The Story of Postumus

This remarkable story was written by Pete Estes as the background history of his gloomy cleric, Postumus Malevolus. It is the most complete, and the most compelling, work of this sort that I have ever seen.

The dreams began the week I left Balimar and have come back at least once a week ever since. They are much more vivid on the nights of the full moon. They start differently, but they always end the same way.

I am walking alone at night on a deserted road. It is springtime, and the air smells gloriously of honeysuckle and wild rose. The night is cool, and the Hunter's moon is full. I know the moon is an evil omen, but I am unafraid, for my God is with me and He is my Shield, and I am His mace. I enter a dark wood and it becomes deathly quiet. The moon slips behind a scud of cloud and absolute darkness envelops me. Suddenly, thousands of slit, hungry yellow eyes surround me. They are on me in an instant, and sharp teeth are quickly devouring my flesh an ounce at a time. So this is what it is like to be attacked by the legendary Piranha of Pelth, I think uselessly to myself. I scream wildly, but only the trees can hear, and they merely sigh with regret - or is it pleasure? I cry out for my God to help me, and He hears me.

In a blinding radiance of light, a Solar appears in front of me, and I think, Now I am delivered from evil. Praise be to Eru. I expect the small, frenzied creatures on me to flee in terror, but they ignore the Solar and continue eagerly to feed. Eru, save me! I cry to the Solar, but instead, the Solar laughs. I look at him, feeling disbelief and betrayal, but he only continues to smile.

"I'm sorry, Postumus," He says, "but you've offended the Rat, and the Rat won't let Eru save you. But thank you for your service. Tomorrow, we'll have you resurrected and we can do this again. After a few months, there won't be enough left for even the Rat God to care about you anymore, and then you and I will meet in Hell, where I can do the same with your immortal Soul. I look forward to that very much!".

Then, the Solar transforms into the likeness of John Mugmoss and, bellowing laughter, vanishes. I die cursing Eru's name. Then I awaken.

Part 1
CHILDHOOD

I was born in Balimar on May 2, 3107 C.R. I have no brothers or sisters. My full given name is Postumus Malevolus. "Malevolus" comes from my father because Balimarans, like most people in Xenthus, are patrilineal. "Postumus," however, comes from my mother, who died in childbirth. My father, naturally, misspelled "Posthumous" (he is dyslexic, among other faults). My father says that my mother's name was Loryn, and though I can't think why he'd lie about it, I have to doubt it simply on the basis of his untrustworthiness. Curiously, I dreamt of my mother once, just after I completed my Clerical training and became an acolyte in the Church of Eru. In this dream, she was a young woman, slight, mousy, brown-haired, and perhaps a little shy, and she looked at me silently and sadly without speaking. Just before I woke up, though, she gave me a beautiful smile and I felt a great sense of peace. Though I never met her, I love my mother and I believe she was a good person.

Not so my father. His name is Cilgor Malevolus, and he is distantly related to the family of King Cilon of Lycapsus. According to family legend, the royal family of Lycapsus kicked my paternal ancestors out of the city about a hundred years ago for some real or imagined wrong - and it was probably real. The family retained the royal "Cil" prefix and the last name, which in Lycapsus is not a name but an epithet. In Balimar, however, it is a badge of honor. The Lycapsus royal family allegedly executed my great-great-grandfather Cilvin as a spy. The surviving family members, including Cilvin's young pregnant wife Ulena, fled Lycapsus just ahead of the executioner's ax.

My father is called John Cilgor, a corruption of his title, Shaan Cilgor. The title means, roughly, Elder, and it denotes a Cleric of The Rat God. He is a moderately important and successful man in Balimar politics, and is very wealthy besides. He made a fortune in shipping and owns the largest shipyard in Balimar. I have completely forsworn Daddy's filthy money, which is just as well, since Daddy disinherited me when I left Balimar. My father is thin and short, with a receding hairline and sharp-featured slender face and blue eyes that burn with low cunning. He has a limp that he received in a shipyard accident. He is strangely blind to a number of aspects of his life, notably (and thankfully) his son, but is vicious and skilled at Temple politics. He recently became a high priest at the Temple, and is a confidant of John Mugmoss himself, the legendary Chief High Priest there.

My earliest memories are of my nursemaid Branwyn. She was a lovely and talented girl, an artful storyteller, a superb actress, and a slave. She was only nineteen when I was born, although when I was young I thought she was older than God. Yet she was wise far beyond her years - the reward of a difficult life. Father made an enormous mistake leaving me in Branwyn's care. She fooled him completely, another instance of my father's strange, intermittent blindness to matters of his own self-interest. Branwyn acted the part of a lumbering simpleton around my father, which is just how my father liked his slaves. As far as I know, he never slept with her; he wanted her only as a stupid wench so that he didn't have to watch his back and could devote more time to what he really loved: money and politics. Yet Branwyn was neither stupid nor simple, and since my father was often busy at the shipyards or the Temple, Branwyn handled much of my upbringing. I loved her as deeply as I could have loved my real mother.

The only part of my upbringing handled by my father was my religious training. He was a zealous worshipper of the Rat God, and he effectively communicated that zeal to me. I learned to love The Rat. I adored his guile, his cunning, his adaptability; I worshipped his ruthlessness, indomitability, and Evil. The Rat was a source of unending delight for me. My father told me all the stories. These stories always began with horrid Men trying to capture, subdue, kill, poison, or eat The Rat; but The Rat, through superior cunning, always foiled the Men. As I grew older, the stories grew increasingly violent, with a prominent theme of vengeance. The Rat was the quintessential underdog, with Men as the corrupt Powers That Be. The Rat represented ultimate freedom. Despite Men's best efforts to destroy or control The Rat, The Rat always managed to live on unsubdued. The Rat was King.

Man's ally is this fantasy power struggle was The Cat. The Cat, in Rat God mythology, is a kind of AntiRat. Several of these nursery stories specifically describe The Cat as a Fallen Rat, booted out of Paradise by the Rat God and marked with his present evil appearance - sleek, soft fur and reflective eyes - that rats might recognize him as the pampered lackey of Man that he really is. The Cat, according to myth, has given up the hard life for Man's handouts - surrendering freedom for a life of enslaved ease. The Cat has retained his Ratlike ferocity, quickness, and stealth, but now uses them in the service of The Rat's enemies. If Man is the Soul of Evil, The Cat is the strong right arm.

As a child will, I believed all the stories. Branwyn did not directly refute the stories, but she challenged my father to battle with a weapon at which she hopelessly outclassed him - charisma. Branwyn told me stories that contrasted sharply with these tales of bloodlust and vengeance. She told me stories of good and evil, wise Kings, beautiful maidens, brave knights, heroism, chivalry, truth, and right - all the stories the other, more normal children of Xenthus probably heard about. She warned me never to tell my father about these stories because he would not approve. The conspiracy appealed to my secretive nature, so I went along with it and never said a word. That undoubtedly saved Branwyn's life, at least for a while. I had no idea what a dangerous game she was playing while trying to insulate me from my father's evil teachings. My respect for her courage grows daily, even now, some twenty-odd years later. It was my extreme good fortune that she was there to raise me - perhaps, in his forever mysterious ways, Eru granted a blessing when he permitted my real mother to die.

When I was four, I found a kitten. Branwyn and I had gone to the park. It was a sunny day in early June, and I had wandered off in a random direction when Branwyn wasn't looking. I felt a soft rubbing against my leg, and when I looked, I saw a small, starving, bedraggled little gray kitten looking plaintively up at me. Exhibiting my usual poise under stress, I screamed. The kitten, frightened out of its poor mind, jumped three feet straight up, hissing, and streaked for the bushes. I raced back to Branwyn in the opposite direction but in equal panic, buried my head in her skirt and closed my eyes, a course of action I thought would make the problem go away. It took her several minutes to calm my hysteria.

"What's wrong, my little mouse?," she whispered calmly, using her common diminutive name for me. Finally, I answered her.

"CAT!," I wailed.

"A cat?," she asked, perhaps a little annoyed. "Is that all? Did he hurt you?"

I thought about it for a minute. "Yes," I said.

"Show me," she demanded.

I thought about it for another minute. "N-no," I said. "He didn't."

"What's wrong then?," she asked, and whispered, "Cats won't hurt you."

"Cat bad! Cat hurt me!"

"You just said he didn't," she reminded me.

"Daddy said cats bad," I said, citing conclusive proof of my argument. I had to convince her of the peril I had just escaped, which if she had been doing her job wouldn't have happened.

Instead, she took my hand. "Come on," she said and pulled me in the direction I had just come, back toward the claws of death. I couldn't believe it.

I screeched in terror all the way. Fortunately, people in Balimar usually ignore screeches of terror. Branwyn dragged me kicking and caterwauling all the way back to the spot and made me show her which way the cat had gone. I continued to screech but pointed to the bushes.

The poor gray kitten, meanwhile, was cornered under a bush, frightened and trembling, but strangely, he didn't run away this time in spite of the commotion I was making. Branwyn coaxed it out with a bit of ham she fetched from her sandwich. The kitten, ravenous, pounced on the meat with a minimum of caution and devoured it instantly. Hunger, as usual, conquered fear, and it looked up at Branwyn expectantly. Branwyn obliged, and soon we couldn't have ditched the kitten if we'd wanted to. Seeing how Branwyn had so effortlessly beguiled the evil creature, I worshipped her all the more. My curiosity conquered my fear, and soon I, too, was feeding the little kitten. It turned out to be not only safe, but fun. As soon as we were able, Branwyn looked about furtively, and hustled us all, including the kitten, to a more secluded spot away from prying eyes. It is dangerous to associate with cats in Balimar, let alone own one, and if the Rats see a person with one in public, it is tantamount to a death warrant. Some people in Balimar do own cats, but they never advertise the fact.

The kitten and I quickly became fast friends. It turned out to be a she, and I named it Branny in honor of Branwyn. By mid afternoon, I was convinced I had to keep Branny. Branwyn balked at this, but my repeated entreaties eventually weakened her. Besides, she saw a chance to give me an object lesson in the trustworthiness of Rat Myths. When we left, we smuggled Branny home in the folds of Branwyn's skirt.

