I burst into the horrific milking room and skidded to a stop. Pools of the food paste were building up at the cow's feet. Mixing with the end product of it passing through the trapped cattle-women that hadn’t been cleaned away for days.

  Those buckles were finicky, the ones holding the food-tubes to the minotaurs' faces. A quick count put the number at… about sixty giant-titted lady-cows. Sixty mouths… two hundred and forty nipples… I was only one dragon.

  Scanning around, I saw plenty of weird magitech devices lining the walls. Green-tainted tubes flowed out, and white-filled ones flowed in. I sent a blast of acidic fire into the nearest one, a bulky thing with valves and glowing yellow glass tubes on top of it, and sparks erupted as it began to melt.

  “Shit!”

  I lunged over and yanked the tubes out. The feed tube had started glowing, the light spreading quickly towards the cows it was hooked up to. Then I jumped closer to the cows and used hastily shapeshifted claws to slice the tubing away and stop the still spreading glow. As the transparent rubber hit the floor, the glow reached the ends and spread out, eating into the stone.

  Dousing moo-moo faces in acid was probably a bad idea, karmically speaking. I’d put them in this situation, out of the best of intentions, as well as to spare my ears, so it fell to me to fix it.

  As the device I’d hit with a blast of acid-snot turned into a puddle, the lights on the next machine began to blink. Healthy-looking greens and yellows became sickly. Red and orange began to dominate the valves sticking out of the things. It spread like a wave down the line.

  I ran, I slashed tubes, I saved the lady-cows. Suck it, Caesar. It had to be a manual job, so it got done the old-fashioned way.

  Breaking the chains holding up the minotauresses and removing their masks took longer. The buckles really were fiddly. After the first few, I just snicked the leather straps away before carefully laying the enslaved milkers down in their own filth. I felt a bit bad about that, but mammalian digestive systems were inherently inefficient. Not being able to fly and make one's droppings someone else's high velocity problem was also a nuisance.

  After fifteen minutes, I looked back at sixty shit-covered cow-women and nodded in satisfaction. A job well jobbed. None of them were in any immediate risk of being force-fed to death, and while they might wake up annoyed at the smell… I doubted it would bother them that much.

  Alicya staggered through the door behind me, tongue lolling out, panting heavily.

  “You need a bath.”

  “Don’t use that word!”

  “Just saying, all that blood is going to mat up your fur something awful. Out of interest, how many rat-dudes have you just slaughtered?”

  She was covered from snout to tails in crimson.

  “About a hundred. I wasn’t keeping count. He got away.”

  "You look like that scene in Carrie. Bad time of the month?”

  “That is an incredibly insensitive comment to make to a werewolf, Bob.”

  “Apologies,” I lied. I waved a hand at the peacefully sleeping cows behind me. “At least I didn’t fuck up. How did Hurg slash Remy get away?”

  “He can fly.”

  “Magic? I thought the clans couldn’t—”

  “They can’t. They’re as unmagical as it’s possible to be. Hurg isn’t a furkin.”

  “He’s furkin something.”

  “Demons can use magic. Some, anyway. He flew away towards Shaftbase, but gods know where he’ll land again.”

  “So what’s the plan? No headwear for anyone we meet, or you kill them?”

  “We need to go after him, you—you.”

  “Well caught. What about these ladies? I didn’t unplug their… udders.”

  “That’s gonna sting when we get round to unplugging them. Chafed nipples aren’t fun. Maybe we should leave it in the hands of others?”

  “Who? The other rats?”

  “You’ve got minions. Bring some of them through.”

  “That’s more Kat’s kind of thing than mine. I’m a hands-off kind of manager.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “No wonder she-who-must-be-blessed-in-triplicate hates you.”

  “Let’s go find Kat and get her on the job.”

  The pressing and curding rooms were much as we’d left them. A few dozen unconscious rats snored, belched and chittered in their slumber. We stepped carefully over them, and I returned to the throne room.

  “Jesus, Alicya.”

  When I’d left, most of the rats had been blinded with barnacles. I really loved that spell. Now there were broken bodies, and bits of them were scattered all over the place. Tails dangled from the chandelier above, limbs lay in lonely places, and the absence of the rest of the bodies they came from was hideous proof of the violence the werewolf had unleashed on her way out.

  “They got in my way! Demonic zombie rat-king, remember?”

  “Is he a zombie? I've got a spell that can deal with that.” We threaded our way through the horror, leaving scarlet footprints whenever we stepped on an unstained patch of floor.

  “He’s not undead.”

  “Bugger. That would have been an easy fix.”

  The streets outside were dead. Thankfully, not lined with dead, although there were a few unconscious bodies scattered about that must have gotten in Alicya’s way as she chased the rodent-lord. I looked down the road, using the knocked-out battle-rats and civilians to track the route she’d taken.

  “He went east,” I said confidently.

  “That’s west, Bob. He took a few turns to try to lose me, but the nose knows so he couldn’t shake me. I cornered him in an alley, and that’s when he went shooting away into the sky.”

