Once in the sewers below the warehouse the darkness was almost absolute. I could make out the barest of shapes without a lantern, which I rarely used because it gave away my presence without any advantage. I could see better than humans in low light and my strategy when it came to fighting was to avoid it. A lantern allowed distant people to see me without letting me know they were there. In the dark I had the advantage over people, and possibly ghouls.
My memory helped as I was able to move in a sort of hunched over way as the arched stone above me lowered as I approached the edge of the tunnel. Even in the dark my hand could reach out and take the shovel’s shaft without fumbling because I was concentrating on where I had left it.
I made my way beneath the privy hole, whistled and then waited until the water stopped flowing as Jake or one of the children cut the flow from above.
There wasn’t enough water flow to keep the solid waste from building up in a pile and splattering out in all directions. I scrapped a path close to the pile and went to work tossing the waste as far as I could down the tunnel.
There was a arm wide hole that angled up to the street just a pace further down the tunnel. As long as I threw past that point the next storm would provide enough water to wash most of the solid waste away.
Once I had a majority of the solid waste cleared away I whistled again. A moment later the water started falling and I cleaned the shovel off as best as I could in the stream before putting it back.
I loaded up with everything, making sure the wrapped shells of Quick Fire were in different pockets so they didn’t accidentally mix.
Under the deer’s weight I didn’t move very quickly. I had to avoid the streams of sunlight that shot down into the sewer from the grates or holes above but that was only difficult in our little branch where the tunnel was narrow enough I could reach out and touch both sides at the same time if I stretched my arms.
Most of the warehouses drained into a wet line where there was a constant, if slow, flow of waste, storm, or aqueduct water. Our line was dry, meaning it only really got wet during a storm.
Wet lines were filthy, but dry lines could build up with waste that dried hard and didn’t flow away when the next storms came. The dry lines also tended to house rats or other vermin as they were safe places to make nests.
I’d spent a long time cleaning out our end of the line, from the drain in the center of the warehouse where I entered the sewers, to the privy hole all the way down to where our tunnel met up with the main line.
I had to use the shovel like a chisel on dried waste for more hours than I liked to think about. Since then I sometimes had the children carry buckets of water to the main drain and dump them as I washed and scrubbed everything quickly with a broom.
Poison was easy enough to make and rats could chew the children’s toes off while they slept or worse get into the stored food. Cook had always told us to tell him if we saw a rat. When we did he didn’t mess around passing up a poisoned bit of bread to one of the older children who had to watch until a rat ate it.
While we didn’t have bread there was more than enough fish paste to mix with poison, or to use as bait in rat traps.
One of the ways Jake and Merle made fish oil was to boil all the fish guts, skins, and heads and then strain the oil off. The cooked guts we would stuff into the old socks and use as crab bait.
In the winter we’d eaten rats, but the healer said we should avoid that unless people were starving.
The sewer system was ancient. From a time when the Slums was the whole of the city and the Ice River had flowed into the harbor outside the city walls.
Then the pirates took over and the city. With their wealth came whores and sailors. The small port city expanded outward pushing into the Ice River to the west and the flood plains of the Ren River on the east.
The pirate captains got rich and old and wanted to live out their lives on land with their grandchildren.
They had both money and slaves and soon enough the land north of the city was cleared with coin, fire, and dagger’s edge. Sewers were laid out and slaves were put to work setting stone. Wizards merged and joined the stonework into seamless tunnels and then the city was laid out on top.
The Midtown sewers, though they weren’t called that at the time, were connected to what would become the shit-water side of the Slums.
Merchants of any worth moved from the Slums, what they called Dockside then, to the new city as slaves moved stones and built the walls.
The city was conquered and rebuilt several times. Eventually the Crown District, castle, and church were built. Each tied into the existing sewer system further overloading it. The need for fresh clean water grew as the population grew and the Ice River was eventually redirected to flow into the city and through it, replacing a strained raised aqueduct system with a walled and elevated river.
The aqueduct system of the time had flowed to specific regions of the city and people had to haul water in buckets to their homes. With the river moved and the newer larger aqueduct lines, the system grew into a larger and more complicated network with stops and tanks and floating bits that controlled how the water flowed to each distant point.
Some buildings were directly connected to the aqueduct system as they were tall enough and it was less work flowing over or along side them than it was building new support pillars.
Eventually people with control of an aqueduct line began extorting those downstream. Pay, or have your flow reduced.
The corruption lead to riots and eventually the whole system was overhauled. Water laws were put in place that carried harsh sentences. Examples were made even of nobles and merchants.
The real issue had been solved during the redesign and that was the volume of water the system moved.
The Ice River was almost twice as wide when it entered the city as when it exited into the harbor keeping the same uniformed depth the whole way. The rest of the water was transported across all three districts of the city via a vast array of aqueducts.
Almost every single building had direct rooftop connections, and those that didn’t had water entering through walls at lower levels.
The maintenance of the aqueducts was maintained by the Whitecoats as the sewers were maintained by the Blackcoats.
I’d never seen the old aqueduct system, but the old timers still talked about how much better the new aqueducts were even if the only time they had seen the old one was as children.
While the aqueducts had been redesigned and upgraded the sewers could not.
