Prelude - Making Waves

[Morningstar]

The young farm boy wakes up in a sweat.  The headaches were back. And the voices too.  He shivers down into his blanket and tries to return to sleep, hoping against hope that whatever is affecting him is not the beginnings of this plague the townsfolk were talking about.

[Zane]

Mirwin hid in an alley - just another nameless, faceless beggar - until the dark hours just before dawn when few were on the streets.  Witnesses would just not do.  Not at all.  Clutching his basket of rats to his chest, he creeps through the winding alleys to the market square at High and Bellflower.  There lay the pestilent corpses, slowly rotting.

"Yes my children," he whispers into the basket, "it is time for you to exact retribution on these foul southerners.  Come, my children,"

Waiting until nobody was in sight, Mirwin enters the square and carefully approaches the corpses from upwind.  He unties the rope around the basket and shakes the squirming load of rats onto the corpses.

"Yessssss ... yesssss my children," he hisses, "Carry pestilence and death to every corner of these abominable southerners' homes!"

Mirwin skulks back into the shadowed alley as the squealing pile of rats clambers off the corpses.

[loren]

Some of the rats feast on the flesh of the two dead men while others run away.  A handful of the rats that eat the flesh of the two men die instantly.  Others make it a few steps before they too collapse.

Curiously, a gold necklace can be seen around the neck of one of the miners.  How in the world the poor wretch would have ever come by it is a mystery.  His wages would never have allowed him such an extravagance.