  “What spell did he use?”

  “Some demon shit. He glowed gold for half a second, then poof.”

  “Let’s go find Kat, then we can hunt the arse down.”

  Rats spooked easily, judging by the empty streets. Heavy sackcloth bags lay abandoned, crates had been put down, and in some cases just dropped, judging from the splinters. The formerly busy town was now empty.

  “I no sign contract! Ass-ass scared away all the customers! Need better rates!” Cheville was loudly declaring as we re-entered the pub, which I was guessing was probably called something like The Split V, based on the picture of rats fighting over a wedge of cheese.

  “I think he’s talking about you,” I said to Alicya, happy that for once I was likely not the cause of a public furore.

  “Chevie, we just agreed to all the terms. You can’t suddenly change your mind because Bob did something fucking—hey Bob!”

  “Kat. What were you saying?” I crossed my arms and initiated a grade-three glare, which she ignored with a sickly sweet smile.

  “So why did all the hairy guys disappear, oh wise master?” she replied.

  “Yeah, Alicya, why did they all disappear? Did it have anything to do with you chasing their demonically possessed king through the streets like a ravening beast?”

  I’d intended my words to not only redirect Kat’s ire away from me and my potentially vulnerable mammal parts, but also to make it clear that this time it definitely wasn’t me that screwed up. Not that it was usually me who screwed up.

  “Oh, right, if you hadn’t put all the minotaurs to sleep, it wouldn’t have happened. I can’t fly, remember? You can.”

  I blinked. My “own” had been uno reverso’d right back at me.

  “I couldn’t let them die! They were being abused!”

  “By being fed and cleaned and milked? How unhappy were they really?”

  “You heard the one whose feed tubes I pulled out! She called him a moooonster!”

  Kat and Cheville’s heads were bouncing back between us as we bickered like siblings. I’d had enough. I was a dragon. Before I could open my mouth, a shepherd's crook banged off the side of my head and then smacked Alicya in the snout.

  “So it didn’t go so well with the king?” she demanded, settling on the ground with blurred wings.

  “He was possessed, like she said. Then he ran. She lost him while I went back to save the moo-cows.”

  “It—”

  “Alicya, stop. For the love of they who cannot be named. By tribulations smoky balls. Stop. Between you, all the rats freaked out, right?”

  “Pretty much,” I muttered.

  “So no yes-yes to contract.” Cheville’s voice was surprisingly firm for a ratkin facing down a werewolf, a dragon in disguise, and a dick-punching pixie.

  “A temporary blip. You guys like cheese? The king made his name on his dairy skills? Well, we can bring in cheese like you can’t imagine. Dozens of flavours and types. Blue, pink, green and milky white. We can get them all delivered via portal. Sign the contract, and you’ll be the most popular eatery for rodentkind in the world. Hell, you might end up as the new king,” I said.

  “Need proof.”

  “For the love—you tried the beer? If I can just give away that kind of booze so I can get served, why on earth would I lie about bloody cheese?” I had to wrestle Greed back into the corner of my mind as I boasted about giving things away. It hurt on an almost physical level.

  Ratkin were refreshingly open in their facial expressions. They tended to run somewhere between annoyed, scheming to rob and/or eat you, or terrified, based on my experiences. Aside from the king, they didn’t dissemble very well.

  Cheville’s face went through shock, hope, fear, back to hope, what I assumed was greed, then back to shock, and finally an expression I could only describe as wonder. It was that, or he just filled his trousers after really needing to take a dump.

  “You alright there?” I asked worriedly.

  “New cheese?” he asked breathlessly.

  “OK. Kat, my work here is done. You’re welcome, by the way. Can you get some minions in to go deal with the three score mino-women who are shortly going to be waking up with sore nipples in the palace, please?”

  “He hasn’t signed yet.”

  “Cheville, sign, and you get a free travel chit so you get access to the market in the dungeon.” They didn’t cost me anything, I repeated silently to myself. Sure, we usually charged for them, but they didn’t cost me anything to make.

  “Bring paper-paper!”

  “Wonderful. I’m not kidding, by the way, Kat. There’s about to be sixty very pissed off lady minotaurs stomping around with a grudge against our new ratty friends.”

  “Fine. I’ll bring in Salnia.” She fluttered over and gathered up the paperwork from where it had fallen on the ground.

  “Tell her to bring Gledna. And some lotion.”

  “Is this how you handle all your business decisions?” Alicya asked.

  “I’ve got style, right? Come on. Let’s go chase down a flying rat-demon.”

  Once we were back on the street, I stretched my wings, scales spread across my skin, and as soon as I was back in the most perfect form, I turned my head down to look at the werewolf. Various shutters slammed closed along the street, and the sound of locks clicking and deadbolts sliding into place echoed out around us.

  Silly rats. As if a building could stop me.

  “Hop on, puppy.”

  Alicya did her best to dig her claws into me as she climbed my shoulder, but god-forged scales were very effective against that kind of pettiness.

  “So… off to Shaftbase then?” I asked.