Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens

by Jeremiah D. Schmidt

  “Edrika,” she corrected him softly while staring down at her feet. “I like it better when you call me by my real name.” She lifted her clear eyes to his and he found them twinkling in the red glow of a service light burning behind a nearby wire mesh. Fen suddenly felt uncomfortably hot. “And what I want, Fen,” she continued cantankerously, “is for you and me to run away to the sky-level together.” And then from around her back, Eddy slipped off Fen’s stolen rucksack.

  From the very second he saw it, Fen felt his temper flare to dangerous heights. “You? You had it this whole time. You took the pack…and then you said my sister had it! Do you know what they did to her because of you?”

  From the corner of Eddy’s misty eyes a pair of tears trickled out and smudged twin trails down her through her makeup, even as the rest of her face twisted to puzzlement. “Because of me…? Wait—”

  “This is all your fault!” roared Fen, crass.

  Eddy’s tears dried up in an instant. From puzzlement her face quickly turned to anger. “My fault?” she said quietly at first, seeming to test the weight of his accusation. “My fault,” she repeated with more force. “You have the audacity to call this my fault!”

  Though Fen had no idea what audacity meant, he was sure of one thing, and that was Eddy was the root of all the tragedy that had recently occurred.

  “Fen Tunk, you’re the one to blame,” The girl threw her arms up into the air and let her voice carry through the Suture, “you’ve always been the one to blame, but predictably, you’re too thick-skulled to see it.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You were the one who stole that pack in the first place! You were the one who lied to Time! You were the one who tried to run away! And you were the one that betrayed us! I saw and heard it all. Trask’s goons said so when they stormed into the Sanctuary and took Time and your sister as prisoners. She was only in danger ‘cause of you, you stupid lout! Time would never have done anything to hurt her, he was real nice. And when the rat lord’s men came swarming around him, Conrad even tried protecting her, sending her away. She might have gone too, but when they said a boy named Fen had ratted them out, she turned back and tried to plead for you. So that’s when they took her too.

  “Fen, even then I cried…for you…for us…and here you are telling me this is my fault! I’m the only one that cared about you. I lied when I said your stash was gone, and I came to help you…even after I saw the paradise you and your sister were squirreled away in. You had everything in that hovel, space galore, and I saw all them candles—hundreds, scattered like flotsam washed down from up above, but I still came back for you! But you know what, Fen? You are a greedy up-level hoarder, no better than ‘ol Gibbs. And to think I loved you… All you’ve ever done is break my heart.” She abruptly turned away from him to weep softly, though Fen might not have realized it except by the way her shoulders bobbed. “You better go now.”

  But Fen just stood frozen in place while Eddy’s words sunk in. Did she just say she loved me? “Eddy…Edrika—”

  “I warned you, Fen.” And then she let out a terrible scream. Fen winced, and when she’d finished she turned to him with nothing but empty contempt in her misty eyes. “You better go now.” Edrika ran, going back the way she’d come, and Fen watched in despair as she disappeared into the murky haze of the Rat Warrens. “I found him!” she continued to yell. “Come quick! He’s down this way!”

  In no time at all, a thundering of footstep rolled up the old rail line, and Fen turned and ran. As he fled for his life, all he could envision was his sister’s thumb falling to the ground, the cackling of Time as his minions appeared in droves, and the way Edrika’s tears stopped when he accused her of causing it all. He followed the pitted track, its rotted timbers and oily rocks, down through an oval tunnel of concrete, but its wide expanse did more to aid the Syndicate than Fen. They were able to run five across. The faster children quickly began to outpace the slower and gain steadily on their prey. If Fen had any sort of chance at escape now, it was in the Tangle to the west; in that wrapped up nightmare of pipework, support beams, ducts, and conduit. In there he might be able to give the skull-wearers the slip, or at the very least fight them off in the narrow chasms and tight corners. When he turned down a brick-lined passage all light seemed to vanish. Even the Suture’s scattered and dying service lights could not penetrate into its threshold, but Fen had already turned, and the children were coming.