Naturally, Branny couldn't live in the house with me. Fortunately, Branwyn had her own detached cottage, and my father never went in there, so that was where we stashed the cat. Branwyn made me promise never to tell my father about the cat, and since I regularly kept secrets from him, I agreed. The reason for the silence was clear even to me. My father would kill the kitten if he found her, and Branwyn, too.

My great-great-grandmother Ulena was an utterly remarkable woman. She died when I was six, but before that time she had lived a long, full, eventful life. She was a mere 20-year-old slip of a pregnant girl when she fled Lycapsus, but even then she was intelligent, strong-willed, and hateful. After giving birth to my great-grandfather, she shunted him off onto the household slaves - a family tradition, apparently - and went off to become a priestess of The Rat. For twenty years, she disappeared into the wilderness, adventuring God knows where, but came back to Balimar older and wiser, a high priestess of staggering powers, and completely mad. She took over as Chief High Priest of the Temple in Balimar at age 46 and ruled with an unbroken iron grip for 50 years. Rumor had it that she always had a young male priest, always under age 25, as her consort, and that she killed and ate at least one of them in the throes of passion. When she left the Temple priesthood, John Mugmoss was an up-and-coming young priest, and she had marked him for greatness. He was her last lover, and they had parted, amicably, when she was a spry young 95 years of age, just before the stroke that left her a wasted paraplegic.

When I was born, she was 101 years old, a bloated, evil, snaggle-toothed old hag who could not walk or see, but her mind, mad as it was, was still razor-sharp. Her face was wrinkled and covered with tumors, and all that was left of her eyes were white cataracts. She needed a wheelchair to get around and spent most of her time in bed. She had outlived four legitimate children, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. She lived in raving seclusion in an enormous old house on the south end of town near the elven quarter. The elves, who fear very little, and almost no human beings, lived in stark terror of her, and gave her house a wide berth. She had few visitors. She lived alone but for her fat, drooling, lisping, cringing old butler named Chiggins. My father told me that Chiggins was one of her illegitimate sons, and she was so disappointed in him that she kept him inside, rather than let the world know that she had sired such human refuse. No one knew why she didn't just kill him.

She claimed she could foresee the future, and often did so; at least that was what she told us she was doing. She would slip into a deep trance, and in a powerful reverberating voice, snarl short couplets in confusing verse that she would then refuse to explain. The Rat had told us exactly what He wanted us to hear, she said, so it wasn't her place to interpret further. John Mugmoss, however, seemed to be completely at ease with these bizarre fugues, and they seemed even to mean something to him. When he heard one of Ulena's couplets - and he always did, he made a point of finding out what she said in her trances - he would smile knowingly and his bottomless blue eyes would kindle with an inner fire. I think he is as mad as she was; who knows, maybe madness is contagious.

I tried to avoid Grandma Ulena because I was terrified of her. However, once a year on her birthday, February 7th, the entire Malevolus clan gathered at her house for a huge, awful party. Grandma Ulena was always the center of attention, so I usually got to avoid her and go play with my bratty little cousins. Once, when I was five, however, I could not avoid it. My father insisted on presenting me to her, so I approached her when he asked me to and fidgeted nervously, hoping I was unimportant enough for her to ignore me. It turns out I was not.

"So, you are young Postumus!," she cackled in a strong voice, passing her knobby, leprous hands over my face. "You will be a troublesome little imp, I can tell. It is written on your face. Cilgor, watch this one. He is very dangerous. You neglect him too much. If you'd like, I will take him in and raise him here myself." I felt chilled, and hoped desperately my father wouldn't do that to me.

"Whatever you say, Ulena," my father replied spinelessly.

Ulena seemed to think about it a moment, then said, "No. I don't have enough time left to raise him properly. A pity, too, for he has very good potential. He will make a much better cleric than you, Cilgor. You are a weakling. I don't know why your father didn't have you exposed at birth. In his heart, he is not. He gets that from me, of course. Unfortunately, The Rat has not given me time enough here on this Earth. It would not substantially change the boy, and could make him worse. Yes, a great pity," she said again, this time caressing every inch of my body within her reach. I tried very hard not to bolt backwards in revulsion, and succeeded.

That was when it happened. When her hands reached my mouth, she stiffened, and I felt a sharp static electric shock followed by a gentle tingling. Ulena jerked upright, drooling slightly, gripping the arms of her wheelchair as if she wanted to break them off. Her voice, stronger and deeper, boomed unnaturally at my father:

"FEAR NOT THE CAT
OUTSIDE THE HOUSE
BUT LOOK INSIDE
AND FEAR THE MOUSE."

Then she relaxed and exhaled deeply, looking at me with her rheumy, sightless eyes. She smiled at me, a hideous evil grin that bespoke nothing but violence. She looked at my father, and shook her head.

"You heard Him," she said. "Now be off with you, before I take care of the problem myself." My father hustled me away, looking confused and afraid. I was more afraid, because only Branwyn and I knew that I was the Mouse. There was a lot more that even I didn't know, then, however.

On the day after I turned six years old, my great-great-grandmother died. I attended the funeral in the special catacombs beneath the Rat Temple dedicated to high priests of the Temple. I couldn't tell you today where it is, exactly, because the temple priests blindfolded us and gave us some kind of sleep spell before they took us there. They awakened us within an ancient crumbling tunnel filled with bones and scurrying things that remained just out of our lamplight. John Mugmoss conducted the ceremony himself with great solemnity. Mugmoss sacrificed a prisoner and buried him with her as her consort in the afterlife. The ceremony was very unpleasant and I was glad to get out of there.

After that Summer, my formal training in the Mysteries of The Rat began. Along with about a score of other boys and girls my age, the teachers singled me out for special training, which lasted two hours a day, five days a week. Our ordinary training, which the Temple gave to the children of all worshippers, lasted another four hours a day or so. The length of time always varied, as did the starting and stopping time and the subject matter. It was all very disorganized and haphazard, and it drove me nearly crazy with annoyance. We "special" children received additional instruction for the simple reason that we were all sons and daughters of Temple Clerics.

I'd already had the kitten Branny for two years, and she was no longer a kitten, but a full grown cat. We kept her inside all the time and she seemingly had no desire to go out. I'd wanted to rename Branny, but Branwyn wisely suggested I retain the name in case I ever accidentally mentioned the cat; people might think I was talking about my nanny, instead. To her credit, it actually worked twice that I remember. By the time I entered school, Branny was happy, well-fed, and undetected.

At school, I met many kids who would become friends of varying degrees as I grew up. They were all brats of one stripe or another, myself included, although I think I was probably the least obnoxious of a really rotten group. However, I learned to choose my friends carefully: it wasn't always safe to be friends with these children.

One of my first friends, whom I didn't choose carefully enough, came from among the Special Training group, a freckle-faced, cowlicked boy named Squire Mugmoss. He was tall for his age, with a quick wit, quick smile, and nasty temper. His smiles never looked very mirthful, but his commanding presence soon made him the playground leader among the boys in both classes. I thought at the time that he was a good one to be friends with, and prided myself on being among the "in" crowd.

One day, Squire approached me and whispered conspiratorially, "She's gettin' on my nerves, Post." I always felt flattered and important when he called me Post.

"Who is?," I asked.

"That fat cow Fiona," he snarled. Fiona was a girl in the class. She was chubby, middling ugly, always unwashed, and refused (worst of all) to have anything to do with Squire Mugmoss. She didn't like us and did not hide it. Squire had singled out Fiona for special treatment. When fisticuffs didn't work (she was heavy and could fight very well, thank you), Squire tried subtlety. He was looking for revenge, and thought he had found it.

"So how are you going to get her?," I asked eagerly.

"I'll show you," he said. "Come on." I followed.

He took me outside the school building, a rundown old brick warehouse near the Balimar docks. My father owned it. It actually was a warehouse, so it was good cover for the school. Nobody ever saw us come or go because we used the city sewer system. In an alleyway, Squire went over to a pile of boxes, lifted out one he had apparently hidden, and opened it. A small kitten was inside.

"She likes cats," Squire hissed, grinning his mirthless grin.

My blood turned to ice, but I kept my voice reasonably calm, and even grinned mirthlessly back.

"How do you know?," I asked.

"I followed her home once. She stopped off in an alleyway, and there was a cat there. She looked around but I stayed out of sight, hidden, like, and watched her pet it! Then she gave it food! Do you believe it?," he asked.

"Are you sure she didn't poison it?," I asked. Poisoning was an approved remedy for cats.

"No, she liked this cat, I could tell."

"Um, that's great," I said as calmly as I could.

"All I gotta do," he said, not paying any attention to me now, "is plant this kitten where she can be found with it. Then she's meat!" He grinned his grin and giggled. I shivered involuntarily.

I agreed to help him. What else could I do? We broke into her house one day - playing hooky from school - and planted the cat there. Then Squire told his father about nasty little Fiona, and that set the wheels turning.

Within two days, Fiona vanished from the face of the Earth. No one ever saw her again. Even her parents later claimed that they had never had a daughter. The teacher's role call sheet did not list her name, nor was there an erasure there. It was as if Fiona had never existed at all, but I knew. The day after she disappeared, when Squire grinned at me like the proverbial cat who ate the canary, I knew that Squire Mugmoss was no friend of mine.

It was several months after the Fiona incident that Squire took me to meet his father, the infamous John Mugmoss. I went reluctantly, although I didn't tell that to Squire. I knew his father by reputation only, but I was afraid of his reputation.

He was a very important man in the Temple hierarchy and, as I've alluded to already, the rumor mill had Mugmoss pegged as a rising star, someday to succeed to the Chief High Priest position. He was even then more important to the Temple than my father, who was a middle-level priest and important just because he had a lot of money. Mugmoss was a different kind of beast. When I met him for the first time, he was in his late thirties and in the midst of a meteoric rise in the Temple hierarchy. Scuttlebutt said that he was a shrewd and insightful man, some even said a visionary touched by the god. Everyone, with one exception, was afraid of him. That one exception was his wife. I remember Mugmoss' wife from that first meeting vividly. She was very young, slender, a pretty blonde, and very pregnant. She had the unquestioning devotion of the True Believer. She walked about with a beatific smile on her face and performed Mugmoss' every request with breathless zeal. Squire claimed she was not his real mother; she certainly didn't look old enough to be.

