The Seventh Tower

Chapter 1--Not Through the Front Door

Aen Ros slogged through the sewers beneath the Tower of Walls. The stench was unbearable. The usual sewer scent blended with the smoke of the torches, and the unmistakable smell of too many bodies in too small a place. The ceiling was only inches above his head, but it was less the physical dimensions of the place that caused the claustrophobic feeling in his stomach than the throngs of people at his sides, and the tide of rats at his feet. Well, he reflected, at least I am  not alone. And the front door was never an option, anyhow. The people were very short, and very thin. All in all he had never seen sicklier people, or, for that matter, healthier rats. Some of them were the size of small dogs, and all were fat and clean. They stayed clean by running along a ledge that was seemingly created for that purpose.
Aen Ros watched as an emaciated woman carrying a child so thin that its legs and arms seemed like toothpicks bent down a picked up a piece of half-eaten food floating downstream. At once half a dozen nearby people attempted to take it from her, but she fought them off by biting and scratching, and emerged coughing from the filth with a sizable portion of the original morsel. She carefully cleaned it off, and with a sad look at her child, tossed it to the rats.
         Ros was stunned. He asked her, “Why did you do that?”
         She shot a suspicious gaze his way, and croaked, “Do what?”
         “Why did you feed the rats, of course? They are fat, and your child—and you for that matter—are starving!”
         Her look turned to confusion, “Sacred rats.” Was all she said. Then she turned and hurried off into the crowd, with a last frightened look back at him. Ros supposed that he had just marked himself as an outsider as well as if he’d jumped up and down screaming. Perhaps more so, given that he’d already seen a few people doing just that. Still, he could not hide his confusion.
         A man nearby seemed to notice. He smiled a toothless grin, and waved a wizened hand beckoning him nearer. “The rats are sacred,” he explained, “and we are condemned to this place for our sins, so that rats get first pick of the food. It is theirs by right, and it is only in kindness that they leave us any, at all.”
         “Condemned?” Asked Ros, “Are you all lawbreakers, sent down here for crimes?”
         “No, no,” Rasped the man, “You are truly an outsider, though your size and strength would mark you as such, even if you had not spoken. Understand, most of us are born to this, as punishment for crimes in our former lives. As to the rats; by cleaning them, feeding them, building them ways to walk above the sewer floor, we earn a better life. Also, we do the bidding of those nobler men and women, without any question, or complaint. By doing that, as well. we can earn our way to a better birth in the next life. I was sentenced to this place for crimes in this life, and I think I may need to live in this Hell again, before I can be reborn in the air, and the light.”
         “I am sorry for your misfortune, then.” Remarked Ros.
         “Yes, a great misfortune. Once I was young, and strong, I walked in the sun! I was so strong, like a bull, though all my strength has left me.  .  . I was strong enough to fight through the rats, though they clung to me so thick I must have been invisible beneath them. All the other condemned fell, but I lived! I carried the body of the woman I loved away, too. Even though I was already carrying my weight in biting, clawing, rats, I saved my wife’s body. And I buried it Where they’ll never find it!” Each sentence ended is a high, quavering, voice that was almost a squeal.
“And for what, what did I live?” He wailed, “To die like this, covered in the scars of the teeth that would have ended my suffering quickly? The waste of men? Why, why, why?”

His eyes were wide, and his remaining teeth bared in a mindless grin. He pulled back his sleeves and brandished his arms in front of Ros, “Look at the scars! Did I deserve this for my sins? Was I so wrong to marry a woman below me? Do you see the scars, boy? They are thick on my skin, and thicker inside. I should have died with her. ”
         Ros tried to back away, but the man grabbed him with a strength that belied his wizened condition, and lent weight to his words of his old strength. His arms were indeed covered in marks of razor-sharp rodent teeth.
         With a final, “Why?” The man fell back to wall of the sewer.

