Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens

by Jeremiah D. Schmidt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Aethosphere Chronicles: Rat Warrens

  By Jeremiah D Schmidt

  Copyright © 2015 Jeremiah D Schmidt

  Smashwords Edition

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Illustration Copyright © 2015 by Jeremiah D Schmidt

  Cover Design by Jeremiah D Schmidt

  Map of the Pinprick Slums by Jeremiah D Schmidt

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

  ISBN: 9781310192074

  V1.5

  Foreword

  Greetings, potential reader. I’d like to take this opportunity to briefly explain to you what you’re about to read.

  As the title implies, this story is part of the Aethosphere Chronicles, which is a loose assemblage of interrelated stories written not only to entertain, but to enrich the storyline of the Aethosphere series of books. However, this shouldn’t dissuade anyone unfamiliar with the main series from giving this story a read, as it requires no prior knowledge of events or characters from Aethosphere (or of the other Chronicles for that matter). It has been crafted to stand on its own.

  So please, think of this as an opportunity to vet the series if you’ve never been exposed; or as a chance to enrich the experience if you have.

  Enjoy!

  Table of Contents

  Map of the Pinprick Slum

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Discover

  Connect

  Map of the Pinprick Slum

  Prologue

  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 the Hierarch boy 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, his 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 he 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 his reach 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 the adolescent stumbled in blind amazement, shielding his eyes against the brilliance and the 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…

  Chapter 1

  Fen Tunk was eight the last time a scamp lost his thumbs. The news of a man caught scamming the system burned through the darkness of the Pinprick Slum as intensely as any lightbringer’s candle, and grew to a Rat Warren-wide event, even attracting denizens as far off as Gutterway, Slag Town, and URP.

  It’d all started when the local rat lord, a gangster-boss by the name of Trevor Trask, caught wind of some schlub hawking Iron notes for tokens directly with the locals, and thus completely bypassing his Bartermen’s Exchange. A practice specifically forbidden. The economics of it were totally lost on Fen, making no sense as to why anyone from the slums would trade out their tokens for notes. Not with a three-to-one rate favoring the tokens, and no market in the Pinprick for notes anyway. In light of that, working with a scamp just seemed like throwing your hard-won money away out of spite…or stupidity.

  However, what did make sense was this scamp skimming profit at the rat lord’s expense. So it was really of no surprise at all when Boss Trask sent his dangermen and bruisers out in force to scour the Pinprick in search of the fool. Didn’t take them long to find him either, not with plenty of loose lips looking for a handout or two.

  “Course they got him…greed makes men blind to danger,” Art Tunk slurred out drunkenly on the evening the news rippled through the slum. Fen’s sister Lydia had just finished asking their father why the scamp didn’t leave the Pinprick after making bank, and that was about all he had to say on the matter. From there on out Art resumed sitting bowlegged on a heap of blankets, staring into the corner of the cramped hovel, where the last of their bric-a-brac burned to embers atop a pile of bricks playing at being a hearth.

  It was a few days later when Trask finally had the exposed scamp dragged out for punishment beneath the Sentinel. The whole slum had taken on a festive atmosphere by then, and though Fen’s father wouldn’t have normally bothered, he’d heard tell the Pinprick’s Skylight was free of charge for the duration, and with bench-rent running two tokens a sixth hour that was a prospect too good to pass-up.

  “As I came around the bend the criers done announced, ‘Lollygaggers welcomed,’ and the ratties lined up and down the Scumside rejoiced. The “Old Big River” Drain Line was so loud—ne’er heard it that loud—nearly brought down the shaft,” Art had explained to his huddled c
hildren in a rare moment of clarity. What he hadn’t explained at the time though, was how he’d been passing along the Chimes Way, drinking away what little they’d managed to scrounge up over the months.

