Cook’s room was dark. That type of dark that hid things you’d rather not see anyway.

I could tell the air was still and stuffy without breathing. The sound of flies was a background noise that appeared as my head dropped into the room from above.

The sound of scurrying mice or rats was less prevalent but more pronounced when I did hear it. The dark was pitch powered with coal dust, not a reflective thing in the whole room. What ever light entered was eaten completely.

Cook had been a large man, so large that I couldn’t move his dead body from the bed when I had arrived even if I had wanted to, and I didn’t want to as it was several days dead at that point.

There was a choice to make. Hold my breath and wait for my eyes to adjust to the trickle of light from the attic above or move while I still had air and put off breathing for as long as possible.

The barrel of water had a tap instead of an open top, so it wasn’t like flies or mice could get into it. Unfortunately it was on the other side of the room.

I tried not to breath as I took short steps wary of stepping on the mice or rats, and wary too of how slick the floor had been last time.

The burning in my lungs finally burst and I let out the pressure in a slow hiss knowing that I would soon have to inhale the filthily and fetid air.

The flies coated me as I guided myself around the outside of the room. I didn’t bother wasting effort trying to kill them or shoo them off.

As I came to the slick part I moved slower, doing my best to avoid thinking about what was making the floor slick.

I’d slipped before and had been covered first in the filth and then in my own sick as the smell of the disturbed liquids hit me.

I finally had to breathe in. Even with knowing how bad it would be, even living in the filth in the attic, with the dead behind the curtain, I was unprepared.

The smell it hit me like acid.

We were always warned to be careful in the laboratory. That the air movers were their for a reason. The master though was of the opinion that ‘a burned finger garners great respect for fire.’ I had to drop a copper coin into a glass container of acid and then sniff the resulting heavy gas that pooled languorously above the liquid. The heavy gas burned mercilessly, and was, if looked at dispassionately, a lesson well learned.

This stink wasn’t painful, but it elicited a biological reaction.

I froze, feet planted and hands leaning against the wall as I tried to keep from vomiting up every meal I’ve ever eaten.

I managed to keep my insides, inside, which took every bit of willpower I had. But like jumping in the Ice River, once I was submerged in the smell, suffused with it, I slowly grew used to it. Then I began to move, because like the cold water, I knew I only had a certain amount of time before my body lost control regardless of what I wanted.

I had to find the tap by feel but eventually the water began to flow. I could still see nothing at all. I didn’t want to drink, not with the smell in my nose, but I didn’t want to come back down any sooner than I had to. I drank deep, able to ignore the stabbing sharp pains in my neck as I tipped my head back.

Physical pain was easier to deal with. My knees and shoulders, after crawling in the attic, didn’t want to work correctly, yet I hardly felt them.

The running sound of water combined with the smell, flies, and darkness reminded me of my journey across the city.

In quarantining the area, the guards had completely cut the Slums off from new sources of food. Ships and traders hadn’t come once rumors of the plague had spread.

The guards had closed the gates in both the Midtown and outer walls. The walls were patrolled by guardsmen with crossbows and firebombs trapping everyone in the Slums. Even the stone beach was scatted with the pin-cushioned-dead who had tried to flee by the only wall-less path out of the Slums only to find guards with bows and crossbows ready to stop the spread of the plague by any means necessary.

I stopped thinking about what waited outside and my thoughts shifted instantly. The hunger I’d been ignoring came to the forefront of my mind. I thought about the last ball of flour paste I’d eaten and wondered how long ago that had been.

Even eating the offering wouldn’t save me from starvation. As small as the boy was it wouldn’t save him either. But leaving it might draw in a fairy who could save him.

They had to save at least one didn’t they?

They had to.

When the canteen was full enough that the sound of the water began to change I turned the tap, plugged the canteen and locked the plug with the metal bits, then slowly started back across the room.

The flies that had landed after my passage disturbed them, took again to the fetid air. The hum of wings grew stronger and I had to pause as the sound and shallow breathing made the room start to tilt around me.

Though the hole at the far corner of the room was lit by weak light from above, the rest of the room was so dark that I couldn’t see anything at all.

