-one rats in a basement at midnight and was now watching a sixteen-year-old girl receive a medal for sleeping beside a door, and who found the entire sequence of events perfectly logical in a way that he suspected said more about the world than it did about him.

  "Thank you," Ria said to Harwick. Her voice had a thickness to it. She swallowed.

  "Earned," Harwick said. He turned back to Levin. "And you. Thirty-one rats. Midnight. Alone. Level 1."

  "They were standing close together," Levin said.

  Harwick stared at him.

  "You keep saying that."

  "It keeps being relevant."

  Harwick's beard twitched. The twitch was, by now, a familiar signal — the seismic indicator of a smile occurring somewhere beneath the facial hair, felt rather than seen, like a minor earthquake registered only by sensitive instruments.

  "Get out of my guild hall," Harwick said. "Both of you. Go eat breakfast. Come back when there's a quest worth posting that doesn't involve my own building's infrastructure failing in front of my membership."

  "The cheese board—" Coll began.

  "The cheese board stays on my desk," Harwick said. "Where I can see it. Where it's safe."

  He placed one large hand on the cheese board. The hand covered it almost entirely. The oak gleamed beneath his fingers. The inlay caught the morning light.

  Levin and Ria left the guild hall.

  The morning sun hit them as they stepped outside — warm, bright, indifferent, the same sun that had been shining on Thornwall for millennia and would continue shining on it for millennia more, regardless of what happened in its basements.

  Ria held the medallion up to the light. It flashed bronze.

  "Operational merit," she said. She was grinning. The grin was wide and bright and slightly disbelieving, the grin of someone who had been given something unexpected and was still checking to make sure it was real. "I got a commendation for operational merit. For sleeping."

  "For holding a position," Levin corrected.

  "For sleeping at a position."

  "The distinction is important. Sleeping at a position implies commitment. Sleeping elsewhere implies negligence. You slept at the correct location. That's merit."

  "Levin."

  "Hm?"

  "You killed thirty-one rats by yourself in a dark basement at midnight and you got five silver coins. I fell asleep holding a bread roll and I got a medal."

  "Yes."

  "Does that seem... proportionate to you?"

  Levin considered this. He considered it for approximately three paces, which was the distance it took him to formulate an answer, reject it, formulate a second answer, reject that one too, and settle on a third answer that was neither complete nor satisfying but had the advantage of being true.

  "No," he said.

  "No?"

  "No, it doesn't seem proportionate. Very little about this world seems proportionate. The reward structure is arbitrary, the level system is broken, the Guild's insurance policy covers acts of deity but not cheese theft, and I have been in this place for six weeks and the single most useful thing I have done — the thing that has generated the most visible, tangible, officially recognised result — is recover a cheese board."

  He paused.

  "The cheese board had an inlay."

  Ria laughed.

  It was a real laugh — full, bright, loud, startling in the morning quiet. It bounced off the buildings on either side of the main street and scattered a flock of sparrows from a rooftop and caused a passing farmer (Aldric, carrying another sack of grain, still grateful, still slightly nervous around Levin) to look up and smile reflexively, because laughter, unlike most things in Thornwall, was contagious.

  Levin did not laugh.

  He did something adjacent to laughing, which was to exhale through his nose in a way that was slightly louder than usual and to allow the corners of his mouth to move approximately two millimetres in an upward direction, which was, by his standards, a standing ovation.

  They walked back to the tavern.

  Ria pinned the medallion to the strap of her satchel, where it hung beside the buckle, catching the light with each step. She touched it every few paces — a quick brush of her fingers across its surface, confirming its presence, the way a person touches a pocket to make sure their keys are still there.

  Marda was in the kitchen. The kettle was on. The broom was in its place, pulling left.

  "Rats?" Marda asked.

  "Handled," Levin said.

  "Paid?"

  "Five silver. And Ria got a medal."

  Marda looked at Ria. Ria held up the medallion. The bronze caught the kitchen light.

  Marda looked at it for two seconds. Her face performed no visible operations. Then she turned back to the stove. "Don't let it go to your head. Medals don't wash dishes."

  "No," Ria agreed. "But they look nice while you're washing them."

  Marda's shoulders moved.

  It was a small movement — a single, brief contraction of the trapezius muscles, lasting perhaps half a second. In anyone else, it would have been invisible. In Marda, it was the equivalent of a standing ovation, a ticker-tape parade, and a heartfelt speech about the importance of believing in yourself, all compressed into a single involuntary twitch.

  She was laughing.

  She would deny it later.

  She would deny it with the full force of her considerable capacity for denial.

  But in that moment, in the kitchen of the Leaky Sovereign, with the kettle steaming and the morning light coming through the window and a bronze medallion flashing in a girl's hand, Marda laughed, and the kitchen — which had heard many things over the years but laughter only rarely — seemed, briefly, to expand.

  Levin put the kettle on. He counted to two hundred. He thought about clouds — cirrus today, high and thin, drawn across the sky like scratches on glass.

  He poured his tea.

  He took a sip.

  Acceptable.

  The broom was waiting. It pulled left. He corrected.

  Five hundred and thirty-nine percent. Thirty-one rats, thirty-one points, thirty-one tiny golden flickers added to a reservoir that had started as a thimble and was now something that the word "thimble" could no longer describe, and that the word "bucket" was beginning to find inadequate, and that was, slowly and patiently and with no regard whatsoever for the number in the blue box, becoming something else entirely.

  He swept.

  The broom pulled left.

  He corrected.

  Outside, Thornwall went about its Friday with the unhurried commitment of a village that had survived another week and saw no reason to celebrate the achievement, because surviving was what Thornwall did, and celebrating was for places that had something to celebrate, and Thornwall had a recovered cheese board and a girl with a medal and a Level 1 mage with thin wrists and five silver coins, and these things were, by any honest assessment, enough.

  The sun moved. The shadows shifted. The goats tested the fence. The bell-ringer struck the ninth bell with the enthusiasm of a man who had found his rhythm and intended to keep it.

  And in the warm, quiet place behind Levin's sternum, the reservoir hummed — five hundred and thirty-nine percent, and growing, and patient, and showing no signs whatsoever of stopping.

  He swept.

  ~ Noah | Nikhil Patel | Robert | Rory natynczuk | James Walsh | The Fool | Hermit Purple ~