Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens (3 page)

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.

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.”

“No I’m not,” he bleated (unconvincingly at
that), prompting Lydia to attack. At seventeen she was easily a
head taller than Fen, and when she grabbed him around the neck he
was helpless. As he struggled to free himself she drove her
knuckles down into the mess of his hair and rubbed furiously,
declaring, “Now, Fen Tunk, you tell me this very instant what
you’ve got in that pack or I swear to the
Enox Unon
I’ll
make you as bald as old Natty Hadd!”

Fen tried to squirm away but her grip was
relentless. “Someday I’m going to be bigger than you, Lyd,” he
growled in impotent frustration, “and when that day comes you’re
going to be sorry.”

“Sorry? Yeah right, bony-bro, you’ll be
nothing but a stick of a man for the rest of your life, so your
empty threats don’t scare me.” She pressed her knuckles down
harder. “Now out with it you miscreant! I think I can already see
your shiny scalp through this patch I’ve rubbed clean.”

The pain was too much to bear, and Fen
snarled and growled, but ultimately surrendered. “Okay, okay, just
let me go already!”

Lydia’s vice-grip loosened and almost
instantly Fen took the opportunity to slip away, but as he dropped
she seized the pack and tugged it off his knobby shoulder.

“Don’t be mad,” Fen found himself saying
reflexively, not sure why he’d preemptively apologized, and when he
wheeled around Lydia eyed him suspiciously. After that she peeled
back the ruck’s flap.