The Bad Blintz Rat-catchers' Crimes Exposed

The Bad Blintz Rat-catchers' Crimes Exposed turns the town’s apparent rat problem into evidence of a human scheme. Under questioning by Keith, Malicia, and Maurice, the rat-catchers admit that they stole goods, blamed the thefts on rats, and kept rats alive in cages for the pits. Their account reaches further than routine corruption: they had bred rats selected for surviving the pit and were trying to make a rat king. The confession exposes both the economic deception and the deliberate exploitation of the rats supposedly being controlled.

The confrontation and the first admissions

The reckoning begins when a voice from the rafters orders the rat-catchers to stop and listen, warning them that running, talking too much, waiting, or trying to outsmart the speaker could prove dangerous. Dust falls as they look up and recognize the cat as the one belonging to the boy. The sudden reversal leaves the rat-catchers no longer in command of the encounter: Keith and Malicia can question them, while Maurice is present to hear the account and identify the harm done to the rats.

Keith asks what happened to a rat the rat-catchers had taken away. The assistant offers an absurd explanation: a rat in a hat came down from the roof and carried it off, while another large rat entered the pit, confronted Jacko, and escaped. Malicia concludes that the rats are all right. Keith then moves from the missing animal to the larger accusation, asking whether the men stole from everyone and blamed the rats. The assistant agrees. Maurice adds that the rat-catchers killed rats, making clear that the deception was not only about stolen property: the blame placed on rats also concealed what had been done to them.

Theft concealed as pest control

Asked why they did it, the assistant explains the reasoning he had accepted from Ron. Since rats supposedly ate goods anyway, Ron had presented taking those goods as something other than theft—a rearrangement, in the assistant’s rationalization. He also reveals that someone Ron knew arrived by sailing barge in the middle of the night and paid the rat-catchers. The account points to a wider exchange behind the scheme, though it does not identify the buyer or establish the full scale of the trade.

The senior rat-catcher rejects the explanation as a lie, but the assistant continues to give away details. His shifting account reveals how the men made their actions seem permissible to themselves: they treated rats as natural thieves and their own taking of goods as an adjustment to what rats would have eaten. Keith’s questions expose the contradiction. The men had not simply responded to a nuisance; they had used the supposed nuisance as cover for their own theft.

The cages and the breeding scheme

Keith presses the assistant about the rats kept in cages without food. The man says that rat-catchers had long supplied live rats to the rat pits and considered this a perk of the trade. To maintain that supply, they bred rats, feeding them dead rats from the pits. His casual explanation presents the practice as established custom, but it also makes clear that the caged rats were being treated as stock for an ongoing business rather than as animals to be removed from the town.

The breeding had an additional purpose. Ron proposed breeding from the rats that survived in the pit, particularly those that avoided the dogs, on the theory that successive generations would produce bigger, better fighters. The senior rat-catcher briefly calls this scientific, but Malicia asks what the point would be. The assistant’s answer is the decisive disclosure: they intended to make a rat king. The senior man calls the information a Guild secret, yet his attempt to protect it comes too late; the assistant has already revealed the scheme, and then falters as he tries to repeat that he made a rat king.

This revelation changes the nature of the reported rat trouble. The rat-catchers had not only profited from blaming animals for stolen goods and using rats in the pits; they had been developing a larger and more capable rat as the product of selective breeding. The evidence gives the stated objective, but not a complete account of how the proposed rat king would be used. What the confession establishes is that the project was deliberate, concealed, and connected to the rat-catchers’ existing pit economy.

From exposure to a different settlement

The confession is part of a wider change in who gets to set the terms of the rat problem. Later, Keith takes the piper’s pipe after winning it and tells the piper to lead the rats out of town. Rather than treating victory as permission to dismiss the piper, Keith proposes that they do the job together and says the piper will still be paid. The arrangement contrasts with the rat-catchers’ concealed profit: Keith makes the terms explicit and presents cooperation as a way for both parties to benefit.

The question of what should happen to the rats then shifts from expulsion by force to negotiation. Keith urges the mayor to convene the town council and talk with them, warning that driving the rats away would not prevent their return. Darktan offers the mayor an opportunity rather than a threat, and later explains that killing humans would not have improved the rats’ position: eventually they would have had to speak with humans somewhere, so they might as well begin with Bad Blintz. The subsequent agreement is described not as a simple happy ending but as a contract worked out by the council and senior rats, with details still to settle.

The exposure therefore does more than identify dishonest rat-catchers. It strips away their claim to be the town’s answer to its rats and reveals a system that depended on deception, caged animals, and a profitable rat-pit supply. Against that system, the later negotiations offer a different basis for order: open terms, mutual obligations, and recognition that the rats can think and act for themselves.