  Blindly he groped his way down the tunnel, sloshing through ankle deep muck and mud while things slithered past his feet. Visions of clamp-jaws, giant snapper eels, and other grotesquery wormed its way through his mind, bringing doubt, and he might have turned, but in the small portal of light far behind him, the silhouettes of rat pups moving in hordes erased any thoughts of going back. He plunged in deeper instead. Eventually a wavering light appeared in his path, and Fen almost cried out in joy, but as he neared its source, his joy turned to unease. Instead of running, or even jogging, he shuffled cautiously while the light grew. Fen held his breath and quaked. It was a candle, like the ones sold by the lightbringers, and it was burning bright in amongst a whole pile of candles, and at its base sat a dead rat.

  “Things have a way of coming around, Fen Tunk,” whispered a woman, and the chills that passed up and down Fen’s skin crawled like cockroaches. He shuddered so hard his spine hurt and every fiber of his being told him not to turn around…but he couldn’t help himself. His feet were already shuffling him around in a tight circle, and when they stopped he was face to face with the Gutter Lady. The black of her veil waved in time to her breathing, catching the candle-light and scattering it in prisms.

  “How…why…why me?” he stammered in his quaking terror.

  “Why not you, a rat pup so indicative of the rest?” As the witch talked she paced around Fen in dizzying circles. “The cards told me a fool would play his role in the wheel of fortune; that this fool was a fulcrum, and not by choice or even by chance, but by sheer inevitability. No top-heavy system can stay upright, there are forces that lurk unseen shifting it towards equilibrium.”

  “I don’t understand.” Fen looked down to his hands and found them red and sticky with Boss Trask’s blood.

  “Nor can you ever hope to. But take comfort. Trask was a monster; a monster who fashioned monsters. After all there’s no one that knew his depravity better than I, his onetime wife…” The Gutter Lady pulled away her veil, dropping it to the sewer floor where it landed with a heavy plop.

  Fen couldn’t help but gasp as he took in her ruinous features.

  “Eventually, the protégé replaces the primogenitor,” rasped the gaunt specter, but Fen was too busy staring at her face to hear the words. It wasn’t encased in glass after all, and there was flesh, but not all of it. Like the bruiser from the rat lord’s manner, her nose was gone, but it had been gone a long time and the flesh had healed to waxy scar tissue. Also missing were her lips, and where they should have been, long brown teeth sat crowded together in a grin that would never go away. Fen staggered back as the woman continued to speak. “One by one he created his undoing, and the cards followed his progress, assuring me my time would come. And it did, when an idealistic young rabble-rouser came stumbling into my abode, thumb-less and delirious with fever. I knew then that my time had finally arrived, and this world has so much to atone for.

  “As for you, you have my thanks, but there is nothing left for you here now but pain and sorrow. So go, while you have this singular chance.” She lifted a knobby white finger, with a nail as long as the switchblade Fen left buried in Trask’s chest, to a side tunnel that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. “Follow it to the sky, and don’t stop.”

  Confused and terrified, Fen stared at the Gutter Lady’s mangled face, fascinated by the macabre way she looked both dead and alive. Somehow her skin sucked up all the light from the candle, leaving her a brilliant canvas against the dark, and when she looked back at him it was with sadness in her s
oft blue eyes. It wasn’t until the Syndicate’s footsteps clattered a riot behind him that Fen finally turned to the tunnel and disappeared into the Tangle.

  Chapter 13

  Whistling through the rusted shells of ancient pipework and concrete blocks stained black by centuries of mold, fresh air breezed in on a tiny wedge of light. The mist and gloom of the industrial crevasse parted with its passing, revealing a hole just barely wide enough for Fen to squeeze his way through. He had to reach that light, because only darkness waited for him back through the Tangle, back where a thousand rage-filled eyes stared blindly into the surrounding blackness. But the hidden passage fought his intrusion, or his escape, and sent ductwork and clustered conduits to bar his way, or steel girders too low to pass under or too wide to shimmy around. So he found different routes, or wiggled and pulled his way regardless of the blockade, sometimes crawling on hands and knees, or sometimes by simply forcing his small body to twist into shapes not meant for a person to be twisted in.

  Dirty, tired, gasping for air in the stifling heat, he stretched and grasped for any handhold he could reach, but finding each slick with slime, or sharp with rust…crawling with creatures too disgusting to imagine. None of it stopped him however, though pieces of his patch-work clothing and bits of flesh tore away. The going would not make it easy, and it grabbed at him with twisted nails and fractured brackets (one of a hundred such loose building materials), and all of it forgotten after centuries of being buried beneath continual upward construction.

  And somewhere above it all, Fen’s destination; the sky, the sun, and the light.

