Slumrat Rising

The Hobden Clan did not have offices or residences in Confen. Their nearest office was a rented suite in an office park outside of Gwaju, which, as far as the vet knew, strictly handled logistics coordination for the mail order pet food and pet medicine business. He had never been there. He didn’t know anyone that had been there. He had only called there once, to find out where the hell his delivery was. Apparently, their communication altar was directly connected to a siren. Simply by attempting to reach them, he found himself lulled almost to sleep and nearly purchased six hundred kilos of wet cat food.

He did not own a cat. He was not, he explained, glaring at Truth, a cat person.

Truth wished him a good day, and left peaceably. He really wasn’t sure how he could make the veterinarian’s life better. No need to make it worse. Instead, he set off for breakfast. A bowl of rice, with bamboo shoots (which he didn’t love,) pickled carrots (which he did,) and a bit of wilted spinach topped off with a bit of spicy fermented cabbage and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t the best he ever had. But sitting at a diner counter, with a cup of burnt coffee in front of him, it somehow felt right.

He wasn’t trying to embody anyone in particular at the moment. He was just another Jeon worker, D-Tier citizen, off for his twelve hour shift. Grabbing a quiet bite before work. The diner was noisy, but he was quiet. His mind was quiet. He wasn’t going to worry about work, or home, or anything. He was just going to eat his rice and veggies, drink his coffee, and forget about the world until he walked out the door.

Truth sat, ate his food, savored the scorched, acrid, thin coffee, and wiped his mouth with whisper-thin napkins. He stood, making sure to tip an extra ration credit on the way out. It wasn’t supposed to be allowed, but people found ways around. They always did. The morning was already hot, and the blue sky had just a hint of haze to it. Going to be a hot one.

He felt adrift. The plague engines were huge, a terrible thing, either planted by Starbrite or by some enemy nation capable of replicating their talismans near-perfectly. But… Well, he couldn’t say “So what?”He was still on the planet, so was Etenesh, the Sibs, and Merkovah. But it felt too disconnected. Too… dropped out of the blue. He was playing The Fool, but he would be damned if he would be a fool.

This reeked. This stank to the Highest Heavens. Was this Manda messing about again? A “divine revelation” dropping in out of nowhere?

“Perks, my guy, congratulations. In the legends to come, you will be known as the Serpent of Wisdom.”

There was no comment from just above his belt. He wished he knew a better place to stash the snake. The summer heat couldn’t bother him any more, but some remembered instinct made him desperately want to untuck his shirt.

Truth fished the snake out and had a look at him. The bulge was… microscopically smaller? Truth had very good eyes and an above average memory, but still couldn’t swear the bulge had shrunk much. If at all. He was going to say… smaller. Which was good?

“You worry me, Perks. Be better. At once. I command you.”

Perks flicked his forked tongue at Truth. Perhaps that really was all there was to say on the topic.

“Haah. Well. Let's see what the day brings.” Truth started roaming the city. He had nothing that urgently needed doing. Next stop was the Internal Security Colonel, and that was going to be a haul. Just waiting on a demon. Maybe he should look into buses or trains or something? Save him some running, at least.

He couldn’t be bothered. He wound up walking two blocks from the diner and sprawling on a bench. Which promptly retaliated by projecting nine nine-centimeter-long spikes along its length. Truth ignored it.

He called up Cup and Knife. The spell came easily. Still jank, still pretty broken, but he felt like he got it, somewhat. He was starting to see how the negative space should be filled. Not in terms of spellwork, that was a million kilometers beyond him. Conceptually. He was starting to get a feel for Manda.

Why did some damage need to be shifted from one place to another, while some damage just evaporated? Because Manda felt like that would be the right way to do things. Why did some clearly wicked people evade the spell? Because the strong have always had their ways to avoid accountability. Manda wasn’t fixated on that.

Manda wanted people to wake up. Be aware. Be alive to the greater world they lived in. Truth felt like he had barely seen a fragment of that greater world. But he had seen it. And the spell wanted him to show others some of what he had seen.

Maybe. Possibly. Felt right, but who knows.

There was a brief scream.

Truth momentarily wondered if he was the one who screamed, but no, it came from- he looked around. There was a short flight of steps into the basement of what looked like an apartment building. The scream came from there. Bored and irritated, he went and investigated.

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Moving from the sun to the shadow of the building dropped the temperature by at least ten degrees. It was psychosomatic, but Truth sighed in relief anyway. The stairs down looked positively inky, compared to the bright daylight outside. Not even a light over the door. Maybe that’s why someone screamed- stepped on a rat.

He opened the door. They hadn’t stepped on a rat.

The woman had her throat torn out already, her tongue pulled through the blood-gushing hole. Her limbs had already gone limp, leaving her body hanging from the bloody hands of a ghul. Truth blinked slowly. It was early in the morning. Bright daylight out. As dim as it was in this basement, it was still very bright for a ghul. So just what the hell was going on?

