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Sir Reginald sighed and leaned back in his chair, eyeing the man standing before him. “You’re sure the blasted things are back?”
“Aye, sir, and in greater numbers than before,” the reeve said, clutching his hat in both hands. The hall of Sir Reginald’s manor was barely bigger than the local tavern’s common room, but it clearly still unsettled the man.
“Even though I slew many of them, but two weeks ago?”
“Aye, sir. It was a mighty feat, though it appears these slimes are a pernicious foe.” The reeve carefully avoided eye contact, and Reginald could feel the fear wafting off him.
“Don’t cower so, my man, you’ve done nothing wrong,” he said. The reeve didn’t seem any more relaxed at that, so Reginald dismissed him.
He’d been given the holding of Witchester and surrounding lands as a reward for services rendered to the duke, around ten years ago. Still, sometimes he wished he was back on the road with nothing but the armour on his back, the sword at his waist and the friends by his side. At least that way, after he’d killed a sewer’s worth of pests, he’d be paid and move on to something more interesting.
This was the third time slimes had run rampant throughout the village of Witchester, and each punitive expedition had achieved less than the one prior. At forty-five years of age, he was past his prime, but he’d been on battlefields that would make the warrens in the mountain north of Witchester look like a picnic. A quick jaunt to kill the world’s slowest monster was nothing in comparison.
And yet it hadn’t resolved the situation. Reginald would be the laughing-stock of the duke’s court if this got out, but he was also running out of ideas. The slimes weren’t hard to kill – they were little more than knee-high, poisonous slugs, and a solid swing of a wooden club turned them into paste – but they kept coming back. With a sigh, he reached for a quill. It was time to write to an old friend. Naye was a wizard and a genius besides, though she’d retired to the university in Chirham, just up the road.
She’d know what to do.
A coach pulled by two brick-red horned horses arrived two days later, but the woman inside wasn’t Reginald’s old travelling companion. The lady who stepped out was short and austere, with pinned-back white hair and blue tattoos covering her hands. Her grey robes were stained and creased, but she carried herself like a noble.
“Where’s Naye?” Reginald asked, confused.
“Rector Naye is busy,” she snapped. “I was sent in her stead.”
“Who’re you then?” It wasn’t the politest question, but Reginald believed in giving as much politeness as he got.
“I am Gudrun, an ecosystems specialist, here to address the infestation in the sewers.” She sniffed. “As they are downstream of, and connected to, Chirham’s sewer system, it was considered important enough that the university required my expertise.”
“Happy to have you,” Reginald lied. He was as pleased about the situation as Gudrun appeared to be. Still, it wouldn’t do to be outright rude to a guest. “I’ll have the butler show you to the manor’s guest suite.”
“No need,” she scowled. “My bags can stay in the coach. I don’t intend to dawdle; I have important work to get back to. Take me to the issue.”
Reginald was wearing a rather fetching velvet doublet that he didn’t intend to get grimy or torn. He excused himself and came back out a few minutes later in a gambeson, stained with use. A short spiked club swung in his free hand, and he’d pulled on alchemically treated boots. Regular leather would be eaten through in short order by the acidic residue in the slime-infested tunnels.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
Gudrun eyed his outfit with disdain, but didn’t say anything. She wordlessly fell in behind him when he led her to the main entrance of the sewer and tunnel system.
They walked down the hill, away from the manor and into the centre of Witchester. It wasn’t a vast holding, but there were dozens of families living within its walls and plenty more within an hour’s walk. The revenues were enough to keep Reginald living a very comfortable lifestyle – he could still remember when he’d slept on a bed of branches because a bedroll was too expensive – but he also felt a keen sense of duty towards the duke who’d entrusted the people to him. He wanted to make the man proud, and that meant handling issues like a couple of slimes with just the resources at his own disposal. If Gudrun could help, Reginald would be shocked but grateful.
If she was utterly useless, he’d ship her back to the university and write to Naye a second time. The woman had handled much worse problems during their travels together.
Around the village were fields, and beyond that meadows and forests. A keen eye could pick out where the warrens emptied their bowels; the crops stood taller, the trees were greener, and the cattle were fatter. The waste from the city and the waters from deep within the earth fed the farms closest to the mountain, and it was prime land indeed as a result. Reginald had adjudicated two disputes so far over the water. The river that flowed past Chirham and down to Witchester meant nobody went without irrigation, but the locals called the effluence from the warrens aqua vitae, the ‘water of life’.
