Chapter 5: Stinky Cheese
“WHO DARES DISTURB HRATZINGER!!!”
A harsh voice screeched from somewhere above them. Instinctively, in unison, their weapons at the ready, the men spun at the sound. Their experience on the landing had put them on edge so it was with great caution that they mounted the short flight of stairs to the domed room above.
As they came level with the floor, they were confronted with a great brass contraption looming over their heads on a raised platform at the center of the room. Part telescope, part astrolabe it stood cantilevered out and up from it’s base supported by a jury-rigged system of ropes and pulleys. Several additions had been haphazardly attached to it—lenses, gears and mechanisms powered by spinning rat wheels and pumping bellows. Out from this central platform, two colonnades of tall arches divided the room into quarters, each obscured from the next by dark, heavy curtains. Atop the platform was probably the one place from which the entire room could be seen. Above it the night sky shown through the opened panels of the dome.
“DOGS!!! EITHER SPEAK YOUR PIECE OR BEGONE!” came the ragged voice again echoing about the dome.
It was hard to tell where the voice was coming from. The larger man gestured with his chin to the left. His keen sense of hearing told him something large lay behind the curtains of the quarter to their right. He could hear its great shuffling feet and after what they had seen climbing the tower, he preferred to go left. The little man shrugged his agreement and they began to work their way around.
The outer walls of this quarter were lined with shelves overflowing with many volumes and texts. Most appeared to concern rats, magic or astronomy and occasionally all three. More books lay piled in stacks on the floor, the capacity of the shelves having been reached and surpassed long ago. Finding their path to the ladders of the central platform blocked by the clutter of books, the duo was forced to make their way further along the perimeter of the room through a maze of overcrowded tables. Some bore heavy loads of charts and maps while others were choked with glass instruments of every variety. Bubbling multicolored liquids hissed and spat, issuing puffs of acrid smoke. Passing another table topped with a wooden maze, they were forced to turn right just before the curtain obscuring the next quarter, their path blocked by a four poster bed. The small man gently pushed back one of the tattered curtains that enclosed the bed with the blade of his rapier to see inside. Gagging as the thick musky smell of old cheese caught in his throat he immediately let it drop, his quick eyes having determined that it was empty.
“WELL?, I’M WAITING…”
The man’s voice seemed to be coming from the other side of the dividing curtain. Each man took a side of the heavy fabric silently drawing it back to see what was on the other side. What they saw was… cheese. Lots and lots of cheese.
The two men softly stepped into this vast stockpile of dairy products. Both this quarter and the one beyond, for the curtains dividing them had been drawn back, were filled with more cheeses than either man thought existed. They wove between wobbly towers and giant stacks of every size, shape, color and smell. Throughout the room, crates and barrels bearing the markings of foreign lands stood roughly open or upended completely on the ground. Waxed rounds of cheese, some almost as big as the smaller man, stood like giant boulders. Save for the dark grey of the stone floor it was as if they had stepped into some rocky desert landscape composed entirely of wheels and hunks.
As they skirted around a carving of a giant rat being rendered out of particularly stinky stuff, the far end of the next quarter came into view. Like the previous quarter it was thoroughly dominated by stacks of cheese as well, but at the far end stood a hunched man. Dressed in what appeared to be fur-trimmed brown monk’s robes he was scribbling furiously at a chalkboard in the same cramped writing style as had been on the tags below. As they moved into the room he stopped writing and visibly sighed, shoulders slumping. Without moving the hand he was writing with or turning to look, he barked in the same grating voice.
“WRETCHES, HRATZINGER HAS IMPORTANT WORK TO DO!!! HRATZINGER IS NOT SOME…”
A large rat standing on a cluttered table next to him raised onto its hind legs and was squeaking at him while looking back and forth between him and the intruders. “Eh…. what’s that?….you don’t say.” His head whipped around suddenly fixing the two men in his beady yellow-eyed glare.
“Well, well, well, uninvited guests, eh?” He smiled wickedly as he turned to face them.
© Tucker Johnson 2020