The Crown District’s sewers flowed into Midtown, which then flowed into one side of the Slums which gave the shit-water side of the Slums its name.
Already at or over capacity just from Midtown and the Crown District, when there were storms the additional storm water forced the contents of the sewers to actually fill the sewer lines enough that the contents were forced out of the grates and onto the streets to flow at street level down to the harbor.
The good part was that in the wet tunnels on the shit-water side of the Slums there was almost no build up of anything as it constantly got flushed with enough water to sweep everything away.
The bad part was when it rained, they filled up, sometimes to over flowing, and if you were caught inside the tunnels you would be swept away.
I made good progress through the tunnels only getting waist deep for the span of ten steps or so when I had to cross the main tunnel. I was able to keep the deer and the sacks out of it, but felt it coating and clinging to me.
Intellectually I knew it was mostly water from the aqueducts, that most of the Slums were empty and that what little waste was put into the system was vastly diluted. Yet I still felt like filth coated and clung to me.
I had stopped breathing before even descending into the sewers and would continue in that fashion until I could either wash well, or had to speak with someone.
From the main tunnel it was slightly uphill all the way until I reached the metal bars that separated Edward’s tunnel from the rest of the sewer.
There was a slight walkway on each side of the sewers in the main tunnels but it was so narrow, and often damaged, that I rarely even bothered trying to stay on it.
Edward’s area was a step up from that walkway. The metal bars followed the natural curve of the arching ceiling and were just wide enough I could step through without turning sideways, assuming of course I wasn’t hauling anything wider than my shoulders.
There was a constant stream of water, about the width of my boot, that ran down the center of the otherwise dry tunnel, spilled over the small walkway on the side of the main tunnel, and then flowed into the main line.
This was the only place in the sewer system that I’d seen bars like these. I’d seen grates of course with any number of bars but not set into the floor and curving up and over like the arch of the side of the tunnel.
I wondered why they hadn’t just set them vertically the first time I’d been here and had yet to come up with an answer.
As I followed the stream down the center of the otherwise dry tunnel the only light came from behind me. I had to turn down a smaller tunnel to follow the water. The one I was in dead-ended at a massive brick wall. It was not merged stone, but brick and mortar, something I rarely saw in the sewers unless you went all the way into the crown district to the new lines which were put in a generation ago. In those lines no mages were paid to join all the stones together and already the bricks were damaged or missing.
Here the bricks were dry and the mortar was intact.
After turning the corner there was a section of almost absolute darkness until I walked farther down the tunnel and the weak light from the magical lantern pushed into the gloom as the sound of falling water grew.
The water ran over the edge of a proper wooden bathing tub just up ahead but I put off cleaning off in case he wasn’t here and I’d just be leaving again.
I walked the deer past the tub and the small wooden aqueduct line that filled it. The wooden trench turned at shoulder height around a corner into a well lit room.
I dropped the deer there noting that Edward was not in the small room.
I checked over the seaweed and snails making sure that even though the sack had some sort of gunk on it, likely from bushing against the walls, nothing had gotten through the heavy canvas.
I filled one of the empty woven baskets with the contents of the sack and then carefully set the Quick Fire set beside it. Making sure that they could not accidentally touch.
The room’s light came from a magical lantern that hung from the ceiling of the round room. There was a dark archway directly across the room from where I entered but I only stared at it.
Edward would disappear into it from time to time and return with a book about this or that. He would lay it out and show me what we had been discussing, even if I could not always read the language it was written in.
In just this room there were four books on a shelf on the wall and another on the table beside the only chair.
He made it clear that I wasn’t welcome when he wasn’t home, nor was I to call out and wake him if he was sleeping.
I waited, wondering if he was still dressing in the dark and would shortly come shuffling out. Sometimes it took him a while before he appeared.
The lantern light had the same weak quality as the light in the Fairy House and I wondered if that was why the unlit archway always seemed so dark, as if the light simply stopped there.
He did not emerge.
I didn’t clean off in the tub but I did scoop a bucket of water to wash my hands in and then drank from the cold water as it fell from the small wooden trench into the tub.
I slipped through the bars and headed back to the warehouse, slowing as I reached the fork that would lead me toward the union barracks.
I stared down that tunnel for a long time before I started moving down it. There were no grates for almost two hundred paces in this direction and though there was a semi-solid layer of wet muck there wasn’t really a flow underfoot either as a few of the aqueduct lines were damaged or collapsed leaving less water to return from near the wall.
The dockworker’s union had been the largest single compound in the Slums and home to its largest gang.
After the plague, Gregor the Butcher had walked into the compound one day and claimed not only the compound but the gang. He killed six men that day, or so rumor went, but since then it has been his with no challenge to his authority.
I stopped only twenty paces down the tunnel.
Why was I headed this way? If it was to kill why go weaponless? If I wasn’t, why go at all?
The grates large enough I could exit the sewers through were all outside the compound’s walls anyway. Even if I went this way I’d have to try to get in from outside the compound.
Climbing up the rope back into the warehouse required burning a bit of blood. I hadn’t been particularly fit or strong before I died and it seemed my body changed slowly now. When I did push-ups, pull-ups, or sit-ups I only had a brief window where I felt the muscles straining with exhaustion before I felt the white-hot fire of healing fixing the strain.
