Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens (13 page)

“Boss want’s to see you, boy.”

“What boss,” husked Fen, but the bruiser just
chuckled.

“You going to behave, or do I have to bind
you up?”

“I won’t fight.”

Fen stepped towards the bruiser and when he’d
reached the cell’s threshold, the blocky brute laid a heavy hand on
his shoulder to guide him. They walked side by side through a
hallway of peeling paneling and moldy wallpaper, and Fen felt his
first pang of fear. “Where am I,” he asked, trembling.

“Boss Trask’s manor.”

“The rat lord’s lair?”

The bruiser snorted. “Best not call him that
when you see him,” cautioned the bruiser as he guided Fen down the
hall, along a floor that was rotted and mushy. In places the tall
bruiser had to duck where the ceiling plaster sagged like the arm
flaps on an old woman. They walked forever, Fen limping along
corridor after corridor, up creaky stairs and then up more creaky
stairs, and all of it in shambles. The only exception was the rat
lords ‘apartment’. There the doors were made of old wood, weathered
to dusty gray, and cracked, but not a spot of mold was to be found,
and when it opened the hinges swung free of any telling creaks.
From the chamber beyond came the heavy smell of cigar smoke and a
dry warmth that could only come from a fire.

“Mind your tongue in here, boy, least you
part ways with it lickety-split.” The bruiser shoved him forward
and then closed the door. Fen didn’t realize he was alone until the
latch clicked and he turned to find nothing but intricate carvings
staring back at him.

“So you’re the rat pup with the interesting
story to share.” The refined voice filled the chamber, and when Fen
turned he found a room unlike any he’d ever seen. He could only
imagine this was what every room looked like up on the sky-level.
Rich furniture, and lots of it, with velvet cushions and lace
sashing, filling a broad space accented by clean rugs and fresh
wallpaper, and all of it in floral designs. To the right, on the
wall, sat a massive fireplace lined in brick with a white mantle
full of carvings. To the left stood a grandfather clock taller than
Fen, ticking away next to an open entryway that revealed the room
was bigger than initially thought.

“Don’t linger, boy, I don’t have forever,”
the voice urged him on. It seemed to come from everywhere and yet
nowhere all at once, and Fen’s mind turned to spirits. This place
was too surreal to begin with, and he had a hard time even
imagining a real person living in such wealth.

He shuffled forward as bidden, his eyes
darting around the room; up to the crystal chandler that gently
swayed in time to the constant tremble of the Rat Warrens, casting
prismatic colors that danced upon the wall and dark shelves like
ethereal wisps. When Fen reached the threshold to the side-cubby he
stopped, choosing caution as he leaned over to peek around the
corner first.

“Ah, and there he is, as cautious as any
rodent I see,” the voice observed, while Fen gawked at what could
only be the biggest bed in all of Aethosphere. It was every bit as
spacious as the Tunk’s hovel, and probably more so, with four
posters at each corner that held up a fabric tent much like the one
Conrad Time sold his goods out of. At the ends, the fabric had been
pulled away, revealing a sea of blankets washed over an emaciated
old man with flyaway muttonchops.

Fascinated, Fen slowly crept around the
corner while a stirring to his left revealed a dangerman guarding
the room from an arm chair beside yet another lit fireplace. In his
lap lay an imperial pistol. He watched the boy approach the rat
lord with dark regard, and as Fen stepped further into the room, he
lifted his gun.

“Leave him be, Simon,” said the boss. “Come,
come, boy,” Trask waved his skinny arms, impatient, “my earman
won’t do you harm…unless you call upon it by doing something
stupid.”

Fen shook his head and approached the kingly
bed slowly, but his fearful attention repeatedly fell on the
earman’s gun. The rat lord’s reputation for despising children
hummed in his ears, and he wondered,
is this just some trick to
get me close…? So Boss Trask can attack?
The man looked old, no
question of it. The rat lord’s face was as wrinkled as a hairless
alley cat, and yet his eyes were still bright and calculating,
unnerving. Beneath his roomy white shirt he looked skinny, but in
the Warrens you couldn’t trust ‘skinny’ to mean ‘weak’. And as for
the rest of the rat lord, he was hidden beneath the rolls of a
thick comforter, so who really knew what to expect?

