Aethosphere Chronicles: The Rat Warrens Read Free Page B

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.

Chapter
3
    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