Jake said it was the strain and soreness that grew muscles so I figured I if the magic healed me it was likely I wouldn’t get any stronger. It was a slow process of working at it every day but only to the point where I felt the lightest strain without healing. I think I was making progress.
Once back in the warehouse I found it was surprisingly empty.
No one came to help me as I moved the crate over the grate or filled it back up. I walked to the privy and normally at least one child would comment on my smell or hold their nose at me in a playful way.
I saw no one.
I washed in the cold water and scrubbed at the clothing in a bucket. Then I washed out the wiping rags and cleaned that bucket as well. The children were more apt to wipe their rears with their hands and wash those in the bucket than they were to wipe with the rag and clean that.
The healer said it didn’t matter either way, so long as they washed their hands well afterward.
Aden, one of the older boys, was the first child I saw. He was sitting behind a barrel where a loaded crossbow rested, aimed at the partially blocked doorway.
“The blacksmith came by with his crew,” he said when he noticed me, “Jake took everyone with him.”
“Firewood or fish?” I asked.
“Umm,” he said and then shrugged.
“Did they take axes or nets?”
“Neither,” he said after a moment, “Baskets, the big ones you can hide under.”
He meant the waist high baskets. Not the largest baskets but also too large for anything heavier than seaweed.
They were out collecting something while the blacksmith’s people did some other task nearby. It wasn’t berries unless there was some sort of berry plant that was ready in the spring.
“Did you eat?” I asked.
“I’ll eat,” he said hopefully.
“That’s not what I asked,” I said and he mumbled something about having eaten.
There weren’t many rules that would lead to a beating. Stealing food was one of them, and eating outside of meals times was stealing. Over the winter I had to punish only one child but that was enough for everyone to learn.
For a moment I couldn’t remember who the child had been. A moment later I was awash in sensations and scents as the memory came.
I was standing in the warehouse, aware that I was freezing cold, and that everyone else was huddled in blankets and sitting as near to the small fire as they could. The small faces were turned away from the fire to look at us.
“It has to happen where they all can see,” Jake was whispering, “we can’t watch them all, all the time.”
“With a belt?” I asked.
“Probably for the best,” Jake said.
In the memory I looked over and Aden was standing there, tears wetting his cheeks, eyes wide. He was already shaking from the cold now that he was outside of his blanket.
“Go get me a belt,” I told him.
I pushed the memory away and the sensations whirled and twisted and I was back in the warehouse. Just for a terror inducing moment I wondered if this- now- was a memory I was reliving.
I scratched my nose, confirming I had control. In the memories I didn’t have control, but then again I seemingly didn’t seek to control anything.
They were so unlike normal memories that I’d call them a different word if I had one for it. In a normal memory the information was just sort of there. Who gave me this knife? Or what did I eat yesterday? The newer types came after the paladin knocked that shadowy thing out of me. They were just as real and as full of sensation while I was reliving them as they had been when I lived them the first time.
In a normal memory I might remember the conversation I had over a meal, but not the taste of the meal or the conversation in the background or what I was wearing. In the newer type of memory all that information was there if I just focused on it.
The paladin had known nothing of that. Edward on the other hand had hummed and twisted his lips and asked for time to think on it. During the next visit he brought out a single sheet of thick paper from the back room. On it was a diagram of a human ribcage. He pointed out the growths between the ribs and then moved the paper close to his face to read.
“When dissected,” Edward had read, moving his finger slowly across the tiny scrip written in a language I didn’t recognize, “the man-leech - that was their word for your kind - had unknown growths growing inward from the ribcage. The older the man-leech, the more growths. As there is no other accurate way in which to identify age for such creatures this method was adopted. It is estimated there is one ridge-growth every eighty to one hundred years. The oldest in church records being a six hundred and fifty-nine years old leather worker named Cenn Dezro, verified with birth records held by the church. The creature had seven fully grown ridges. Many have been dissected with less than a full growth that were verified to have died only twenty to thirty years previous.”
That is when I learned I could live for a very long time, something Edward thought I already knew.
He wondered if the black ooze had it’s own memories and that the ridges between the ribs might be the structure that did the remembering for it. There were accounts he had read but could not find, where damage to a vampire’s head that had crushed the brain would heal and the creatures were still able to remember things.
I washed up in the cold water before pulling two handfuls of the fresh seaweed and a couple of pieces of the dried kelp stalk on the cutting block.
No one liked eating the seaweed but by mixing the dried crunchy bits with the wet slimy ones you could at least make it interesting.
I used one of the knives to chop everything up and pretended not to notice Aden checking to see if I was making two bowls.
I sat one bowl on the barrel and Aden looked at me without touching it.
“I’ll watch the door for you while you eat.”
That was another rule. Those on watch were on watch. They didn’t play, didn’t eat, didn’t do anything that wasn’t being on watch. The other children were not to bother them.
He reached out for the bowl and I put a hand on it indicting with my head that I’d set the other bowl on the table.
He abandoned the closer bowl and shot off like a dustling toward the other one quickly.
I sat on his stool and ate the seaweed. It was slimy and unappetizing, salty and tough, but it was fuel. I chewed a lot more than I would have before I died.