I crawled up, pushing the canteen ahead of me.

I could hardly fit through the hole and I was never considered anything but scrawny. I’d been scrawny my whole life. I’d stayed in this very attic longer than most children did on account of that scrawniness. On the streets of the Slums size mattered far more than age.

Cook kept us off the streets until we were big enough to serve an apprenticeship. We got no say in which craftsman we were sold to, whichever needed help at the time.

I was luckier than most. Being small meant I was older when I was put out. I knew more numbers and could read better. The alchemist had an opening and I met the minimum standards. Of all the crafts that was considered the best.

When Cook told me I had a chance with the alchemists I did nothing but read out loud to the rest of the children from the small pile of books we had. I read so much I lost my voice. But I kept practicing even if I only read silently.

When I passed down through the hole, I never expected to return to the inn in failure, which whispered rumors said had happened a few times over the years. Nor did I ever expect to return to the attic.

I’d done both. Been returned in shame, head down, and made to listen as Cook refused to buy me back. He had to use the coin he did have to keep the little ones fed.

You either made it as an apprentice or you went to the sailors or the streets. If you failed to learn Alchemy you could always become a scribe, or so I was told. But the problem I had centered on writing letters that didn’t flip around oddly when I wrote them. It happened when I read as well but I could sort through that with enough time.

I thought that happened for everyone. When Cook said that reading was difficult and took practice, that’s what I thought he’d meant. Other children struggled to read the picture books too. I wasn’t the only failure.

I got myself up through the hole enough to see into the attic.

I glanced at the curtain and the bodies it hid and felt like a failure again.

I stared at the boy.

My chest squeezed tight as time crept forward. I tried to will his small chest to expand. The longer I watched and nothing happened. The tighter my own chest felt.

I had the water now.

What else could I do?

Another failure.

Just breathe.

When it remained still for some time I stared up at the hole where the offering lay and the flickering light spilled out across the roof. The lamp and the offering were both hidden from direct view, but I willed a fairy to come. This was the last one. Surely they could save one?

Cook had fed them his whole life.

Pre-payment for a future need just like this.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

My legs wobbled and I considered not crawling up at all.

I was empty as I struggled the rest of the way up through the hole. I’d just have to go back down when I confirmed he was dead, but I had to confirm it. I couldn’t just leave him there. Not if he was waiting on me, waiting on the water.

If nothing else there should be someone there at the end.

What was a bit more work for a mule?

When I put weight on my knees I groaned a bit as pain shot through them, but soon enough I was moving forward, pushing the canteen ahead of me.

The ever present drumming of rain almost ate the sound of the scrap as the canteen slid across the floor.

My grunts as I placed my swollen knees were soft sounds I hardly heard.

I turned him over and swept my fingers through the pink slime and froth in his mouth and slapped his back a few times to try to get him to breathe. Then I rested my hand along his throat and felt for the pulse I knew I would not find.

I watched the foam in his mouth remain undisturbed, and unbothered by breath moving in either direction.

I rolled over so that I was sitting, my back bouncing lightly off the wall behind me, the lamp in it’s hole above me.

I realized the attic was so much smaller now that I was grown. I was short, but even I couldn’t stand up without hitting my head. Yet I could remember racing around this attic with the other children when I’d lived up here. We never had to duck until we toward the edge where the roof met the floor.

The single flame cast the attic in shadows just bright enough to illuminate memory.

The games had been simple and we learned our letters and from the older children while the sun was up. Then Cook would return to his room in the late evening and ask the older children which of the younger children had done their best that day. Those children got to climb down into his room and help pass the food up to the others.

I smiled now staring down the length of the attic into the deepening shadows. He made a game or contest of everything. Our letters. Numbers. Being quiet at night. The prizes were little sweets or a second piece of bread with dinner.

Sometimes there was fruit.

I didn’t move, and the single flame above hardly flickered as the rain drummed down.

It seemed like I could almost see the children I’d grown up with out of the corners of my eyes, or in the shadowy distance. That I could almost hear the ever present whispering.

