Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens (15 page)

“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
soft 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.

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.

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.

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

www.aethosphere.com

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