“So you are going for the carriage then?” I asked after the conversation had died away for the sixth time.
The Chef, Lem, and Mrs. Miller were the ones participating most in the arguing.
“You aren’t going with them?” Mrs. Miller asked.
I sighed. The sun had risen three hours ago. Even inside the warehouse I had felt a portion of the deer’s blood inside me burn away when the pressure popped, and a new day dawned.
The excess power my body couldn’t hold was just gone. If I stepped out into the sun to help them I’d burn. Badly. Then the healing would start, the paladin’s book said I couldn’t stop that from happening. It was in fact the weakness it suggested hunters exploit.
The healing would burn blood, which would fill me with a greater need for it.
Eventually the need to consume blood would overpower me and I’d kill and eat someone, or everyone.
Intellectually that was the process I feared, but emotionally I feared the pain of the sun’s light. I perhaps feared it more than I did killing people, though I didn’t let myself consider that.
I could use the daylight clothing I’d tested over the winter, but it was awkward and bulky and more than a little odd to be in. The selected pieces of clothing created a layer between my and the sun, but it was an odd looking outfit that covered everything.
In the winter with the cold and the wind, being bundled up in thick gloves, mask, and hat hadn’t drawn many eyes, as many others were covered as much as they could, and some in stranger outfits that I had worn. But now, I would look strange and people would wonder why, and that could be dangerous. More so now that I considered the ghoul’s words. It would make me odd, and odd people were outsiders.
I didn’t want to explain any of that though, so I said nothing.
“I’ll be going along as as escort,” Marcus assured her. No one rolled their eyes but many looked away from the awkward man. He wasn’t right before the plague, and he’d gotten no better since.
“I’ll go. Chef William said. “I need to raid the pantry and herb garden, assuming he allows me back in. He asked me not to go- so- I think there’s a chance he will let me back in. If there is a chance I can get in I should go right?”
I didn’t know who he was asking and no one else spoke up. I didn’t know if he was trying to convince us he was coming back, or himself. Apparently the Banker had asked him not to leave but the wife had, and so he’d left. He believed he would be welcomed back if he went. That’s what he stated early. Though he had sounded much more confidant when he first brought it up.
To me it sounded like if he was allowed back in he wasn’t returning. I didn’t look at the others, worried they felt the same or that my look might make them think that way.
“How many of your people can we expect to help haul the carriage back down here?” Lem asked.
“None,” I said flatly, “I’ve explained the risks, the gangs. My people are mostly children that don’t even fish except on the days the blacksmith and his people offer protection. We stay inside where it is safe.”
“And we can’t borrow your crossbow?” Lem asked, “after giving up-”
I slammed my hand down on the massive stump table and opened my mouth to shout at him but managed to hold the words back. I jerked my eyes away from his calm face and felt like a fool for losing my temper.
“You don’t seem to understand what it takes to survive here,” I said slowly. “You were behind thick walls with stocked pantries and deep cellars all winter while everyone here starved. The people in the Slums survived day to day, or didn’t. Sometimes surviving meant taking from someone else, knowing that it was us or them. Everyone in the Slums that survived the winter did so because they were willing to get blood on their hands. Either to defend what they had or to take from others.”
I lifted a hand when he began to interrupt and he held off.
“You still think of the Slums as the same type of dangerous it was before the plague, a knife in the dark, a diseased whore, a cut purse. You need to stop thinking that way. The rules are different now. Being part of a larger gang isn’t going to protect you from a stray bolt fired from a rooftop. They won’t fight, just put a bolt into someone’s gut to bleed you as they run away. The Slums changed. There is no law here now, no safe road, even for armed men in the daylight. Taking crossbows won’t make you stronger, it will make you more valuable targets.”
No one spoke for a moment until Jake said, “That’s settled then. Either go now, or wait until nightfall.”
“We’ve already discussed that,” Mrs. Miller said, “If I don’t show up today he will-”
“What makes you valuable,” I asked. She glanced at the others before answering but no one spoke.
“I’m sorry,” she said slowly, “I’m not sure what you mean?”
“Why should we let you stay. What do you do that makes feeding you worth it?”
“What?” she asked with a bit of heat in her voice.
