Death. The stench was embedded into his skin. Blood, guts, muscle, feces, slowly decomposing flesh. His clothes, his hair, even his fingernails reeked of it. Death seeped into the very wood of the shed, and belched its breath back out again.
He knew he would never be free of that smell again.
A rat squealed at him, the thickened sunlight of late morning telling him it was feeding time. Small claws scrabbled at the metal bars of its cage. The cries of one set off the others, and soon a chorus demanded the man deliver food, now.
Tycho rose from his chair, leaving behind his scrolls and manuscripts for a moment to fetch the rats their bread. He drew one of his twin knives from his belt and dug the blade into the loaf of bread, more tearing than slicing.
One rat in the room lay silent, no breath left in its lungs to squeal. It could not eat food with its guts exposed to the sunlight seeping through the windows. Limbs stiffened by poison and relaxed by death stretched across a wooden board, held by pins. Scalpels stained by blood littered the table. A page full of notes lay beside the board.
Alive, dead. Caged, pinned. Tycho knew too well now the line between the two. He'd felt them all die, held them in his hands as they gave up their struggle.
They lived when he gave them bread, they died when he forced poison into their veins and let it freeze them from the inside out. All in the name of knowledge. All in the name of a cure. Or maybe, all in the name of more death. Tycho wasn't sure.
He dropped the partly torn, partly sliced pieces of bread through the hatches atop the rats' cages, silencing their hungry cries one by one to the end of the row. Only one rat remained still squealing. He turned to it and its cage, settled on the one table not crowded with papers and tools.
"You tore your bandage again," he told it.
Its black eyes gleamed at him and it gnashed its teeth.
Tycho shrugged and opened the hatch, dropping in the bread, and shut the hatch again. "I don't speak rat. But you seem healthy still. That's good enough for me."
The rat fell to the bread, tearing it apart and devouring the crumbs. Tycho stood, watching it. It was moving again, and eating normally. At any moment, he expected it to collapse, its body slowly freezing in the heat of summer until its lungs went stiff and its eyes dulled, and its corpse became just another piece of rot stacked on the pile.
He knew the way the venom went, the way it killed, too well.
But this one hadn't died. This one lived. It had been sick, and the warm freezing had begun in its limbs, but it had recovered, begun to move again, and lived.
It was progress.