The first things I noticed were Mugmoss' eyes. They were blue and as bottomless as a thermal pool. They pierced into the very depths of my soul. The moment I saw them, my formless fear crystallized and then turned to abject terror when he spoke to me.

"You have the mark of wickedness about you, Postumus," he said softly. "Ulena saw it, and I see it, too. You are an imp. I believe I shall have to kill you."

And this before Squire had even formally introduced us. Even accustomed as he was to hearing his father say bizarre things, Squire looked at me horrified. My stomach froze. You can only imagine the impact on a six-year-old boy when seriously threatened with his own murder. I was speechless, but of course he was not, and he went on.

"But not now. Beware the Spring, Postumus. Beware the Spring."

I have more insight into his warning now than I did then, but I believe that it is a prophecy as yet unfulfilled. I believe this in spite of what happened in that fateful Spring of 3125, the Spring I turned eighteen years old. I await the foretold Showdown with terror in my heart, but trusting in Eru to deliver me safely.

Three weeks past my seventh birthday, in late May, 3114, Squire Mugmoss invited me to the formal baptism of his newborn baby brother.

By this time, Squire Mugmoss had taught me two things about himself: (1) he was dangerous to be friends with, and (2) he was dangerous not to be friends with. At age seven, the concept of hazard is a formless one, but the situation was nevertheless starkly clear to me. I decided it was best to maintain the pretense of friendship while trying to distance myself from both Squire and his creepy father. So when he extended his invitation to me, I felt I needed to accept. When my father found out, I had to accept, anyway, because he heartily approved. He would gain great credit if John Mugmoss thought well of his son.

The ceremony took place by the light of the full moon on the last day of May. It was a hot, still, humid night, the air hanging damp and slightly foggy over the harbor. I remember the stillness vividly for some reason; even the crickets were silent that night. We celebrants filed into the Temple of the Rat by a rear entrance and ushers issued each of us a black, hooded wool robe (oppressively hot!) and a lit candle. Even though the robes came in various sizes, mine was too large for me. Some people had brought their own. When the people put them on, their faces disappeared into the shadows of the heavy cowl, not even illuminated by the candles they carried. Very strange, I thought. An usher directed us to our proper positions as we entered, and I followed Squire and directions, in that order.

We filed into a large chamber rimmed with galleries on three sides and a huge malignant-looking statue of the Rat God on the fourth. We entered the first gallery level from behind the statue and entered the side boxes, which afforded an unparalleled view of the proceedings. We stood throughout the ceremony. In the end gallery, opposite the statue, a number of young women dressed uniformly in maroon robes stood with their cowls thrown back. They all held candles and looked very solemn.

The only lighting in the room came from the candles held by the spectators and scattered haphazardly throughout the chamber. This nevertheless afforded relatively good lighting, even if it caused the shadows to do eerie dances around the room. The lighting, for my taste, was much too good. What I saw caused my pulse to race and my body to freeze into a cold sweat despite the heat.

Staked to the floor, naked, and still very pregnant, was John Mugmoss' young wife.

Then the ceremony began. John Mugmoss himself, in full clerical regalia, entered the chamber from some hidden entrance beneath the statue of the Rat, followed by six attendants. Although they all wore the mysterious impenetrable cowls, I recognized my father as one of the attendants by his limp. Mugmoss took up a position at his wife's feet, while the attendants filed alongside her, three to a side. Mugmoss began the invocation.

"Favor us, O Master, for the blood we give you tonight," Mugmoss intoned.

"Favor usss...," whispered the entire congregation in unison. This mode of worship was unexpectedly creepy. I knew the text of the ceremony by heart from my classes, but had never stopped to consider what the words really meant. They were rote words, but what was happening below me was real.

The prayers lasted interminably. I joined in the responses without having to think. I began to grow calmer - perhaps my imagination was getting the better of me. Then suddenly Mugmoss stopped. He turned slowly around, facing all the spectators in turn, silent, before finally facing again towards the pregnant girl at his feet. He smiled reassuringly at her, and softly asked:

"Are you ready, my dearest?"

"I am ready, John," she said evenly, if somewhat dreamily.

"Then let the birthing begin!," he cried.

The six attendant priests removed their cowls, and I'm sure I gasped aloud. They were no longer human, but in the form of hideous monster rats, what I later learned were their wererat forms, a blessing bestowed upon all worshippers on their eighteenth birthdays or upon induction into the Church. They dropped onto all fours and leaped upon the young woman's body, and they began to feed.

She uttered but one sound throughout the entire process. "I love you, John," she said. I think Mugmoss replied in kind.

What seemed to be days later, though it had to be mere minutes, the ghastly ritual stopped. The largest of the rats stood upright and handed Mugmoss a squalling, bloody bundle. Mugmoss took the baby boy in his arms, murmured soft, loving invocations over it, then stooped down and cupped some of the girl's blood in one hand in an obscene parody of Eru's symbol. He poured the blood over the baby's head, then slowly licked the baby clean. An attendant, still in rat form, brought a font of unholy water forward, and Mugmoss gave himself and the newborn child a thorough washing. Then he handed the baby back to the attendant, who carried it, still squalling, from the chamber.

The next thing that happened seemed to make no sense. No one else remembered it afterwards. Mugmoss reached down into the bloody corpse and extracted the heart, and then he faced toward me. He held up the heart, his eyes seeming to pierce deeply into me even though I knew he couldn't see me through my cowl, and said in a soft, clear voice:

"Next time, young friend, it will still be beating."

He tossed the heart away as carelessly as he would a rotten fruit, and turned to face the maroon-robed girls at the far end of the chamber.

"And who will be my next bride?," he asked.

The girls filed helter-skelter out of the end gallery onto the floor of the chamber and crowded around Mugmoss, each clamoring for the honor of being his next wife. He chose a beautiful, lithe blonde with the figure of a dancer, silky, shoulder-length hair with bangs, and brown eyes. An impassive Temple priest led the girl, beaming happily, away from the chamber.

I turned to Squire, consciously trying to keep the fear and horror inside me, to find he, too, was beaming happily.

"You've been to one of these before?," I asked Squire.

"Sure," he said. "For all my other mothers."

I paused a moment, filled with revulsion. "I don't think your father likes me," I said absently, still much too shocked to think straight. I shouldn't have said anything like that.

"Oh, sure he does!," Squire replied lightly.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because it was his idea that you come tonight."

An object lesson. He wanted to give me a warning, and he wanted me to learn why I had been named Postumus.

Part 2,
ADOLESCENCE

If it seems by now that my life was one long episode of unspeakable horror, that is a misconception. In spite of the dreadful cult that orbited my life like an unstable moon, I had long stretches where my life was uneventful, even pleasant. Branwyn grew from a remarkably self-possessed girl into a remarkably self-possessed young lady, my mother in an all but biological sense. She was my comfort and my refuge, and I loved her more as I began to appreciate the risks she took on my behalf. Branny the cat grew into a feline parody of a halfling, an enthusiastically friendly little beast who would always greet me by leaping onto my shoulders and rubbing against my neck. I loved Branny the cat, too, but I knew she made Branwyn very, very nervous. Branwyn had a deeply cautious nature, and Branny the cat ran all over that nature with claws extended. Branwyn tried more than once to get me to give up the cat, but I couldn't, so Branwyn made the best of it, keeping Branny hidden in the back bedroom and obsessively cleaning up cat hair.

I got a job. At age ten, I became a "runner" down at my father's boatyard, and I loved it. A "runner" is an agile little adolescent who takes messages back and forth between the docks and the office, runs errands, and descends into small crevices to make delicate repairs or fetch a dropped tool. I got paid a little money and learned all about building ships. I knew all the boatyard workers, who were a rough but jolly lot and were only mean when they drank (unlike my relatives, who were mean because they liked it). I spent most of my days off from school there, and about half of my evenings. I decided I wanted to become a shipwright when I grew up, or perhaps a sea captain. It was a way to get out of my father's clutches and still earn his respect, I thought. How could he disapprove of his son helping to further the family fortune?

I also met most of the merchant captains and fishermen who frequented the docks. I talked a few of them into allowing me to go to sea with them on fishing trips. My best friend on the docks was a boy about five years older than me, a fisherman's apprentice named Zack. Zack was a big, friendly kid who always had a huge grin on his face and liked to tell rather obvious jokes. Zack was also a few bricks shy of a full load. I knew Zack was the son of Rat worshippers, like me, but he cheerfully ignored the whole thing and went happily on about his business. I liked him for that, because that is what I wanted to do.

Zack smuggled me aboard his boat, the Miss Nereid, on several occasions with the benign acquiescence of the Captain, a ruddy-faced old sea dog named Walter Planck. He would always turn a blind eye towards me and Zack, whose smuggling was clumsy at best, and then berate us in tones of blood and thunder that would have pleased Poseidon himself when we got out to sea and there was nothing he could do about me anymore. So I would help set the fishing lines and even steer the boat, sometimes, and have a wonderful time doing it. I learned the rudiments of nautical charts, navigation, fishing, and sailing, and Zack and I would eat crabs and drink mead on the beach at night after we'd returned. My father didn't seem to notice, and Branwyn, after initial disapproval, grudgingly gave in after I'd taken her to the docks to meet Zack. Zack always thought Branwyn was my mother, and no matter how often I tried to explain it to him, he still never got it. I liked that about him, too - his utter conviction is his own beliefs, all evidence to the contrary.

Around this time, I began to notice that Branwyn became increasingly moody and withdrawn. I had never seen her this way before - she had always been almost unnaturally tranquil, keeping her head smartly while everyone else around her was losing theirs. Finally, one day, I asked her about it, and she asked me to come with her on her walk to market.

