Nix is the first to move once the mimic is truly down.

  He steps back from the corpse, reaches into his kit, and pulls a potion free with the practiced irritation of someone who resents having to spend money on being alive. He bites the stopper, spits it aside, and drinks.

  The smell of it hits the room a second later—cleaner than anything else in the crypt, sharp with herbs and magic.

  That does it. The worst of the damage stops mattering almost at once. Not all the way—pain lingers, and pride more so—but the one bad hit from dying look is gone.

  Jim, still hugging the bronze doorway at floor level, feels an absurd little flicker of relief.

  Good. Bread rogue remains operational.

  Selise and Garrick move in on the mimic corpse.

  Neither of them trusts it, which is sensible. Garrick gives it a testing nudge with the tip of his sword, then another, ready for the thing to suddenly spring back to life. Selise hangs back half a pace, lantern angled low, using the light to look over the dead mass while Garrick pokes at it.

  The mimic stays dead.

  They begin checking around it and through it in the ugly, practical way adventurers do when a monster was pretending to be loot.

  Brother Halden, meanwhile, stands still in the middle of the room and looks around with a different kind of alarm.

  “This should not be here,” he says, voice low but edged. “The priests would not have left a mimic as a guard.”

  That lands in the room harder than a shout.

  Garrick glances back at him. Selise straightens a fraction. Even Nix, who had been recorking the empty potion bottle with a look of faint annoyance, lifts his head.

  Halden turns slowly, taking in the room again—the Ilmater carvings, the old marble, the flooded entry, the bronze door, the dead mimic.

  “Someone has violated the crypt,” he says.

  Jim’s whiskers twitch.

  That fits. Too well. Not ancient defense. Not an intended ward. An intrusion. Something placed here later by someone who wanted this entry watched, trapped, or both.

  Nix is already moving before Halden finishes speaking.

  He crosses to the inner door—the one leading farther into the crypt proper—and crouches beside it.

  His expression changes very slightly.

  “Strange,” he says.

  Garrick looks over. “What?”

  Nix runs a thumb along the edge of the door and holds it up.

  Even from the floor, Jim can smell it when the rogue exposes the surface: oil. Recent enough to still carry a clean, worked-metal scent under the crypt dust.

  Nix gives the latch a careful test.

  No resistance.

  He looks back at the others.

  “It’s unlocked,” he says. Then, after a beat: “And oiled.”

  That changes the room again.

  Not just violated, then. Maintained. Used.

  Jim stays very still at the doorway while the board in his head rearranges itself. The mimic was placed here after the crypt was sealed. Whatever lies beyond is not just ancient dead and forgotten relics.

  Selise keeps the lantern low and circles the dead mimic with a wary look.

  Garrick does the prodding. Selise does the seeing.

  Between the two of them, the corpse starts yielding its secrets.

  “Hold,” Selise says.

  He crouches near one side of the mimic’s collapsed mass, using the end of a dagger and the lantern light to lift a sticky fold of false wood-skin and look beneath it. Something glints there, half-sunk in slime and filth.

  With obvious distaste, he fishes it free.

  A brooch.

  Selise wipes it on a rag, squints, and his expression sharpens.

  “Useful,” he says.

  Brother Halden steps closer. “What is it?”

  “Brooch of shielding,” Selise says.

  Jim’s whiskers twitch.

  That is, from his perspective, an offensively good find.

  Selise keeps digging. A little coin comes out next, clotted with filth, then a small sapphire dark with slime until the lantern catches it and throws a hard blue spark back into the room.

  Not a hoard. Not even a respectable priest’s lockbox. Just enough to prove the mimic had fed on more than rats and sewer vermin.

  Then the search turns uglier.

  Garrick’s sword tip hooks something pale in the waste heap tucked against the wall where the mimic had nested its filth: a jumble of old bones, scraps of fur, gnawed carcass pieces, fresh mimic excretion glistening obscenely among them.

  At first it looks like what you would expect from a sewer predator—assorted animal remains, cracked and dirty.

  Then Selise angles the lantern lower.

  There, mixed in with rat, dog, and unidentifiable butcher-shop leftovers, lies a small clustered set of human bones.

  Not a full skeleton. Not neatly laid out. A hand. Some ribs. Part of a forearm. Bits of a skull. All together in the midden, fouled with the rest, as if the mimic had eaten a person in pieces and kept what it did not digest well.

  Brother Halden’s face hardens in a way Jim has not seen before—not fear this time, not even grief exactly. Anger, but disciplined into something colder.

  Nix looks over from the inner door, and his voice flattens. “Well. That answers whether anyone’s been through here recently.”

  Selise does not answer at once. He is staring at the bones with the lantern held too steady.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Halden steps closer to the waste pile, careful where he places his boots. “Gather the bones,” he says quietly.