“Why are you trying to leave. If you can go back, like Chef William, why are you not? Here you are burden if you can’t pull at least your own weight, and every time you go outside to pull that weight, be it collecting wood, fishing, or hunting, you’ll be risking your life. What are you going to do here if you stay here? We don’t serve the Queen’s Gift. Food’s at a premium right now and is only going to get worse this winter. If you come back here and can’t pull your own weight, why wouldn’t we kick you out like your husband has?”
“I-” Mrs. Miller said, her mouth hanging open for a moment before she closed it.
“There are more of us-” Lem began.
I stared at him for a moment and he met my eye.
There were more of them.
So what?
For what?
To take from us?
For a moment I was back in that attic staring at a curtain but knowing well what it hid. Then I was in kitchen with tiny bodies and the taste of offal on my tongue.
I glanced once at the tall stacks of crates that filled the warehouse and imagined tiny shriveled bodies between the stacks. I didn’t know if they had starved or been drained of blood, but it didn’t really matter.
That wasn’t going to happen.
I couldn’t stop a plague, but I could damn well feed them.
He was still talking, still threatening me without outright saying they could stay here no matter what I wanted.
I burned blood. Even with my enhanced speed and strength he managed to get an arm up to block the slap I’d aimed at his face. It was hard enough though to spin him off the stool he was sitting on.
I followed him down enraged that he’d blocked me, pounding into his face and ribs, striking whatever area he left exposed as we began trading blows.
He fought back but he was slow and even the blows that connected were no worse than a deer’s kick to the face or the tearing of a boar’s tusk.
I didn’t bother blocking. I didn’t know how, and in truth, I never even considered it. I was going to hurt him, I was going to work this lesson into his flesh.
Quickly enough he abandoned attacking and covered himself the best he could.
Grunts and impacts of knuckles on flesh merged into a staccato rhythm that pounded in my ears.
I jerked back and spun around when I thought about Karl, only to find he wasn’t attacking as I had feared. He was still sitting, wide eyed with his mouth hanging open. I hardly paused as I shot to my feet and drove the heel of my boot into his uninjured shoulder. I sent him and his chair sprawling backward with a grunt and a clatter.
Chef William lifted his hands up as I turned toward him and I spun around a few times looking for other threats. I was panting wildly as I looked around for anyone else. They were all in shock, unmoving.
Jake was moving his head from side to side with his mouth slightly open. He did that when he was focusing, trying to listen to everything at once.
Karl had picked his head up to stare at me but wasn’t otherwise moving.
I spun around to stare at Lem.
“Tell me again!” I shouted at Lem as I drove my foot into his ribs. He grunted and rolled away curling up on himself.
“Stop!” someone said, but they didn’t matter.
“Tell me again that you’ll take what I had to kill for!” I was bent over him, screaming down at him. He stayed curled up, protecting himself as best he could.
I looked up to see the horror painted on Mrs. Miller’s face. The two maids in the kitchen flinched when I looked at them.
I cursed and spat on Lem.
“If you want them to stay,” I spat at Jake, “you make them understand. I’m going to sleep!”
Except of course that I couldn’t sleep. Not because of nerves or anger, but because I physically was incapable of it now.
The kids were at the far end of the warehouse. I saw them watching me approach from between crates and stacks of looted items. They didn’t look scared, but even when they were starving they had never looked scared. They would just stare with that same flat look as if they were waiting for whatever came next.
“No one’s taking any food from us,” I told them.
One child in the back nodded but the older ones in the front didn’t move.
I climbed up the ladders until I was at the highest shelf and then climbed out onto the sailor’s sling. It was old sail cloth sewn double and doubled again. With a blanket, of which we had many after the looting, it was comfortable enough though it did swing oddly once you got into it.
I tried not to listen to the echos of voices from the other end of the warehouse. There was a chance Lem or Karl would load a crossbow and shoot me were I lay, but I doubted it. Besides I should be able to hear the crossbow ratchet. I hadn’t pulled my punches and I’d likely broken bones. If he was still here tonight I’d give him some of the medicine.
A short time later I tensed as I heard chairs moving. Then it was blocks and bricks and planks. Then I heard Jake call out, “They’re gone,” and I climbed down to meet him near the huge stump table that had been here when we moved in.
