Slumrat Rising

They drove over in silence. The apartment building was four stories, blocky, and unadorned. The apartments were arranged around a central courtyard that people had thrown their garbage into for years. The miasma of rot, of fermenting excrement, overwhelmed the senses. Despite this, the building appeared to be mostly occupied.

“Any of these places have working toilets?”

“A few. My late master wasn’t picky about such things.”

“Lead me to one that does.” Thrush did as commanded, and the offensively flimsy magical lock on the door was quickly shattered. It was a vermin-filled shithole, but the water talisman in the sink worked, the drain worked, the toilet worked, and the shower installed above the toilet worked. Primo housing, he reckoned.

“Seal the door and cleanse the air.” Truth looked around as close to cheerfully as the slums would allow. It was dark, damp, and crawling. It was a start. “Now. Time to clean up and figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my life.” He was already worried that this place felt like home.

Truth set about exploring the apartment. Three rooms- bed, bath, and combined living room and kitchen. Similar to where he grew up, just in a much smaller building. It was furnished, sort of. A full-size bed, a sofa, a plastic table, and rickety chairs. A stove he didn’t want to touch. A lukewarm refrigerator. He wouldn’t open the cabinets on a bet.

The furniture and the rooms themselves were infested with bedbugs, cockroaches, rats, ticks, fleas, centipedes, spiders, snakes, spiders big enough to eat the snakes, monstrous magically mutated insects with sickle arms that screamed like babies and preyed on the rats, and, of course, black mold. Somehow, it was nastier than the trash-filled apartment he grew up in. A genuine achievement.

“Thrush, your first job is to consume all the vermin in the apartment. If you can remove and eat the mold without damaging the walls, do that too.”

“Thank you, Master. Your servant shall enjoy its task.” The inky black bird started flicking around the room, pouncing on the various critters in an orgy of violence. It was one of the quirks of air demons- they absolutely loved eating creatures considered “dirty” or impure. Somehow, it enriched their magical energy. Truth had no idea about the mechanics; demonology was far beyond him. He just knew the basics, the same as anyone.

While Thrush was enjoying itself, Truth started counting his loot. He had ten guidebooks, seven in the local language, three in what looked like… maybe G’zd? It had the sort of swoopy look and little sharp-edged lines over words he thought of when he thought of G’zd. Not that he could read a word of it. So, short term, the guidebooks were useless. He knocked that store clerk out for no good reason. Although, there was a good bad reason.

The cash made a shamefully small-looking heap in front of him. Examining the bills more closely, they were all marked with numbers he could read. So there was that. Lilac bills were ones, browns were five, and greens were tens. Coffee costs five… whatever these were? That seemed high. There were also five orange bills marked twenty and a single bright red hundred that had been tucked under the cash drawer. All told, he had two hundred fifty-seven… whatever these were. And this included the money he looted from the guy in the alley.

Lunch at a stand costs five or ten with coffee. The books had price tags and seemed to run between seventeen whatevers and twenty-five whatevers. So two hundred and fifty-seven fun-bucks was not a lot.

Maybe he could collect scrap down by the river. Truth snorted. Or maybe he could fight down in the pits. Banditry was practically the national occupation, so there was always that option.

Yeah, no, the System was right about this. Learn the local language, get a hold of whatever spells he could, and become a power in his own right. Not just be a thug in the biggest gang he could find. Truth could practically hear Phil, the scrap dealer in his old neck of the slums, growling about getting his own strength. Seems the old man had a point. Heck, more than a point, he had golems.

He… didn’t want to deal with the “And then what?” follow-up question just yet. He sensed it would be jumping into a particularly nasty viper’s nest.

“Thrush, your former master couldn’t survive one exchange with me, but he must have been at least Level One to summon and bind you. What spells did he have?”

“That permanently filled his aperture? None. He did know a few cantrips and some minor ritual workings, but they had been taught to him orally by his mother and died with him.”

“Wait, what? Literally, no spell? Why didn’t he just learn the… I don’t know what they call it. The Free State Universal Spell or whatever.”

Thrush paused his dissection of a particularly electric blue centipede. “I know of no such spell, Master.”

“The universal spell? The one you need to use most basic magical tools more complicated than, well, a basic demon binding or simple talisman?”

“That does sound useful. Alas, there is no such thing, at least here in the Ressilaud Free State.”

“Then how do people do any work? In Jeon, they give that thing away for free. It’s carved in centimeter-deep letters on a two-meter-square steel block just inside the entrance to every subway station, bus station, post office, police station, and school in the country. I hear it’s written on the walls of cells inside prisons.”

Thrush made a wet, appreciative noise. Truth suspected it was a laugh. “Ah. Such enlightened predators. I can see it. Give the livestock the tools to labor productively for you, but not to pursue power. Not without being reliant on the tools and protection you provide them. An elegant system, worthy of those Lords and Excellencies of the Infernal Courts.”

Truth reluctantly found himself agreeing. Starbrite employed the best of Jeon’s labor force, and those most capable kept their spell slots open for the System. For the menial laborers in factories or service jobs… give them just enough to labor with. To ease your life and to give your valuable slaves someone to feel superior to. Make supplements and cultivation resources too expensive for them to rise up and leave them scrambling around at Level One. Some will even lose themselves to drink, drugs, hopelessness, and sheer laziness, letting their apertures collapse and severing the path to power forever. It truly was an elegant system for the predators.