After some problems during the winter I made sure to make it as easy as possible for my system to digest whatever I ate, even if I had to chew it seemingly forever.
The only healer left in the Slums was an old whore turned madam, whose training in healing had been overseeing two decades of whores and sailors.
Everyone knew that the only people who got sick more often than whores were the sailors that visited them. Those of us left alive in the Slums counted ourselves lucky to have a healer with such experience.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Most other healers set bones and helped birth babes. Real healing tended to fall to alchemists or priests with the latter having most of the workload.
Whenever I stopped breathing, there was a long drawn out moment where my body yearned for air before the black ooze that animated me burned blood as a substitute.
It worked similarly with hunger, though I’d discovered I didn’t need to eat before I realized I didn’t have to breathe.
While not breathing burned blood it did not burn it very quickly. Not eating, on the other hand, burned blood at a much faster rate.
I’d get busy and then forget to eat a meal or two and then I’d notice that I was burning through blood very fast and wouldn’t know why only to realize I’d missed meals for four or five days.
In the winter, I went two weeks straight without food because there was barely enough food to keep the children alive. That was right before I decided to rob Edward and ended up with the spears which changed everything.
Those two weeks were long enough to cause me problems when I started eating again.
The pain inside me after eating was so bad that the white-hot fire healed something inside me every time I ate. Worse though than the healing was that I never stopped burning blood, even if I ate. I wasn’t getting what I needed from the food even though I was eating.
Six days of that pain, healing, and the wasting of both blood and food, was all I could stand before I went to see the healer.
No one was doing well in the winter and she flat refused to see me without payment in food, food we couldn’t yet spare.
I hadn’t yet figured out about the not breathing. Once I did, everything became easier as it allowed me to gather food during the day as well as and night.
The spears had helped massively that first outing and I’d been lucky to drag the boars back without running into another hunting party, but we were far from well fed.
Being winter, and the fact that just about everyone else was hunting, day and night, I wasn’t getting much. Even when I did get a kill I had to bring it back in a long loop or risk getting shot by other hunters or those gangs setting ambushes for returning hunters.
Lord Fennic’s men still patrolled the King’s Wood in their green and white uniforms. He had arrived in mid summer while the plague was still burning its way through the city and set up camp at the north end of the King’s Wood almost forty miles from the city.
They occupied that northern portion of the forest but sent out patrols through the rest further complicating matters. While they hadn’t successfully shot me yet, they had shot at me. Not that his people weren’t being killed by hunters from the city as well.
I know the ghouls killed a number of his men because on one hunting trip I had smelled freshly fallen blood and went to investigate. It was not uncommon that someone could hit an animal poorly with a crossbow bolt but not kill it quickly. Often they lost track of the injured animals.
I’d found more than a few recently dead animals just by following my nose.
That time the blood had turned out to be human. Someone had killed a number of armed men and dragged them away. Small things indicated they were people. A belt knife, a boot, a broken strap and buckle.
I followed the trail west until I found a poorly covered, shallow mass grave.
I uncovered a partially covered body and could tell from the uniform it had been one of Lord Fennic’s men. I could tell from the missing bones they had been the victims of a ghoul attack.
I learned that starving men from the city didn’t fear death in the King’s Wood as much as well fed soldiers did.
Eventually the patrols Lord Fennic sent out stayed to their half of the forest, either by his order or without his knowledge.
Hunting at night though was not bringing in enough food. My first attempt at hunting during the day almost ended in disaster. I’d taken two thick pieces of canvas sail cloth out to make a shelter. Thinking I could hide inside and shoot anything I saw, collecting the bodies later.
I saw no game, and no hunters, but was beset by waking nightmares and fear so strong that I could barely remain seated.
There was a bit of cloth that separated me from the sun and I was trapped. A charging boar, a passing hunter, a strong gust of wind might remove the sheets of sail cloth and expose me to the sun.
I knew from the testing in the Fairy House that I was not in control when burned. I moved away from the fire, but out in the wilderness there was no place to go. Panicking would only expose me to more sunlight.
I was a wreck by the time night fell. I sprinted back to the city, entered the sewers below ground and stayed there for two days until hunger drove me back to the warehouse.
The children were starving by then. Jake had thought me lost and had wept silently under a blanket at my return.
I still feel shame at my choices. Not so much trying to hunt during the day, but how I reacted to that crippling fear afterward.
It was learning I didn’t need to breathe that saved us that winter, and I learned that by accident.
I would stand on the dock with a rope tied to the end of the fishing spear. With a gull or other bait I’d wait for the sharks. This worked best closer to sunrise or sunset when the larger predators seemed to be the most active.
One time, just after I tossed a gull with a broken wing into the water, a shark snapped at it. I hadn’t yet tied the rope on the end of the spear. I reacted without thinking, hefting the spear up and throwing it.
When I realized what I’d done, I didn’t think, I just dove in after it. The shark was thrashing on the surface and as I rose from the dive I was able to get my hands on the shaft of the spear.
The shark’s tail battered at me, and it twisted to try to snap at me, but I was just barely able, by burning blood, to keep everything out of it’s mouth.
Blood poured from the shark but it fought over and over to bite me or to get away.