Walking past the lush orchards and gardens that sat at the base of the mountain, Reginald could see why.
“Here we are,” he said at last. They stood by a shadowed crevice in the rock face that the village sheltered against, upstream of which sat Chirham. Once upon a time, great poisonous worms had claimed the land for their own, and though they’d been purged long ago the ground was still crossed with tunnels of varying sizes. Many had been enlarged or extended by later occupants or just the natural movement of water, and this particular tunnel entrance had a slow-running stream coming out of its mouth and into a drainage ditch.
“That’s an awful stench,” Gudrun said, wrinkling her nose.
Reginald shrugged, unperturbed. He’d smelled worse. “As you said, Chirham’s sewers are part of the same tunnel network. They drain out here. It doesn’t enter the drinking water and the farmers say it’s good for the crops.”
“I’m not a crop, and I’m not dealing with this!” She gestured, chanted something under her breath, and then touched a curious metal plate that was sewn into her gown. Reginald had missed it at first, but on a closer look there were at least a dozen similar charms and devices hidden in the cloth.
He was distracted by a burst of sweet-smelling air.
“That’s better,” Gudrun exclaimed, and without further ado she clambered into the crevice, carefully stepping around the wet areas.
She was nimble, and Reginald had to rush after her lest he lose her in the dark tunnel. He carried a lantern, but Gudrun seemingly had no issue finding her way without light. The passage wasn’t particularly large or wide – Reginald’s club was short so that it could still be swung in the tight confines – and it twisted and turned considerably. If she was more than a few steps ahead by the next fork, he might never find her again.
He calmed considerably when he saw a soft glow from just in front of Gudrun, throwing a shadowy silhouette back towards him. Naye had conjured up something similar whenever they’d been delving beneath the earth. He extinguished his lantern and stowed it at his belt.
“Do you not want to hear more about the problem before going exploring?” Reginald asked, once he’d got his wits back about him. Her aggressive approach had left him somewhat off-balance and flustered.
“We can do that while moving,” Gudrun said from up ahead, the sound distorting weirdly due to the narrow walls. “You’ve seen a surge in slime numbers, and they’re spilling out of the sewers and into the village itself? Despite several culls?”
“Aye. Most of the folks living here hadn’t seen one until a few months ago. Same goes for the gastrovores – pig urchins, the locals call them – but they’re not a pest, and there’s not so many of them. The slimes come out at night and feed on whatever they can find, and they’re not picky. Grain fields, vegetable patches, livestock, even thatched roofs. So far only a few chickens have died, but a girl lost a big patch of skin on her arm two weeks ago.” Reginald sighed. “I went after them three times, and the most recent one I was killing from sun-up to past sun-down. Must have been at least a hundred adult slimes, and twice that in young. They’re everywhere down here.”
“I found one,” Gudrun announced. There was a curious chirping sound and then a soft shattering, as the surface of a frozen puddle breaking. A shudder ran through Reginald as he felt the aftereffects of the spell ripple out. “And now I’ve taken care of it. You say there are gastrovores here?”
“You know them? They’re the ones like small pigs covered in spines, or massive hedgehogs, or something in between the two?”
“I know of them, yes. The spined ones are more properly called armoured gastrovores, though ‘pig urchin’ is new to me,” Gudrun said. The passage had opened up, though they’d passed several branches too small for a man to even crawl through, let alone walk. Reginald knew they were past the opening of the sewer tunnel system because he wasn’t at risk of bumping his head on the ceiling any more.
“They mostly stay out of the village now, though they used to live in the larger tunnels.”
“What was keeping them in before?”
Reginald considered the question. “Nothing, I suppose. There’s too many cracks and crevices to block them all up, and they all connect to each other somehow, even if the passages are too narrow for people. The pig urchins must have liked being in here. Why do you ask?”
“Eurgh,” Gudrun moaned instead of reply. She was picking the path essentially at random, following the twists and turns of the tunnel and turning left or right at intervals. They were heading steadily upstream, at least, which meant they were going deeper into the warrens and away from the village. Every minute or two, a bat would flutter past as they disturbed its perch. “What’s wrong with the dirt in here?”
“It’s not dirt, it’s mud,” Reginald replied, his own boots squelching with every step. ‘Mud’ was a euphemism for what was commonly found in sewers, though using the proper word in polite society was frowned-upon. “The slimes leave acid trails behind, and they get mixed into it as well. It’s part of what helps the fields, when it’s dilute enough.”