“So he just, what, relied on some cantrips and you to get everything done?”

“Yes. He earned money selling drugs. He used the women in his life for bodily pleasures, trading single doses of his drugs for “gifts” of clothes, food, and companionship. I was used as a means of intimidation or attack. Occasionally, I was called upon for more subtle matters. I persuaded his customers that they were in far more need of drugs than they had imagined, or suppressing the hope that they might get clean, might turn their life around. Discouraging the thought that his women could do better than sleeping with a peddler of stepped-on drugs. One who had already given them innumerable diseases, and in two instances, unwanted children, born sickly and eternally a burden.”

Right. Air Demon. Specializing in mental attacks. Such fun.

“He didn’t need any spells, because you were all his spells.”

“Essentially. The little fool fed me all his magic, thinking it would strengthen me. His power when he died was no greater than the day he summoned me.”

Fantastic. Just… fantastic. A child of six knew better, at least in Jeon. Demons as lightly bound as Thrush scarcely existed in Jeon precisely because they did know better. Talismans were ultimately far more reliable and infinitely safer. Heavily bound demons had their place, of course. Modern technology ran on them. But not used sloppily like this.

“Pathetic. But some people clearly do have spells. Where do they get them from?”

“Inherited, often. Or they will receive badly weakened spells as part of their indenture to their employers.” Thrush sounded disinterested. “There are essentially none for sale. You might find some at auction if you were so inclined. Otherwise, it will be banditry and burglary.”

“I’m guessing anything at auction would be freakishly expensive and badly gimped?” Truth asked.

“Indeed. A spell might become the foundation of a family, after all.”

“And they don’t import because?”

“Most of the population is Level Zero; even the moderately comfortable would struggle to gather enough money to travel abroad. Purchasing a complete, useful spell would cost more than an entire village was worth. And remember, buying it is only the easiest step. Keeping it is far, far harder in Ressilaud Free State. As is surviving.” Thrush’s voice dripped with satisfaction.

Such fun. “How is the cleanup going?”

“I am making progress, but this will be time-consuming. While I appreciate the running buffet, you may wish to invest in some ward stones or talismans to keep the vermin out once I have cleaned them from this place.”

“Yep. Any thoughts on furniture?”

“Your neighbors will have some. Take what you desire.” Thrush was happily picking the limbs off one of the screaming baby bugs. Truth shook his head. Alright, he was making things more complicated than they needed to be. There were loads of street markets and street vendors everywhere. The markets were probably run by gangs or at least some people with the means to defend their stuff, so outright theft was probably not the best way to do things. On the other hand, even with only one spell, at Level Two, he was clearly much stronger than most of the local trash.

“That gang that your former master ran with. Where are they based?”

“Why, this very building, Master. How else would I know of it?”

Prager, give me strength! “I just killed a guy, and you lead me directly to his gang brothers?”

“Your goals are shelter, knowledge, power. To that end, you require wealth and the trappings of wealth. The simplest and most expedient way is to take it from near helpless prey. You are welcome.”

Truth remembered the slum gangsters he grew up around and drew a line around the words “near helpless.” There was a persistent myth that Demons couldn’t lie to their masters. This was not true. The binding supposedly compelled them to tell the truth, but what it actually did was provide consequences if they lied. Demons, therefore, had developed an aesthetic of speaking the truth in deceptive or misleading ways. To Truth, “near” seemed to glow with infernal light.

“Are any of them over Level Two?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Are they backed up by a considerably more powerful gang or organization?”

“No.”

“How are they armed?”

“Cold steel weapons and homemade fetishes. Some have bound demons such as myself.”

Ah, there we go. Thrush was solidly in the “Imp” category as demons went. Not too bad by themselves for someone who knew what they were doing, but Truth wouldn’t want to face them in quantity.

“Traps, fixed defenses, and the like?”

“The apartment building itself is their fortress. They rely on the clannishness of its occupants to alert them to strangers. Doubtless, they know you are here already.”

“Traps, fixed defenses, and the like?” There was a definite edge to Truth’s voice now.

“A few minor mind and soul-breaking talismans, generally installed over windows and on bedroom doors. My late master was too junior in the gang to know how the stash was defended, but he was repeatedly assured that the stash both moved regularly and was well protected.”

Truth interpreted that as: "The whole place is rigged with incredibly unstable, poorly constructed IEDs, and the gangsters will come at you with demons.” So. Not ideal.

He looked at the wretched apartment he was squatting in. The walls were a rotten aqua blue, the ceiling a sort of off-white, once but now speckled liberally with rot, and in several places, blue fungus battled it out with the black mold. Even after Thrush’s extermination, the furniture wasn’t even fit to be burned. It was, however, there. And if shithole gangsters could make magical IEDs, how about someone trained as both a proper Talisman Maintenance Technician and a top-notch private soldier?

They are outlaws. Bandits. The same shitty thugs who made your life hell for seventeen years. Who cares what happens to them? It wasn’t even conscious. The thought seemed to snake through his mind and body. He grinned. He knew just how to handle this.

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