The old man must have taken Fen’s hesitant
steps and wandering eyes as an indication of wonderment. “Do you
like my abode? Been in the family since before the second tier went
up—something like three hundred years past. I must admit it has
seen better days, but in this decrepit age who hasn’t, aye?

“Anyway, come and sit down already.” Trask
watched with an eager fascination until Fen seated himself in an
arm chair beside the bed. “Good.” He smiled a mouth full of sharp,
yellow teeth. “I’ve been told by my associate Mr. Weir,” he
gestured with a long, skinny arm to the earman in his chair beside
the fire, “that you trespassed beneath the Skylight; partaking in
some of
my
light without payment—and on a bench no less. He
also informs me that you attacked a bruiser, and while that happens
quite frequently here in the Pinprick, the ferocity you displayed
was…well, quite shocking to say the least. I believe one of my men
likened it to a gargorul attack—how fascinating. And from one so
small and young… Anyway, that’s all superfluous to what interests
me most. Seems you’ve information on a barterman of mine, a
gentleman that goes by the name of…” the old rat lord paused as he
leaned over to a bed tray and pulled from it an open ledger.
Dragging it onto his lap, he took a moment to scroll down its pages
with a skeletal finger, “Ah, Conrad Time, a luxury peddler it
seems, with a stall midway down the Boulevard.

“Perhaps you’d care to elaborate on what you
told my dangerman…after they pulled you off that poor bruiser. You
know the butcher had to take the nose, and one of his ears as well?
Too much damage to both he said; which is really of no consequence,
the man learned his lesson about being lack, but now this Time,
what do you have to say concerning him?”

Fen looked down to his hands, laying in his
lap, to the cuts and blood still crusted on his pale skin.
They
had to remove the man’s nose and ear
, he wondered in
bewilderment, flexing his hands and imagining them doing what Boss
Trask told him they did.

“Boy,” snapped the rat lord, “are you even
paying attention to me?” Fen swung his eyes up and recognized anger
in the man’s aristocratic features. He was sitting tall, leaning in
the boy’s direction and leering, bug-eyed with intensity. “Speak,
or so help me, my face will be the last thing you see. And that
tongue of yours will stay silent forever.”

No matter how much rage Fen felt towards
Conrad Time, he couldn’t seem to get his mouth to betray the man;
not even after his goons had grabbed his sister…might have even
killed her when the hovel collapsed… Tears came flowing once more,
sudden and too many to stop.

“Crying!” Trask was filled with puzzled
outrage, “why is he crying? Why isn’t he talking like I told him
to, Weir? This is why I hate children. They never do as they’re
told. Could you please come over here and cut out his tongue if he
doesn’t start talking.” Then the old gangster paused a moment to
ponder something else. “Do they stop crying if you take out the
eyes? If so, do that too.”

The gangster’s advisor climbed heavily from
his chair and trundled over with a side to side gait. As he stepped
up in front of the crying boy, he offered a single statement of
solace. “Nothing personal, son.” Then in an instant he was around
behind the chair. Before Fen knew what hit him, an arm was pressed
to his throat, while a hand crawled up and seized his cheeks,
squeezing them together until his mouth was forced open.

“This is going to be a simple conversation to
begin with, boy,” Trask said in the meantime. “I’ll ask you a
question, and you’ll answer it with a simple yes or no. First, this
Conrad Time, he plots to depose me?”

The hands at his cheeks let got, but Fen
still couldn’t talk. He could at least nod.

“Sufficient,” the rat lord clapped with
approval, “seems a rat pup can be trained after all. Next, his
hideout, this place you called the…what was it, Simon?”

“The Sanctuary,” said the thug with a
monotone delivery.

Fen nodded again. He could taste blood where
his teeth had cut into his cheeks.

“Now this is becoming productive.” Boss Trask
threw the heavy blankets aside. From beneath the hem of his long
nightgown, the gangster’s legs stuck out like two boney snakes,
fascinating in how the veins spider-webbed up and down his sallow
skin.

“I heard tell you stole a substantial amount
of notes and was trading them in the Exchange for tokens. Is that
true, you little scamp?”

