Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens

by Jeremiah D. Schmidt

  “Is that you, Sunshine,” a high and broken voice squeaked out as Fen dashed past a side passage, and when he turned his head midstride he found a mate of his mischief gang scampering from the throngs to join him.

  Fen groaned. Ratter was a bugger of a rat pup who was about the size a four year old and had about the same sense and demeanor. Fen wanted to deck the little tart for calling him ‘Sunshine’, but then seeing as how he didn’t have a moment to stop, he let the irksome nickname slide. “Not now, Ratter,” he husked breathless instead, though the kid still sidled on up next to him.

  Rattigan fought hard to keep pace with Fen’s longer strides. “What you got there,” the lithe boy pressed as he skipped and bound around some scroungers hauling bits of scrap metal.

  “A big ol’ bag of ‘shut the hell up’,” Fen snarled out the side of his mouth, just before skidding to a stop and hooking left into a narrow split in the foundation. He’d poked down the Crawl in hopes the whistlers wouldn’t dare follow him into the winding crush of hovels and structural supports. As quick as up-level constables were to give chase, they were equally quick to give up once it moved beyond the service causeways and utility corridors they were comfortable patrolling. Barring that, this little slice of heaven was a hard route for even a seasoned rat pup, and when the whistlers kept coming, Fen felt his stomach fall to his feet.

  “Gypsum! Whatever you filched’s got the whistlers all a squawking, Sunshine. If you don’t end up in the cages come find me and the rest of the gang out on the Pipeyards later. We’ll be palling around the Little Brothers, like usual; till about three horns past the second Sister’s flush. You can tell me all about what you’ve got in the pack then.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” dismissed Fen through heaving breaths, and just like that Ratter ducked off into a narrow crawlway, leaving Fen to ditch the whistlers on his own. He’d have been mad about the abandonment under different circumstances, but with a sack full of money in tow, having that particular gang-mate slip off was probably for the best.

  The whistlers proved far more persistent than Fen had ever seen, and he ducked down one narrow corridor after another, shoving past throngs of woman and children, and when he came to the crawlspaces he even had to climb over them. Soon enough he was deep in it, and each twist and turn seemed to grow darker then the last. The poor, crowded in this slum borough, didn’t even have the luxury of building their own hovels so they just wiggled and planted themselves into whatever space they could find, and about all they had for light as a result were candles purchased from lightbringers. With candles being a two-token each, seldom did the Crawl have much in the way of illumination, but then Fen had never known it this dark either. It was damn-near abyssal.

  Eventually the shriek of the constables’ whistles fell away, just about the time the world turned to absolute darkness, leaving nothing but a humming in Fen’s ears and his own erratic breathing to keep him company. As he shuffled on, the walls grew tight, so tight he had to twist sideways, and just like that, Fen entered into tunnels he’d never seen before. These were tight circular shafts that even the Warren denizens seemed to steer clear of, and for the first time since leaving his family’s hovel in the Pillars, Fen found himself alone. The sound of it was deafening.

  Fen swallowed hard and lumbered forward, slightly hunched beneath the ceiling’s endless curve, while a creeping disquiet filled his legs with lead. There was almost no light to be seen except the most fleeting circle ahead of him, and that was only in the sense of a shade less black then the rest.

  By the time the tunnel finally broke Fen’s disquiet had turned to low-level dread and when he stepped out into a corridor he stared around at his surroundings wide-eyed and alert. He’d come to an access way of old brick all covered in lichen and mold, and somewhere around the curve ahead a fire flickered. Not a soul was in sight, and it was so quiet here he could hear the water dripping from the ceiling, and his own heart pounding in his chest. Fen had to remind himself to breathe when he began to feel lightheaded. He hadn’t been lost in the Pinprick Slum since he first started scrounging when he was six, but he had to admit none of his current surroundings looked familiar.

  Adjusting the pack over his shoulder, Fen ventured towards the light while trying to reason it all out. The Crawl was a labyrinth alright, but it was also surrounded by thoroughfares. To the north was North Walk; to the west, the Drain Line; south, the Chimes Way; and east, Skitter Row. To be in a tunnel like this meant some sort of service corridor, but nothing even close to it existed in the Crawl. Fen turned and looked back from where he came, but it seemed he’d lost track of the tunnel he’d come out of.