“All of them?” I asked. I hadn’t seen anyone since I came down but I hadn’t searched for anyone either.
“They thought it best that they should stay together if one of them wasn’t wanted-”
“You heard what he said! I couldn’t let that go.”
“I told them they could return,” Jake said without commenting on my beating.
“Why?” I asked, but I knew why he had invited them back. They didn’t have any place else to go and weren’t equipped to survive on the streets. He didn’t bother answering and I knew he remained silent to avoid any arguments.
There were a lot of things I did that Jake didn’t agree with, but he’d learned long before the plague how to survive as a blind man in the Slums, and it wasn’t by arguing or disagreeing with people who put food on his plate.
He was also entirely too observant for a blind man. He didn’t ask direct questions but he noticed things.
When one of the children asked why I didn’t go out with them fishing during the day, he listened and remembered. I was never a good liar, I didn’t need to be as I’d followed Cook’s advice about always telling the truth. But here, I was sure he’d caught many of my lies. There were only so many excuses I could make yet he never called me out on my lies.
Which wasn’t the same as not knowing I was lying.
When I said I was hunting during the day I’d slip down into the sewers beneath the warehouse and either meditate or practice using my blood enhanced senses.
My eyesight was easy enough. I’d sorted that out with the paladin long before I returned to the Slums. But the other senses took longer. When my enhanced hearing would come unbidden in the warehouse and everything would be amplified at least I could tell Jake I had one of my famous headaches, crawl up to my hammock, wrap a blanket around my head and wait for it to pass. It was my sense of smell that was the most problematic.
I’d go mad from the smell of dried blood stuck in the cracks of the stones from some previous butchery.
At that point I hadn’t yet realized I could stop breathing if I wanted, and the constant smell of blood around so many children, drove me mad. Both with the yearning for blood and the fear of acting on that need.
One of those times, hidden beneath the warehouse and unable to turn off my enhanced hearing I heard Jake speaking with Merle in the warehouse above. No one knew why she couldn’t speak. There were no obvious scars on her throat, but the healer said a child’s voice could be frightened away from them, or beaten out of them.
She’d been part of the original group I’d found with Jake. Him blind and her mute, and yet they had made rat traps of a sort and harvested seaweed everyday. Most of the other gangs left the children alone. But the children had told stories about how men had taken the rat traps they made or pushed Jake around searching him for coins or valuables. Taking the knives and tools he used to make the traps.
In the dark of the sewer I listened as he told her about all the ways she had to protect herself. She had argued with me that morning about something in her silent way. Jake explained to her that she couldn’t risk me being angry with her. That he’d learned people, no matter how friendly they seemed, only ever tolerated cripples.
He told her that while others could risk arguing she couldn’t. Ever. I’d never thought about his life before the plague or why he never argued with me before.
I felt dirty for listening to the examples from his life that he shared with her in confidence. Those six or seven minutes had explained more to me about who Jake was than living in the same building with him for most of the winter.
The deer from last night had not yet been butchered. We’d eaten snails and crab and seaweed stew.
I stared at it, not wanting to butcher it inside, but knowing too, that it had to be butchered soon.
No matter how much I scrubbed the stone floor or the drain afterward the smell of blood remained until I cleaned everything for hours with boiled sea water and stiff brushes. The positive part about keeping the warehouse clean was that we didn’t get too many rats or mice in here.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“I’ll take the deer to Edward,” I said.
“And some snails,” Jake reminded me. The man had asked for snails last time.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Merle sorted out snails and seaweed for the reclusive man and dumped them into one of the sturdy cloth sacks. I didn’t understand why she was using one of the heavy canvas sacks until I realized I’d be brining the deer bones back for the ghouls.
Like Jake she was good at thinking things through though it was harder for her to communicate those thoughts.
“A bit of Stumble too,” Jake said as he moved slowly around the kitchen.
Jake was well aware of the debt we owed the man.
Edward was one of two men we fed outside the warehouse. Edward because we had a debt we could never repay and Marcus because in his own way he was childlike and needed help.
Marcus often ate at our table or received a bowl when he came by. We’d often fill his sack with seaweed when he did. When he didn’t come by, and if I had the time, I dropped seaweed off at the barracks where he lived.
