“It has ever been my impression that my fellow Lords insist on populating their cities with the survivors of the Sunfall rather than good solid constructs because they can imagine no other use for power or proof of its existence than the subjugation of others.”

– Helgon the Eternal to no one while tinkering with her thirty seventh failed attempt at creating a self-willed construct.

I wound up in the sewers. I mean it wasn’t a surprise or anything. The sewers weren’t exactly spacious and so me and Smiles were obvious candidates for the crews that got sent down there. There’s no positive spin to put on sewer work either. Maybe once upon a time, sewer workers were held in some kind of great esteem for what they had to put up with, but if so that had died with the old world.

Smiles and I crawled back to Lucky’s that night at the end of the work cycle. He stunk. I stunk. Everyone stunk. Lucky’s had the answer to that though – warm showers! One of the perks of ‘volunteering’ for sewer work was that you could have an extra water ration sent to your home, and for a change the extra water ration wasn’t a miserable little trickle.

I hadn’t needed a shower the previous day thanks to my extended swim, which had been part of the reason I hadn’t been too unhappy with the sewer work. A Ratkin who was too clean was a Ratkin who stood out. I’d managed to get reasonably dusty on my climb out but the smell wasn’t as easy to replicate. One day in the sewers had fixed that though. 

If I wanted to smell bad, why was I happy to have a shower to look forward to when we got back? In part there was the ‘too much of a good thing’ going on. I needed to smell normally bad, not horrendously bad. More than that though, the soap most nest’s used had a specific smell too and that was as much a part of my olfactory disguise as anything else.

I’d had that all planned out. What I’d forgotten to plan for though was Sola.

Are you making the water warmer? I asked her when I noticed that it wasn’t merely ‘not cold’, it was actually warm to a degree that felt criminally good.

I should be warming oceans, Sola said. I thought this was the least that I could do.

It’s heavenly but it’s going to attract more attention. There’s mist rising in here.

I’m heating all of the water in the building.

Which…I don’t know why that surprised me. I knew how vast Sola was, or how vast she had been. To her, something like all of the water coming into Lucky’s building was no different from all of the water in a teacup or all the water in the city.

Can you afford to do that? I asked, thinking of the beast that was waiting to devour her still. One quick flash of light and everyone who saw it lost their minds. This isn’t going to make them any saner.

To be fair, the people from Lucky’s were the sanest madpeople I’d ever encountered. My second biggest fear had been that one or more of them would start blabbing about the light they’d seen which had to be exactly the sort of thing Vaingloth’s agents would be looking for in order to discover where I’d gone.

That was the second biggest fear only because I was convinced that the Eternal Neoteric High Lord of Supreme Blah Blah Blah must have some infallible mystic means of tracking Sola and so was going to show up right behind me, personally, and ruin my day something fierce.

But he hadn’t.

I’d kept my head down and worked on repairing a few holes in the sewer walls while staying ready to flee on an instant’s notice only to have that instant never arrive.

I got out of the shower and signalled the next person, a halfling guy, that the stall was free. My clothes were almost dry by the time I got back to the slumber pile but I stayed in my borrowed bathing dress anyways since it should have taken until more before they were wearable under normal circumstances.

There were fewer people in the room than there’d been the previous evening which I attributed to the bits of side talk I’d heard on the journey back to Lucky’s that with most of the work happening in other precincts, the people from Lucky’s were going to be able to spread the details of our plan farther by finding a nest for the night in those districts. That happened a lot,  though not typically as an exercise in community building. Usually people took wherever they could get it and crashed wherever that was. The city shuffled people around as needed, but it did not shuffle them back to where they’d been. If you wanted to return home after your shift, you needed to get back on your own.

The other reason the common room was empty, it turned out, was because when people were put into the mindset to make connections with each other, a fair number of them either admitted to the romantic connections they’d been hoping for, or were inspired to pursue said connections once they learned more about the people around them

Happily, I was neither hiding feelings for anyone, nor inspired to develop any. Smiles was roughly my age and the right species but, and no offense to him, no. Just no. It’s possible I was wired different than other people, and even other Ratkin, but I had less than zero interest in pursuing anyone, Ratkin or otherwise.

Smiles seemed to be of a similar mindset, which I’d observed to be more common than people assumed for Ratkin. We had the reputation of being fertile little baby machines since we typically had four to six kids at a time and could have them a couple of times a year. What people missed about that was how most of us had to be outside that process or we’d overrun the meager food supply that was available to us.