The long attic had always scared us at night Staring down it, with just the offering lamp to light the space. You could almost see the monsters in Cook’s stories lurking at the far end waiting for you to slip off to sleep before they attacked.

It was the same lamp, the same attic, except everything was somehow darker, the corners were lost to that darkness.

The long stretch that ran over the guest rooms on one side of the building had always been off limits. There were little blocks stopping the children from walking over a guest’s room.

The other side of the attic’s floor was the ceiling of long term storage, where the captains left their things while they were out and about in the world. Since no one was in those rooms we could play on top of them without fear someone would complain about the rats in the attic.

My eyes moved back to the curtain and the literal pile of tiny bodies it hid, at least from sight.

I hadn’t realized I’d stacked them over a guest’s room, the only place they were not allowed to be.

“Isor kat il berrium,” I said from where I sat, my eyes shifting to the hole and the untouched bread above my head. My neck hurt looking up at such an angle but I stared anyway.

“You never lie,” Cook had told us, his voice rising up through the hole in the floor during one of his lessons. His voice had always filled the attic space as we lay gathered around to listen.

“You never lie, because one day you may absolutely need to lie to save your life. If you’ve always told the truth they will believe the lie and you will live.”

He had much the same advice about fairies who were both beautiful and wicked.

“You feed the fairies, asking nothing, and never agreeing to any bargain, contract, or compact, so that one day, when you need to make a deal, they will come.”

The flour Cook had stored away in his room before he died ran out a week after I arrived. Had the children not died of the plague, they would have starved.

I coughed once and my whole body seized up as I waited for another to follow.

It always started with cramps, but everyone had those from time to time. Next came the coughing, then the blood tears.

It was harder to lie to myself about what my future held now that I had the cough.

Nothing moved except the flickering flame of the oil lamp and the long shadows that filled the room.

Aldus, named for the same Companion I was named for, by the same man that named me, moaned and the tiny sound filled the attic.

The first time I heard a little moan escape from the recently dead I’d feared I’d missed some sign of life. That they were still alive. The first time a leg spasmed I’d thought they were rising from the dead like the monsters in some of Cook’s stories.

They were just things the dead did. Who could know why.

He’d piss himself in a moment or two if he had enough water in him. Then in a few hours his body would start to harden. In a day or two he’d start to get soft and then he’d really start to rot and stink. He would bloat and his skin would split, then the wet would leak out of him with the worst smell you couldn’t imagine until your whole world was soaking in it.

I hardly noticed it anymore.

Flies buzzed, the light flickered, and the rain drummed as the shadows danced at the far end of the attic. In them I saw the great fairies that could have saved the children with a casual wave of their hand.

They were watching the attic, looking through the wall as if it was smoked glass.

Norn, the bear-man, cursed with an unslakeable hunger, sat uneating to show his respect.

He dwarfed the others, his head large enough to crush Melky’s tall and slight frame between his massive jaws. Her ever-beating wings were still and her huge multifaceted eyes somehow conveyed her sorrow.

There were others watching as the shadows shifted and suggested their shapes.

Then the Mother came forth.

Antlers, thick arms, red eyes, and a wreath made of flowers and thorns around the neck of a faceless woman.

Dustlings and Shades flicked through her legs and raced around the bodies of their betters. There was a Druid Stone there behind them and in the deepest shadows. The promise of an ancient gateway.

The shadow moved like smoke now and the stones were closer.

I felt my cheeks move. The grin that formed had no happiness in it.

I knew what would happen if I crawled towards the gate.

Nothing at all.

Or worse, they’d save me instead of the children.

I didn’t have much water in my mouth but I worked it until I had enough to spit in their direction.

I think it landed on my own leg, but that didn’t matter. I pulled my eyes away from the shadows even though I wanted to shout at them that they were too late, but I didn’t bother. They knew.

I didn’t have too many places to look though and by the time I looked back, they were gone, if they were ever there at all.

The shadows made other shapes, bogey-men and hook-claws, razor-fangs and little lighting bugs that spun and danced.

I jerked my head when a fly tried to climb into my nose. My head slammed into the wall behind me and a new blossom of pain spread.

