Book 3 Chapter 23: I don't have to kill you here
Jacopo was hanging upside down from Dantes’s tree throne as a bat when he found him. Hanging from his mouth was a fat moth that was still wriggling a bit. He leapt from the throne, launched himself a few feet, and shifted into a rat in mid air, maintaining his control of the moth as he landed and continuing his meal as he got comfortable on Dantes’s shoulder. There wasn’t always much of a need for conversation between them. They could sense one another’s thoughts without effort, and feel one another’s intentions. The only time conversations were really needed were when the senses or understandings of one didn’t fully translate to the other, or one of them really needed to tell the other a joke.
Dantes climbed onto the roof through the access he had in his chambers and shifted into a pigeon, taking flight toward the docks. He didn’t have a perfect idea of where he was heading, but the feeling of rot was the strongest there, and he hoped to be able to pinpoint it better as he got closer. He did some circles over the docks, with Jacopo in tow. The streets were sparse, with only local sailors at the taverns and whorehouses that dotted them. Those few foreign ships in the docks hadn’t let their sailors take shore leave for fear of bringing the sickness onboard. The busiest part of the dock was where one leviathan hunter had docked with a recent kill, and Dantes found that the smell of its fat being rendered made him feel much hungrier as a pigeon than it had as a man.
As he did his circles, he started to get a better and better idea of where the rot he was looking for was. A series of fish processing buildings that seemed abandoned towards the south end of the docks were where he felt the strongest impression of it, the worst feeling of rot. He landed on the roof of one of them, and shifted into a rat along with Jacopo, crawling into the building where the sense of decay was enough to make their eyes water.
They moved through some narrow corridors, the smell of fish still permeated everything despite the years of disuse. They eventually saw several other rats scurrying in the same direction that they were moving. Dantes reached out to them, but his mind bounced off of theirs. He exchanged a look with Jacopo, and followed where they were going, continuing to try and contact any rats in the area. All of those in the immediate vicinity ignored him, but a few nearby heard his call and started to gather. Eventually Dantes and Jacopo reached what all of the other rats were heading toward.
Even with the stomach of a rat, Dantes felt ill. The sense of rot and sickness was thick in the air, and in the center of a large open room, was a mass of rats writhing and coiling together. Their fur was patchy, with exposed skin showing oozing lesions and pustules near bursting. Their bodies seemed to be blending together in a way that, at first, Dantes thought it was a trick of the light, but he realized that all of the rats in the writhing pile were connected to one another, joined into a horrifying mass of flesh where their pustules and scabs had melted into one another.
There was a kind of familiarity to it, and Dantes realized it looked almost like a sick mockery of the rat god he’d met so long ago. There was such an inherent sense of falsehood and evil to it that was so strong that Dantes forgot himself for a moment and found himself shifting a wand protruding from his wooden palm and a scowl on his face.
Jacopo considered suggesting caution, but he felt the same revulsion to what he was seeing as Dantes did, except even more so, as in his mind he could feel just a trace of whatever sick call had led his cousins there.
Dantes began to send his will through the wand when he was very suddenly hit by something massive and thrown into an old pile of rotted barrels that shattered from his impact. He quickly adjusted the aim of his arm toward where the blow had come from and fired off the wand he’d been readying sending out a blanket of flames.
A large spiderlike figure leapt away from the blast, but a dozen of the plague rats that had been coming toward him were instantly immolated.