He was our only semi-regular guest and the children I think enjoyed him, though he could sometimes tell tales about whores or sailors that caused Jake to clap his hands and change the subject.
I had invited Edward to our table after I’d stumbled into his home running from the sewer monster.
Edward had joined us here only that single time, but left before dinner was finished cooking. He stood up, said there were too many people for his comfort, and left.
When we were struggling to get enough food to keep the children alive during the winter, before I learned that I didn’t need to breathe, I’d gone to his place to steal from him.
As he was often not home I hoped to avoid bloodshed. He was there, reading a slim book in that first room. I told him of my need and what I was willing to do for the food he had. That I was sorry to be doing it didn’t stop the children from starving.
He told me that he didn’t have food to spare but that he had a boar spear and a fishing spear I could have so long as I brought him food from time to time.
I needed food now, not a spear, and I told him so. He said I’d have to kill him then as he wasn’t going to let me steal so much as a fork from his home. I could take the deal and the spears, kill him, or leave.
I pleaded with him, that two of the children were already too weak to rise from their beds.
He spread his hands and asked me to choose, the spears or his death and whatever I could steal afterward.
I left with the spears, willing to risk one more night.
That was the first time I actually attempted to hunt in the daylight clothing. I’d used it before to collect wood or loot buildings, things I could do slowly. I set rat traps in the neighboring warehouses while wearing it and traded with the other gangs. They were much happier trading if they didn’t have to do the walking outside in the cold.
I went to the King’s Wood which extended north from the city. It was bordered on the east by the flood plains for a bit then the Ren River.
By noon even in the bulky and restricting clothes I had killed six rabbits and four squirrels with thrown stones and been burned half a dozen times on the exposed skin around my eyes or worse on my eyes themselves as I looked up at the trees for squirrels.
There was no escaping the pain and I’m sure my howls had sounded monstrous in the cold leafless forest. I knew the screaming would only drive game away and so then had to trudge ever deeper into the wood.
The snow wasn’t high, but the spear was heavy and I was wearing a lot of clothing that was growing heavy with snow. The healing fires continuously burned in and around my eyes and the there was no way for me to drink blood without exposing something to the sunlight.
But we needed food, and I was going to stay out until I found some.
Just before sunset I came upon the boars. I was not a skilled hunter by any means but my need was so great that I burned blood with abandoned. I’d gotten lucky in that initial mad rush and injured or outright killed two fat boars and three smaller ones. There were almost too many to haul home by myself, even after I cleared the gathered wood from the sled.
I broke the back of one and waited. Its fellows all stacked on the sled waited silently near the painfully squealing thing. It turned my stomach to listen to its pain and I longed to put it out of its misery but I had a greater need.
When the pressure in me broke, indicating the sun had sat, I ripped the hat and mask off. I plunged the punch into the injured animal’s neck and drank it dry. Then tore its chest open right there and ate the organs.
I didn’t enjoy them raw, but I could feel the blood they contained as I swallowed the flesh. I gored myself.
Full of blood and hope I was able to drag the sled out of the woods. There were two men who spotted me. I learned of them as the first arrow slammed into my hip.
There was no option to trade, or treat that day. The children were starving.
I didn’t take the boar spear with me, not because it wasn’t suited for the task but because I didn’t even think about it.
The two men got another set of arrows in me, and the older got a third off before I tackled him. One of the two produced a knife somewhere in the middle of it all.
They didn’t scream or flee, but they didn’t die well either. The older one died first, gutted with his precious blood spilled out over the snow.
The younger one could barely stand, his eyes wide with fear. I tried to make it quick, but there was entirely too much time from my knife thrusts under his ribs up into his heart and when his eyes went slack.
I left the knife inside the boy and trudged back to the sled.
I think someone looked out the spy hole at the gate but no one opened the door nor asked for toll or tariff.
Since then Edward’s spears had kept everyone fed well enough. Jake didn’t ever let me forget the debt I owed, that we owed, and in truth I didn’t want to forget.
Merle picked up two different sized jars of Stumble and brought them to Jake. He felt both of them and lifted the smaller one. She added that to the sack as well.
She looked at me while holding up two bivalve calm shells. Each one was half full of an alchemical mixture that looked like colored clay. One blue, one red.
