“I hear one! Just hold on, they’ll help!” I lied.

I stared down into her wide shadowed eyes as I moved the wet rag over her face, “I can hear-”

Her tiny head had shifted as I wiped at the blood leaking down into the sweat-damp hair at her temples. Her eyes, still open wide, had moved with her head instead of staying on mine. My eyes dropped to her tiny chest. The coughing behind me was beginning to turn wet again, and yet, I couldn’t move as I watched the tiny chest in front of me, hoping it would rise, but knowing it would not.

“Isor kat il berrium!” I screamed with a throat so hoarse half of the words didn’t come out at all. I glared at the tiny open hole high in the attic wall, just under the peak of the roof.

From the hole the attic’s only flickering source of light ebbed and waned. The shallow bowl there held oil and wick. A tiny flame illuminated the offering just beyond the simple lamp, near the outer edge of the hole. A lump of wheat bread the size of my fist covered in honey was presumably still waiting, untouched.

Even the flies that had made their way into the attic left it alone. As if they knew how much it was worth, or respected the hope layered upon it.

The coughing was momentarily drowned out with a crash of thunder and the ever present drumming of rain on the roof was momentarily the only sound. The sound of the rain drumming on the roof above was so common now I rarely recognized it.

For two years there had been unseasonably strong rainstorms and winds. Wet crops, floods, and poor harvests followed the damning weather. Wheat was pricey even before the plague had set in. After both trade and farming stopped. I doubted there was any wheat left in the city, excepting the honeyed bread in the offering bowl.

I knew very little about the outside world but I knew about the rising cost of food because it determined how many apprentices the Master would keep and how many he had to send away.

Bread and noodles became scarce last year. The King, returning home from somewhere, hadn’t been able to find bread in some village, or so rumor said.

I didn’t understand why that had caused such a fuss at the time until it was explained to me.

It meant the village didn’t have grain in which to grind for the king’s bread, even seed grain, having been forced to eat it to survive. That village would have no seed the coming spring to plant. Without seed to plant they would be forced to eat their sheep and goats and dairy cows to get through the year.

But it would likely only buy them a single year and come the following spring they would have no wool to sell, no meat to eat, and no seed to plant.

No bread for the king meant the village was dying, perhaps already dead, though they were still moving about. Like a man with his throat cut who wouldn’t make it but wasn’t fully dead yet.

It continued to rain through all the calamities, sometimes stopping just for an hour, or a day as if to give everyone hope only to drown that hope again with the next gale and storm rose.

Even if the rain stopped tomorrow there would be no seed to plant. And now, with this plague, no one to plant the seed even if it was at hand.

I closed the girl’s eyes and realized I’d never known her name. She’d been one of the quiet ones. One of the good helpers who did as she was told and didn’t complain.

“Can someone-” I began before I realized that there was no one else in the attic able to help.

The weak coughing I could hear was punctuated with wet sucking noises.

For a moment, only a moment, I considered not moving. I didn’t have it in me to hold another one as they died.

But it was only a moment.

I crawled over, my knees painful and swollen from the hard attic boards. My shoulders we weak with exhaustion. Flies buzzed here and there but there wasn’t anything close to the number on the streets below. Something skittered in the shadow where the roof reached the floor and I stared hard at the thing, hope welling up in my chest even though I knew I would be let down.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Thunder crashed outside and a moment later the cadence of rain on the roof above changed as the downpour grew even heavier.

I could hardly make the shadow out, but still I stared.

“Isor-” I began but my voice caught on a sore throat. I tried to swallow but that hurt more, the wince threatening to force my eyes closed. I kept them open and staring. As if closing them could change the thing into a shadow.

I began to speak again as the shadow shifted and resolved.

It was a mouse of some sort, not large enough to be one of the wet furred black rats I’d seen on the city streets moving among the dead.

“Isor kat-” I lost the words and had to swallow painfully to start again, “Isor kat il berrium.” I lifted a arm to point at the offering, but the mouse didn’t change shape.

