Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens (14 page)

And the crowds went wild while Fen pondered
who Trask meant by two scamps and a traitor; that is, until the
nose-less bruiser dragged him off towards a platform setup beneath
the old Sentinel like a stage. As Fen approached, Simon Weir turned
his blocky form and stepped out of the way, and there beyond the
line of bruisers and dangermen waited Conrad Time, shackles binding
his hands and feet, and next to him stood Lydia.

As soon as he saw his sister Fen fought to
pull himself free, but the brute had a death-hold on his collar,
and about all Fen managed was to strangle himself. Meanwhile, Lydia
turned towards the hole made in the line of rat lord thugs, and
when she saw her brother she cried out his name, but her words were
lost in the tidal roar of the Warren denizens.

“I ain’t afraid of your justice, Trask,”
Time’s voice issued boldly, rising over the crowd, and as he spoke
he began pulling off his gloves, letting them fall to the ground,
one at a time, as he stared contemptuously into the gathered
masses. “You had me five years ago,
rat lord
, but I keep on
coming back.” Then he held up his hands, and he showed all those
mangy ratties, gathered to watch this farce of a trial, just how
much contempt he had for the rat lord and his domain. Two
thumb-less nubs stuck out from both hands, and Fen knew then that
this man was the very same one he’d seen all those years back. “You
can try your punishment on me, Trask, but best do it fast, and you
best do it right, because this is about the
time
your reign
comes to an end!”

“
Enough!”
Trask roared, the hidden
speakers amplifying his shrill voice to ear-piercing decibels.
“Begin the phase of punishment, and save the traitor for last. I
want his agony to be slow and prolonged. Now bring up the first
scamp!”
And the crowds cheered.

Fen watched in horror as they grabbed hold of
Lydia. And while she fought, the bruisers dragging her to the
block, Fen struggled against his capture as well. He kicked back at
the brute’s shins, but a hammer blow to the back of the head sent a
burst of light through his brain, and when he regained his wits
Lydia was at the cutting block, her hands bound over the stained
wood with the cutters poised at the ready in the butcher’s hand. He
grabbed her left hand first, and she screamed and tugged, but the
rat lord’s men held her firm.

The captive merchant refused to stay quiet.
“The time’s are a’changin’, Trask!”

Snip
, Lydia’s thumb fell to the ground
like a dead leaf from the overhead tree. Her scream of pain pierced
through the crowds’ uproar.

How could they do that to my sister?
Fen’s stomach turned in an instant and he vomited all down the
front of his jacket. His head was spinning in dizzying circles and
his vision had turned red. He wasn’t sure when he broke free, but
he realized it around the time he leapt past the condemned
merchant. By then he’d pulled the hidden switchblade free from his
jacket.

“
Do it!”
Time seemed to yell in his
brain.

All time seemed to slow, but even slowed, Fen
couldn’t stop himself as he buried the tarnished blade into Boss
Trask’s chest. The collective gasp (of what seemed like every
single person in the Warren’s), sucked all the air from the world,
and in the vacuum that followed, Time could be heard howling with
laughter. Fen looked down to his own hands, hands painted red with
blood, as the rat lord gargled for breath and coughed up foamy
crimson. Feebly the old man took a swipe at him, but Fen staggered
back, and then turned to the crowds, almost pleading to them. When
his eyes caught movement a dozen meters off, he found the Gutter
Lady lingering beneath the hanging chains of the Chimes Way. She
stood like a phantom, observing, but when Fen’s gaze fell on her
stygian veil, she raised a hand and pointed in his direction.

All hell broke loose.

From every alley, side road, and access way
children came flooding in, and each of them wearing skulls for
masks, and all the while Time howled and cackled in glee. Scores of
children streamed in; hundreds; thousands; and though gunshots
followed, they never slowed. What dangermen stopped to take a stand
and shoot were trampled in the stampede, and though little
Syndicate troopers fell in droves, more just came streaming in
behind them. Someone had unleashed a tide, a swarm, and it swept
aside all the gathered men and women; all the bruisers and
dangermen; all the Warren trash like flotsam. Fen caught a brief,
final glimpse of Trask, as he and his chair were both trampled to a
pulp underfoot.

“Don’t leave a single one of them breathing,”
hollered Time, now freed and standing in a throng of death-masked
children. From behind the Sentinel, Simon Weir and a meager handful
of bruisers were backing down the alley towards the rat lord’s
manor door, but a tide of rat pups were near to washing over them.
“Not a single one of them,” continued Time, and when he locked eyes
on Fen Tunk he added with a sideways grin, “and bring that one to
me!”

From somewhere in the rumble, above the
screams and the yelling, Lydia’s voice rose up above it all,
piercing the chaos like a ray of sun through the mist of the Rat
Warrens. “Fen, run!”

And for the first time in his life Fen did as
his sister told him. He booked it south by instinct, seeking the
familiar route home, while behind him a score of rat pups geared up
for pursuit. About halfway down the access way another pack of
Syndicate pups cut him off as they came streaming north and so he
cut west, winding his way through Maze Town. From there they chased
him right to the putrid shores of the “Old Big River”, and over and
around the rickety shanties of North Scumside. More pups seemed to
appear with every meter, and by then the chaos of the Node seemed
to have spilled all throughout the Pinprick slum. Whistles blew
shrill for a brief time, but were quickly silenced, and as Fen
blundered past bewildered bruisers, he looked back moments later to
find them plowed under by herds of skull-masks. The mob proved
relentless, and Fen sucked and heaved for breath while the stitch
that had slowly been building in his side threatened to tear his
chest apart. Still he ran on, hitting North Walk and cutting west
as the muscles in his legs seemed to burn to ash. He’d wanted to go
east, but Syndicate minions could be seen down that way piling atop
a handful of bruisers making their final stand.

It wasn’t until Fen hit the Suture and turned
north towards the Shambles that he started to slow from exhaustion.
By then the noise of pursuit had died down to a trickle; to what
sounded like a single set of footsteps pounding up after him, and
fast, faster than he could outrun anymore. But one, Fen could
handle, one just might help quell the rage bubbling within him, and
with just one, Fen stopped. With fists at the ready he turned to
face his pursuer. But his pursuer was ready for him, tackling him
full on, and together the pair went tumbling into the wet dirt.

“Got’cha,” blurted Eddy in a breathless husk
as both her and Fen, all in a tangle, rolled over one ancient train
track then another.

“Get off me!” Fen managed to twist around and
brace his knee against the girl’s chest. With a savage snarl he
kicked her away, and she went tumbling back onto her butt.

“Owe, you stupid oaf, that hurt,” she shouted
back while sitting splay-legged in the mud and rubbing at the spot
where his bony knee had thrown her off. “What gives? I’m here to
help you.”

“Help me?” Fen flashed his snarling teeth.
“How? Did you see what they did to Lydia…what all you Syndicate
goons did—”

“What we did…? What we did was free the
Warrens, Fen, and besides, you’re the one who killed Boss
Trask.”

“I…I…” but Fen had nothing to say about that.
It had all happened in such a blur of frantic activity that it was
more akin to a dream than to reality. “What do you want, Eddy?” He
changed topics and locked his seething eyes on the girl; on all her
obscuring makeup and garish clothing. She seemed to grow timid
under the scrutiny.

“
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.