My father lived on Carg Island in the harbor east of the mainland section of Balimar. It consisted mostly of warehouses and boatyards, but we lived in a large house on the south end with a magnificent view of the Sea of Xenthus and close to our family shipyard. A long causeway joined the island to the mainland, a marvel of engineering or druidic stone-shaping. Branwyn and I walked in silence the full one-mile length of the island to the causeway, where we stopped in the middle amongst some fisherman and sat down to throw pebbles in the harbor.

"What's wrong, Bran?," I asked her finally.

"Little mouse, I'm thirty years old," she said," and I don't have a family, and I want one."

"You've got me," I said, puzzled.

She smiled sadly at me. "I know, darling. I love you like my own child. But I want to get married, and start a family of my own."

I thought about it a minute. "You could marry my father," I said.

To her credit, she didn't guffaw. "Your father and I are - different," she said. "Besides, I am his slave. But I've met someone I'd like to marry. He's a manservant named Meggs in a rich banker's house on the mainland. I met him at market one day and fell madly in love with him. I couldn't stand the thought that he might reject me. But we've met in the market at least once a week for the past three months, and I really think he loves me, too. He asked me to marry him, and I asked your father for his permission."

"Do you think he'll agree?"

She paused. "I don't know, but I think so."

"You're not going to move out, are you?," I asked, trying to control that sinking feeling in my stomach.

"No, I don't think so. Meggs could move in with me. He knows all about your father, but he's willing to put up with him if I ask him to."

"That's great!," I said with unfeigned enthusiasm, and I gave her a big hug.

"And he knows all about you, too," she said, smiling at me.

The rest of the day was terrific. We walked to the mainland, where we climbed to the top of Round Hill, which afforded a nice view of the city, and had a wonderful picnic lunch. Round Hill was open then, but has since been overrun by halfling developers and made into the largest hobbit village outside their own valley. It is called Hobbit Hill now. Afterwards we walked into town with our empty baskets to do some shopping in the central market square. We looked for Meggs, but he apparently wasn't there that day.

We returned from Balimar happy and tired, the July evening gloriously cool, the air damp with wisps of salt fog. We walked around the house to Branwyn's cottage, laughing and feeling marvelous. We opened the door, and stopped dead in our tracks. There sat my father, in a chair facing the door, Branny the cat laying limp and dead on his lap.

My father's face literally boiled with obscene rage as he tried to keep from turning into his wererat form then and there and settling accounts Rat-style. "What is this?," he screamed murderously, hurling the dead cat at Branwyn and missing.

Branwyn was completely calm. "It's a dead cat, sir. It must have come in the open window to get at the food I left on the table, over there." Sure enough, there was food on the table. Branwyn always left food on the table for just this contingency. "I assume you killed it."

Doubt suffused my father's face, but there was no stopping the frenzy now. He leaped to his feet, grabbing Branwyn by the hair, and beat her, while I screamed useless commands for him to stop. Finally, he dropped Branwyn, stunned but still very much alive, at his feet like a used dishrag, and Changing before our very eyes, said, "Do you have any last words, you worthless trollop? To think that I was coming out here to tell you I was going to let you get married! You ungrateful slut!"

"Father, stop it!," I screamed. "It was my cat!"

Finally, he looked at me, stunned. He snarled, and moved menacingly toward me, in full ratform by now. His rage was unstoppable, and he was going to kill at least one of us. I didn't want it to be Branwyn.

But she had other ideas. She could have run away and had a very good chance of escaping while my father ripped me into tiny pieces. She did not. "Stop trying to protect me, Postumus!," she shouted, though it was she who was protecting me. She grabbed a heavy iron skillet and charged my father with the fury of a mother grizzly. "The cat was mine, and I loved it, you rat-faced little shit!", she screamed at my father as she landed a skillet blow to the back of his head that should have caved in his skull like a ripe melon. Incredibly, she didn't even draw blood, but he turned instinctively on her as the greater threat, his claws ripping the air in a frenzied blur. Branwyn turned and ran out the door at top speed, still holding the skillet, with my father in limping pursuit, and I lay there crying and screaming, without so much as a scratch.

She must have led him on a wild chase, for I didn't see them again all night, but I did hear the sounds of his hunting. From Branwyn I heard no screams, no sounds, and found no evidence of a struggle the next day. My father, for his part, did not seem to remember much of the incident, for he never mentioned it again, not even my confession about the cat. However, I never saw Branwyn again.

I got a new nanny who wasn't half the woman Branwyn was, but she could have been a lot worse. This one really was stupid and simple, a fat gossipy woman named Gerta who spent all her waking hours giggling like a teenage girl about God knows what with the cook. I pretty much did what I wanted.

I mourned the loss of Branny the cat, but the apparent death of my beloved Branwyn left me desolate. I spent weeks in the blackest depression, avoiding everyone, and thinking about suicide. I hated my father passionately. When I stopped thinking of suicide, I began thinking of murder. When I stopped thinking about murder, I began to hope that maybe Branwyn wasn't dead after all. I hadn't found the body, or even any evidence of her wounding. My father had been in a foul mood the whole next day, which was unusual the night after a hunt; he was usually expansive and satisfied. I didn't know how she could have possibly escaped, but I began to hope she did. Branwyn, after all, was always prepared for every eventuality, and surely she must have foreseen this one, too. My fantasies of her escape grew ever more elaborate - for example, she had hidden boats, food, water, maps, and weapons on the island; had streaked straight for the beach down the hidden trail to the cove, put to sea, sailed to Lycapsus, married a handsome knight, and was now happily-ever-aftering in a big castle. Or she had acquired a magical teleportation device that allowed her escape to her lover Meggs' house, and together they fled to the Greybole Forest, where they are living happy and free among the elves. Et cetera.

To deepen the mystery still further, I discreetly tracked down Meggs. I waited several weeks so that the furor, if there was any, would die down, then went to his house. I intercepted a serving maid, who was very nice until I mentioned Meggs' name. At that, she shut up tight as a clam and hurriedly made excuses to get away. I tried this with several servants, who all behaved the same way. The best information that I could glean from any of them was that Meggs was gone, they didn't know what happened to him, and that was their story and they were sticking to it. I preferred to believe Branwyn had stopped off for Meggs before she left. The alternative was too terrible.

But three weeks before I turned thirteen years old - April, 3120 C.R. - everything changed. I met Eru for the first time in the person of a sweet, quiet little thirteen year-old girl with red hair, green eyes, a heart of gold, and a will of iron. If she was not Eru in person, she was certainly His agent. She gave me purpose, direction, and courage where there had been only chaos, aimlessness, and terror. She became the love of my life, then and forever, my Sun, my Moon, my Goddess, my Tabitha.

She contrived to meet me alone. She was in one of my school classes, seemingly a withdrawn and sullen child in a class full of sullen children. The teacher, a spike-nosed old spinster named Miss Gnawgood, tried to get someone to volunteer to go out and clean the erasers. We children just sat there looking sullen. Eventually she gave up trying to get us to do this willingly and sought to pick some poor soul to do the job, which she always had to do, anyway, so I don't know why she didn't just skip the nonsense. I tried to look small but failed. She picked me.

At that very instant, Tabitha's hand shot straight up. Miss Gnawgood was so surprised that it failed at first to dawn on her that she had finally, after all these months, achieved Volunteerism. She just looked at Tabitha, then at me, and decided we both should go. She handed me a box of chalky erasers and ushered us down the corridor to the sewer tunnel where we had to do our work.

When we got to the walkway in the sewer tunnel, ten feet above a turgid run of slimy water, I put down the box of erasers and looked at Tabitha. She was already facing me, a polite smile on her face, her hand extended in greeting. I took it. "I'm Tabitha Kemmer," she said. "And you're Postumus. Pleased to meet you."

Her smile then vanished. "I'm going to tell you something very important, so you must listen carefully because your life depends upon it. You are...," she began, then stopped, looking at me strangely. "Are you all right?"

My mouth was hanging open in dumb surprise. "What?," I said stupidly.

Tabitha rolled her eyes in exaggerated disgust. "God, I always get the bright ones," she said. "I said you must listen very carefully, because I'm going to save your miserable life, though I can't see why that's at all desirable. Your alignment is beginning to coalesce very quickly now, and..."

"My what? Who are you?"

"Shut up and listen! You are becoming Good. You're nice, all right? Is that part clear? Within a few weeks, you'll set off every magical detection device in Balimar. They'll know what you are, and within four weeks you're going to be dead, or worse, if you don't do exactly what I say. You must..."

"Who are they?"

"The rats, you dolt! They want you nasty, frightened, and ambitious. You aren't, and they won't like it. I want to save you."

"Very commendable. How do you know this now and they don't?"

"Our...that is, the people I work for...have better detection devices than the rats do. It gives us about a month's head start on people like you, sometimes more, sometimes not enough. If you want to live, you'll go to this address within the next three nights." She gave me an address verbally, and made me repeat it three times. "Good, better, maybe there's hope for you yet. When you get there, knock once, then three times quick, like this." She demonstrated with a pair of erasers, sending clouds of chalkdust everywhere. "Sorry," she said, and finally the smile came back. "I know this is a lot to handle all at once, but you won't regret it. You'll see. Just come, and listen to what we tell you. Then make up your own mind. Now let's get these erasers done before we're gone too long." At that point, she was done smiling and went diligently to work. I was to see this pattern repeated many times in the next five years.

I went on the second night. I was confused, lonely, frightened, and very curious about this mysterious little girl and her faceless employers. I knocked on the door at about nine o'clock in the evening, wondering what sorcery awaited me on the other side.

The door was opened by a belt buckle. That's the first thing I saw, anyway - a belt buckle right at eye level. My eyes scanned upward until I saw the face, black as pitch, looking down at me impassively. I'd never seen a black man before, nor had I ever seen someone this enormous. He didn't speak but waited for me to state my business.

"I'm Postumus," I said, hoping that would do the trick. After a moment, he nodded slowly, and ushered me inside the house without a word.