Other than the obvious.

The ghul looked as surprised to see him as ghul are capable of looking. It hoisted the woman onto its shoulder and started walking away. Truth followed behind it, out of a morbid sense of curiosity. He didn’t usually associate ghuls with carrying bodies away, but of course they must. They had art to make, and new ghul to animate.

They traveled the length of the apartment building basement, then through a broken wall into another apartment building basement. Then on again, to a storage unit at the end of a hallway who’s lightbulbs had all carefully been broken. Quiet building. Well, it was early. Maybe everyone was out at work.

The storage unit was a narrow, stall-like room. Surprisingly deep, perhaps four meters, but only a meter and a half wide. At the far end of the unit, the ghul had built its sculpture. It was a human, or all humans. He wasn’t quite sure what the ghul were going for there- it was an amalgam of parts, dozens of parts, all looking quite different. The sculpture hung from a pair of hooks, arms limp by its side, its eyes missing. The absence was clearly deliberate.

Was it a bad sign that he didn’t find it particularly horrifying? It just was. It wasn’t good or bad, happy or sad. It was the ghul’s answer to his endlessly repeated question- What is a human? Whatever this isn’t.

The ghul, body still resting on its shoulder, reached under one of the shelves running the length of the room, and pulled out an old metal bed frame. Small, industrial, bent metal tubes meant to hold a single mattress which would more or less hold a single person in indifferent comfort. It now supported a leather sling.

The ghul carefully laid the woman’s corpse in the sling. It gently pushed the sling, and began to rock back and forth. The basement was silent, except for the creaking of the bedframe and the stretching of the human-hide leather. No noise above. No creeping rats. Not even the building settling or shifting.

The creaking of the bedframe slowly got louder. The sling began to bulge and swell. A new smell filled the air. He knew that smell all too well. The fluid. The “elixir” he just happened to discover in a shop. The only elixir he could afford for his breakthrough, after he happened to find a basement in a building full of ghul that would, ironically, be a safe place for him to break through.

His life had been marked by remarkable coincidences. Maybe life was just like that when you had three destinies. He didn’t buy it though.

There wasn’t a hint of magic. Not the faintest trace of enchantments on the bed, or talismans summoning that tainted water from wherever it came from. Just the ghul, gently rocking, and waiting. Truth had no idea how long it would take. Nobody did, from what he had heard. After a while, the swelling stopped. The rocking took on a longer, slower pace.

Truth slowly realized that the ghul hadn’t led him here with any intentions. He just saw a fellow ghul, or at least a co-religionist, and that was that. If Truth followed him, that was fine. If he didn’t, that was fine too. It wasn’t that he wasn’t seen or was ignored. He was just accepted. He was welcome here.

Truth looked around a bit more. He could see where the possessions that used to be the purpose of this unit had been shoved. All of the extras that wouldn’t fit in the apartment were now pushed to the back of the shelves. Didn’t look very dusty. This probably happened fairly recently. The bodies who’s collected parts had been stitched together were missing. He frowned at that. The ghul didn’t eat their victims. So where were the spare parts?

He didn’t know how long he stood there, looking at the hanging meat. Long enough that he came to imagine himself as the hanging meat. All that he wasn’t, propped up by the ruthless will of the world. He was everyone, and since he was everyone, he was nobody. His empty eyes could never close- seeing everything and understanding nothing. Learning nothing. Remembering nothing.

What memories he had were relics of the flesh- scars, tattoos, broken knuckles and cauliflower ears. A calloused foot in need of a trim and scrape. It was neither male nor female, but had deliberate elements of both. The genitals carefully bisected and stitched together again, male and female set in juxtaposition. All just meat, useless meat. But it was all that he had.

If what you perceived of the world wasn’t reliable, if all you could trust was the records of your flesh, what did that make you? What did the human count for, when stripped of its memory? Stripped of its ability to touch and be touched?

Eventually he shook it off. The ghul was still rocking the sling. Truth stumbled out of the basement, and onto the street again. Night had fallen. He had spent the whole day in contemplation.

The world felt like it was spinning around him. That he was being spun. That all the suffering and the horror of his life was someone’s game. Some scheme. His damn triple destinies at play. Did he get a say in all this? Was this free will thing for real, or was he just blindly walking the path some remote and hostile God had laid out for him?

He grabbed hold of the street light. Looked up. He knew this model. It was on the SAT. What is the expected service life of a Ke-Te-Wo Type 61 Streetlight Talisman, assuming eight hours in operation every day?

The prescribed answer? Five years. The real answer? How could some meatsack trapped on a mud ball spinning through the obliterating void possibly know? Truth looked up into the light, past the light and into the night. Then, all unguided, he fell into the bowl of the sky.

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