Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens

by Jeremiah D. Schmidt

  “Ah, don’t take offense, kid, you’re a product of your environment is all. I get it; grew up in a slum much like this one myself; might have ended up like you too had my pops not been quick with the belt and high on the virtues of hard work…bit of a social spitfire as well, so we got the old oppression lecture ‘round the slab-table most every single night. So’t goes I guess. You got a name, kid?”

  Fen hesitated and then lied, “Gordon.”

  The merchant stood straight and rubbed a hand on his clean-shaven chin. “Don’t look like a Gordon, kid. I knew a Gordon once, a fat sow of a man who looked like a mist grub and had the temper of a one-winged drake, but guess we can’t pick the names our parents give us, now can we? As for me, I go by Time, Conrad Time, please to make your acquaintance.” He held out a gloved-hand, and when Fen took it, he found the glove’s leather supple to the touch, but the handshake beneath firm.

  “So here’s a question I got for the ages. Where did a pup like you get all that token?”

  Fen waffled at any sort of reasonable answer and was grateful when the plank door at the front of the room groaned inward, setting a bell to jingling. Both snapped to attention to find an older dark-skinned boy clomping in wearing oversized boots.

  “Guess you can answer that another time…if you’re feeling inclined to do so that is.” Time turned back with his face filled with concern. “You feeling better?” he asked.

  “Aye,” Fen muttered back, though truth was everything hurt. At the very least he felt more aware and less queasy then he had when they’d first entered the shop.

  “Good, take your time to gather your wits and finish that drink. I gotta go take care of business as usual. Got’cha, Gordon?”

  “Got’cha.”

  Fen sat for a while, sipping at his drink, while Time attended to his customer, who was just some boney young adult, shy of a draftable age, and who just couldn’t seem to decide on what he wanted. So the merchant had to walk him around the store, seemingly forever. A few times Conrad grew frustrated, but Fen couldn’t hear the exchange over the ringing in his own ears, and Time seemed to keep his voice to just above a whisper anyway. Fen guessed it was so as not to disturb him, which amazed. Fen had never known an adult to take an interest in a child’s wellbeing before, at least not one they weren’t related to. In the Warrens children were ghosts, and ghosts were best ignored, but here was Time, nursing Fen back to health and humoring some idiot who couldn’t make up his mind.

  When the time came, and Fen had finished his drink and wiping his face clean, he picked himself up to make the long walk home. As he did Conrad Time said his goodbyes with a friendly nod. “Now watch yourself out there, you hear? And if you’ve got business in the Exchange,” he raised a thick, yet neatly arranged eyebrow, “I’d suggest stopping on by the Sin’s Devil Cat; it’s what I call this place. I’ll treat you fairly. But don’t hesitant ether if you find yourself around these parts for no particulars; just stop on by. I got some kids like you who do work for me on the occasion; you might even enjoy their company; and I could always use a hand for one thing or another, so’t goes.”

  Chapter 6

  Fen limped his way back to the home, feeling physically better than earlier, but also feeling as dejected and morose as the rotted buildings that peeked out from the foundations from time to time. He was plagued by the notion that he’d a fortune in tokens not more than an hour past, and now he’d next to nothing but a busted nose and some bruises and cuts, and a feeling of being as far from the light as the old city that sat crushed beneath the tiers overhead. Sure the stolen rucksack still sat hidden in pipe on the Sister, filled with a whole bunch more notes, but he’d traded with a fair number of Bartermen that day already, and the spectacle of getting robbed would only make it more conspicuous should he attempt trading more. Notes didn’t exactly fall from the sky on the regular…unless you were fortunate enough to be a wage-maker (like his mother had been before she’d run off), but seeing as how he was just some rat pup, Fen knew he’d lost his chance at riches in the Exchange. About all he had now was a pack full of pretty paper, all-a-glitter with little portraits of the first official Iron Emperor, Ludwig Wilhelm the Second.

