How To Avoid Death On A Daily Basis Book One

37. Behind The Curtain

There was a cart and horse outside the shed. It was the first horse we'd seen. It looked like a regular horse, no wings or horns. Soldiers were piling sacks and boxes into the back while Grayson watched. He saw us approach and his eyebrows rose.

"Ah, you're back. Looks like you've been busy. What have you got there?"

We dumped the bodies in front of him.

"First, I want to ask you about this." I took the bunnicorn horn out of one of the sacks and showed it to him. He jerked back like I was offering him a severed penis.

"Why," he asked, "are you holding that severed penis?"

I looked down at my hand. "No, this is a horn from a rabbit."

"Yes," said Grayson, "a rabbit penis. When it's their mating season, they incubate inside an ogre and come out with the horn."

I stared at the thing in my hand unable to work out what to do with it. How do you dispose of a severed penis? If I had access to the internet, I'm sure I'd have thirty million search results to that question.

"But they all had them. There weren't any females." That's all I could think, still trying to convince myself I wasn't holding a cock in my hand.

"They are both male and female. Once they get the horn, they form a circle and, well, I won't go into the details. I wouldn't carry that around if I were you. You'll scare the children."

I turned around and threw it as hard as I could. It sailed over the buildings and out of sight. I turned back and pretended the last few minutes had never happened.

"Can you have a look at these and tell us if we did the right thing?" I pointed at the mice.

He bent down and unwrapped the cloth over the male mouse's face. He stared at me open-mouthed. "You did this?"

I nodded.

He rushed towards me, grabbed my shoulders and shook me. "Well done, my boy, well done. You have done us a great service."

"We have?" I was relieved he saw it as a good thing, but a little confused at the enthusiasm of his response.

"This isn't just an ordinary mouse warrior—although that would have been a worthy achievement too—this is their king. Every nest only has one breeding pair, the mouse king and its mate. You can kill off all their warriors, and this little monster will repopulate the colony in a few weeks. They're incredibly hard to kill. They stay hidden most of the time."

He bent down and undid the other mouse's wrapping. "And you got the female too! This is wonderful."

He pulled apart the cloth until the female was fully exposed. Seeing her lifeless body again put a knot in my stomach and I turned to the others. They were all avoiding looking at it. Grayson, on the other hand, poked the body with a gleeful look on his face.

"Seems like you got her just in time. She was pregnant. A few days at most before she would have birthed a litter of at least four or five."

The tightness in my stomach fell away, like I was going downhill on a rollercoaster. My throat constricted so my voice sounded strange to my ears. "We didn't know." A cold shiver ran through me and sweat broke out on my face.

The replacement mice they were expecting weren't reinforcements from some other nest, it was their babies.

Grayson looked up at me. "There's no need to be shocked. These weren't babes you need to regret ridding us of. In six months they would have grown into mature males. There's only one breeding pair in the nest, so the males find their jollies elsewhere. That means they kidnap young girls from places like this town and use them to satisfy their urges. We sometimes find the bodies, or what's left of them. Let me tell you, you should be enormously proud of yourselves."