  As Lydia told it, since losing his comfy position at Hanns Company, their father had taken less and less of an interest in the wellbeing of the family, seeming more concerned with drinking and muttering at ghosts than anything else. She’d once said some claimed it was the Miner’s Madness that ailed him; too much time spent around the atmium crystals buried deep inside the isle; but most brushed it away as an excuse for weak-willed men without the backbone for hard work. So down to the Rat Warrens they descended once the companymen gave them the boot from the workers’ tenements up on the second tier. After that, it was their mother who fought to support the family, but that could only last so long. Two, sometimes three shift workdays took its toll, until one night, before leaving for her shift at the Scullery, she’d snapped and screamed bloody-murder at Art, calling him an unmotivated lunatic. She never came home after that, and as proof positive of Art’s decline, he barely acknowledged her absence at all, and instead just charged Lydia with picking up the slack, even though she was only ten at the time.

  Fen was but four himself, but he could still hear the rapid pattering of his mother’s footsteps as she fled through the pipe, taking her from their hidden nook in the Pillars to the snarl of the Pipeyards; and from there…who knows. It would prove to be Fen’s last memory of her.

  After she’d gone things only got worse at home. Art’s attention vanished until the day he simply stopped breathing and they had to drag him down Skitter Row and pitch him into the Axillary Drain Line, turning him into floater-food for the finslugs and snapper eels. But until that day came about, Fen’s father’s sole occupation was with what he could find in the Warrens, and for how much he could pawn it to buy his evening draught of gutter gin. The only exception to the routine came the day the scamp was set to stand trial (and the Pinprick’s light was offered up free of charge). Though Art had been an ill-tempered and mad drunk for as long as Fen could remember, at least he’d had the decency to take Boss Trask up on his singular act of generosity—for the sake of his children—even if his motivations might have been selfish.

  Art, like Fen and his sister, hadn’t seen the light of day in four years, and in order to see anything during the trial meant arriving at the Node hours beforehand. But when they’d arrived, it was to bruisers and the sunkeepers keeping an already anxious throng at bay so the rat lord’s dangermen go about their preparations. Fen got so antsy waiting that he met the back of his father’s hand three times before the Pinprick even saw its first inclination of daybreak, and he might have gotten the boot too had Lydia not taken her younger brother’s hand and engaged him in a perpetual game of Fists for Skies, which, owing to their father’s mood, she went ahead and let Fen win more occasions then her pride might otherwise have liked.

  When the moment finally arrived for the scamp’s judgment, the threshold to the Node was so packed with onlookers that the sunkeepers had to climb the pipework just to escape the eager stampede. The whole Chimes Way rocked beneath their thundering passage, setting the overhead chains to jangling madly, while Fen and his family rode the tidal crest of hapless poor right into the Node’s open plaza. And as soon as they could, they grabbed a spot on a bench…a real bench, as others packed in so tightly around them it became hard to breathe. Every square inch of the Node’s chamber was crammed full in no time at all, transforming it into a cesspool of bodies. When room below failed, some even dared the train trestle some twelve meters overhead, where a break in the foundations made the Skylight possible.

  Everywhere there were people, with but one exception, a telling circle beneath the Sentinel Tree’s pale up-reaching canopy. That’s where Fen had locked his eyes in anticipation, and that’s when he’d first felt it…real light. After having wound its way down through three hundred meters of upward urban sprawl, a fleeting trickle of sun splashed against his face. The heat and the light brought with it memories of an easier time, of when his family had a real home, and of a special place on tier two where Fen used to sneak off and talk with his only friend at the time.

  See, the second tier was almost as dark as the Warrens but there was a place hidden behind the Tunk’s tenement where Fen could wiggle through some piping onto a ledge. There was a clearing punching straight up to the sky there, and every once and a while Fen’s friend, the sun, would come peeping on down. After, Fen would run back to their two room apartment and tell his mom all about it. She’d smile and nod and comment, “oh really, that’s fantastic!” and then give him a big hug and shoo him away. There was a lot of happiness in those memories, and standing in the Pinprick’s wash had been like being back there wrapped in his mother’s embrace.

  At eight Fen knew he was too old to be crying, but tears sprang to his eyes almost instantly anyway, and from there on out he had to watch the proceedings through blurry vision. He felt a little better about it when he saw his sister crying too, and at that time she was twelve.