Only as it stilled near the bottom did I realize I’d been in the water fighting it for what felt like ten minutes.
I got to my feet, the spear shaft still held in both hands, the dead or dying shark on the far end, and realized I had no urge to breathe at all. I reveled in it.
Then swam to the surface dragging the shark with me. When I reached the surface I sucked in lungfuls of air which felt natural and right, and I didn’t realize yet what had happened.
I tested it, jumping back into the water. At first I still had the burning need to breathe. Then, instead of giving in, I just waited, thinking the worst that would happen was that I would pass out. Instead, the urge to breathe faded away. I did not pass out even though I stayed below the surface with stroking arms and kicking legs for a very long time.
Later I would come up with the obvious solution and exhale all the air I had in my lungs so that I did not float and could sink to the bottom much easier.
Being able to stay underwater led to a steady supply of food in both seaweed and snails.
With the new supply of food we could finally be confident we had enough food to keep everyone alive, even if the meals were boring.
We even had enough of a surplus to trade for firewood and other once common food like mushrooms or walnuts.
Every so often as we all sat around the massive stump table Jake would pause while he was eating to sigh loudly.
Then he would complain about the seaweed or the snails in an overly dramatic voice. He’d encourage others to complain and before I knew it the children were trying to outdo each other while smiling and laughing.
Once we had food security and a bit of food stored up I took the required boar to the healer, who was surprised that I still had the same problem I had seen her about before. I lied, poorly, and told her it was the same problem again, not still the same problem.
In truth I had simply stopped eating altogether. What was the point after all if it hurt and I still burned blood.
It was clear to both of us that she didn’t believe me, but she didn’t argue as I was paying in much needed food.
She tried several things that didn’t work, from teas to potions, to eating a horrid chalky mixture that made me burp for almost two days. After examining my poop again she asked me straight faced if I was a ghoul.
“Not a ghoul,” I said unable to quickly think of something better to say.
“But dead,” she said nodding, “cold hands, always with the cold hands even when you wear those thick gloves.”
We stared at each other for a while and then she asked me, straight faced and calm, if I was going to kill her.
“No,” I said. She nodded at that and asked her questions again. This time I answered as best I could leaving out only that I drank blood to feed the black ooze that let me walk around in my own corpse.
“I can smell acid in your waste,” she’d told me, “except after you ate the powered crab shells.”
“Is that what they were?” I asked.
“It neutralized the acid in your stomach,” she said. I remembered that from the alchemy lab. The snail shells could be baked at high temperatures, then ground up and used to make a powder that helped with heartburn. It caused you to burp.
“In both cases the food looks undigested. More so when the acid is neutralized,” she said, “There are tiny bugs, too small to see without a stack of lenses. They live inside your guts,” she said, “when those die people can eat and eat and never get what they need from the food, dying of starvation with full bellies. You should likely be dead, but the bones keep you alive,” I didn’t correct her, “and I don’t know how to fix dead gut bugs or if they are even the problem. I can keep trying,” she suggested with a shrug, “We collected many books from the homes and shops of other healers that I haven’t had time to read yet.”
She shrugged.
“I’ve got my own people to care for and my own food to gather. If you bring us food, I’ll spend the time I would spend fishing, reading, but that’s the best I can promise. Sometimes when a thing dies, it dies. If your guts are dead, they are likely dead for good.”
When I asked if they would rot like the limbs of some of the shambling men, she had shrugged.
“I can barely treat the living,” she confessed seriously, “I don’t know what help I can offer the dead.”
For a while, even after I spent my days fishing and my nights hunting, we ate lean because we shared out the food we had with others who were in bad ways. We were lucky that none of ours died. Others were not so lucky.
I traded sure, but never negotiated. I’d show them what I had to offer passing it over without argument and they’d give up what they had to spare.
Most of it was things we already had enough of, knives, clubs, blankets, boots, buckets and canteens. When people offered coins I knew they were down to nothing, because coins had no value at all anymore.
I took what they offered and never once asked for more.
A brace of rabbits, three boar, half a deer, six and a half baskets of snails, and ten baskets of seaweed later she told me she’d found something she’d like to try, but that I wasn’t going to like it.
It was involved, disgusting, and humiliating, for all of us, as I wouldn’t be the only one involved. The book she had found, said the treatment was a last resort to stop people dying from watery shits. It went on to describe them, and she read that part to me.
“The waste is loose, watery, or waste that was not digested and is seemingly only chewed.”
She had tapped the book at that part and looked up at me nodding.
“That’s what your waste looks like,” she said, “chewed but not digested.”
Before she described what would happen in full she haggled over price.
Still, in the end, it had worked. Now I made sure to eat at least one meal every day to ensure that the gut bugs didn’t die out again. Which is what she was convinced had happened.
I chewed fourteen times before swallowing. Counting each to make the time last longer.
I knew Aden was watching me, waiting for me to finish and put him back to work watching the doorway.
I considered our food stores. We had a lot of snails and seaweed, but we were out of fruit. The healer had said fruit was important.
I’d hunt the swamps tonight for one of the big lizards and drag it to the Fairy Garden to exchange for fruit. I could try to collect pine needles for the tea as well as we were getting low, but those were easy enough to trade for if someone else had some.