He took me to a cozy study, lined with bookcases, well lit. Along one of the long walls, there was a fireplace with an active fire burning merrily, and three cushy easy chairs sat before it. Tabitha sat demurely in one, grinning at me, and a man I didn't recognize sat in another one. The third was empty. The man rose, smiled, and shook my hand. He was short and skinny with blonde, thinning hair and green eyes that shone with wit and intelligence. He looked to be about forty. The giant, meanwhile, stood silently behind me after shutting and locking the door.

"I'd hoped you would come," said the blonde man. "Tabitha has been keeping an eye on you, and she reports that we have to talk with you rather urgently. You know Tabby. My name is Alcon. Tabby is my daughter. The man behind you is named Goth. Won't you sit down?" I took the empty chair. Goth continued to stand at the doorway, looking large.

Alcon sat down again and continued. "I'll get right to the point. You have a decision to make before the night is through. We represent the Church of Eru, and we want to recruit you. If you do not wish to join us, you are free to say so and we will respect that wish. However, if that is your choice, we will remove you from this town tonight. We will take you somewhere far away from here and safe, and place you with a foster family - people who are very nice, and who will treat you with kindness and respect. You will remember nothing of your life here. We will give you false memories, pleasant ones of growing up happy and normal with your new foster parents. We are very good at this, so there will be no problems. I give you my word on Eru's name.

'If you choose, instead, to join us, we can promise you nothing but this: your life will have purpose, you will be helping those who are innocent and too weak to fight back, and you will be hurting those who have hurt you.

'You should know a little about the three of us who asked you here. I am John Mugmoss' personal alchemist. He does not know what I am. What I am is a spy for the Church of Eru, a cleric by training, an alchemist by profession. We all three here are members of the Most Holy and Secret Order of the Mouse. We watch the evils and report what they are doing back to Eru and the Church. Our work is very dangerous, for our foes are powerful and clever, but so are we. Our protection devices are extremely sophisticated. Our alignment auras register as chaotic evil, even to a True Seeing spell. We can tell the most bald-faced lies and the listener will believe us implicitly; not even Detect Lie spells can penetrate this. This room we sit in now" - he gestured grandly - "is immune from scrying spells. Anyone scrying into this house from afar will perceive only what we want them to perceive. Only Gods themselves can penetrate our disguises."

I chose this moment to sneak a quick glance over at Tabitha. She was watching me closely with an uncomfortably appraising look. She was not smiling, exactly, but there was just a hint of amusement in her pretty green eyes, and honesty; so much honesty. I was overmatched. I looked away quickly, feeling hopelessly inadequate in the face of such overpowering confidence. I felt shame for what I was hit me like a pressure wave. I had never before felt the withering judgment of a virtue so powerful that it made me feel my mere existence was defilement. I knew I was so deficient that I could never attain the respect of that virtue; but I also knew that I had no choice but to try.

Alcon paused in his monologue, perhaps sensing my discomfort, but then continued. "We must be very careful about what we do. Eru gives us special dispensation to perform heinous evil deeds in the furtherance of our cover. The only thing we may not do is torture another sentient being. My Eru forgive us if we are ever forced to do this, for the Church will still severely punish us for it.

'Although we may do evil deeds - and I have done many; I whip up some frightful poisons - the taint of evil is very powerful and our immortal souls, while guarded, are not immune. We members of the Order of the Mouse agree to undertake strenuous Quests to cleanse them. The longer the period between Quests, the more strenuous they will be.

'For many years, I lived in Soroth with my wife and daughter. I was a Cleric full-time then. Tabby was born there. My wife died when Tabby was eight. Assassins from the Temple of Set murdered her. That was when I asked to become a member of the Order, and after a year of training, the Church sent me here.

'Goth, here, is a Sorothian, also. He was a magic-user once before the Temple of Set caught him, found out he worshipped Eru, and cut his tongue out. It is unregenerable, so he cannot cast most of the spells that once provided his livelihood. He joined us for revenge, and was assigned to work with me here. Some day he wants go back to Soroth to fight the Temple of Set."

"How many of you are there in Balimar?," I asked, intrigued.

"I can't tell you. If you join us, Goth, Tabby, and I will be your only contacts with the Order."

"Why me?," I asked. "Surely there must be older, more mature people that could do a better job for you. Adults. Why children? Why do you put your daughter at such a horrible risk?"

"Adults are very difficult to recruit," he said. "We're always on the lookout for them, but suitable candidates are rare. Most people are too set in their ways, not malleable like children. We recruit a lot of adolescents like yourself. Children are clever, resilient, dedicated, and we can recruit them from right under their noses and they never suspect a thing.

'As for Tabby, she whole-heartedly supports what we're doing. She is as bitter about her mother as I am. We are a team. I told her she had complete veto power over our endeavor. When she wants out, we go. Like that." He snapped his fingers.

'If you decide to join us, Postumus, we will not permit you to do anything dangerous for at least a year. We will train you thoroughly first. Be prepared to lose some sleep, because we do much of our training at night. You're young - you'll handle it very well, I'm sure.

'Do you have any questions?," he asked.

"Three," I said. "First: If I join you and decide I want out, am I free to go?"

"Absolutely, at any time," Alcon replied. "Just tell me, and I'll get you out within the hour. Next?"

"How do I know you're not lying to me?"

He laughed heartily. "A good question. You do not, but I swear upon Eru's holy Name that everything I have told you is true. If I told you a lie, my soul is now eternal toast. The last question?"

"Can you find out what happened to Branwyn?"

"Who is Branwyn?"

"My former nanny. I think my father killed her, but I don't know for sure."

"I'll try. No promises. Is there anything else?"

"No."

"Will you join us?"

I would have joined anyway, but I looked at Tabitha and saw her smiling at me, bright and beautiful, and I couldn't have left Balimar if I'd tried.

"Where do I sign?"

The first thing they did, that very night, was extract one of my adult molars and replace it with a magical ivory tooth. This tooth, Alcon explained, was the source of the aura alteration that would eventually register me as a true chaotic evil. It was designed to begin functioning slowly, over the period of a month or two, to simulate the formation of alignment that seems to happen at adolescence. It was, for all intents and purposes, a real tooth. It did not radiate magic. Once it was placed, it was just like the old tooth, but getting it into my gums was very painful. Alcon cast a spell on me that kept me paralyzed, and Goth extracted the tooth with pliers in one swift, excruciating tug. After placing the new tooth, which grafted instantly into the empty socket, Alcon applied another spell, which he called a "cure light wounds," and both the wound and the pain vanished instantly. This was my first direct experience with magical spells.

As Alcon promised, my life as a "Mouse" began slowly. Tabitha gave me periodic lessons as often as she could without attracting undue attention. She showed me how to break into buildings, use invisible inks, choose dead-drops, make surreptitious note passes, and tail people. She told me about the rats, gave me a magical truncheon (only magic could hurt the rats, which was why Branwyn's skillet had not hurt my father), and told me never to use it unless I would surely die otherwise. She told me about lycanthropy, the disease that turned men into rats, and how it might be cured or its onset slowed (belladonna worked well; I thereafter kept some hidden at home). She gave me a magical wand with six "color spray" spells on it, which she said had a good chance of working on one or two rats, if I could shine it directly into their eyes. She taught me the "alignment tongue," a specialized language that was enough different from the common tongue that it was unrecognizable to the untrained ear. We always spoke this language to each other on our "jobs," so the rats wouldn't understand us. Alcon gave me a code name: I was called BLINDMAN.

Tabby was a hard taskmaster. She was always brusque and businesslike with me when she was training me, and hardly ever smiled. Evils never really smiled, she said, so she practiced being silent and grim. Being grim wasn't hard to do in Balimar. She ran like a gazelle and never tired. Our first five-mile run was hell, but I was determined she wouldn't out-tough me. I doggedly followed her, destroyed after three miles but not giving in to the pain. I completed the run, but fell exhausted at the finish and didn't move for another hour. She only looked at me with pity. This girl was going to be really hard to impress, I thought miserably.

One day, when I miraculously wasn't doing anything, I went back down to the boat docks to see Zack. I knew his eighteenth birthday was coming up, and I was worried about him. The Temple of the Rat called age eighteen the Age of Epiphany: it was when they turned adolescents into wererats. Even Miss Gnawgood admitted that this was a dreadfully painful process. I wasn't sure how it would affect Zack. I didn't want him to stop being my friend. I found him cleaning the fishing gear on the Miss Nereid.

"Hey, Zack!," I called.

"Hey, Post!," he said. "Come aboard!"

I climbed aboard the boat, and poured myself a cup of mead from the keg they kept on deck, then sat down ostentatiously, put my feet up, and watched him work. He didn't seem to notice my deliberate laziness.

"When's your birthday, Z?," I asked nonchalantly.

"Oh, a month or two, I dunno."

"Do you know what happens on your birthday, Z?"

"Yeah! Cake, presents, a song or two..."

"No, I mean this birthday. Your eighteenth. The Temple is going to give you a ceremony, you know."

"You mean a party by that nice Mr. Mugmoss? That'd be swell!"

"No," I said, not sure how to pierce such bottomless ignorance. "They're going to do things to you. I want you to promise me something. No matter what they do to you, you'll still be my friend, okay? Will you promise me?"

"Sure, Post. I promise."

"No, Z. I mean really promise me. Swear it. Swear on your mother's name. Swear on the Rat that you'll always be my friend. Will you do that?"

Zack looked puzzled. He could see I was serious, but he couldn't understand the question. "Sure, Post. I'll always be your friend, you know that. May the Rat strike me dead if you're ever not."

A month later, Zack disappeared.

Tabby and I wrapped up one particularly grueling night of training at three o'clock in the morning. Goth was giving me training in hand-to-hand combat, and I ended up on my back every time with Goth pointing his club at me and growling as if he meant it. Maybe he did; I could never tell with Goth. By the time it was over, I ached everywhere. When Goth finally allowed me to quit for the night, Tabby said she wasn't tired, and suggested we walk down to the elven quarter, which was both beautiful and safe from marauding ratmen. We borrowed two of the invisibility rings (which also allowed the users to see invisible creatures, so we could see each other all right) and walked down to the elven quarter. Predictably, the ever-lawful Church of Eru required us to sign for the rings.