  After he slinked into the family hovel and got caught on the ladder up to his room, he had to lie when Lydia hopped up from their parent’s old mattress on the second floor and struck a match. With the light held close to his face, Fen spun a tale of dusting up with another mischief gang while she tilted his head this way and that, brushing back his shaggy bangs, and making a bigger fuss than need be. Examining his nose, she didn’t seem convinced in the least of what he was telling her, and if not for the lateness of the hour she might have kept on pressing him. Fortune be she couldn’t stop yawning every couple minutes, and eventually she collapsed back down in her bed out of sheer exhaustion and waved him away to deal with later.

  Fen finished his climb to the third floor and felt his own hard-won relief when he dropped into the nested pile of mildewed blankets that he called a bed. He laid there for some time staring up at the various poster fragments he’d recovered over the years, pieced together, plastered on the steel walls, and aglow in the light from a tin can of burning rubbish.

  He was nearly asleep when Lydia hollered from below, “Starting after tomorrow you’re with me again, mister, back like it used to be, and I won’t take no for an answer…even if I got to drag you out by your ears.”

  Fen’s initial reaction was rebellious, but as the hours drifted by he began to reconsider. Maybe his sister was right. Maybe he was better off following her around than running with a mischief gang. They hadn’t exactly been all that successful, and Nickle had sucked away all the fun with his excessive territorialism as of late. Coupled with their takes getting smaller and smaller, and the major thoroughfares being picked clean and filled with rivals, these days gang life mostly involved fighting or running from bruisers and whistlers. If he went back with his sister he could at least count on some sort of take, hard found, but honest.

  His mates would certainly give him a hard time about scrounging for sure, and with his sister and her friends no less, but he could take a little ribbing from the likes of Shoat, and as for Durreem, he wasn’t the sort to tease anyway. Beaut was too busy fussing at his hair and clothing to care, and Ratty was about the biggest loser any of them knew. Any attempt he tried at giving Fen a hard time would amount to a rash on the Necrosis (meaning not a whole lot at all). The only real issue was how Nickle would take it. He was the only one who might look on Fen leaving as a personal slight, but Fen would find some way to work around him… But all that was for a another day to figure out, and when Fen finally fell asleep it was to the grinning face of a clown, advertising some exotic circus show that happened years and years ago on tier three.

  When Fen woke the next morning it was to the afternoon bellow of the Three Fat Sister’s horns, just before they began their cyclical flush. By then he should have been well into his day, but he was still in bed when the hovel trembled and vibrated in time to the giant tanks. Once he got up and made his way down the ladders, it was really of no surprise when he found Lydia sitting at their table sorting scrounge by the light of her own tin can lantern. She was waiting for him alright, with a scowl on her face, and words waiting on her lips. But Fen grinned. She could be mad all she wanted, but he’d already made up his mind; and was she in for a surprise.

  “I made some breakfast,” Lydia snapped. This morning she was wearing her faded blue head-wrap, and the way it pulled back her dark hair gave her an already severe look.

  “Great.” Fen could feel his stomach rumbling like the Sister’s pipework and he eagerly planted himself at the table, where in amongst the bric-a-brac Lydia had set out a broken plate for him. It was piled high with finslug eggs and fried rat strips, and she’d even sautéed up some gutterweed, but when he started into it he found it cold. She must have made it hours ago, and if the meal hadn’t cost a half-token he might have pushed it away, but
instead he choked it down while his sister watched.

  “You mind not glaring at me like a harpy while I eat,” grumbled Fen.

  His sister’s stately eyebrows lowered. “Just finish your breakfast…so we can talk.”

  “There’s no need to, Lyd—”

  His sister was quick to interrupt, and her tone was already heated. “Now you listen to me, Fen Tunk—”

  “I’ll go with you,” he stated, and then he gobbled up a spoonful of eggs. In the silence his chewing echoed in the small room, and when it got uncomfortable he turned to look at his sister. The expression on her face nearly made him choke. Befuddlement made Lydia look a fool; like the clown on his circus poster.

  She frowned fiercely and folded her skinny arms over her nonexistent bosom. “Don’t mess with me, Fen, I’m hardly in the mood for your crap.”