  He turned to continue…

  …But something appeared out of nowhere and blocked his away.

  With a startled yelp, Fen fell back, hitting the ground on his rump before staring up in a panic. It was the figure of a woman, not more than a meter away, and as thin as a skeleton. This creature was wrapped in a dress of dusty white and the brittle flesh of her legs and arms were covered in peculiar tattoos. On her head hung a tangled gray mane of coarse hair, beneath which hung a veil of black that completely covered the face, leaving it a blank canvas to which one’s terrors could be painted.

  “The Gutter Lady,” Fen gasped aloud, unable to stay silent. There was little doubt the immediate woman blocking his path was the infamous witch rumored to prowl the Pinprick. Eddy, the best of his gang mates, was often fond of saying she moved like a ghost, appearing and disappearing in a flash, but most disturbing of all, it was said she had no skin on her face, just muscle and bone beneath a mask of glass. Staring up into that gossamer veil, Fen almost thought he could see it all, long teeth, slit nostrils, lidless eyes, and glistening red muscle. Overcome with fear, he scrambled back through the grit and the mud as the woman took a few steps in his direction.

  The Gutter Lady’s feet didn’t seem to touch the ground but instead appeared to float, and that made the snakes of terror wriggling around Fen’s guts wriggle around all the more, and between the mud and terror-sweats he couldn’t tell if his bladder had let loose in his britches. He hadn’t much time to contemplate it either before the specter lifted up a bony arm and held out a dead rat dangling by the tail. Fen lost his ability to reason, and as she dropped that corpse to the gutter, his vision flushed to black and he bound up to his feet and ran.

  Fen didn’t care where he was running to so long as it was far, far away. In the darkness what did it matter? All he had to guide him anyway were the echoing of his pounding boots and the gasps of his own breathing. He thundered through a nightmare, bouncing off curved brick walls that only got narrower and narrower, and at some point every little bit of light vanished. Only darkness was left, black as bilge-oil.

  With his heart banging strong like some hammer forge, Fen wiggled and squeezed his way forward, feeling the presence of the Gutter Lady hot on his heels, the screech of her predator’s voice ringing in his ears, and her bony claws racking at his hair. Then all at once a brilliant light flashed and Fen skidded to a halt and slammed his eyes closed. Staggering back he flailed an arm ahead of him to ward off the Lady’s attack, but nothing came, only the sound of harsh, mocking cackling.

  “You something of a spas, boy-d-boy,” rasped a scratchy voice, and when Fen opened his eyes he discovered the familiar tunnels of the Crawl stretching out around him. Standing in his path was some old crone, holding the numb of a burning candle in her twisted fingers. The light barely broke the gloom beyond a two foot radius, and yet it seemed a brilliant beacon that cast the hunched old woman’s face in orange. She’d a hundred wrinkles at least, and hair so sparse as to be a mere suggestion at covering her spotted scalp.

  Confused, terrified, and drenched in mud, sweat, and who knows what other filth, Fen looked back to find nothing but some rusted pipework standing a few meters behind him. Could it all have been imagined…the Gutter Lady nothing but a daydream, he wondered in a daze. He knew that in the dark strange things often happened, and
minds could become muddled, but as far as Fen was concerned nothing as harrowing as what he’d just gone through had ever happened…to anyone…ever. He still couldn’t wrap his head around the Gutter Lady’s miraculous appearance as he walked through the Crawl on his way home…or the strange tunnel…but most of all, her holding out that dead rat.

  Chapter 3

  By the time Fen reach the hidden hovel his father had built next to the first Fat Sister tank, he was beginning to feel himself again. The shock of seeing the Gutter Lady turned to a distant memory after the walk through Maze Town into South Scumside, and then across the bridge into the Pillars, so that once he reached Skitter Row Fen was whistling a merry tune. With his loot slung confidently over his shoulder, and feeling good about the haul, he glanced up and down the service corridor. When he was sure no one was watching, he slipped in behind an exhaust manifold that was coughing out sulfurous steam, and then ducked beneath a rusted cross-member to pop up in an underside fissure where he could climb into an abandoned pipe.

