~2.3k words

In the blighted corner of Aerodin known as the Pitts, it was wise to move slowly in the presence of death and wiser still to avoid moving at all. So, when Bal encountered death on the mouldering stretch of thatched willows that was his path, he did what he knew he must. He spread his feet wide for balance, braced himself against the lurching walkway -one among thousands in the chaotic network of vaulted platforms that surrounded him- and wrapped both hands firmly around the nearest railing. Then, he watched.

A little further along, perhaps only a hundred feet from where Bal stood, a young pittsman in an overlarge tunic scrabbled across the flexing willows. Caught like a rabbit in a trapper’s snare, the youth struggled against a braided rope that ran out from around his ankle and plunged over the edge of the raised walkway.

Jaw clenched tight, Bal looked on in muted horror.

Tucked within a natural hollow at the base of the mountain known as Nero’s Thumb, the Pitts were a haphazard patchwork of canted willow beams propped up by little more than their own constantly offset weight. Aerodin’s slum city stood atop centuries of the Empire’s waste and looked, on approach, as though the goddess Aeras had started a game of pick-a-stick, and upon discovering the game could not be won, spit on the whole mess before breathing fresh life into the rest of the world out of spite. It was difficult to believe such a place could remain upright with nothing save rotten wood and knotted hemp to turn the trick, but it managed it all the same.

And yet, if a linchpin existed that kept the Pitts from falling into the reservoir of filth below, than it did not work wholesale, and huge swathes of walkway were often lost to circumstance. The people of the Pitts assigned all manner of reasons for these extreme architectural failures. Foremost of which were the Gods; low hanging fruit for a low hanging people who had not the time to divine the ‘whys’ of their world. After all, Gods were the perfect scarecrows, open to all the blame and abuse the world could throw at them, without ever showing up to argue the matter. But divine meddling wasn’t responsible for the ever-changing face of the Pitts. It was the perpetual shade of the mountain’s ill favor that cut the legs out from beneath the willow beams. Rot was what brought the Pitts to its knees, and there was nothing quite like a violent disturbance to hasten that work.

“Rantha take all of you!” Cried the snared youth, not bothering to point his curse at anyone in particular. Then he dropped to his belly and spiked his fingers down through the thatched willows.

Bal groaned.

Once looped, a pittdwellers best chance of survival was to cut the loop with a knife. That this luckless pittsman had dropped so quickly to the floor, informed Bal better than anything could, that the unfortunate youth did not possess one. The boy would fight the rope and hope it broke. A dead man’s gambit. Worse, with Bal standing on the same walkway, his own odds of dying had suddenly risen as well.

An inhuman, creaking groan came from the struggling stranger as the rope around his ankle thinned, and the willows along the edge of the walkway bowed. The young pittsman flexed against it, but the effort was wasted. Even with his forked hold on the walkway and low center of gravity, the snared youth was ripped brutally backwards, his fingers tearing deep scores through the wood like a tiller through a turned field.

The walkway lurched.

One moment, Bal stood with his feet wide and his hands tight on the railing. In the next, the railing slammed into his belly, forcing air out of his lungs in a violent rush. Bent over a single beam of flexing willow, he looked down on the thick haze which covered the pittfloor – a muddy brown canvas masking a world of rot and ruin. As he hovered over the precipice waiting to see if the willow would bear his weight, his thoughts remained practical. What will my mother think when I die and she discovers I’ve gone to the Pitts against her wishes? Would she even know that it happened? Would Ico bother sending word?

Then the railing snapped back and the platform settled, returning time to its normal rhythm. As it did, his practical -if morbid- thoughts faded. He looked down to find the railing had splintered beneath his hands. Rather than stepping away, Bal gripped even tighter, too afraid to move.

The other Pittsmen -what few were nearby anyway- hurried around the snared youth. They danced just out of his reach as they passed to their chosen side of the walkway before the structure collapsed and the option to do so was taken from them.

Paralyzed by fear and resigned to his place on the willows, Bal ventured a look beyond the unfortunate pittdwellar. There, atop a box at the far end of the precarious walkway, sat a frail, shirtless man with dusky hair. Ico.

Covered from face to waist in matted grime, the shirtless man marked Bal’s presence, hopped down to the wide platform below, and beckoned with a frenetic insistence that did not at all match the immediacy of their shared task.

Bal groaned at the insufferable Ico, a childhood rhyme bubbling up as he did. If you find yourself a-fixed, be sure to use your tricks. If you find another noosed, keep your distance, plant, and roost. Even as the walkway lurched beneath the youth’s flailing efforts to free himself, still the people of the Pitts ignored their better sense, picking past the boy with stolid indifference. Well, thought Bal. The people of the Pitts might have forgotten the rules that governed their world, but I haven’t. Only when the boy was dead and the danger gone, would Bal brave the path ahead. Assuming, that was, the path still stood.