It remained a mouse.

The coughing changed to a wet sucking and I moved quickly on my hands and knees over to the boy before turning him on his side trying to get the bloody froth out of his mouth.

He passed out in the process, which actually made it easier to tip him up so that the frothy liquid drained out of him.

I wiped at his face, at the bloody tears that swept away from his eyes. Once his face was clean I lifted the canteen, shook it and tossed it aside. It made a hollow sound as it skittered across the floor. The sound filled the attic for only a moment before the sound of rain drowned it out. I crawled over to another canteen that I knew was empty. I checked it anyway.

I crawled back, making sure Aldus, who shared my name, was on his stomach and wouldn’t draw in the bloody froth while I got more water.

I didn’t bother moving the girl to the pile behind the curtain I’d fastened to separate the dead from the rest of the attic. There was no more room behind it anyway, and no one out here who would care.

“Isor kat il berrium!”

I shouted the words at the bread, my throat ripping and filling with a burning pain I welcomed. The bread was a treasure during the last two years and now- Now it was possibly the last piece of bread in the city. Surely the last in the Slums.

“Save one! At least one,” I mumbled the last as I started forward again, my knees painful on the wood, my head hanging as I crawled. The flare of desperate anger I’d had burned out instantly. The dim light showed the gap in the wood floor before me as a black space. I had to turn around to get my feet into it and in the process my hip and calf cramped up.

For a moment the fear was far more powerful than the pain.

“Just lack of water-” I lied to myself as I stretched the leg out. I tried not to think of the children’s complaints or how the nameless girl had helped rub the cramping out of the others.

“You owe him at least one!” I tried to scream at the window as I maneuvered my way through the tiny trap door. Again the words fell off near the end.

I knew they weren’t listening. I knew they weren’t coming, but I had to keep moving and my anger displaced despair. Except I couldn’t even muster true anger any more. There was nothing there. Even fear of the future had died as I accepted the inevitable outcome.

It was odd. Here, near the end of all things, I was, in a way, fearless. When fear had mostly defined my life.

I wish I could say fear of the future was a new feeling, but as I descended into darkness a memory rose up.

“You want to stay?” Journeyman Halbright had asked me after Master Juun had pushed me into the Journeyman’s arms and told him I was his responsibility now. I would stay or go on his word alone.

I’d nodded. I had no where else to go.

“You aren’t smart enough to stay,” Journeyman Halbright told me tapping my head, “Your hands are not wise yet, they hesitate or bump into things. They spill yes?”

I nodded.

“Not smart. Not wise,” he said nodding, “but worker yes?” He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed.

I nodded.

No one made fun of Journeyman Halbright to his face, but everyone could do an impression of his voice and how he still struggled after all these years to speak our language.

“Then you work. You empty privy. You wake early to cook. You split wood. You cook again. You wash dish. You wash cloth. You dig. Haul. Stack. You sleep little. You work much. Smartest stays. Wisest stays. But worker stays too.”

I couldn’t rouse my anger any more, it was burned out of me, but I could trudge on through. I was practiced at that at least.

The other apprentices had called me Mule because I advanced the slowest out of all the apprentices. I was stupid, I did the grunt labor, and I was stubborn.

But years after Journeyman Halbright passed his Master’s test and moved on, I was still there.

As food prices climbed and the weather tortured fields, Master Juun put other apprentices, smarter apprentices, out. I stayed because Master Halbright had been correct, the smartest stayed, and workers stayed, and the least of the rest were discarded.

Now, back in the attic of my childhood, when I just wanted to stop, I continued on. I slid backward toward the hole and the darkness it contained. My feet dangling as they searched for the top of the cabinet I knew was there.

A fly landed on my face as I started down the hole and I realized they were coming from Cook’s room below.

I took the next step down and was face level with the attic’s floor. I watched Aldus long enough to see his chest move then I grabbed the canteen, took a deep breath and descended the rest of the way into the foul darkness below.