I rubbed at my head. The shadows were just shadows.

I should eat the offering. I had only left the alchemy compound when I was starving. We’d kept everyone else out with firebombs ,avoiding most of the chaos and killing that followed the initial outbreak. But eventually it was starvation that motivated us to move. Likely it was starvation that motivated everyone to leave whatever safety they had secured.

Two apprentices had died within the first three days. They hardly had time to bleed from their eyes, the coughing was so bad.

The healing potions did nothing but remove the bags from under their eyes and settle their stomachs.

I think the plague killed off a lot of people quickly in that first wave.

Unfortunately, no one who lived past that first week died quickly.

We were safe from the people outside but we didn’t have food to last much more than four days. We stretched that to two weeks.

When I returned here it was because I was starving. Cook was dead by that point and the oldest child, Wen, hadn’t opened the door to Cook’s room because Cook had told him not to open it for anyone. Wen didn’t know me, and rightfully didn’t trust me.

I would have starved at the alchemy compound if the men outside hadn’t been desperate enough to brave the fire bombs in numbers. They pushed past burned and blacked bodies and attacked the gate with axes. We’d run out of food and were holding off death on the same rats and cats and birds as everyone else who could manage to catch something that moved.

When we ran out of firebombs and they still had men with axes, we fled over the rooftops, which we had defended until that point with the two crossbows and the higher elevation.

Somehow I’d made it back here. Like every other child Cook had raised, I had no family. Cook didn’t take in the unwanted children. At least those children were noticed, and disliked by someone. He took in the discarded children. Those left in alleyways or rubbish bins. The ones left for high tide or placed in tall weeds. The ones the world had already stopped noticing.

It was whispered in the attic, while Cook was far below in the kitchens, that he had once save the life of a powerful fae, perhaps even the Mother herself. That each and every one of us was found by lesser fairies and brought here as a discharge against that debt.

I’d heard the stories myself, and later, when I was older, told them to the younger children, careful not to add anything to the story I hadn’t been told.

I had no one that would care if I lived or died. No one but Cook.

I’d arrived and found the door locked, Cook already dead.

I leaned up against Cook’s locked door, Wen on the other side, and waited to die. Wen had a crossbow but couldn’t work the ratchet to get the cable back. The bodies of four looters were scattered across the dark hallway outside of Cook’s door. Men Cook must have killed with the weapon before he succumbed to the plague.

The iron bound doors that secured the storage rooms for the various ship captains were open and looted long before I arrived.

Another group of looters arrived while I waited. They had a small candle for light. They noted the first body and then sent someone through the open door of the first storage room at a sprint.

“Empty,” the man said and they left, just that quickly.

Wen had asked me to tell him stories through the door. I told him my favorite story of the Companions. One of the many stories Cook had told me when I lived in that attic.

I didn’t ask him to open the door, but he did it on his own when one of the girl’s starting bleeding from her eyes. He had to shake me to wake me.

I woke weak and dehydrated and didn’t recognize the bodies in the hallway or where the hallway even was at first.

The honeyed bread had been in the offering bowl when I arrived. A sack of flour in Cook’s room and a keg of water were the only things of value.

We had a few candles then, and the oil for the offering lamp.

Cook had pulled the thick blankets up over his own head and told the boy not to take them off if he didn’t wake.

He was just a big lump under the blanket. I had enough care then to stand there and weep, though I didn’t know if it was more for him or selfishness that he couldn’t help me.

When I saw the offering I had doubt Cook had made the fist sized loaf and covered it in honey when the sickness started. Honey covered fresh bread was a fairy’s favorite treat.

The fairies hadn’t come though. Cook had fed them for decades. He taught the rest of us the words and the stories.

When the Alchemist took me on, I squirreled a portion of my meals out to the windowsill each night and said the words. I even heard a dustling once, or so I’d convinced myself at the time.

I should eat the offering if for no other reason than to spite them.

The lamp flickered again as the wind outside the hole shifted. The steady drum of the heavy downpour was still there, but somehow I hadn’t noticed it for a while.