The elven quarter was wooded and green, with little hillocks and glens and an occasional elven dwelling placed discreetly among the rich foliage. We saw a few elves (elves don't sleep) but they didn't notice us. We climbed to the top of a small hill overlooking the city of Balimar, mostly dark except for the large public buildings. The Temple of the Rat, to the north of us about five hundred yards, was lit up like a malignant Christmas tree, looking watchful and alive.

We reached the top of the hill. Tabby seemed content just to sit there, serene and relaxed for a change. I spoke anyway; I needed the sane conversation that had left me since Branwyn went away.

"Tell me about your mother," I said.

She looked at me, pained. Oh, terrific move, Postumus, I thought at myself; you'll really impress her by hurting her feelings! However, when Tabby spoke, her voice was strong and even.

"My mother used to sing to me when I was a little girl," she said. "She had red hair, like mine, and the clearest, most beautiful voice. She sang solos in the Church choir in Cardalusa, where we lived. She was a Cleric, too, like Daddy. I'm going to be a Cleric when I grow up. I'm going to be the best Cleric in the whole Church of Eru, and become the Matriarch, and live in the Seven Heavens with Eru himself. I'll feed the poor and clothe the naked and cure the sick. There are so many things wrong with this world that just a little kindness could cure. Instead, most people are just mean.

'I remember a song Mom used to sing to me, called 'Hard Times'. It went like this." She began to sing a slow, maudlin melody in a lovely soprano.

"Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears,
Oh, Hard Times come again no more.

"While we seek mirth and beauty, and music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door.
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say,
Oh, Hard Times come again no more.

"'Tis a sigh that is wafted upon the troubled wave
'Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore.
'Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave,
Oh, Hard Times come again no more.

"Tis the song, the sigh of the weary:
Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more;
Many days you have lingered outside my cabin door,
Oh, Hard Times come again no more."

"And then there was 'Amazing Grace'," she said. "Mom had such a wonderful voice. We used to sing 'Amazing Grace' together. I'd sing the melody and she'd sing the harmony, and it was very beautiful. Do you sing?"

"A little," I said. I loved singing, but I had never sung harmony with anyone before.

She began singing, and I joined her, shyly at first, but quickly gaining volume. Tabby switched to harmony and soon the hills rang out a surprisingly sweet rendition of 'Amazing Grace' upon the silent and disapproving Temple of the Rat.

"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.

"Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come
'Twas grace that brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home.

"'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fear relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

"When we've been gone ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we first begun.

"The Lord has promised good to me
His word my heart reveres
My shield and mace shall Eru be
As long as life endures."

She sighed, deeply and sadly, and then finally she began to cry. I felt tears tugging involuntarily at the corners of my own eyes, thinking of Branwyn, the only mother I had ever known. I put my arm around Tabby's shoulder without thinking and pulled her closer. She tucked her head into me and sobbed quietly but in real anguish. I leaned my head against hers, and the tears came flooding out in an irresistible cascade, and we sat there in the cool dark night crying together for the mothers taken from us for no more reason than that someone else wanted to take them.

Slowly, the Church of Eru began issuing me assignments. Usually, I worked alone; sometimes with Tabby. Most of the assignments were frightfully dull - tail this guy, watch that guy, listen to what that lady over there is saying to that gentleman; that sort of thing. Sometimes, Alcon asked me to retrieve messages left at dead-drops. However, my job largely consisted of keeping my eyes and ears open, and reporting what I saw and heard.

One day, Alcon summoned me to his house. Goth let me in and led me to the same book-lined study in which Alcon had recruited me over a year earlier. Alcon led me to a chair and sat down opposite me. He smiled at me, then got straight to the point, as usual.

"I have some good news for you," he said. "Your nanny, Branwyn, is alive and well. I can't tell you where, or how. It took me a long time just to learn this much. I was very surprised myself at the delay, because such a request for information doesn't usually take so long. I thought this was very strange. I finally found out why." He paused, and my impatience boiled over.

"Why?," I asked.

"She was one of us," he said. "She was going to try to recruit you when you got a little older. We took over her job, although we didn't know that at the time. The Church compartmentalizes all information in our business, and they don't tell you these interesting tidbits of information even if you ask for them. I had to call in some favors to get this much information, and it's all I'm authorized to tell. Still, I was happy to hear that she's still alive."

As I was leaving, Alcon called to me, and I turned to look at him.

He said, "Branwyn says to tell you that Branny was really her cat."

I was overjoyed to hear that Branwyn was alive and well, and I hoped to arrange to see her again someday. I knew she was too smart for those big, ugly rodents. However, I simultaneously developed a creepy feeling that my entire life was being manipulated by forces too vast and powerful for me to see. It was kind of unpleasant, in a way; I didn't know to what end I was being used.

As a young Rat-Cleric designate, I became eligible for assigned duties within the Temple. Alcon thought that this was a very positive sign. It showed the Rats trusted me, and that I would be in an increasingly better position to gather useful intelligence.

My first assignment was to attend to the needs of something Miss Gnawgood called "The Colony". What was "The Colony," I asked?

"You shall see when you get there," she replied brusquely. "A caretaker is always there to attend to the needs of the guests. The caretaker's term of duty is one week. There is a small cabin, completely stocked with everything you need for yourself and our guests there. Here is a map. Please do not divulge this location to anyone. When you arrive at the location shown on this map, say the password aloud, and a magical gate will appear. Step through, and the gate will close behind you. Any questions?"

"No."

"You leave in a week. Be ready."

And so I was. I walked several miles out west of the town, then turned north on a side road, into a dark wood. I came to a clearing, shown on the map, and left the path to walk to the large granite boulder marked as the point where the gate should appear. I said the password aloud - 'Beware ye the eyes in the dark!' - and the gate magically appeared as described. I stepped through, into a strange world.

I was on a desolate, dark plain. Occasional stunted trees dotted the ugly landscape. There were cheerless, forbidding hills in the far distance and very dark clouds overhead. The air smelled faintly of decay. I was on a path, so I followed it.

Eventually, I came to a house-sized building. Along the path beyond the building, there was an iron wall with a large, mechanical gate set in it. The gate looked unlocked. A boy not much older than I whom I didn't recognize came out of the building and greeted me sullenly.

"So you're Postumus," he said in the half-sneer common to many rat-worshippers. "Well, welcome to your week in Hell. I don't think it really is Hell, but if it isn't, I don't envy the ones who go there." He didn't bother to shake my hand, but just reached inside the door for his duffel-bag and prepared to leave.

"Hold on a second," I said. "What do I do here?"

"Oh, so this is your first time, huh?," he sneered. His nose crinkled in ratlike disapproval. "Then I'll give you the tour.

'But first, a little history. You know about the Epiphany, right? When we get new worshippers, or when the children turn eighteen, they must be made into Rats so they can serve the Rat God better. It is the Rat God's greatest gift to Man. You know all this, of course. What they don't tell you is that sometimes it doesn't work quite right." He opened the heavy iron gate with a switch, we walked into a no-man's-land between two fences, and the boy shut the outer gate we had just entered. Then he opened the inner gate, and we walked into The Colony, shutting the second gate behind us, too.

At first I didn't see anything, but as we walked deeper into The Colony, I glanced to my right by a gnarled old dead tree, and saw my first Blessed of the God. We walked over to him, or it. My companion went right on speaking as if the creature in front of us were not alive, though it plainly was.

"See, sometimes it don't take," he said, picking up a stick and poking at the hideous creature in front of us. It was roughly the mass of a full-grown man, but it was nearly formless. Its skin, if that was what it was, was dead-white and slightly viscous; it flowed like a very thick jelly. A piece of jelly dropped off the creature when my companion poked it, falling to the ground quivering, and then crawling like an obscene inchworm back to its home. The creature had no arms, legs, or nose, but had a quivery opening approximating a mouth. Only the eyes of this formless monster were still human. They were unchanged, and blazed with horrified, desperate life. The eyes looked familiar, somehow, as if...

"Possdumss," the thing that had once been Zack burbled at me, almost happily. "Im s-s-sdih ur ffren', Possdumss. I dole oo I ood be!"

"You feed them. That's what you do here," my companion said callously, and dragged me away to see the rest of the Blessed Ones.

"My god, Tabby," I said, recounting my ordeal at The Colony. It was the night of my return, and I was still in shock. We were sitting on a bench in a little corner park in the northwest part of the city. It was May, 3122 C.R., and we were both fifteen years of age. "You can't believe how awful it is there. Those poor people, turned into faceless lumps of goo...I had to call up every bit of courage just to go near poor Zack again, let alone pretend he was still my friend. But he was so happy to see me! He thinks I came to see him out of friendship, not because I had to go. He's just the same as he was, Tab, but he's been turned into muck."

Tabby looked stricken and just sat there for a while. Finally she said, "Do you have any nice clothes?"

"What's that got to do with it? Of course I have nice clothes. What do you think we are, poor?"

"Don't knock it. Run home, change into some nice clothes - evening dress clothes - and meet me back here in an hour and a half."

"What are we going to do?"

Trust me. You need this. Just be here in ninety minutes." She wouldn't elaborate further, so I did as she said.

When I came back to the park, a little over an hour later, Tabitha was sitting primly on the park bench wearing a forest green full-length evening gown of real silk. It nicely complemented her green eyes and red hair. She made me look frumpy by comparison, although my formal wear was not cheap stuff. She looked up and beamed radiantly at me as I approached, and rose from the park bench to greet me. She handed me a small, burgundy velvet ring box and held a matching one for herself. I took the box and opened it to find a man's gold wedding band, delicately traced with carvings of faces of various ages ranging from a little baby to a very old man.

"Is this a proposal?," I asked coyly.

She blushed, this interpretation apparently not having occurred to her. "No, silly," she said. "Do what I do. How old should we be?"

"I've always wanted to be twenty-four," I said, waiting to see where this was going. Tabby loved indirection.