“My shoes are proofed against low-grade alchemical compounds but it’s chewing away at them,” Gudrun snapped. “You didn’t mention this earlier!”
“I suppose my brief was rather brief, for some reason,” Reginald said. He wasn’t growing any fonder of Gudrun over time; first she didn’t want to hear his thoughts on the problem, and then she blamed him for it. He reminded himself that he hadn’t been immediate friends with Naye at first, or Norgrim or Pelts either. Now, he could think of few people he trusted more, even if life had taken them all in different directions.
Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t have fun at Gudrun’s expense. “I can carry you out, if necessary,” he offered.
“That will not be needed. This is all important information for understanding what’s gone wrong here, though. Clearly the problem is–” Gudrun’s voice cut off with a shriek and the light went out.
“Are you alright?” Reginald hissed, his hand going to his lantern. It was a ridiculously overwrought model for any use other than the current one of delving into a dark and dangerous place, but he’d commissioned it when he’d been a full-time adventurer and it had proved its worth many times. A muttered command made it flicker to life, and while it wasn’t as clear and bright as a magelight, it showed Reginald his surroundings.
He immediately scurried back to avoid the expanding cloud of ivory smoke ahead of him, through which he could make out the faint shape of Gudrun, fully comatose and bundled up in a net that hung from the ceiling.
She’d walked straight into a trap.
One hand pulled a scarf over Reginald’s nose and mouth, and the other drew a dagger. The lantern at his side swung wildly, sending shadows scattering over the rough stone of the tunnel wall, as he strode forward and into the smoke. He held his breath as much as possible, but still caught hints of the sweet-smelling drug it carried. He recognised it instantly.
The net was easily cut through and Reginald slung Gudrun over his shoulder as he staggered back out of the cloud. She was limp but breathing, as he’d expect from the soporific smoke, and Reginald almost retched as her air-cleaning spell failed and the stench of the sewer water hit him like a brick to the head. Lantern lighting the way, he hurried back towards the exit.
Luckily it wasn’t a long journey, as they’d only made it a few hundred metres into the tunnel system. Gudrun took another minute of breathing clean air to recover.
“What happened?” she asked groggily.
“Kobolds,” Reginald bit out. “This is a new development – I went that way a mere two weeks ago and found nothing untoward. They set a net trap and prepared a vapour that incapacitates its victims, and kills if left for more than a few minutes. The muscles in the chest grow too weak to allow for breathing.”
“I’m gonna kill the little shits,” Gudrun groaned. “But not today.”
“You’ll need a few days to recover, most likely,” Reginald agreed. “I’ve seen these sorts of traps before.”
“The air purification spell will have taken the edge off. A good night’s sleep and I’ll be fine. But we have some preparations to make before we return, so let’s get to it.” She tried and failed to get to her feet, her legs flopping around rather than propelling her upwards.
Reginald stood and watched her, not saying anything.
“Does the offer of a lift still apply?” Gudrun asked, entirely unrepentant.
By the evening meal, her physical health had improved almost as much as her demeanour.
“You have to understand, the last four times I was dragged away from my studies were utter wastes of time,” she expounded, gesticulating with her fork. “A single avarragh, a nesting gryphon pair whose hunting grounds didn’t even extend anywhere inhabited, some infection that was affecting carp yields, and a small slime colony that some sufficiently motivated children could have dealt with. My focus is on metastasized monstrous ecologies, not rat catching.”
“I’d prefer if this were another waste of your time,” Reginald countered.
“I suppose that makes me the lucky one, despite the poison,” Gudrun said. She took another bite of the meal: roasted chicken and boiled greens. “Slimes and kobolds aren’t that uncommon a pairing, according to the literature, but the recent changes here are what have me very keen.”
“Why’s that?”
“Stable ecologies exist in plenty of places, but I’ve never seen one form before.”
Reginald dropped his own fork, suddenly feeling sick. He thought he’d heard that term before, but he hoped he was wrong. “By ‘stable ecologies’, you mean…”
“Dungeons, they’re also called. Sometimes people prefer lairs, or hives, or strongholds, but they’re all the same thing, really.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as if she weren’t discussing the death of Witchester.
“We have to stop it,” Reginald said immediately. “Whatever the cost.”