  Selise moves to collect the bones and as his eyes turn he goes still for half a heartbeat.

  Not the stillness of fear. The stillness of someone whose mind has just snagged on a detail that does not fit the rest of the room.

  His head turns slightly toward the bronze doorway.

  Right at Jim.

  From the floor, the eye contact lands like a thrown knife.

  Jim freezes so completely he may briefly qualify as a decorative element.

  Selise studies him for just a moment—long enough for Jim to know this is not a passing glance but actual recognition. Lantern light catches one side of Selise’s face, leaving the other in shadow, and his expression does something strange: not alarm, not disgust, not even immediate suspicion.

  Curiosity.

  Then he says, in a calm voice that cuts neatly through the room’s grim mood:

  “There is a most peculiar rat looking at us from the doorway.”

  Everything in Jim’s body clenches.

  Garrick’s head comes up first, sword hand tightening on reflex. Brother Halden turns next, slower but sharper, still carrying the weight of the bones in his face. Nix, by the oiled inner door, does not startle at all—he just shifts his eyes toward the doorway with the weary air of a man whose private theory has just become annoyingly public.

  And there, framed by corroded bronze, old stone, and the smell of dead mimic, is Rat #1:

  wet paws,

  whiskers stiff,

  one black eye bright in the lantern glow,

  very suddenly no longer background scenery.

  Jim has exactly one clean thought as the room’s attention lands on him.

  Well, shit. I guess everyone fails a roll sometimes.

  Then the second thought follows right behind it, with all the resigned dignity of a man who knows the scene has already gone sideways.

  I guess first impressions are everything.

  Jim makes a decision that is either inspired or the dumbest thing he has done in either life.

  He rises.

  Not much—he is still tiny, still damp-pawed and filthy—but he pushes up onto his hind legs as straight as his little rat spine will allow. His forepaws come up in front of him, close to his chest. He steadies, tail acting as a counterbalance on the wet stone.

  Then, with all the seriousness of a courtier in a ballroom and all the absurdity of a rodent in a crypt, he sketches a small bow.

  Precise. Brief. Polite.

  Like a proper gentleman.

  Garrick’s face goes from rat? to absolutely not in one clean transition.

  Brother Halden inhales softly through his nose, eyes narrowing not in threat but in the sharp, searching way of a man whose theological options have just multiplied.

  Selise stares at Jim with the expression of someone who has just discovered that the strange variable in the equation has decided to be stranger on purpose.

  And Nix—

  Nix closes his eyes for half a second.

  Not in disbelief. Not exactly.

  More like: of course you did that.

  Jim straightens from the bow and remains upright for one impossible beat, black eyes bright in the lantern light, fully aware that he has just kicked the situation out of peculiar rat and into we are all going to have to talk about this now.

  Inside, his heart is trying to chew through his ribs.

  Standing in the bronze doorway like a tiny, sewer-soaked ambassador of terrible decisions.

  Well, I’m all in now.

  There is no point in half-measures. Not after the bow.

  So he drops back to all fours.

  Then he starts walking into the room.

  Slowly.

  He angles himself nearest to Nix and Brother Halden, toward the rogue who fed him and the priest who looks more likely to interpret than to stomp.

  Each little step sounds absurdly loud on the damp marble, though in truth it is barely more than a soft skritch-skritch under the lantern hiss.

  The room watches him come.

  Jim reaches the patch of stone nearest Nix and Halden, turns in a small circle to settle himself with what dignity a sewer rat can manage, and then plops down on his rat butt.

  Forepaws tucked. Tail curled. Black eyes up.

  He looks, for all the world, like a tiny gentleman caller who has arrived to discuss important business and is now patiently waiting for the room to stop being stupid about it.

  Inside, of course, his heart is detonating.

  Because the next obvious step is questions.

  Questions like What are you? and Can you understand us? and How long have you been following us? and Are you some kind of familiar? and Should Garrick hit you?

  Questions he absolutely cannot answer in any useful sense.

  So Jim sits very still, ears forward, doing his best impression of intelligent and harmless, and waits for the inevitable impossible questions.

  The room holds still around him.

  Selise is the first to recover enough to speak.

  He keeps the lantern low in one hand, the other free, his face unreadable except for the sharp focus in his eyes. When he talks, his voice is careful in the way people get careful around unstable magic and socially dangerous noblemen.

  “Can you understand us?”

  Jim’s heart kicks once, hard enough to hurt.

  Well. Here goes.

  He gives one small, precise nod.

  Garrick is the first to break.

  His sword does not rise, but it might as well in spirit. His stare hardens into something halfway between disbelief and insult.

  “…No.”