Then I’d spend the day in the kelp forests and have the healer come out to check the children again. It had been a while since she had looked them over.
Then I would deal with Gregor and make sure he knew I wasn’t going to stand for anyone grabbing up children.
Except I couldn’t see a way to do that without starting a war.
I touched my shirt feeling the leeches under it and pressing on them. They were still tightly attached.
If I went lizard hunting that meant little or no blood as it was difficult to get blood from those while they were alive.
Fish just didn’t have enough blood in them to justify trying. Cutting into them while they were still moving and draining them out just didn’t produce anywhere near the volume of blood a land or air creature did. Even worse, fish seemed somehow lacking in the substance that I needed. When I drank fish blood it felt weak and insubstantial.
Birds, on the other hand, were ideal. They had something more, more of whatever it was that nourished the black ooze inside me, more than any deer or fish or swamp lizard did.
Volume to volume, bird blood was the best.
The reality of harvesting blood from birds in the post-plague Slums was another matter. There were no chickens at all and the doves had gone from proliferate to scarce over the winter.
The only other birds we had of any size and number were gulls, and they were only active during the day.
Shot with a crossbow or killed with a sling during the day didn’t help me any. Drinking the blood of an animal at night if it was killed killed during the day didn’t help me at all. After something died, the power in the blood faded quickly and burned away completely as day turned to night.
To drink from the gulls, the children had to capture them on the roof during the day in overturned basket traps. Then they worked them into old wool socks that had holes in the toes. With the bird heads sticking out of the toe holes and their wings and legs held against their bodies by the socks they could be kept alive for a few days with water or possibly longer with food.
I’d not tried keeping them alive as I collected their blood at the first opportunity so that the birds could be cooked and eaten. On occasion I used them for bait. Shark blood was as weak as fish blood, but there was a lot of it.
If we captured a live gull during the day I simply waited until after sunset so I could cut the gull’s heads off and hold them over a bowl while they bled out. Then Merle would pluck and cook the birds.
I’d claim to use the blood in alchemy and take it into my corner of the warehouse. I did have a curtain I could hang from wall hooks but most of the time the children went to bed at some point, leaving me with just Jake, who was as blind as a tree and couldn’t see if I drank blood from my copper mug or not.
Black pudding, fried blood, was something we tried once. While there was something of the power in it, just enough to notice if I concentrated, it was even weaker than fish blood and not worth pursuing as a means of feeding.
“Aden?” I asked. He was sitting in Jake’s big chair, the one the man had layered with old blankets for added cushion and warmth.
“Do you know how to trap the gulls on the roof?”
Ten minutes later I sent him up the ladder in the far corner of the warehouse while I stood below to tie the items he’d need onto the rope for him to pull up.
There were scraps of crates and sail cloth on the roof constructed in such a way that there was at least a shady spot for the children on watch during the day. On a day like this where the children accompanied the blacksmith and his crew all but one went, and that one had orders to shoot the first person to open up a hole in the doorway before running to the sewer drain to get away.
I filled one of the canteens with fresh cold water and sent that up with him as well.
“Aden,” I said seriously, “You come on down if you get too hot or need a break.” Jake was always telling them to drink water up there, and worried over them getting too hot.
“Yeah,” he said darting away.
“Aden!” I screamed and his head appeared again over the hole.
“Close the door so you don’t fall down the hole!”
I sat in Jake’s chair completely alone in the building for the first time in a long time.
I checked the leeches again, but they were still holding fast. Normally they took twenty minutes to an hour to get their fill and fall off on their own.
How long had it been? I pushed the enhanced memory away. I’d put them on before I took the deer to Edward, after the others had left. How long had I been gone?
It had to have been three hours at the least. I wondered if a sick or injured leech would heal first and then drink its fill. I could experiment by cutting one and then letting it attach.
Except I didn’t get up.
I glanced around the room. It was so odd that it was empty. Except it wasn’t empty.
I sat up straighter and really looked around. The place was full of stuff. The kitchen area was full of jars and plates and things. The chairs and stools around the stump table were crowded in. The water barrel and snail barrel, and the shelves on the wall were all full.
The crates on the shelves were full of looted items and I knew the rows between them were filled up with hammocks and blanket forts.
The stacked and split wood was chest high and three rows deep.
I’d been in the warehouses enough as an apprentice to poison rats that I’d seen them with various amounts of cargo. I’d been the one sent into the sewers whenever a job required it. So I knew that this warehouse sat above a dry section of the sewer long before the plague.
After I died, spent time with the paladin and decided to return to the city to try to help, I’d looked for places to stay. Cook was still dead and rotted in his room when I returned.
I hadn’t even bothered to climb into the attic to check on the children. Instead I burned the inn to the ground. It was a waste of a perfectly good building but they deserved a burial of some sort.
By then the ghouls had claimed the sweet-water side of the Slums. I didn’t know that at the time and was lucky I didn’t run into them when I walked back to the alchemist compound on that side of the Slums. The compound, including the shop, bunkhouse, laboratories, and barracks, were empty and looted. We’d had real beds, if simple, and even those were carried off. Almost all of the kitchenware was gone and someone had put some effort into moving the stove half way across the kitchen before abandoning it. There were other places I checked but most had been looted or burned and were therefore without doors.