I glanced at the other corner of the room where the alchemical supplies where and counted the other sets. I needed to make more of those as well. It was the single item I could make that others in the city could not. But like every other task I had, it took time.
So many people died from the plague that I had to assume the other survivors were situated like we were. More blankets and cloth than they knew what to do with. More than enough old clothing. Multiple crates of knives and clubs, the only weapons common in the Slums. Boots, buckets, forks, spoons, curtains, chairs, stools, all of it had no place to go. People might have burned anything with wood, but the children slept warmly in piles of blankets and had multiple shirts and pants to wear, even if Jake had to make the larger shirts and pants smaller with needle and thread.
There had been enough Quick Fire scattered throughout buildings that every gang had some, maybe a lot, but as far as I knew, and I had asked around, there were no other alchemists in the city at all. Not in Midtown or the Crown District.
Unless there was a Master locked up behind the castle walls with the king or locked away in the church, I was it for the whole city, and I was barely an apprentice before I died. I could extract but it was a slow process for me. After dying-
Whatever slight magic I had before I died that let me preform the alchemical tasks was lost to me in death. Now I had to burn blood to preform the same magical extractions I had done when I was alive. While it wasn’t a significant amount of blood, like not breathing, it all added up.
Which meant I only really ever did alchemy on the nights I hunted and fed and had an over abundance of blood that I would loose at dawn anyway. Better to use it on something productive than just lose it.
I’d been lucky enough to loot the alchemist compound in Midtown after the gates fell.
I was with the first wave that moved into the middle city. The guards had succeeded in trapping the plague in the Slums with fire and crossbow bolts for months.
No one knows why the plague spread to Midtown when it did. Perhaps the guards clearing the Slums of dead bodies contracted the disease and took it back with them. Perhaps the bad vapors made it through the sewers and collected in the root cellars and basements.
Perhaps it was divine punishment for how they had treated the Slum dwellers.
No one knows for sure, not even Healer McCain. We only know their control of the Slums lasted until winter began and people started doing the only math that mattered. How much food they had. The Slum Dwellers took note of the low numbers of guards on the wall and plans were made between the various crews and gangs.
Just about every able bodied man in the Slums poured through the gate the day they came down. Not going wasn’t an option. Everyone knew that. Those that choose to stay home would bleed for it later if anyone else survived.
Even the ghouls took part.
At sunset the ghouls attacked the sweet-water gate with firebombs and thrown stones. The guards on the Midtown walls rushed there for support, pulling them away from the shit-water side.
An hour later a horn blew and Slum Dwellers poured forth from the buildings we had slipped into near the gate.
The gate was already down by the time I reached it and I had been close.
There was no comfort or aid given in Midtown that night. A single hour in Midtown cured my need for vengeance, yet the Slum Dwellers spent days there slaughtering the sick and breaking down the doors of those who had no guards or weapons to protect themselves.
I didn’t participate in direct bloodshed after that first night, as it had shaken my control, but I did take to the looting without concern.
Instead of hauling whatever I deemed valuable over the streets and losing it to larger gangs in the Slums already robbing the looters, I hid the loot in the sewers.
As an apprentice I’d worked with the Blackcoats smearing rat poison in the sewers. While I hadn’t been past the gate that connected the Slums to Midtown I knew there were dry ends in all the sewer tunnels to help limit the amount of flooding that could happen by giving the sewage more space to fill. Tunnels that extended upstream of their last grate, or just branched off into nowhere were often dry enough.
I worked at night looting everything of value I could find. I cared less about gold and silver. I took what little food I could find, blankets, clothing, that sort of thing. At the time I was collecting blankets for padded mattresses for the children, not for warmth. I carried everything into the sewers and stacked them on the chairs or smaller tables I had managed to get down there.
I knew where the alchemist compound was and had gone their first, but there were bodies burning in the street surrounded by other older burned and blackened bodies.
I knew that sight. That was how we had kept the looters away from the alchemical shop in the Slums. Fire bombs were a powerful deterrent. You only had to listen to a screaming man burn to death once to know you never wanted to go out that way.
I kept going back, throwing a stone or rock at the wall and watching to see if someone looked out. When they did I left, and looted someplace else.
