Just after noon, the professor and Brother Wadin hurriedly set off on their way back.
The people working the fields outside the Monastery were still laboring away without a break. Perhaps for a moment, they had felt a slight dizziness, but they had brushed it off as mild heatstroke.
Whatever the case, the irrigation channel had to be repaired as soon as possible. With no more rain to replenish them, the water reserves above and below ground were steadily dwindling.
Beneath the land they worked lay a rich, bustling world, riddled with loose burrows where moisture-loving creatures lived. Awakened by the recent rainy season and stirred by the changing water levels, they had grown active.
Their movements had not yet broken through the crust of earth, merely raising a few mud bubbles or stirring mossy leaves. But given enough time, who could say what might hatch from the familiar ground beneath their feet?
It seemed as though nothing had changed: the same road, the same scenery, and the increasingly unbearable sunlight.
No. Something had changed.
As they passed through waist-high grass, swarms of black shapes, startled by the tremors, burst out and exposed themselves in the middle of the unprotected road, flowing from one side to the other like filthy water spilling through a broken dam.
The horses had no time to stop. They trampled straight into the mass, and sharp squeaks and filthy red matter burst beneath their hooves.
It was a vast swarm of rats. Kraft had never seen so many. Driven from their nests, these nocturnal creatures had ventured out at the worst possible time, forming a frenzied dark tide that spilled across the ground.
The deaths of their own kind had no effect on their behavior. Or perhaps their tiny brains were already too full to