I’d walked to the docks assuming correctly that people would be fishing from them.
I’d found Jake working waist deep in the freezing water of the Ice River where it entered the harbor to collect seaweed while four small children waited huddled together under a couple threadbare blankets.
They knocked a few rocks together as I approached.
“No problems now,” Jake said loudly, “they aren’t going to cause problems. We are just collecting seaweed. Not here to cause problems.”
He couldn’t speak without the cold touching his voice. I stood there staring at them and I felt like they were the reason that mace hadn’t killed me. I wasn’t touched by Moria, nor had I heard a voice from the heavens, but I knew I could help them.
The warehouses were close to the harbor and as I battered down the planks and barricade of the first warehouse I’d found dead men on the other side. Victims of the plague.
I’d remembered the dry sewers beneath the building and had planned on putting everyone in the sewer under the building for warmth, or at least sleeping there myself as I mistakingly thought the warehouses had windows.
The warehouse itself worked better even if it did start to get horribly cold later. When it did I found out that the sewers weren’t much better.
Jake had mended nets before the plague but no one had need of his services afterward. There were more nets than people to cast them.
Jake didn’t have a permanent place but moved from building to building. The kids were able to worm their way into collapsed or burned out buildings in ways that men couldn’t. They would loot what they could and when they found a prize like Stumble or coins they’d trade it to one of the other gangs for a bit of soup or stew.
Sometimes they ate rats that Jake could catch in crab traps and the children could stab with knives or smash with clubs. While he was able to find clams from time to time mostly they ate the seaweed.
Four days after we took over the warehouse there were seven children at dinner instead of four, without anyone having said a word to me. At that point they still went out with Jake to scavenge from burned down buildings for firewood or anything else of value. The dead men I’d dragged out of the warehouse had a fair share of valuable loot, but most of the practical items we currently had in the warehouse were collected by the children.
I hunted as best I could with stealth and enhanced speed and brought back seaweed when I failed to get an animal.
Then one night Mary was trapped and killed as a building shifted and the small tunnel of open space she was moving through collapsed. The rubble shifted and she only screamed for one brief moment, but it was enough for Jake to know she was dead, he did not send any children back in for her but he could not turn his back without knowing for sure.
He got the other children back to the warehouse and as soon as I arrived from hunting Jake led me back to the building where it happened. How he could remember how to get to places without seeing landmarks still amazes me.
I shook my head and willed the memories away before I had to relive the vivid memory of seeing her insides squeezed out the split in her side just below her ribs.
I stood up and looked around for something to do. I had once worried that being awake during the day would eventually drive me mad as I would be trapped with nothing to do. Yet this was the first time I could think of where I rested without having to put off some important task.
I found work to do.
I had just finished sweeping the whole building when Aden called down to me that he’d trapped one of the gulls.
“Back up from the hole!” I snapped, “Don’t lean over it like that! You could fall. Did you put it in a sock?”
“No. It’s under the basket. I need help.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I said.
When he came down later I could smell the blood before I saw him.
I set the basket weaving aside and stared at where he would appear.
The bird had got him on the face, close to one eye.
“It got away,” he said without looking at me.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said forcing cheer into my voice in the hopes that he wouldn’t start crying. I didn’t know how to handle that except by hugging them and half the time that only made them cry harder.
“Those birds are massive,” I said, “come over here and I’ll clean it with Stumble.”
He winced as I cleaned the cut and sort of placed the triangular flap of skin back in the hole.
“Is it going to scar?” he asked.
“Not with medicine. Put your finger here. No like this. Now go sit in Jake’s chair and tilt your head back so you are looking up at the ceiling.
The two leeches had fallen off my chest earlier, and I’d put them in a small bowl of water. Now I took one out of the water and dropped it into a jar with just enough stumble in it to drown the poor thing.
I held the head down below the liquid with a wooden stir stick.
I’m not sure exactly how it works. I tried putting my blood on a broken deer’s leg to test, but it did nothing. The next test had been putting a leech that had just feed from me and a leech that had not in the same bowl of Stumble. The one that had feasted on my blood survived for much longer before it drowned.
Eventually though, having fed or not, the leech would sort of project this thin stream of white vomit into the Stumble and then die, or perhaps the dying made it vomit. Either way it went still and vomited at about the same time.
“Did you toss the basket over the bird?” I asked when I realized I didn’t actually know how they caught the birds, “is that how you caught it?”
He turned his head to look at me, “Keep looking at the ceiling.”
“We set the basket up on a stick with a pull string,” he said, “then put a crushed snail on the roof and wait until a bird sees it, lands, and eats it. When it’s about done eating you throw a snail under the basket and it goes under to get it. Then you pull the stick out and run over to hold the basket until it calms down.”
It only took a few more questions to keep him talking and distracted.
When the leech vomited I waited with the long set of tongs until it went still, counted to three and then put it on the cutting board.
Between the knife and the mortar and pestle, I had a thick chunky paste that smelled like blood and strong spirits.
“Okay,” I said, “take your hand away and close your eyes I’m going to put this on your cut and then you are going to eat two big spoonfuls of it.