  With the Warrens being packed to the brim with people, the Tunk’s hovel was a rare oasis of privacy, and for that they owed Art everything. Years of crawling through the mines and caves of Junction in the service of Hanns Company had given him a preternatural ability to sniff out hidden locations, so when he found this pipe led to a break tucked in behind one of the over-buildings massive I-beam supports, Art had known he’d found a place to house his family in relative safety. As far as hovels in the Pinprick were concerned, Fen suspected they lived in a mansion by comparison to what his mates described. Ratter told about living beneath a duct in the Crawl with his mom and about half a dozen other woman; all women, because like Ratter’s father, most of the men were either off laboring under the table for one of the mega-corps, or, like his older brother, off dying for the Iron Empire in remote foreign skies. As for the others in his mischief gang, Shoat “the Goat”, Beaut, and Durreem each lived in one Pillar hovel or another with families and extended families and family friends, while Eddy lived in a small shanty in South Scumside with her mother and sisters. Of all of them, Nickle probably had the hardest go of it. Being an orphan he wandered alone in the Pipeyards and slept where he could when he could; usually up near the ceiling where the older ratties couldn’t reach him.

  The Tunk’s hovel wasn’t exactly big; the crevasse created between the flanges and web of the I-beam only measured a couple square meters at best; but Art had built his way up creating three stories before his alcoholism and mounting madness robbed him of ambition. A forth story had been left unfinished as a result, but still usable enough for storing lighter goods that Fen and his sister scrounged out from the refuse dumps, or from what came trickling down from the sky-levels. Even further down the pipe Art had created a storage closet of sorts between the Fat Sister and the I-beam, where they stored anything they could burn in the hearth, which these days didn’t particularly amount to much.

  Fen stopped suddenly. Down the pipe came the flickering of flames and with it the sounds of shuffling and things being tossed around, and that set the hairs on the back of his neck on edge. He tried to remember what day it might have been, but he hadn’t been paying much attention to the Three Fat Sister’s schedule since Lydia and her crew left for the Tangle, and with the run-in with the Gutter Lady occupying the periphery of his thoughts, he felt as oblivious as any old-timer. Could it be Lydia…or is it some troller’s found their way into our hidden hovel?

  From a secret pouch in his breast pocket, Fen pulled out a small and tarnished switchblade and flipped it open, determined to protect what was his. He’d pricked a couple trollers and scroungers and trudgers in his lifetime, but always a quick jab before bolting away. Here he’d have to stand and fight, and raiders and burglars were said to be vicious. And if the hovel was to stay a secret he’d have to finish it too. At least that’s what his dad always taught him. Cautiously he stalked towards the split in the pipe, which marked the entrance to his home, and when he reached the threshold he took a deep breath and braced.

  Brandishing the knife high over his head he leapt around the opening. “Ah!” he roared at the same time. But what he found was a young woman standing with her back to him in the room’s darkened corner. She was covered head to toe in mud, and emptying out items from a large satchel onto a plank of wood that served the Tunks as a table. Fen came to a screeching halt as the girl came wheeling around, terrified.

  “Fen,” she cried out, throwing her hands up to her forehead in surprise. “What the hell is wrong with you?!” She tore off her compound goggles and heaved them at him in frustration.

  “Lydia,” muttered Fen as his muscles relaxed and his knife-arm fell limply to his side.

  “Of course it’s me, you nitwit,” his sister hollered back. “What did you expect?”

  “Dunno, burglars or trollers…maybe.”

  “It’s Wednesday, Fen,” she raised a gloved hand to the entryway, “I’m always back on Wednesday.”

  Fen shrugged nonchalantly before folding and tucking his knife away in his jacket pocket. “Lost track of the Sister’s schedule, I guess.”