Gudrun waved his interjection away. “Naturally, and we will. I’ve often been accused by colleagues of studying phenomena to destruction. But in order to break this as thoroughly as possible, we must understand it first, yes? No sense splattering slimes a fourth time and accomplishing nothing again.”
It was oddly reassuring to see Gudrun get swept up in that part of academia that was cousin to madness. Reginald had watched that same tree bear deadly fruit on many an occasion. “What’s our next step, then?” he asked.
“I’m well-furnished with reference materials, but I need two slimes, one alive and one dead. I have a hypothesis I need to confirm.”
Reginald blanched at the idea of Gudrun heading into the sewers again, given how poorly the last trip had gone. “I’ll fetch those. By myself, I mean. We’ve no time to waste, and you’ll be needing to read those reference materials, I’m sure.”
“Very well. Oh, and if you can find a gastrovore lair, do so. No need to bring me the creature, just identify where it’s nesting. We can confirm that they do, in fact, eat slimes in sufficient quantity to dent the population.”
“Of course. Do you need anything regarding the kobolds?”
She shook her head. “I believe they’ll cease to be a problem once we address the slimes. They were brought here by the slime expansion, so logically its end would lead to them leaving again. I don’t think we’ll need a closer look for the moment. Unless you enjoy crawling through trapped tunnels?”
Once the kobolds left the problems wouldn’t be over. Unsprung traps would remain active for years or decades afterwards, Reginald expected, or at least enough of them to be a hazard. The sewers would forever be a great deal more dangerous, even once the current inhabitants were driven out or pruned back.
Still, that was a problem for another day.
The butler had prepared the guest suite and Reginald might be feeling warmer towards Gudrun, but he still doubted she’d mind the lodgings being somewhat simple. She lacked the refined taste of some of the nobles who’d visited his estate in the past, which Reginald found a blessing. Once she’d left for her quarters, he spent the rest of the evening in the workshop, repairing his boots. There were people who could do it for him, but when it came to his equipment, he’d never been able to trust anyone else to be quite so thorough as he was.
They were worn almost entirely through in places, despite the thick layer of inert paste applied to the leather. The slime mucus in the sewers was getting more potent by the week.
Reginald tried not to contrast it with some of the dungeons he’d explored as a younger man. There had been smooth tunnels full of poisonous mushroom spores; ancient cave networks with pockets of thick, choking smoke coming from deep underground; mossy groves where great nests of wasp-like creatures would fight for their territory against all comers; and ruined elven halls where the alabaster stone reflected sound back ever-louder, until an unwary traveller’s footsteps became forceful enough to shatter bone. They’d all been inhospitable places, except to the handful of monsters that carved out a niche to live in, and the thought of that happening beside – and, no doubt, eventually it would spread into – Witchester, was hard to bear.
With Gudrun’s words echoing in his head, his imagination ran wild.
He could see the pieces slot into place. Slimes, grown ever more numerous, and ever more varied in their colour and poison of choice, would spill out and drive away the people. As their waste grew more dense and potent, it would stop bringing fertility and instead scar the land. Barren fields coated in acid and interspersed with rivers of foul fluids would spread downriver, while the tunnels themselves became a nightmare of kobold traps and yet more slimes. Careless adventurers, coming to seek fame or fortune, would find their equipment worn away to nothing before they could swing a blade or cast a spell in the tunnels themselves.
Three days, Reginald decided, was the most he could spare. If the forming dungeon hadn’t been crushed underfoot by then, he would write once more to Naye – beg her, if needed – and ensure this nightmare was put to rest.
He felt worse in the morning, after a night filled with dreams of lakes of acid and an endless array of ropes and nets and pits and spikes that stopped him from warning anyone. Over breakfast, the reeve brought news that a lamb had gone missing, with kobold tracks found nearby. Slimes had also destroyed a vegetable patch. The people were scared and angry, and if Reginald could offer them some reassurance, it would be well received. Reginald sent the reeve out with news that the city had dispatched an experienced wizard to aid them, and hoped it would buy him enough time.
A mass exodus, or worse, a riot, would take too much focus away from the real problem.
Gudrun cloistered herself in the guest suite and Reginald figured the most helpful thing he could do was let her concentrate on her studying. He set out to fulfil his part of the preparation, his repaired boots at the ready. The slimes excreted a steady stream of acidic mucus, so a metal cage was borderline-useless. He picked up two large ceramic pots instead from the kitchens.