  Selise does not look away from Jim. “Yes,” he says quietly. “That was a yes.”

  Brother Halden draws in a slow breath through his nose. Whatever he had been preparing himself for in this violated crypt, it was not this. But when he speaks, his voice is controlled.

  “No one strike him.”

  Garrick turns his head slightly. “Brother—”

  “No one,” Halden repeats, firmer now. “Not unless he gives us cause.”

  Jim remains very still.

  Inside, he is pure shaking wire and effort. Outwardly, he is a rat with manners.

  Nix, leaning by the inner crypt door with his knife still loose in one hand, closes his eyes and sighs loudly.

  Garrick hears it in the silence and rounds on him.

  “You knew something.”

  Nix opens his eyes. “I suspected something.”

  Selise finally looks away from Jim and over at the rogue. “You suspected,” he repeats flatly, “that a rat in the sewers was unusual.”

  Nix gives the smallest shrug. “He kept showing up.”

  Garrick’s eyebrows go up. “He what?”

  “In the tunnels,” Nix says. “Before the camp. Before the tide line. Same rat, wrong places, too often.”

  Selise’s expression goes from curiosity to the particular annoyance of discovering someone else has been sitting on relevant information.

  “And you neglected to mention this because…”

  Nix looks at Jim, then away again, as if admitting any of this out loud is personally offensive.

  “Because I thought he might be a servant of my god.”

  That lands almost as strangely as the nod did.

  Garrick stares at him. “A rat.”

  “Yes,” Nix says. “A rat.”

  Brother Halden’s eyes narrow, not mockingly but with immediate interest. “A servant of whom?”

  Nix grimaces just slightly. It is the face of a man who now has to explain his religion in a crypt while standing over a dead mimic.

  “Brandobaris.”

  Selise blinks once. Garrick looks no less baffled.

  Halden, at least, knows the name. “The halfling god of thieves.”

  “The halfling god of stealth,” Nix corrects automatically, then sighs through his nose. “And luck. And clever entry. And not getting caught with your hand in someone else’s lockbox.”

  Garrick gestures vaguely at Jim with his sword. “And this looked like one of his servants to you?”

  Nix’s mouth twitches. “I didn’t say I was sure.”

  “You left him bread,” Selise says.

  It is not a guess.

  For the first time, Nix looks properly irritated. “Bread costs less than disrespect.”

  That almost breaks the room.

  Not into laughter. But the sheer absurd weight of the sentence hangs there for a beat while everyone tries to reconcile rogue diplomacy via baked goods.

  Jim, for his part, feels an entirely unhelpful surge of affection toward Nix.

  You magnificent little weirdo.

  Brother Halden kneels slowly, careful to keep his movements readable, and lowers himself just enough to bring his face closer to Jim’s level without crowding him.

  The cleric’s expression is grave, but not hostile. There is weariness in it, and intelligence, and a deep spiritual caution sharpened by the place they are standing in.

  “If you understand us,” Halden says, “then I ask in good faith: are you here to guide, warn, or hinder?”

  Jim’s heart sinks a little.

  Right. The impossible questions.

  He cannot answer that. Not in any useful way. Not without speech, hands, writing, or some deeply embarrassing pantomime.

  He looks at Halden, then at Nix, then back at Halden, and stays still.

  Selise watches the silence closely.

  “He understands language,” Selise says. “That doesn’t mean he can answer in words.”

  Nix crouches down, slow and easy, settling on the balls of his feet a short distance from Jim.

  He studies him for a moment, eyes narrowed just slightly, all the dry humor gone out of his face.

  “Are you a normal rat?” he asks.

  Jim looks at him.

  Then he gives one small, precise shake of his head.

  No.

  Garrick rubs a hand over his face. “I hate this room.”

  Brother Halden does not take his eyes off Jim. “Noted,” he says quietly, to the room or to Ilmater or to himself. “A thinking creature. A watcher in the crypt. Possibly touched by trickster divinity. Possibly something else.”

  “Definitely something else,” Selise says.

  Jim would object to the tone if he could.

  Halden’s gaze flicks to the oiled inner door, then back to Jim.

  “This place has been violated. The dead have been disturbed. Something was set here to kill intruders. And now a rat follows us through the underways, understands our speech, and bows at the threshold.”

  He pauses.

  “I am not prepared to call that meaningless.”

  That changes the air more than any spell has so far.

  Garrick is still wary. Selise is still studying. Nix is still trying not to look too pleased with himself for having been right in private first.

  But the room has shifted.

  Jim is no longer a problem to be solved before the crypt can continue.

  He is now part of the crypt problem.

  Jim sits on his rat butt, forepaws tucked, tail curled around his feet, and thinks with weary precision:

  Excellent. I am officially a theological complication.