  “Hard to believe…not with them billowing and bellowing every hour.” She scrunched her face up in skepticism. “Anyway,” she waved him over, “come here and check out the haul the gals helped me scrounge up in the Tangle.” Turning to the table, Lydia set to running her fingers through her hair and teasing it free from its mud-crusted ponytail. With a final shake of her head all that ruffled black hair came tumbling free to rest on her shoulders. “I think we really got something here,” she added while Fen stepped gingerly through the clutter of their common room. Placing one hand on her hip and the other on her chin, Lydia took to surveying her accumulated bric-a-brac in apparent approval. “We managed a good amount of combustibles,” she gestured to a spread of moldy newspapers, broken dowels, and product boxes, faded and wet, sitting off to her right. “But that’s not even the half of it. Come look at the scrap metal. Tin cans and paneling and even a fender portion to some old rusted steamer-cart. Probably worth a few tokens if the bartermen are feeling generous.” Then she turned suddenly to block the table from view. Her narrow nose and small mouth pursed up in amusement, and no matter how hard Fen tried, he just couldn’t see around her. Dressed in her canvas scrounger coat, patched and sutured together at the seams, she easily blocked his every attempt to peek around her.

  “Well? What is it?” he whined. Even with a pack full of cash he couldn’t help his curiosity.

  With a cruel smile planted across her angular face, Lydia stepped aside and waved a hand down with theatrical glee to her newly found treasure.

  Fen’s jaw dropped when he saw the apparatus sitting in amongst the rest of the junk, and it made him blurt out his astonishment. “Where did you find an arc-torch?” A treasure like that was a rare find indeed, especially with so many picking at the refuse from the upper-levels. The best him and his sister had managed up to this point were a few broken bulbs, some smashed sconces, and a casing or two; enough to make a working lantern for a couple hours on occasion; but never anything as intact as this.

  “And that’s only the half of it,” she exclaimed eagerly, and from behind her back she produced a copper cylinder, presenting it proudly.

  “What? A chem-bat too! Does it work?”

  “Check it out,” she grinned from ear to ear, snatching up the arc-torch and pressing its contact against the battery’s diode. A powerful light came blazing out, blinding Fen and sending him staggering back with his hands shielding his eyes.

  Fen couldn’t help but bark out with laughter. “Alright, alright,” he pleaded mirthfully, “you’ve made your point.” It was more light than he’d seen in months, and it filled the room and sent the spiders and centipedes and cockroaches skittering for cover.

  Lydia snapped the lantern off and the room seemed all the darker for it. The small fire guttering in the corner brick pile stood in as a poor replacement, leaving more shadows than light
and seemed to suck all the joy that had filled the small hovel. For a brief moment it was like being back in his hiding spot up in the tenements of tier two, or back beneath the Pinprick Skylight. Now, it was like that strange tunnel earlier today, and he shuddered to think of the Gutter Lady and her black veil; the claw of her pointing finger. And why did she hold a dead rat out at me? He shifted the pack on his back, feeling the burden of its weight on his thin frame.

  “The on/off switch is loose and fickle,” explained Lydia as Fen tried to reign in his disquiet, “and the battery contact’s busted and can’t hold a battery proper—not that this one’s the right size anyway—but I’m sure we can rig something up with what we’ve got laying around upstairs, and given the charge, we might have a few dozen hours of brightness. So…what do you think?”

  “It’s great…it’s really, really great,” replied Fen, staring down at the soiled floor, all the while trying to sound upbeat. Her find was an honest to goodness godsend, but its significance was most certainly overshadowed by his stolen loot, and that made it mighty hard to be genuine.

  “So what did you and your gang of laze-abouts pilfer while I was gone…?” She nodded to the pack slung over his shoulder. “Never seen its like before, and I know you couldn’t have come by it honest-like, so makes me wonder what’cha got for trouble in there this time around, baby brother.”

  Fen suddenly felt self-conscious, and with something approaching shame. A few found tokens, a note or two was one thing, but this was a veritable bankroll, and the pack’s weight seemed to grow with his hesitation to acknowledge that fact. “Oh, this? It’s… it’s nothing. I ain’t even been with the Bednest Boys today, and that’s the True God’s truth.”

  “A likely tale as any…but what’s here is here so let’s have a peek. Whatever it is looks heavy,” she observed, tilting her head and locking her colorless Hierarch eyes on him. “You’re not goin’ to hold out on your own sister are you?” She raised an eyebrow. “You becoming some sort of hoarder now?” She stepped forward and made a swipe for the strap, but Fen hopped back. “Oh-oh-oh,” she hooted, “now I know you’re holding out on me.”