Locked doors throughout Midtown fell to battering rams, pry bars, hammers, or fire. People huddled that much deeper into the shadows of their own homes as they listened to their neighbors scream their lives away in the darkness and waited for their turn. Looters turned on each other soon enough and the streets became unsafe for most to travel.
The Plague had spread through Midtown in the spring, but the guards had closed the Slums down quickly enough that it hadn’t killed too many of the Midtown citizens.
The rest stayed behind locked doors with their families and avoided the sick.
In Midtown, with pantries, and cellars, and basements full of food they could afford to do things like skip going to the market. In the Slums most people visited the market everyday and healer McCain said that the market spread the disease faster than the brothels had.
After the gates came down in the fall, the plague was carried on the backs of Slum dwellers into Midtown, or on the smoke of house fires, or on the feet of flies that rested in all the spilled blood.
The Plague spread through Midtown as the looting and killing continued though there was far more of the former than the latter.
The Plague killed people behind their locked doors as easily as looter’s clubs killed their neighbors.
Chaos followed the madness and death and Midtown burned.
One time when I went back to the alchemy compound and threw my stones, no one looked out.
I got on the rooftops and made my way to the compound and watched. I peeled the roof tiles back on one of the buildings and dropped down inside.
I took my time checking the alchemy compound for traps. It wasn’t laid out exactly like the Slums but it was similar enough. A building where people slept, apprentices on the bottom with the Journeymen and Master above. Laboratories of various quality, and finally the Master’s office.
After opening that door I closed it very carefully, checked the gloves I was wearing for damage and then left.
In the Slums, even in the best of times, Master Juun had left coins on his desk that were poisoned, books on his shelf that were trapped, and all manner of other surprises for a would-be thief.
I only heard the rumors from the other apprentices, and wouldn’t have learned the truth of what was trapped and what wasn’t until I became a journeyman.
In the Midtown alchemy compound I found apprentices dead of the plague stacked up near the wood pile. Two smaller boys and a young man, likely all apprentices, were pitched over the remains of a meal in the dinning area. They each had a small glassware cup near their plates that belonged in the laboratory.
There was no more food to be found in the pantry and if I had to guess they held out as long as they could, but saw no hope that anyone was coming to help them.
The only poison I knew how to make was the one that killed rats and it didn’t do it nicely. I hoped they had taken something else.
I did not find the master among the dead. I wondered if he had fled like my own master had. Master Juun had told everyone that the King had need of an alchemist and had selected him of the three masters in the city. We spent two days carrying supplies from various shops back to the compound. He even rented a horse and wagon. We didn’t know the extent of what he had packed until after the plague had spread and we were trapped in the Slums. He, and the two journeymen, had packed a large amount of books and supplies from their labs.
Two apprentices searched the Master’s office and found three purses of gold hidden away. Some of the others argued Master Juun would not have left coin if he wasn’t coming back.
Others argued he had cut apprentices loose as the cost of food rose for the last two years and that he was more than capable of leaving us all to die and returning to pick up the gold afterward.
I wasn’t sure what happened. The only time we received orders from the king was when it concerned rats, but he had left the gold. If he was fleeing that would have been easy enough to take.
Once inside the Midtown alchemy labs I collected, for safe keeping, the contents of everything I recognized and knew was safe to move. I cleared out the apprentice labs of both components and equipment, and carefully removed the equipment from the journeyman labs. I did not however take material components that I didn’t recognize.
I’m sure I left a fortune on the laboratory shelves, but I also avoided accidentally creating poison gas as I hauled everything back to the Slums.
My plan had been to teach myself alchemy. I planned to become a Master in my own right. I saw a future in the equipment and books and an opportunity in the lack of alchemists.
The survivors of the Slums had moved into the now empty homes in Midtown, or were banding together against the estates in the Crown District and continuing the assault on richer targets.
The healer once told me that we lost more than half of the people that assaulted Midtown, and that most of those losses weren’t in Midtown, but when the mob tried to assault the Crown District.
The Crown District had almost a full week to prepare as Midtown was sacked. They also had alchemical and magical defenses, fighting men, and weapons like crossbows.
With all the dead the food that was left would last longer. The way the healer told it, she thought if we hadn’t attacked and died, no one in the Slums nor Midtown would have survived the winter. We would have all starved.
