Eirik is visited by a rat

Fire! There was a scuffling, and a banging, and – fire!

The lamp was out–

There was only the light of the fire and the hideous, dancing shadows it cast around the room.

The lamp–

The lamp had fallen and set fire to the rug.

Water–

He had water. He reached for the pitcher–

A rat. An enormous white rat had climbed onto the bedside table and knocked the lamp onto the floor. It peered up at him through red eyes, panting, and its naked teeth were long and brown.

“Go away!” he shouted, torn between the ancestral fear of fire and the ancestral fear of rats.

At once the animal leapt to the floor and bounded past the fire and onto the chest across the room.

Water–

Eirik grabbed the pitcher and slung its contents over the fire. Fortunately there was water enough.

He looked up just in time to see the scaly tail of the rat disappear behind the tapestry that hung on the wall behind the chest.

His sword–

His sword in hand, he felt like a man again. He was not afraid of strange beds, of the dark, of fire, of rats, or of any unseen, scuffling enemies. No – he would light the candles, and he would see.

But first, the door…

The thread he had stretched across the doorframe before retiring was still there. The door had not been opened since he had closed his eyes.

He yanked on the thread for the satisfaction of feeling it snap, and then he went out into the corridor. There was no one, and no one in the stairwell. He took a rush to light the candles in his room and closed the door again.

His next thought was for the rat. He had seen it disappear behind the tapestry, but there was not enough space between the chest and the wall for a rat of that size. A man’s hand could barely fit – not that he was fool enough to try. A sword blade, however…

But the tapestry billowed strangely when he prodded it with his sword. He had checked behind it before going to bed – he was not fool enough to sleep in a strange room without looking for any secret openings – but he had found only a blank wall.

He slipped his sword behind it and pulled it aside…

There was an empty place where previously there had been a wall. Inside he could see a panel like those that lined the walls of the room. The blank wall he had seen before had merely been the outside face of a secret door.

After scraping the walls up and down in search of rats or other foes, he slipped through the tapestry himself, and found another door, undisguised from the inside, that opened onto the stairwell.

He pushed the secret door closed from the other side and found a latch preventing it from being opened from within the room.

But no rat could have opened this door in any case.

He returned to his room through the ordinary door and pulled the tapestry back into place. He would dress and go to Tryggve, and the two of them would keep one another awake until dawn.

If Tryggve could still be awoken.