Now he knew about the kobolds, he’d prepared himself. It wasn’t the first time Reginald had come across them. In an old trunk in the cellar was a scarf that filtered out toxins, and he also dug out a pair of bladed gauntlets that were useless in battle but amazing for shredding his way out of bindings. The same slime-bashing club as ever adorned his arm, its strap wound tightly around his wrist, but he held a lantern in his other hand and moved slowly through the gloom. Every side passage was carefully inspected for a potential ambush, especially those slightly too narrow for a human.
Reginald felt twenty years younger as he crept through the gloom.
It didn’t take long to find the first slime, though it shied away from Reginald’s lantern once he got close. He placed down his first pot on its side, hurried past it, and used the light to shepherd the slime back towards the crude trap. It soon found that the only dark area was inside the pot itself and crawled in, at which point Reginald flipped the pot over, trapping the creature within. The weight of the pottery was too much for the slime, which was on the smaller side besides, to either throw the pot off or drag it along, and so Reginald left his prize at the side of the passage to collect on his way back. He headed deeper into the tunnels, looking for more slimes.
With the lantern’s flickering light, it took him a while to notice, but once he knew the signs it was hard to miss. There were small traps hidden in the crevices of the ceiling. Every few metres he spotted another snare, tucked in the shadows or disguised with moss. The snares weren’t large enough for a human’s head, or even a rabbit’s. On impulse, he pulled one down to examine it. The pulling motion brought a pair of metal spikes out of a crack between two stones that narrowly missed his fingers. Reginald stowed the spikes and snare in a pocket for later study, and put it out of his mind for the moment.
He set upon a trio of slimes further in, their soft bodies giving way to swings of his club. It took a lot of force to break the slime apart, and any blow that didn’t split the body into pieces wouldn’t kill the thing. They were some of the least dangerous creatures to fight, especially when they were alone or in small groups, but Reginald had heard of some close shaves in the past, where people had exhausted themselves cutting a path and then found their way out blocked off by yet more slimes. It was why he didn’t take any of the locals into the sewers with him. Reginald was confident in his own strength, but also his ability to know when to rest or turn back.
The remains of the three dead slimes were swiftly scooped up in the second pot, and he left the dark and dripping tunnels behind. The live slime was squirming around in its container when he recovered it, but Reginald put a lid on top and wedged it under an armpit, and it gave him little trouble after that.
As he walked home through the fields, he basked in the sight of the rich land all around. It wasn’t clear how much longer it would last, and he was determined to enjoy every second left.
“What do you need these for?” Reginald asked Gudrun back at the manor.
She looked up briefly from the scroll she was perusing. “Do you have a pen or something you can put them all in?”
“The dead ones too?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t elaborate further, her expression faraway, and Reginald figured it was better to let her concentrate on her research. There was a storage room in the corner of the chamber and he emptied it out, piling the bed linens on the furniture and then dumping the dead slimes in the now-empty space. Whichever maid cleaned up later would have a foul job to do. He wasn’t sure the wooden door of the closet would hold the living slime, since it had a gap at the bottom, so Reginald left it wide open and instead dragged a heavy wooden chest up against the doorway. It was about thigh-high on him, and the slime he’d caught was a smaller one, perhaps the size of a cat. Without further ado, he set the pot and slime down in the makeshift pen, then turned it onto its side.
The slime stayed tucked away in its ceramic carrier, refusing to come out.
“Now what?”
“Watch and wait. Tell me if anything happens.” Gudrun glanced at him. “Take notes – what you see, how long it takes, any relevant information, and so on. You’re literate, right?”
“I know my letters and numbers, yes,” Reginald huffed. She’d forgotten that he wrote to the university in the first place, it seemed. He cast about for some parchment.
For the first few minutes, the room was quiet. Gudrun flicked through her tomes and Reginald doodled some pictures of the small traps in the sewer. He had a quill to hand and the slime was sitting in its pot, ignoring the pile of pulped slimes beside it. After a while, though, the slime crept out and over to the pulp. With a quiet slurping sound it started to feed.
“Gudrun,” Reginald hissed. “It’s eating them.”
“Are you taking notes?” Gudrun replied, sounding distracted.
He wrote a few lines, then turned his attention back to the slime. It was consuming the mass of acid-covered guts and ooze with alarming gusto, and it might have been Reginald’s imagination but he was sure it was larger than it had been.
Over the next half-hour it steadily reduced the offal to nothing, even cleaning the flagstones beneath it. It had gained in stature, around equal to the size of its meal, and the implications were enough to leave Reginald frozen where he stood. The only sound was the occasional scratching of his pen as he recorded the events.