Fen hesitated to answer, and so Trask
directed his piercing eyes up to the earman. Suddenly the arm
around his neck squeezed tighter. Fen gagged, sputtered, and kicked
out. He grabbed the arm and dug his nails into the fabric of the
man’s jacket but the grip was relentless. This henchman was going
to pop his head clean off!

“Well, scamp?”

Fen choked out, “yes,” between gasps and
coughing, and the arm relaxed.

“Now for my final question.” Boss Trask swung
his emaciated form around on the bed to drop his legs out over the
edge. Fen recoiled as the man scooted near him. This creature
reminded him of a vapor wraith, a pale bloodsucker who fed off the
living to feed its undead hunger. Trask even licked his lips while
smiling with those sharp teeth of his. “And this money, where is it
now?”

Afraid he might be hurt even more if he said
it was gone, Fen lied instead. “Time has it.”

Trask inched even closer, until he was just a
handful of centimeters away. He was so close now that Fen could
smell the rat lord’s rank breath, and when the old monster reached
out and laid a clawed hand on Fen’s shoulder, Fen shuddered in
anguish.

“Now about this Sanctuary you were talking
about,” said Trask, “you’re going to tell me exactly how to find
it.”

After the rat lord got what he wanted from Fen Tunk,
he threw the boy back in his dungeon, which appeared to have been
some sort of bedroom maybe, but years, or decades, or even
centuries of occupation by condemned men had turned the chamber
into a horror. In that brief moment, before Fen was once more
consigned to darkness, he saw long scratches in the rotted plaster,
unimaginable filth caked into the floor’s wooden planks, and bugs
by the thousands, crawling in waves away from the hallway
lanterns.

There Fen waited. In the darkness all he had
were his thoughts, and his thoughts became images snapping here and
there like photographic bulbs, to burn and vanish. He saw the day
he stole the money, the way the trudger stood leaning back with his
chin in the air peeing down a rusty drain. He thought back to the
moment his sister told him to throw the sack in the drink, and then
to the sound of all those tokens as Conrad Time let them spill in a
flood all over the counter. They’d laughed and picked them up by
the handfuls, letting them spill through their fingers to clatter
on the counter again. “This should certainly brighten your day,
Gord-O,” the merchant had laughed, and that laugh echoed in the
dark pit Fen had been left to wallow in; a pit every bit as dark as
the one Lydia went falling into when the Tunk’s hovel collapsed. At
one point he thought he could hear her screams, so he planted his
palms to his ears and squeezed till it hurt.

Between memories he cried, and between crying
he slept, and when he woke it was to the memories, and each cycle
pulled him further and further into the darkness. At times he
contemplated pulling his hidden switchblade and ending it all, but
when he finally did snap the blade open, his determination
faltered, and he tucked it back away.

When the door finally opened and a bruiser
ordered him out, Fen had no concept of time, nor any tolerance to
even look at the light. At first he was hesitant to do as told, he
figured this was just another dream, more cruel than some, and yet
not as cruel as others, but when the bruiser lost patience and
yanked him out by his hair, the pain snapped him back to reality.
When a fistful came out it hurt all the more, but by then Fen had
no more tears to cry, and he sucked it back and gritted his
teeth.

“It’s off to the Sentinel for you, boy,” said
the bruiser in a nasally whistle, and when Fen turned his eyes on
the man he discovered he’d no nose, just two slights poking out
from a carnage of inflamed red tissue. It made him want to laugh,
but he didn’t know why. Fen tried to hold it back but it came out
it gasps and snorts anyway, and the bruiser struck him across the
face.

“Leave him be, Hobbs,” ordered Simon
Weir.

It was in a bewildered stupor that Fen was
dragged out into the node, and the crowds roared and cheered when
he emerged. In the twilight of a cloudy afternoon, he could see
them, every man, woman, and child he’d ever known, all gathered
together. He thought he could even see his father, and his sister,
and himself; even his mother sitting up on the train trestle high
overhead.

“
My beloved citizens,”
hollered an
amplified voice, ringed in high-pitched feedback.
“Today is a
very auspicious day for us all!”
When Fen turned to the
Sentinel he found Boss Trask sitting in an armchair beneath the
gnarled tree, in his hand he held a microphone, and when he saw the
boy looking at him he offered a savage grin.
“Call it a treat!
Today we have two scamps and a traitor to judge. So let there be
feasting and light for all on this day!”