"Twenty-four! I like it," she said. "So be it!" She put her ring - a matching woman's wedding band - on her left ring finger and said, "Twenty-four!"

Instantly, Tabitha changed - from a freckle-faced girl of fifteen, cute but a little gangly, to a stunning young woman of twenty-four years of age. Her red hair was beautifully styled, waving silkily down her back to her waist, with strands brushed over her forehead and ringlets dancing around her ears. Her cheeks formed into winsome little dimples as she smiled triumphantly at me.

She enchanted me. "You're beautiful," I breathed. "Is this what you look like when you're twenty-four?"

"Yes," she said, looking downward in embarrassment. She raised her eyes back up slightly, smiling at me. "Put your ring on."

I did so, saying "twenty-four" just as she had done. I saw her looking at me with wry amusement. "What is it?," I said.

"You're starting to lose your hair," she said, playfully rearranging the hair on my forehead. "Never mind. Come on." She grabbed my hand and pulled me down the street to the northeast.

"Where are we going?," I asked her.

"To a very nice inn for dinner."

"Where do we get that kind of money?"

She dangled a heavy, jingling purse she had retrieved from somewhere, Eru knows where. "Petty cash," she said.

"Stealing?," I asked, slightly offended.

"Oh, no," she replied. "A legitimate expense. We have an account for helping burned-out employees. Don't worry about it. Just relax and enjoy it."

We arrived at the best Inn in Balimar, where the maitre'd greeted us solemnly. Tabitha gave him a reservation in a name I had never heard before, and the maitre'd instantly became solicitous. He guided us to a private table outdoors, where he seated us and gave us a flagon of house wine before dinner.

A very good band led by a half-elven bard was playing soft dance music. Some dozen or so couples slow-danced around a wooden dance floor.

We ordered and received dinner, talking idly of everything but rats; no shop talk on this night. Eventually I asked the question I had been dying to ask all evening, but hadn't the courage to.

"Is all this really just for a burned-out employee, Tabby?," I asked, afraid of the answer. "Or did you do this for yourself, too?"

She looked down, as if considering, took a deep breath, and looked back up at me. Her small mouth inched upward in a shy, uncertain smile, her lightly freckled cheeks making those dimples-to-die-for, and said, "I did this for me. Are you offended?"

"Not at all!," I said. I paused, considered, and asked, "Would you dance with me?"

"I'd love to."

I was not a good dancer, but she didn't seem to mind, and soon we were holding each other close and slow-dancing to the sounds of a harp solo by the bard. I was blissfully happy.

We kissed at the end of the third song, and it was delicious, slow and sweet, like the music. I was entranced, bewitched by this beautiful green-eyed girl. I wanted that night to last forever.

"Run away with me," I breathed in adolescent rapture. "Let's leave this town, tonight, and get married and have a hundred kids and clothe the poor and feed the sick and heal the naked. Or whatever that was. Wherever you go, I want to go with you."

"Silly, I need to stay here," she said. I should have known she would be unswayed. Then she nearly made me faint with surprise when she said, "But we will, though not now. We'll leave here just before we turn eighteen, and if you still want me then, I'll be yours forever. I love you, Postumus," she said.

"And I love you," I said. Even in Balimar, despite the best efforts of almost everyone I knew, I could be happy, if only for a while.

Part 3
AMAZING GRACE

For the next two and one-half years, Tabitha and I dropped into a routine that was sometimes harrowing but usually comfortable. No one seemed to suspect us of anything subversive, and although we became an "item," even Ratmen have girlfriends. It was difficult, however, not to show the depth of love I felt for Tabitha. Love was not an emotion Ratmen regularly indulged in; the Rats considered it soft and spineless. Rather, the Rats assumed and expected a relationship between a man and woman (or in our case, boy and girl) to be one of lustful convenience. If they suspected anything more, they gleefully imposed the only penalty that the Temple had for transgressions against the Rat God.

Our campaign against the Rat God and his minions on Earth was mundane, as I've said. Our duties consisted mostly of reporting what we heard, although occasionally Alcon asked us to do something more dangerous. Twice, we broke into houses to steal small items of interest, once we planted some kind of magical scrying device in a warehouse in advance of a secret meeting, and many times we acted as messengers or couriers. We were usually quite safe unless some Ratman was watching very carefully.

Winter warmed and melted into the Spring of 3125 C.R., the year both Tabitha and I turned eighteen years of age. We knew we had to leave Balimar no later than April 22nd of that year, the day Tabitha turned eighteen. Alcon was a little sorry to have to leave because our efforts there had been both very useful to the Church and surprisingly easy, he said. The Ratmen were extremely passionate, violent, and unpredictable, but they apparently couldn't organize a systematic counter-espionage campaign like Lawful Evil organizations such as the Devil Worshippers, Al-Islam, or Set. Those counter-espionage networks were well-organized and effective. Nevertheless, Alcon recognized the necessity of cutting our losses and leaving while we could still get out. He discreetly removed whatever items he could slowly over the year prior to April, 3125, even though circumstances would force him to leave behind many of the possessions he had acquired during his eight years in Balimar. We couldn't just haul a large moving cart and team of draft horses to the front door and leave, after all.

We set our "moving day" for April 15, 3125, one week before Tabby's birthday. We thought it was an auspicious day - the new moon meant that the Ratmen were at the ebb of their power, so there should be very little activity on that day and escape should be easy. Our mode of escape was the Word of Recall, a magical spell that transported us instantly to the Temple of Eru in Krell. We had one such spell available to us, in a hidden safe in Alcon's workroom, which we would cast from an enchanted phylactery. When we returned safely to Krell, the Church of Eru would give us our respective Quests and if we survived those, which was fairly likely, Tabitha and I would marry and enter Clerical training. We hid our excitement as best we could, but we couldn't resist using the magical aging rings one more time before we left the city for good.

And so, on April 10, 3125, Tabby and I went to dinner together for the last time. We made ourselves sixty-eight years of age - we wanted to pre-experience our golden wedding anniversary. We went to the same elegant restaurant we had been to on that wonderful evening when we were fifteen impersonating twenty-four. Our meal was wonderful, the wine excellent, and the dancing romantic. We were full and pleasantly intoxicated on our walk home when we found ourselves confronted on a suddenly empty street by three Ratmen.

They moved fast. One of them jumped at me but missed, giving me time to draw my wand. I "color-sprayed" him in the teeth and he crumpled in a mangy heap at my feet. Tabby wasn't quite so lucky.

Two of them went for her and grabbed her on their first try. She screamed and struggled but there wasn't anything she could do to stop them from dragging her into the alley. She did slow them down, however, enough for me to run after her when I'd finished with mine.

The Ratmen were ripping at her clothes when they heard me enter the alleyway. One of them turned on me and charged, but I had my wand out and ready. I pointed it at him and sprayed. He, too, dropped unconscious in his tracks. The third Rat, the biggest one, grabbed Tabby around the throat from behind, and looked threatening. He snarled at me and hissed, "Come no clossser, hyumann, or I kill her now."

"Let her go, you cat turd," I said calmly. His right claw moved like lightning toward Tabitha's exposed throat, but suddenly the rat stopped and looked at me as if I were Bast the Cat Goddess herself come for retribution. I didn't know why he stopped, but didn't hesitate at the turn of good fortune. I fired at him, too, and the third Ratman crumpled unconscious to the cobblestones without another word, a look of stunned surprise on his rodenty face.

The color spray had knocked Tabby out as cold as the Ratman, but I scooped her up and scrambled away as fast as I could, shaken but unhurt. Tabitha awoke a few minutes later cradled in my arms. She gave me an adoring "my-hero" look and jogged without help the rest of the way home. Tabitha had some scratches which Alcon assured us were not sufficiently grievous to inflict lycanthropy. We thought we were very lucky. We didn't know it then, but our luck had just run out.

Moving day came, and we were all busy destroying evidence and retrieving valuable items that we could take with us. It was early evening and we were making last-minute preparations when a loud knock came at the front door. We all looked at each other in surprise, but not alarm. Maybe it was another Church of Eru contact with some late instructions or warning. Goth answered the door looking his most menacing.

A small man with an expression that made him look like he'd been eating prunes stood aggressively at the door. We recognized him as a low-level Rat Cleric from the Temple. He had four very large, well-armed fellow-worshippers with him. He looked at us all and spoke.

"Oh, good," he hissed. "Postumus is here, too. John Mugmoss announces the baptism of his newborn baby girl. You are all cordially invited to attend the ceremony. Bring your own robes."

"This is delightful," said Alcon smoothly. "But she was not due for delivery for another two weeks. Is something wrong?"

"Premature labor," the prune-eater said without a hint of irony.

"We will certainly be there," said Alcon. "Thank you for the news."

"I'm to wait for you," he said. We had little choice but to go with him.

At the Temple, a priest took Tabitha's black robe from her and gave her a maroon one. He then led her firmly away. Other clerics led Alcon, Goth, and me away in separate directions.

I thought I was dead then. They seemed to suspect something. Instead of leading me to the dungeon, however, my guide directed me to my usual spot on the balcony to watch the ceremony. The crowd filed in, holding their candles, and the Birthing Ceremony began normally. I relaxed a little - if they suspected something, they surely would have acted already. Besides, the Ratmen were always this pushy. Perhaps there was nothing wrong after all.

I strained to see Tabby in the maidens' balcony, but I could not pick her out. I was not too worried about Tabby being Chosen; Mugmoss had never chosen anything but a blonde for his wife. He was very consistent that way.

Mugmoss' current wife lay naked on the floor, just like that other poor young woman had eleven years ago. The baby born from that union was a vicious, sadistic boy who liked to torture small animals. I understood John Mugmoss was very pleased with him and believed him to be a very talented prospect for priesthood. The ceremony was proceeding in its profane and terrible way. Eventually, the time came, and the baby was born. It was a girl, just as prune-eater had said it would be. The baby girl was duly washed, sanctified, and taken away, and Mugmoss turned on the maidens in the balcony.

"And who will be my next bride?," he asked, very softly.