He moaned but didn’t complain.
“Let me know if it burns,” I said, “but don’t wipe it off.”
“It burns!” he said with a hiss. He squirmed a bit and I held his head still until he settled. A few minutes later I wiped it off to see that the skin had already knit closed with a tiny white scar where the point of the flesh hadn’t lined up with the hole.
“Again,” I said putting another lump of it on his face and using the wooden spoon to feed him the rest.
“Anything else catch on fire?” I asked.
One day as I cleared the pile of shit that stacked up in the sewer under the privy hole, I noticed in the dim light from above, something move. Worms. We dosed the kids with the medicine because I thought it would help.
About six of them ended up complaining that fire burned in their bellies, and in my ignorance and arrogance, I had smiled thinking myself clever.
It turns out though that the worms are living things too and that ground up leeches fat on magical healing magic might just cure the worms as much as the body of the child they are living in.
The medicine didn’t kill the worms. So I did then what I should have done in the first place and went to the healer. She made a paste from the meaty fruit that surrounds walnuts that had everyone, the children, Jake, and even myself, vomiting and shitting ourselves before the day was out.
With twenty or so people in the warehouse at that time one privy hole wasn’t nearly enough. When those kids were all sick, because she convinced me to douse them all or risk missing one and reinfecting everyone again, we ended up with a huge mess, lots of crying, and lots of washing up in the tub.
Thankfully, when it was over, all the shit was clear of worms, and we learned to cook all the meat before we added it to stews or soups.
She said it was likely from the boars and that we could still cook the venison so that it was red. I wasn’t going to clean up a mess like that again though so all the meat was more than cooked, no matter where it came from.
“Nothing is burning,” he said after a moment.
“Good,” I said patting him on the shoulder.
“Hello!” A woman called from the other side of the barricade.
“Stay,” I said pushing Aden back down as he tried to get up.
“Tell me if anything else burns.”
“Hello!” I called out loudly as I moved toward the door.
“It’s Mrs. Miller” she said loudly and I made sure not to sigh, “Jake said we could return if we couldn’t find accommodations.”
“What does accommodations mean?” I asked. The pause was brief but obvious. I never understood how the rich folk felt embarrassed when the rest of us didn’t know something. If they didn’t know a thing what did they do, not ask? Just pretend they knew? Why would she feel embarrassed for me when I asked.
Then it dawned on me and I felt like the stupid Mule all over again. Likely she wasn’t feeling embarrassed on my account, likely she thought I was an idiot. Not that I could tell either way talking to her through the barricade like I was.
“Some place to stay,” she said.
“One moment.”
I removed a few of the blocks and bricks until I could back the largest plank out of the door frame and move it to the side.
I saw several people behind Mrs. Miller, Lem being the most obvious.
“Careful not to knock the rest of this down,” I said as I made a space for them to slip through.
Lem was bent over in the rear of the group, his face black and blue, one eye swollen. He straightened up before he entered.
“You know where the chairs are,” I said as they entered, “Take a seat and make yourself at home.”
There was, to my surprise, a carriage in the alley behind Karl who stepped inside making a show of keeping the crossbow pointed down with his good arm. The other one was still in the sling from the stone I’d hit him with on the docks.
“I’ll wait here,” he said, “so I can watch the carriage.”
I didn’t like keeping the door unblocked at all. They could have made some arrangement with the blacksmith’s crew, or Gregor could be waiting outside with twenty men.
“Or I can wait outside,” he offered as he studied my face.
“I’ll have the boy pass out cold water and a rag to wash with in a bit.”
He nodded and stepped back outside.
I moved the plank back in place cutting out most of the reflected light and dropping the inside back into it’s natural state of gloom.
“Dreadfully dark in here,” one of the maids said to Mrs. Miller. The woman promptly shushed her. The whole warehouse was lit by a single magicked lantern, much like the one Edward had, though this one was powered with wizard magic instead of fairy magic. The light wasn’t the half light of the Fairly House but bright and full. Until it faded.
It had to be taken down once a week to boil the enchanted metal rod inside. It took several hours for the heat to warm the metal rod up. Once it did the rod would be at it’s strongest, but even then the light was weak at the far edges of the warehouse.
Since the building was so large and the shelves that took up more than half the space so tall, only odd thin streams of light made it to the open end of the building where the huge stump table, chairs, alchemy corner, kitchen corner, and fireplace were. Thankfully there was almost always a fire to add warm light.
When they were all seated around the stump and I’d handed them cups of fresh water, and put another piece of wood on the hot coals, the silence stretched uncomfortably. Aden looked like he wanted to be anywhere else and I felt the same.
“Aden,” I said, “fill a bucket up with fresh water, get a rag, that stool there, and a wooden mug for Karl, but wait for me to open up a space in the doorway.
“Chef William,” I said using the master craftsman’s title, “there is fresh seaweed there,” I pointed, “and dried kelp stalks there, and plates on that shelf behind you if you wouldn’t mind feeding anyone that’s hungry. The food’s boring but filling. Mugs are there and that barrel should have good water.”
I was more than a little surprised to see the man. It was clear from the amount of food items they brought that he’d been invited back into the house. I was honestly surprised he left it again.