He’d spent hour upon hour killing slimes in the tunnels, and all he’d done was feed slimes to their stealthier siblings.
At last the grisly feast was over and Reginald put the quill down, only to pick it up again when the slime squirted a string of little green-grey globules out, encased in yet more acidic ooze. They stuck to the wall and it took him a moment to recognise them for what they were. Eggs. Slime eggs, specifically. He made a note of the discovery, picked up his club, and carefully killed the somewhat deflated slime that had laid them. Then he scraped the resulting mess, plus all the eggs on the walls, into the now-overflowing pot and took it outside to dump by a nearby gastrovore den. The pig urchins inside made short work of the meal, and once the last egg had been devoured Reginald felt a tiny bit of the tension in him ease. The village was still under threat but at least his manor was safe again, for the moment.
One detail that stuck with him was how the pig urchins were very careful to keep their paws away from the acidic slime skin as they ate. Even after the slime was gone, they stepped around rather than over the ooze left behind.
When he returned it was to a sympathetic look from Gudrun. “I was afraid that would be the case,” she said, when he told her what he’d seen.
“The pig urchins might be the only thing that will eat those bastards, and without that, we’re just shuffling the slimes around a little.” Reginald had a path forward, but it was a narrow one. “We need to somehow make the tunnels safe for the gastrovores again. They won’t – or perhaps can’t – handle how much acid is in the mud there. It chewed through my boots after I proofed them, there’s no chance an urchin can pass through. But if we kill enough slimes, and drag their bodies out for the gastrovores to eat, then the next rain shower will send a flood of water down there and flush out enough acid that they can return. That just leaves the kobolds.”
Gudrun tilted her head in thought. “What if the kobolds are eating the slimes? Maybe all our problems will magically disappear overnight from a single fix?”
“Kobolds don’t eat slimes,” Reginald corrected her. “I don’t know everything about them, but that much I’m sure of. They prefer meat, and mostly hunt small creatures like rats or voles or pigeons, but will also take grain or vegetables if they can.”
“Someday you’ll have to tell me how you know so much about kobolds,” Gudrun said. “But alright. What are they doing in the sewers then?”
“They also brew poisons and potions, and the slimes are ingredients but also offer protection of a sort. What predator will make it in there to attack them? As long as the kobolds can block the slimes out of their nests, they’ll be safe.”
“And what do they eat in there, besides your lambs?” Gudrun shook her head. “There must be more to the kobolds migrating here than just the protection. They’ll be eating something in those tunnels, or otherwise they’ll starve once the slimes drive everything else away from the area. Any area underfoot will bring death to the wildlife.”
“Whatever they’re eating isn’t underfoot, then,” Reginald reasoned. With that, it clicked. He understood the whole sorry system.
The snare and thin metal spikes – needles, almost – were still in Reginald’s pocket. He pulled them out and laid them on the table. Kobold handiwork, he was sure, had made them.
Gudrun cocked an eyebrow at him.
“It’s the bats. They’re the missing link. I saw traps in the tunnels that were too high and too small to catch anything walking on the ground, or even crawling along the walls. The slimes protect the kobolds from predators, and protect the bats from everything except the kobolds. Once the slimes are returned to their former numbers, the nascent dungeon will fall apart.” Reginald slumped down in a chair, feeling relief wash over him. It was over. They’d solved it.
“About that,” Gudrun began carefully. “It might be harder than we thought to deal with the slimes. The gastrovores keep them under control, usually, but it sounds like the sewers have become too acidic for them. The slime population’s entirely out of control. Bringing the numbers down again will work in the short term, but until I know why this happened in the first place, there’s no guarantee it won’t occur again, a few months or years down the line.”
They sat in silence for a moment, considering the problem.
“Why are the slimes even there in the first place?” Gudrun asked eventually.
“There’s records from when they were imported, around a century ago, to deal with increasing sewage. Chirham’s been steadily growing for a while and the waste became too much for the village. The slimes process and purify some of that waste, and what’s left is a good fertiliser, so long as it’s dilute enough to not kill the crops.” Reginald thought for a moment. “The slimes nearest the tunnel entrance are all the same kind, but there are other sorts as well. Deeper in, there’s another breed of slime which accumulates metals in its body, and my predecessor used to hunt them on occasion. They’re good money, especially if you find a nest of them. It needs a well-trained team, though, and even then it’s not that safe. My purse was never lean enough to tempt me.”