The young maidens, probably in thrall to some magical spell, squealed with rapture, and descended upon Mugmoss with adoring eyes. I finally spotted Tabitha in the crowd, and noted with approval that she was hanging back and trying to look inconspicuous. There were several likely looking candidates between Mugmoss and her, so she was in no danger.

Or so I thought. Mugmoss moved quickly. He strode forward into the screaming mob of young women, knocking several aside, and marched right up to Tabitha, without hesitation. He touched her lightly, almost tenderly, on the shoulder, and suddenly the other girls fell silent, as if they had but one voice. Tabitha stood rooted to the spot, looking up at Mugmoss with her mouth hanging slack.

"I now pronounce us man and wife," he said, and suddenly and violently threw Tabitha against the far wall. He Changed into his ratform in an instant, clawing at my poor, beautiful, doomed Tabitha, and ripped her still-beating heart out from her chest.

I leapt to my feet, screaming. Mugmoss turned slowly around to look at me, a smile forming on his rodent face, and he held the dripping heart up for me to see.

"I told you, my little imp," he said, softly. Clawed hands seized me from behind. More loudly, Mugmoss said, "REMOVE HIM!"

I spent that night and the next day in a dungeon far below the Temple, chained with my feet dangling beneath me on a damp stone wall. The rats were very busy that night. Several people were brought into the dungeon and forced to undergo hideous tortures while I watched. There was an older man, a younger woman, and a teenage couple, whom the wererat torturers alternately raped while they forced the others to watch. There was no one I knew, however, and no one paid any attention to me.

The next night, they came for me, led by John Mugmoss. Accompanying Mugmoss were my father, looking murderously angry; Squire Mugmoss, my old "friend"; two goons I did not know, and Grandma Ulena.

I knew Grandma Ulena was dead, but here she was again. I knew instantly who she was, although the skin on her face was dried, flaky, and half rotted away, exposing gleaming yellowed bone. Her sightless cataracts were gone, leaving empty sockets that glowed with bright pinpoints of red light. She wore a rotted purple robe embroidered with gold thread depicting scenes of sexual torture, and she carried an elegant ebony staff. I screamed in fright and despair. Ulena merely cackled in delight. She spoke to Squire Mugmoss.

"Are you sure it was him?," she said in a surprisingly clear, strong voice for someone who had no tongue.

"Yes," Squire said simply, obviously afraid of her.

John Mugmoss approached me and looked into my eyes, and I stopped screaming as if my throat were connected to a switch that he controlled.

"And so, little imp, we meet again."

He gestured and his two flunky goons walked out of the dungeon entrance and returned moments later carrying two poles. Impaled on the tops of the poles were the heads of Alcon and Goth.

Speaking to the poles, Mugmoss said, "Tell Postumus what he should have learned earlier."

Simultaneously, the heads of Alcon and Goth (despite his lack of a tongue) shrieked, "BEWARE YE THE EYES IN THE DARK!"

Turning back to me, Mugmoss smiled. "I want to thank you for helping me to break up this little ring of yours. Just what was it you told Squire the other day, Postumus?"

"He called me a 'cat turd'," said Squire. "It didn't look like him, but I would've recognized his voice anywhere."

Oh Holy Eru, it was Squire that I had color sprayed in the alley six days before. If I had said nothing, we would have escaped and been gone by now.

"The ones you saw here last night were other members of your subversive little organization," said Mugmoss to me. "They have you to thank for their stay here, which will be long and entertaining for us. Tabitha also asked me to convey a message to you."

Suddenly, my head received a physical jolt, as if it had been hit with a board, and my mind was filled with stark images, as though I were witnessing them firsthand, of John Mugmoss doing unspeakable things with Tabitha's animated corpse. I screamed and vomited, then vomited and screamed. After an eternity or two, Mugmoss cut off the images.

"Tabitha was a most enjoyable companion last night. A pity our marriage won't last long." Switching subjects, Mugmoss turned to the Ulena-thing. "What tortures should we subject him to, Ulena?," asked Mugmoss. It was then that my father spoke for the first time.

"Let me take care of it," he said.

Squire looked furious, and whirled on his father. "NO, FATHER! Don't let him! This jackass raised the little monster in the first place! He's incompetent! He'll..."

"SILENCE!," roared Mugmoss at his son. "Or you may get what the imp is going to get." Squire shut his mouth so quickly I heard his teeth clack.

"Your vapid son is correct, for a change, John," the Ulena-thing said silkily. "Cilgor is a weakling, and it would be a very bad move to entrust the imp to him. Give the imp to me. He would make a most suitable subject for some of my experiments."

But Mugmoss looked pensive for a moment, then said, "No, Ulena. You always did neglect the long view. This time I believe John Cilgor has a good idea. I'm going to grant his request."

"A mistake, John," said the Ulena-thing, looking disappointed.

"We shall see," said Mugmoss, unlocking my manacles. Then he turned to the goons and said, "But first, convert him."

The two goons Changed into ratform and hurled themselves at me, clawing and biting. I was ripped, chewed, and salivated on, but they were very careful not to inflict fatal damage. I knew that they were infecting me with wererat lycanthropy, and that soon my mind would degenerate to the point where I was a hungry, cruel, raving, evil mad thing like all the others.

After the goons had finished, Mugmoss said, "Oh, Postumus: I thought you might like to know that I named my new baby daughter Postuma, in your honor." He paused, and smiled. "Take him, John Cilgor," he said, and my father and the two goons led me away in chains, while the idiot heads of Alcon and Goth continued crying "BEWARE YE THE EYES IN THE DARK!" like obscene parrots.

My father took me straight home, where we gathered in the elegant living room. Then he dismissed the two goons. They looked surprised, and just stood there uncertainly. My father repeated his dismissal, this time at a bellow. They finally thought they understood: my father was going to torture me all by himself, and my father wasn't allowing them to join in the fun. They shuffled out the door, looking sullen and resentful.

My father then unlocked my chains. He looked at me a long moment, then thrust a club toward me, saying, "Hit me, Postumus."

I was taken aback. "Why?," I asked through my bloody mouth. "You have all the excuse you need. Just kill me."

"Your escape must look genuine," he said quietly. "It will look much better if you beat me senseless first."

"You want me to escape?"

My father looked at me for a long time, then down at the floor. His eyes were tired, defeated, infinitely tragic. I really saw him for the first time - just a sad, incompetent little man. He looked like an accountant who had just lost his job instead of a fearsome creature of the night.

"You are my only son," he said, so softly that he was nearly inaudible, still avoiding my gaze. He appeared to struggle with himself, and with great effort, he said, "And I love you. Go, Postumus, please. I couldn't bear to see you killed."

"Why should I?," I said furiously. I could already feel the liquid violence of the disease coursing through my veins. "You murdered everyone I ever loved. You killed Tabby, you killed Branwyn," - I didn't let on that I knew she had escaped - " but worst of all, you killed my mother!"

My father's face suddenly blazed with passion and he looked me directly in the eyes. "I loved your mother with all my soul! She was the best thing that ever happened to me and I did not kill her. I swear upon the unholy Rat that I didn't know they were going to put her through that birthing ceremony. Priests' wives don't have to give birth that way. I had Mugmoss' agreement that Loryn would not be subjected to that, and he went and did it anyway without my knowledge. It almost killed me when I found out she was dead." Suddenly his animation dissolved like smoke and he burst into tears of utter despair. I learned with a shock that my father was a very lonely and broken man.

But I was not about to let him off that easily. He was still a vile excuse for a man. "Forget it," I said contrarily. "I have nothing left to live for anyway. You'll have to kill me here."

"Please, Postumus!," he implored pathetically. "You are my son. I couldn't save your mother, but I can save you. Go while you still can!"

I let him sweat awhile longer. "All right," I said finally, "but I want something from you."

"Anything," he said eagerly.

"I want you to give Tabitha a decent burial. You gather up every piece of her you can find, and give her a decent funeral in the pauper's cemetery outside of town. And I want you to give her a headstone, an expensive granite one with something kind written on it. No, write: 'Here Lies Tabitha Kemmer, beloved of Postumus; She was beautiful at any age.' Write it down and show it to me." He did. I corrected his spelling, then added, "And if there isn't anything left of her, I want the headstone anyway. Got it?"

"Yes."

"Good. Good-bye, father. Believe me, it is good." Then I left, but first I beat him senseless, just as he had requested.

Before I walked out of the house, I stopped in my room and ate as much Belladonna as I thought I could without killing myself. Waves of nausea washed over me as the poison hit my bloodstream, but I remained conscious.

I lurched across town, my consciousness wavering, the Belladonna moderating the disease just enough for me to keep my eye on the prize. I remember very little of that journey, except the end. I managed with supreme effort to climb the great stone steps before I collapsed and whispered "I'm a wererat, please help me," to a very surprised young acolyte at the Temple of Eru.

EPILOGUE

The Church of Eru cured my lycanthropy, and after two months of rehabilitation, they smuggled me out of Balimar. I went directly to Krell. The High Priest in Krell himself gave me Quest and Atonement spells to cleanse my soul of the evil taint I had accumulated during my five years as a Mouse. I completed my Quest and immediately entered Clerical training, where a year later, the Church of Eru made me an ordained Priest.

One year after Tabitha's death, April 15, 3126 C.R., I quietly returned to Balimar. I went to the Pauper's Cemetery south of the town, not sure what I was looking for. Yet there it was: the largest, most ornate headstone on the grounds, inscribed to my beloved Tabitha just as I had instructed my father to do.

The day was as cheerless and gray as I felt. I sat down at the headstone, not even knowing if my Tabitha's remains were below me, and laid a large bouquet of flowers on the grave. The wind picked up, cutting me like a chill blade. A drizzling rain began to fall and continued steadily all through the bleak afternoon as I sat there, crying sporadically. Finally, at dusk, the rain stopped and the setting sun peeked uncertainly through the clouds, bathing the cemetery in shades of orange and indigo. As the wind stilled, I stood at the head of Tabitha Kemmer's grave and sang 'Amazing Grace' alone.