  “Not messing with you, sis,” he spoke around the food in his mouth. “I’ll go.”

  “Go,” she muttered the words in disbelief as she stared off at the wall in front of them, looking for some sort of clarity in the rust. “Well…good.” And suddenly she seemed to decompress like a hydraulic piston turned off. She even ventured a smile. “Glad to hear.”

  Fen returned to eating, glancing once at his sister beside him. She was leaning with her knobby elbows resting on the table, and it occurred to him how loose and baggy her tank-top hung off her shoulders. Through the sleeve of her armpit he could even see clear on through from one side to the other, and how her homemade bra wrapped around fleshy ribs rather than any sort of breasts. There wasn’t an ounce of fat to be found on her, anywhere, and that got him worrying. Their father had been in a similar state when they’d dumped him into the Axillary. He’d been so light, hardly heavier than a piece of damp cardboard, and now Fen shuddered to think of the same thing happening to Lydia.

  “Here,” he offered his plate up.

  “I already ate,” she said tiredly, and pushed it back.

  “What…like yesterday? You on some sort of air diet now?”

  “Funny. Just finish eating, Fen.”

  For four days Fen tried to find some sort of contentment in crawling through trash heaps and drain grates and narrow catches with his sister and her gals; sifting through up-level flotsam; but it just reminded him of why he’d left it all and joined the Bednest Gang in the first place. When contentment failed he tried reason alone, but when days of scrounging had brought them nothing but a few product boxes and some spent tobacco, the hours of labor looked less like making a living and more like torture. He was sure kids sent to the sweaty were better off. At least they got fed and could count on a token a week.

  But day after day took its toll; wading, breath held tight, sometimes in mud, sometimes sewage, and sometimes in waist-deep rotted food littered with broken glass; and his mind drifted to the stash with more frequency. Here he was slaving just to survive when a fortune lay waiting for him. He wondered what his mates might be up to, or how they’d taken to his sudden disappearance. Fen tried to find them at one point, but they were off causing mischief, and Lydia was something of a taskmaster.

  “We’ve a narrow window with some of the more choice locations, Fen. Those high-dwellers dump on a pretty regular schedule and there’s not a scrounger who hasn’t taken note—”

  “I know, I know.” Fen grumbled as he tromped behind his sister through ankle deep muck along some long-buried access way. “I used to do this too.”

  “Well not for years, and things change.”

  “Yeah, like your gals,” He’d looked around the darkened passage to a trio of squat forms lumbering just past the circle of light thrown out by Lydia’s arc-torch.

  “Fen Tunk, what is that supposed to mean?”

  “‘Supposed to mean’ ”, he repeated as though his sister was being dense. One needed only look at the girls. They looked like they’d each devoured another person and double in size for it. No more than a few years back they were like Lydia, thin, and each with their own enticing attributes. Sasa with her charcoal skin and perfect complexion, fiery Dalana, and coy Mitz with her ample features. Though he’d just been a kid when they came around on the regular, he remembered them fondly. “I just don’t know why you’re all skin and bones and those three look like they’ve been feasting on the regular.”

  “Well…we all find different ways to survive, Fen,” she’d whispered, “and sometimes consorting with the rat lord’s bartermen brings in much needed perks.”

  Fen pointed off to where Lydia’s friends probed the darkness. “Maybe they oughta try taking less of those perks.”

  Right then and there Lydia had turned on him and smacked him in the face. Wearing gloves, his sister’s assault wasn’t particularly painful, but it was shocking. “These girls are out here for us. They don’t need to be scroungin’, Fen, and they don’t need some creep like you putting them down for nonsense that don’t affect you one bit. Their life’s goal ain’t exciting you, so if they take extra today, ‘cause tomorrow there might be none, then that’s their call, and we should be happy for ‘em. Their bodies their prerogative. You understand, Fen? Honestly, I worry what’s to become of you if I’m not around.”