“So if we somehow purged the slimes entirely, that would cause its own set of problems? The fields would be barren and people would starve. That or leave, and not come back.”
“Yes,” Reginald sighed. “It’s better than a dungeon on our doorstep, but would still spell Witchester’s doom in the long term. Chirham lets all sorts trickle down to us, and plenty of it would ruin the harvest for decades to come. Alchemical concoctions, animal waste, runoff from all sorts of foul industries. The village would be a midden pit.”
Chirham was a double-edged sword in many ways. Without such a centre of commerce and learning so close, Witchester would never have grown so large or so wealthy, but now that same proximity could end up killing the village.
“That growth in Chirham is still happening,” Gudrun said slowly. “The sewers have had three new connections added in the last five years to accommodate the additional people and industries. And the slimes are feeding on it all.”
“No wonder there’s so many of them now.” A city’s worth of effluence to feed on, filtering through a dense warren of tunnels where the slimes could lay eggs in relative safety and where their own acidic emissions kept all predators far away – it wouldn’t be possible to design a more perfect slime breeding scheme. The addition of the kobolds gave them another layer of security, as the traps would keep humans away as well.
The emotional whiplash was getting to be too much for Reginald. One moment they’d received a miracle, and held salvation in their grasp, and the next they were doomed. Chirham wouldn’t stop growing, and there was nowhere else for the sewage to go except in the river, which would be just upstream from Witchester and kill it just as surely as the slimes would. A lack of drinking water was the one way to end the village faster than letting the dungeon fester.
“Let’s think about this,” Gudrun said. She rose to her feet and started pacing the room, then stopped and picked up a quill. As she spoke, she wrote in a scrawling, sprawling hand. “Chirham emits waste that needs filtering, which is where the slimes come in. Dense enough slime habitats become fortresses, keeping out predators and sending the slime population soaring. That spills out into the surroundings, creating new slime-dominated areas until eventually there’s no habitat to expand to. Eventually the infestation will spread upstream all the way to Chirham, though Witchester will be long gone by then.”
“Would Chirham die too?” Reginald asked. For a single mad moment he wondered if its own impending doom could be leveraged to curb its growth, and save Witchester.
Gudrun shook her head. “The university and the militia would establish some system for purging the upper levels of the sewers on a rotation, though it would be wildly expensive. Not to mention boring for the people doing the work. Less expensive than cutting the city’s expansion off at the knees now, though.”
“It sounds like we need to find a way to remove the slimes, then. No other path forward would keep Witchester alive.”
Gudrun reread her notes, and a smile slowly grew. “Not necessarily. I have another plan.”
Gudrun went home to the university and a few days later, the gastrovores returned to the sewers. A few weeks after that the kobolds left, though their traps would be a hazard for years to come.
To his great surprise, Reginald received a grateful note from Gudrun. Field work, she explained, was very much not her specialty, and she hadn’t realised how much danger she’d been in when the kobold trap had caught her. He decided to return the favour by sending her a jar full of pickled slime eggs, for her studies and as a memento of the village they’d saved together.
The inhabitants of Witchester had decidedly mixed feelings about the whole affair. On the one hand, they were once again safe, and the slime infestation was over. On the other, the flow of water from the sewers had doubled and then doubled again, and the lord of the manor claimed he couldn’t change that without the slimes returning. There were irrigation ditches and drainage ditches and flood dykes to plan and dig and maintain, work enough to keep everyone busy well into the winter.
Those farmers whose fields benefited from the additional aqua vitae were pleased, though the politicking over which ditches should be dug first was brutal enough to shatter friendships before the year was over.
Sir Reginald watched it all from the window of his manor. He had a healthy respect for Gudrun. Magical power was all well and good, but she’d managed to talk the mayor of Chirham into diverting part of the river into the sewers. The extra flow was enough to wash out the acid in the entire sewer network, and dilute any new excretions from the remaining slimes. Monsters could be deadly, but bureaucracy was a whole other beast, and one he had no experience in slaying.
The pieces had been there all along, he now saw. The real problem had never been the slime numbers, but rather the increasing density of slime food without an increase in the sanitation that washed their waste away. Gudrun had sounded confident that she would be made a rector as well, once she finished writing a book on their discovery, and Reginald thought she very much deserved it.
For now, though, all that was left to do was enjoy the remainder of his retirement.