         The old man’s gaze focused on some place out on the horizon, and Ros sensed that, if there was any life in him, it would be gone by morning. Yet there was no morning in this place. He shook his head in sorrow, as nothing else could be done, and walked onward, shoving through the tangled mass of people. Where they were all going, he didn’t know. All they owned, as far as he could see, were the rags they wore, and perhaps the ledges dug into the walls, where the lucky slept. There were a few who were traders, of a sort, hawking the things they had found floating in the sewers. Even here, thought Ros, could be found a sort of hierarchy; the abject squalor of these people was becoming slightly less.
         
         That must, he decided, be because they were getting nearer the source of the sewers, after all, the refuse these people treasured was certainly someone’s garbage. Unfortunately, the sewers narrowed ahead to a size that allowed only the rats to proceed. The sewage flowed from a wall of perhaps twenty manarms across. That was unfortunate simply because that was where he needed to go. He would go as far as he could, as there seemed to be a side passage up against the wall.

He continued onward, and came soon to the side passage. Seeing that all the people avoided it, despite the flow coming from it, he turned down it. To stave off the loneliness, he chanted to himself. Even if anyone had been around, and even had they understood his language, the meaning would have escaped them. Seeing no sign of lighting ahead, he grabbed a torch.

         Though no people were visible, ever more rats scurried about. Every surface was covered by rats, bigger and healthier even than the ones in the lower sewers. Many stopped and stared at him, as if surprised to see him. There was even a gleam in their eyes suggesting that they were wondering whether he, perhaps, tasted better than garbage. They might even have tried to find out, if it were anyone else, but something about this man held them back. Ros, for his part, had a creepy-crawly sensation all about him, and all those shiny eyes, glittering in the light of his torch, gave him chills.

         They followed him, ahead, behind, and on all sides, leaving a circle of open space, like an island in a sea of rats. His island, Ros noted, was quickly sinking into the sea. There was an almost intelligent gleam in their eyes, not malicious, but hungry.
“I’m not food for the likes of you!” He growled, “And if you eat me, there’ll likely be less food for you in the end.” He had no idea why that thought had leapt to his mind, yet he did not doubt it for a moment. As if they had understood his words, or at least his meaning, the rats thinned a bit after that.


         Ros stopped humming, and sniffed the air. Foul it was, but less foul than few minutes earlier. Soon there was a breeze, and shortly after there was visible a light. Finally he came to the place where sewage was pouring through a grate, high above him. Set in the wall were rusty pegs, apparently meant to be a ladder of sorts. They were covered in slime, and looked to be corroded straight through beneath that. With some trepidation, he started climbing. Many were loose in their mortar, and one gave out near the top. It was all he could do, as he fell, to grab onto the slimy rung below. By some miracle he managed, however.

Silently cursing the filth and the mission that had brought him to this terrible place, Ros reached the top, and pushed open the grate, with a frightfully loud screeching that echoed off the stone walls. On top the sewage was flowing from a pipe along the floor, and he decided this must be a bathroom. There was a sort of communal bench along the wall, water flowing beneath it, a fountain for the rinsing of hands, and, praise be to rivers and the rains, a bath.

Ros felt dirtier than he had ever felt, which was saying something, given what he had been through in the long years of his youth. It was not just the sewage that covered him, or the stench still burning his nostrils, nor even the lingering feeling as if there were rats crawling on him. All together, though, it was as if he could not move, could not breath, for the weight of the un-cleanliness that pervaded his whole being. And he could not shake the feeling of rats crawling on him. Even after I leave the dratted things behind, their memory messes with my mind, grumbled Ros. Heedless of any risk of being caught, he threw himself into the clear, cold, and ever so clean, water. As the wetness pervaded his clothes, there was an indignant squeak, and a rat, not the slightest bit imaginary, wriggled out of his cloak and swam off downstream, back to the grate. Ros smiled at the surprised squeak it gave as it went over the edge.