“Food wagon’s going to be coming by in a bit,” Smiles said when I flopped down onto the floor beside him. “Want to help me grab stuff for the old folks?”

The old folks weren’t terribly old in most cases. Shockingly, in a populace that was used for fuel and expendable troops and whatever happened to people beyond the air portal, a lot of people didn’t make it to old age. That didn’t mean a lot of people didn’t wind up too hurt to work for extended period of time though. Some of them were never going to be able to do the kind of work that the Milgos of the world doled out, but that didn’t mean we threw them away. It was too likely that we’d be in the same boat as they were for a while at least. That’s what we told each other, but I think a truer reason was that letting people die for our own convenience wasn’t who we wanted to be. 

I’m not saying we can’t be awful to each other, and there are definitely nests where only able bodied people are welcome, but most nests seem to understand that you gotta help everyone if any of us are going to make it.

I tromped down to the street with Smiles and a bunch of other people, letting my thoughts linger on how many of the food packs I could carry back and feeling marginally safer since there were no signs that anyone had noticed my role in healing the old Kobold lady Mumora.

That I literally ran right into one of Vaingloth’s Inquisitors as I turned the corner at ground level should have prompted any number of unfortunate reactions, but I lucked out. I froze. Just like any other Ratkin would have.

Perfect cover.

“Pick this one up,” the Inquisitor said the patrollers that were behind him. “Pick them all up.”

“Shall we call for the wagons sir?” the near patroller out of the set of four asked.

“No. We just need to question them. Hold them in the center of the street and don’t let any scamper away. If any try, cut their legs out. Our Lord Eternal may want to personally question them if it looks like they know anything of value.”

One of the patroller’s short sword’s poked me in the back.

Rudely.

So I moved.

I could feel Sola moving too within me, but I shushed her down to buy myself a moment to think.

We don’t know what their questions will be, I said to Sola, since for the first time in my life I had someone to throw my crazy ideas at for review. There’s zero chance they’re not looking for me, but they clearly don’t know that I’m the exact person they’re looking for. 

They will not harm you, Sola said with the sort of grim determination that was the opposite of comforting to hear in the voice of a god.

I don’t want them to harm anyone, I said. I think the option we have for that though is making them think there’s nothing interesting here. This has to be part of a general sweep right? If they’d heard what happened last night they would have brought more than four patrollers.

If he knew you were here, I believe my captor would have come in person.

That was good, but it definitely did not make me feel good.

“Looks like you were about to have dinner,” one of the patrollers said. “Sorry to interrupt there. If you can help us find the lady we’re looking for, we’ll let you get right back to that.”

They were looking for a woman.

I was a woman.

Only a lifetime of practice kept my feet bolted to the floor. 

Could I have asked them who they were looking for?

Yes.

Was it ever, EVER the right idea to talk to a patroller?

No. Never.

It wasn’t worth lying to them and telling them the truth was the literal worst possible choice in every situation.

My fellow captives, since that was what we were at the moment, knew that too. Even the scumbags among us have had it drilled into them that patrollers cannot be trusted. Too many people who’ve opened their mouths have wound up as Kindling for that to be a point that’s open to debate.

“If there’s cause for us to think any of you are hiding her though, we’d have to impound this shipment and arrest you all as potential accomplices.”

Because there was never a carrot without a much bigger stick when you were dealing with the patrollers.

I was oddly proud that no one said anything. Solidarity wasn’t guaranteed by any means, but for a change people were managing to not be idiots.

“This Kobold the one?” a patroller asked from a balcony on the second floor. He had Mumora by the arm and it looked like he’d dragged her out of the shower.

“Bring her down here and we’ll see,” the Inquisitor said. “Keep the building sealed though in case it’s the wrong one. No one gets away, am I making myself clear this time.”

“Yes, Inquisitor,” the patroller’s said in unison.

I’m not a good person. I should have felt horrified that they’d found Mumora but my first reaction was relief. I was safe. Then the horror came, tagging along after the thought of what Vaingloth was going to do to her.

She was doomed. No matter what she answered, no matter whether she was or wasn’t the one they were looking for, Mumora was doomed. They were going to take her in for questioning, use every technique they had for breaking down her resistance, and all the ones that amused them or whatever, and then they would put her onto the pyre. Another life spent to buy warmth and life for Vaingloth and his minions.

Mumora apparently understood that too because she bit the patroller on the hand and wordlessly threw herself off the building.