  Fen rubbed the spot where she’d struck him. “So then why aren’t you taking the rat lord’s perks if it’s all so dandy?” He barked back, on the defense, while his cheek throbbed.

  After that question she’d clammed right up, saying only, “We all got different measures on what’s tolerable.”

  By the end of the fourth day the arc-torch had stopped working and that sealed the deal. Their prized battery had become just another piece of scrap to be sold, and the lantern a relic to be stashed with the rest in their loft. Now, not only were they starving, but they had to crawl around in the deepest dark from then on out, seeing ahead by match, or what little phosphorescent gel they could mix up from the tullywogs they found from time to time.

  When they’d come back to the Pillars Fen had all but made up his mind. Perhaps enough time had passed that he could trade in some notes. He could stash them in his pocket when they went out to scavenge and then claimed to have found them. It might even have worked, but by then his wounds had healed and his confidence returned. The slums had been quiet, and no one was talking about a rat pup who lost a fortune in the Exchange. All had returned to normal. Taking in another stack seemed more and more reasonable. What sealed the deal was remembering Time, and how Time had treated him, and he deduced if there was any man to be trusted in the Exchange, it was the man who’d saved him from the bruisers. After all, why save him one day to turn on him another. In that way he could keep Lydia totally out of it.

  So he fixed his mind to climbing the Sister, to pull a stack from the ruck and trade it at the Exchange. This time, to avoid the sunkeepers, he’d leave in the dead of night. So when the time came he snuck out while his sister slept peacefully in her second floor room. He’d avoided a confrontation by telling her he was staying up to tinker with some scrounge. She seemed convinced when she yawned wide, ruffled his hair, and told him not to stay up too late. Soon after she was snoring up a storm.

  That’s when Fen made his move; grabbing his patchwork hide jacket and slipping out the pipe towards his secret hideout. Though late, it seemed the Pipeyard was always active, and Fen carefully climbed and balanced his way up the Bednest towards the first Fat Sister, leery of any curious eyes. After ascending a couple dozen meters through intertwining pipework he came up on the first of the giant tanks, confident no one could have followed him, and when he climbed to the split pipe sticking off the First Sister like a pimple, he found the rucksack right where he’d stashed it. He pulled one stack at first, and then a second. Getting up here’s treacherous, so why not a second? He reasoned, tucking one in his pants and the other in his jacket.

  When he slipped into the Sin’s Devil Cat Conrad Time’s face lit up, and he hopped off his chair at the counter to greet the boy with a merry shake and an affectionate pat on the back. “Gordon! Good to
see you, kid. I say you’re looking much ado, just a little yellowed where the bruises linger, but otherwise A-okay. Though got to admit, I didn’t expect you back here any time soon. Thought the pounding you took might have scared you off for good.”

  “Naw,” said Fen, “Takes more than that to dissuade me.” Though truth was his nose still hurt and would probably never be the same again.

  “Ah, now there’s a-boy. Don’t let no one else guide your destiny…least, that’s what some seem to think on the matter. There’s those out there that believe we’re all threads on one big rug, so’t goes.” He ushered Fen into his establishment. “Anyway, what do I owe for the late-night visit, Gordy-boy? Something tells me you’re not here to offer a simple thanks for patching you up.”

  “You said if I ever had business I could come here.”

  Time slipped past him and secured the rickety door with a latch. “It’s what I specialize in, kid. Business keeps the isles afloat and the highdwellers in the sky, so’t goes. Now what is it I can do for you?”

  “Well, it’s… I got some…” Fen drove his boot-toe into the floor and fidgeted at a seam in the stonework.

  Conrad interrupted with an upheld hand. “Just out with it, kid, don’t play coy. You don’t strike me as the type.”

  “Do you exchange notes for tokens.” He lifted his eyes and rested them on the merchant. The man didn’t look phased in the least. If anything he was just as passive as ever. Only his carnival clothing offered any sort of amazement.

  “Course, every barterman does,” he said.

  “I mean a lot of notes.”

  “Any quantity your heart desires, kid.” Time threw out his arms as though offering up the world.