  What they watched together were two dangermen leading the precession, with a host of bruisers behind them and the scamp shuffling in their midst. Despite being chained, and held, and facing the clippers, that young Hierarch, with his unassuming expression, seemed brave enough. Though later Fen would come to realize it was probably more defiance than bravery on the condemned’s part. The only eventual break in the scamp’s stoic disposition came when he hollered something out to the crowds, though no one could hear him over the tide of excited murmuring and a bruiser’s fist quickly silenced his outburst.

  Soon enough the cutters came out, and after that screaming, then two more thumbs hanging from the only tree in the Pinprick. And as for the man stupid enough to try and scam the Boss and his bartermen, once they carted him off (with blood flowing freely from those fresh nubs), no one ever saw him again. Yet, from time to time, Fen thought about this scamp, if for no other reason than that he’d brought down the sun for a few brief moments.

  Chapter 2

  Years later, as Fen Tunk pounded the filthy pavement with a stolen sack slung over his shoulder, gutter water spraying behind his heels and the whistlers shouting and blowing down the tunnel after him, he wondered if he might lose his thumbs like that scamp all those years back. Though Fen wanted to believe the old trudger he’d pilfered from wasn’t all that important, events afterwards seemed to suggest otherwise.

  But then that young man looked like every other scrounger in the byways. Nothing stood out. Just another crawler winding through the nooks and crannies in search of something to pawn, so Fen made his move. If anything, it was the trudger’s fault. He’d practically given over the ruck when he’d set it aside to piss down a drain, and in true fortune’s-fashion Fen was all but invisible in the heavy gloom. Wearing his piece-work crawler-hide, all greasy black as it were, kept him but a shade lighter than oblivion, and with his hood pulled up tight he was near a spitting representation of the Ol’ Crowscloak.

  The trudger never saw him coming. Fen felt like he could have danced the Candaran sputtle right there in front of him and still been as stealthy as the hero him and his mate Eddy used to play back before hair came sprouting from ‘neath their pits. Grab and dash had been a simple matter under that setup, and he might have gotten off scott-free had he not mirthfully hooted upon flipping back the top to see all those Ludwigs staring up at him. His eyes damn-near popped out his skull when he held up the first fat stack of banded Iron notes, and there were dozens more where that came from. It was right around then that the whistlers came barreling out of nowhere to give chase.

  The whole predicament might have gotten Fen to worrying, if he was the sort for that kind of thing, which he wasn’t. And he might have dumped the sack in the midst of those crowded byways and let the chaos throw off the whistlers, but then a sack of cash was a sack of cash and a fortune beyond measure. His only real concern was how he could trade ou
t his loot for tokens. Notes might have been the currency of the sky-levels, but down in the Rat Warrens they were only good for trading out for tokens. And so the whistles continued to blow shrilly behind him, promising that somewhere not that far back down the crowded tunnel of Skidder Row, a small unit of smartly dressed imperial constables were pounding the pavement in pursuit.

  Fen Tunk ducked and weaved a course through the gloom towards escape, but when he spotted a pair of legs stretched across the crowded causeway tunnel he couldn’t help but alter course specifically to leap over them. Not a lick of adult sensibilities meant a thing to a “rat pup” living in these crowded slums, no matter the circumstances. Besides, he’d enough of a head start, and the murky twilight of the Pinprick Slums made an ever faithful companion, so why not a little fun.

  “Stop”, and “halt”, and “give it up”, followed, and when Fen landed on the other side it was with a satisfying splash. Up went a torrent of brackish water, and the three sleeping dog-ears who’d made an indent in the wall their home, suddenly woke to a drenching cascade of filth. Nothing could have been more satisfying than hearing the angry tirades and hurled threats of Candaran immigrants. Their comically foreign words meant nothing to someone who only spoke Dunshule, but the sound of their anger made Fen break into laughter all the same. He just continued to pound his way over the swamped pavement, while the worn heels of his boots flopped and slapped loosely in the putrid puddles.

  More insults and threats were hurled his way from those he sprayed, but when the whistlers came along seconds later, shoving them aside, that shut them up. Others just scurried helter-skelter out of the way, disappearing into the concrete nooks and crannies of the titanic building overhead.