From time to time I ran into others in the sewers as I shifted the loot from the Midtown sewers to the warehouse. Most of the time I’d scream, “There they are! After them!” and that was enough to send them running. Only once did the man I screamed at scream something back behind himself and charge toward me. There were other shapes behind him and I burned blood to flee.
Those looted jars of fruit, roots, and beans had allowed every single child in my care, including those additional children dropped off throughout the winter, to survive.
I set up an alchemical space in the corner and eventually, when I had time, sorted out how to make Quick Fire by burning blood.
I had such hopes for my future at that time. I felt, for the first time, that I had a future. At the time I hadn’t really begun to worry over food. We had an abundance of food in jars as well as wilting onions and potatoes in sacks.
In fact it seemed like we had so much food I worried that some of it would go bad.
Had I been smarter I’d have saved some of the dried beans, onions, and potatoes to plant, and every single jar of food for winter. As it was, when things got bad, I made sure it all went in the cook pot.
Merle moved slightly and I realized I’d slipped into various memories and she was waiting for me.
I nodded at her silent question and she set the Quick Fire set down on the counter being careful to make sure they were separated by a good distance.
I went and changed into a set of canvas shorts and a worn long sleeved canvas shirt.
There was no avoiding the filth of the sewers. A book Edward had about the undead claimed we couldn’t get sick in the same way others could because we weren’t actually alive, or possibly because we were too cold.
I surely hadn’t got sick since I died, not even a running nose or sore throat. I wore older clothes and an old ratty pair of boots whenever I went into the sewers.
I made sure to take my punch tool, not because I thought I’d need it on the trip but because when I did need it and didn’t have it, it was so great of an inconvenience that I made sure I carried it everywhere.
Too many times had I set off for one task or another and something went wrong. When things went wrong I healed, but that meant burning blood.
Sometimes that would leave me low enough on blood that I had to hunt. Hunting meant I needed the punch and going back to the warehouse full of children when I was low on blood to get the punch was never an option.
I unloaded the blocks and bricks from the crate that sat over the sewer grate and was hopefully too heavy for anyone to lift.
Then I pulled the wooden crate away to give me access to the grate and only drain hole large enough for a man to crawl through in the warehouse. The only other drain was much smaller, just large enough to be able to get your arm into it. Not that you’d want to, being that it was the privy hole in the office at the opposite end of the building from the fireplace. Not that it had been a privy hole originally. The water from the aqueduct flowed through from the outer wall and into the office then down in a solid stream and through the other drain and hole into the sewers below.
We’d modified that area adding a privy bench and a place to fill buckets to refill the water barrel in the kitchen.
The drain hole in the middle of the warehouse, was in the center of the row between two of the massive wooden shelves.
A heavy ship’s rope was wrapped around supports one level up and another thick rope was tied in the center so that it hung directly down the hole. When not in use I just coiled it up and left it on the top of the crate.
I moved the deer close to the hole and then tied the back legs to a smaller rope and fed the animal down the hole head and front legs first.
While I had to duck a bit below, the arched chamber was large enough that I’d still be able to lower myself down on top of the deer.
After picking a child at random from the group watching me I put them in charge of the others to watch the hole and make sure no one fell in or that anyone climbed out.
I paused in the kitchen then headed over to one of the larger thicker jars and dipped my fingers in to scoop at the creatures within. When I grabbed one of the leeches and opened my hand I saw I’d gotten two.
I had likely broken Lem’s ribs, even if they didn’t come back he didn’t deserve to die, and broken ribs, without a priest, could mean death. I sighed as I pressed the slimy things to my chest until they took hold. Then I dipped in the water for another.
“Any of the fruit left?” I asked Merle when I found her waiting silently behind as I turned around. If she saw me with the leeches it wasn’t like she could say anything. Nor did she know they made the medicine. I always cut and smashed them behind the curtain in the alchemy corner.
She shook her head. Edward liked the fruit that grew in the Fairy Garden. Everyone liked fresh fruit, even those that knew where it came from.
Unlike Marcus, who survived by eating whatever handouts people had for him, Edward seemed to have his own food supply sorted out. What I brought would be a gift or repayment for the help and advice he gave me. And, as I saw it, a continued apology of the time I’d come looking to rob him.