  Each meter, each centimeter, the light grew and the breeze turned sweeter. The Gutter Lady had pointed him true, but then the sky seemed paradoxically ahead and not above as reason should dictate. But what did reason really matter to a child—to a rat pup who’d lived in the Rat Warrens most of his life? Instead Fen found his heart racing all the more, pounding against bruised ribs and intoxicating a brain already flushed with adrenaline.

  As he climbed his mind turned to how long it had been since he’d last seen the sky? Days, months, years? In the thrill of the moment time meant nothing. The musky tang of metal and moldering filth continued to wane and the coolness encouraged him on as it dried away the beads of sweat gathered on his forehead; caressing them away with a mother’s tender touch. And yet every twist and turn seemed to have another twist and turn, and each a little tighter than the last. Frustration mounted. Escape seemed just beyond Fen’s grasp and he growled and gnashed his teeth until his emotions were just as chaotic as the slums he’d left in turmoil. And then the pipes and the concrete, the ductwork and the conduits—all of it parted way and the sky opened up to light and air.

  At first Fen stumbled in blind amazement, shielding his eyes against the brilliance and a strong headwind that tussled the shag of his black hair. And for one terrifying second he lost perspective on what might be up or down. But he reached out and caught his balance on the surrounding pipes and used them to guide his way forward, drawn, not only by the open space ahead, but by all the light it offered him. It blazed, as if the sun hung only a few feet away, and though it hurt to look directly into it, he made himself do so, but as his eyes adjusted he realized it wasn’t the sun at all, but the moon. Night had fallen in his flight from the Node, and out beyond the void between isles, Civil City floated, looking like strings and pillars of lightbringer candles.

  Fen took a few more tentative steps, only to find that his means of escape suddenly fell away. He scanned the immediate area for a side-tunnel, or a shaft, or even some ledge, but the pipework peeled back in all directions as though bent by the moon’s pallid light into perpendicular angles. He could have cried had he any tears left, and the thought of lying down in surrender became a powerful urge, like sleep, and almost impossible to suppress. But a little voice in his head, a girl’s voice…his sister’s voice, told him not to give up. “You can’t stop now,” it whispered in the wind racing along with the imitation light, “not now; you’re so close, and there’s nothing back there for you but darkness.” The Gutter Lady had said just as much, and both were right. He could feel it nipping at his heels, threatening to swallow him whole should he dare to back up, even a centimeter.

  “Gord-O!” Time’s voice drifted through the Tangle and mingled with the wind. “It’s time we had ourselves a true heart to heart! Before the end. You know I can feel it…time, and there ain’t much of it left for you and me—for everyone down in this pit. You know time stalks us, prowling like an alley cat in the dark, just waiting to pounce on the unwary. Now we’ve had our differences, you and I, but it’s time we settled up, so’t goes…”

  Fen moved towards that final edge, leaning, and then teetering as he peeked over. What he found was an endless precipice, and below that the churning soup of mist and cloud, the Shrouded Abyss. Again the Syndicate leader howled down the passages behind him, and Fen knew there was no going back. With one final look to the moon, Fen took a blind step forward and felt his world fall away.

  Epilogue

  Fen fell and fell and fell, tumbling down through a night of starry blackness, on course for the Shrouded Abyss, but the end of his fall arrived far quicker than he would have thought, and with it came a world of savage pain. When he hit bottom, he hit hard, and the impact rattled every bone in his body, snapping one or two that proved weaker than the rest. But he was alive, and no one was quite as surprised as the mist-hunter standing over this boy-come-fallen-from-the-sky, now sprawled across the deck of his airship.

  Fen tried moving, but the solid impact of striking the deck left him dazed, fading between consciousness and oblivion, which was probably a blessing given the pain that would come later. But for that brief moment, as he lay in harmony on the deck, he watched Junction pass by like a specter overhead, giving way to a limitless sky of stars and moon.

  The sky, he marveled, but it was a marvel tempered with one realizing fact…that he’d become the villain of his own story, and that his sister had been left behind to pay the price for him. Eddy had been right after all, everything that had happened was his fault, and in that moment he closed his eyes… and he slept for a long time after that.

  Discover Other Titles by the Author

  From Aethosphere

  Book 1: Coalescence of Shadows and Light

  From the Aethosphere Chronicles

  Winds of Duty

  And Coming soon!

  Aethosphere: Book Two

  Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains

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