“We are having a problem, Shai-Alud Marcus.”

If he was being honest, Marcus heard these words with a complete lack of surprise. In the pit of his stomach, he had known escape wouldn’t be so easy. Not with all those rats out there singing his name in the streets.

He summoned all the knowledge on monarchical etiquette he had, and then remembered that it was probably useless in the face of the King of spume and slime.

“I was given assurances,” Marcus nevertheless replied, trying to avoid further eye-contact with the King’s mutant hounds. “Assurances that, if I guided Skeever’s forces back to Fleapit successfully, I would be granted an audience with the Prime Putrefact and be given a way to return to my home.”

Shrykul considered this unblinkingly, his sharp claws drilling into his throne’s solid armrests.

“I know what you are wishing, Shai-Alud,” he said.

He leaned forward slightly, raising a single finger to command his dogs to heel. Like real pets they mewled and spun around, laying down at his feet with their spiny tails tucked between their legs.

“I am believing in honesty,” Shrykul then said. “So I will tell you what you are thinking of us, and you will tell me if this is being correct: you are thinking we are filth, stupid, and uncivilized. You are thinking we are cruel and unusual compared to humankind. You are thinking we make war only because we are vicious.”

Marcus straightened up and met the King’s rigid stare. “Not entirely, King Shrykul. In my journey to this place, I have seen Ratmen show both bravery and cunning that befits the title of warrior. I have seen Skeever care deeply for his duty to you. I have seen Deekius demonstrate powers that go beyond anything we mortals could employ on the battlefield. But, more than all of this, I have seen a commander among you who genuinely cares for his men. It is that very fact that killed him.”

“Gatskeek,” Shrykul said. “He will be honored.”

Marcus nodded solemnly. “But I will admit you are correct in some of your assessment. I do find your kind filthy and uncivilized. But perhaps this is because your people have not been given the chance to grow.”

Shrykul stroked the long, thin piece of hair under his chin.

“You speak well, Marcus,” he said. “You are reminding me of someone else. Someone who was here and is now not.”

The King grew somewhat pensive. Then, after a moment, he resumed his stately air.

“Now I am telling you what I think of humans,” he said with a grin. “I am thinking they are brash, pushy, and expansionist. I am thinking they look down on other races and think they alone can guide the world and think of their desires before anything else. I am thinking they are children who are told they are strong but who would fall before even the smallest of my Ratman warriors. Am I wrong to think these things?”

Marcus gulped again. “Where I come from, King Shrykul, there are many who think the same way you do about humankind.”

“Is this so?” the King asked. “And what happens to such people in the place beyond?”

Marcus shrugged. “They are forgotten in the annals of time. Our species progresses without them, and they are left behind. Mostly, this is because they are skilled only in the art of complaining and not in acting.”

The stately King leaned back in his throne again. “Do your Kings also execute those that are insulting them in their own palace?”

Marcus smiled. “Yes. But our Kings do not value honesty.”

From the flash in Shrykul’s beady eyes, Marcus thought we was ready to unleash his hounds on him right then and there.

But it was laughter that gripped the thin King then, not fury.

“You speak well,” he told Marcus again. “It is a talent humans of the surface are having, too. It is what is making them so tricky in negotiation.”

So, there are humans on Thea, Marcus noted.

“Very well,” the King said as though something important had just been decided. “We are understanding each other. You are knowing what I want. I am knowing what you want. This is why we are having problem. Because even if I am wishing to grant you the boon you deserve, it is not being within my power to do so.”

Marcus stiffened.

Deekius, if you have tricked me…

“But, surely as the King of your Clan…”

“Not all offices of state are being mine, Marcus.”

“Well, who then?” Marcus asked, acutely aware that his tone approached that of a disgruntled 30-something wishing to speak to a bargain clothes store manager.

Shrykul sighed, scratched his chin again, and rose steadily from his throne.

“Be following. I will take you to her.”

A bleak crest of weariness seemed to overtake the Ratman’s features. Marcus began to follow him through another set of gilded doors hidden beneath a shabby curtain behind his throne. It was only now that he noticed the King walked with a slight limp on his right side.

“You are wounded, King Shrykul?”

The Rat replied without looking back. “In a manner of speaking,” he said, tapping his right leg. “This is being occupational hazard.”

Occupational hazard…Marcus mused. What…

The sudden change in environment in this section of the palace struck Marcus. The King led him down a narrow, damp tunnel only dimly lit by torch sconces that threw the shadows of crawling insects along the stone walls.

Here and there Marcus could see dents and cracks within the brickwork which revealed a thick, greasy, jelly-like substance oozing through the walls like a creeping infection.

He quickened his pace. The King seemed to do the same.

The further down the passage they went, the more Marcus felt his entire body quake. The guards stationed in this section of the castle seemed shaken and unnerved as they allowed the King and his Shai-Alud passage, and Marcus could probably ascertain the reason for their hesitancy:

The screams.

They came from the end of the tunnel – from a corrugated steel gate bolted with six individual sets of locks. They were not the screams of one person. No, they were much too savage to come from a single throat. Instead, Marcus heard the chorus of a hundred living, breathing agonies emanate from behind the gate.

And when the King halted and looked up at his terror-stricken face, he sighed again.

“I must be warning you,” he said. “What you are about to see may be…distasteful to your human eyes.”

Marcus kept a stiff upper lip. “I’ve seen plenty of horrors on the outskirts of your Kingdom, King Shrykul. But why are you bringing me here?”

“To meet the one who will tell you why you cannot leave,” he replied, nodding to the guards stationed beside the gate to unlock its bolts.

Before the darkness beyond the gate was even visible, Marcus already knew who awaited him on the other side.

“May I be presenting my Queen, Shai-Alud Marcus,” Shrykul said as the screaming suddenly abated. “Darling, you are having a visitor.”

Beyond the depths of the dark chamber that stretched out before Marcus, a wild, flaring snout appeared and wormed its way into the light cast by the door.

“Hail, your Highness,” Marcus said, giving his best impression of a stiff bow. “I have come to ask –“

Marcus stopped, feeling something wet squish underneath his feet. He looked down to see the shredded corpse of a Ratling child – a pink, hairless, mutilated thing – breaking apart beneath his heel.

Then he saw the rest of the ground was similarly littered with long dead bodies – bodies that had been left to rot for so long that many had simply become a grey paste of blood and bone, ground down by something…big. And angry.

He stumbled forward, lost his footing slightly, and then fumbled to rise and –

“Ask?” a deep voice boomed above him. “A hairless male is coming to ask something of us. How…heretical.”

Marcus looked up to see the body of the queen emerge behind her snout, the ground literally quaking beneath her gargantuan form. He watched as the thick knots and folds of fat tissue that comprised her belly stretched up as she rose to her full height – and he made the nauseus realization that such rolls of fat comprised her entire body. She was like a bulging, writhing sandworm from the science-fiction novels he had read as a child. But unlike them, her oozing, bloody body demanded no reverence. Indeed, Marcus was doing his level best to not vomit across the chamber as she leaned down to sniff him.

“A fresh human sample,” she said, her pale eyes blinking rapidly as the hairs from her snout – like a legion of twisted feelers – fell over his head and smeared their snot across his face.

Her mouth opened to reveal a brown maw dripping with bile, and a lithe tongue wriggled its way out.

“Darling,” she moaned. “Such a lovely gift you are bringing me.”

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