Not that the shirtless Ico sympathized with such caution.

The weathered man paced the thatched willows beyond with less patience than a lean wolf in a long winter, his very frown so near a vocalized curse that Bal nearly hopped along the walkway to answer it. But no, it wouldn’t be long now. Better to wait it out.

Ignoring that same good sense, a bald Pittsman darted along the walkway. “Kings boy,” said the Pittsman to the snared youth. “Do us all a favor and fuck off before you ruin this path for the rest of us!” Then the bald man lashed out with a kick.

The young Pittsman yelped in pain, then glared at the man who’d kicked him, drawing in a deep breath as though preparing a curse.

It never left his lips.

The railing snapped and the youth was jerked backwards, eyes going wide in surprise. In a final frantic effort, the young pittsman lunged for the edge of the walkway, bounced off the willows without purchase, and fell promptly out of sight.

Even as the youth’s final scream pierced the air, laughter rose to mask it. A shared chuckle joined by those nearby, as though someone had told a particularly good joke and then paused to let it marinate.

Bal felt a tap at his shoulder and turned to see the bald man looking down on him with a toothless grin. “Danger’s passed dirt-urchin, you can let go now.”

Looking down, Bal saw his knuckles were white along the splintered wood. With great effort he forced himself to step away from the railing. Then he turned to the grinning man. “Nissonos in a garden, man,” he pressed. “What have you got to smile about?”

“Thought I was gonna be stuck taking the long way to the Cradle, but now…” The grinning man jumped on the thatched willows, indicating its continued presence. “Straight shot.” Laughing, the man turned and picked his way across the walkway, stepping over braided nooses and gaps in the thatches with little trouble.

“Fucking place,” Bal muttered as he made his way to Ico.

This walkway, like every walkway in the Pitts, was littered with loops like the one which had dragged the young Pittsdweller to his death. Dangers from the untraveled world which had sprung out of the wastes below. Arms out to the side, Bal scanned the walkway carefully, his every step deliberate and slow and safely placed, even as the people of the Pitts flowed thoughtlessly around him. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t risk his life to pretend he belonged here. Still, knowing he was right to exercise caution didn’t banish the image of Ico that loomed ahead; shirtless and mangy, two bone thin arms crossed below a too-gaunt face as the old Fox waited for the dirt-urchin to cross the cobbles.

“Do you think a tip-toe across the timbers will save you from joining that unfortunate boy should Rantha choose to claim you?”

“No,” said Bal mechanically, not risking a look up.

“Ahhh,” said the voice, affecting a sage tone. “Then you hope to creep past Rantha’s gaze on slippered feet, yes? Very wise.”

Bal frowned. “Rantha is no more real than Dragons or Riddleskins.” He didn’t like people joking about his calf-wrapped sandals. Other than the man himself, they were all he had left of his father.

“Is that right?”

“It is.”

“And yet every time I see you, you’re shuffling towards me at half-speed, eyes darting this way and that as though death lurked in every corner. I say you believe in Rantha most of all, Bal, despite the lies you speak to the contrary.”

With a final relieved hop, Bal left the walkway behind him for the relative safety of the platform. “Oh, and was it Rantha who took that boy? And here I thought it was the Fiends down in the filth.”

Ico smirked and leaned in. “Rantha is the Fiends. He’s disease, starvation, old age, and whatever else culls the herd. He takes us all eventually and he’ll take you too, no matter how carefully you walk.”

“Well isn’t that convenient? Still, I don’t see why I should be in a hurry…” Bal waved at the air in front of him, as though he could banish the rank smell of decay that saturated the Pitts.

Scoffing, Ico stepped back. “You shouldn’t be thinking of him at all! You should be banging your fists at the bastard every day until he’s forced to collect you.”

“If I lived like that, I’d have died ages ago.”

“Bahh,” said Ico, and shook his head. “Death is a threshold all cross. It’s only you dirt-urchins who work so hard to forget it.”

“I don’t forget it, Ico. I simply don’t delight in it the way you Pittdwellers seem to. Here.” Bal dug a strip of folded parchment out from the leather wraps of his sandals, and held it out. “This dirt-urchin would prefer to get back on solid ground while the sun still touches the sky.”

Chuckling, Ico took the offered parchment and unfolded it.

Even with the platform’s relative stability, the world moved gently beneath them – a constant rocking cadence like a ship docked at harbor. Bal looked out at the walkway and its scored floor of thatched willows. Covered in moss and circles of braided hemp, it swayed much more heavily, like a rope bridge across a chasm at the onset of a storm. Each noosed line ran down into the filth, crossing and sagging until they disappeared beneath the immutable haze that covered the pittfloor like a permanent atmosphere. It was quiet now. The vaporous cloud of brownish green giving the effect of a deep winter’s snow, muting the groaning paths and the laughing denizens who walked along them. Even the youth’s scream had been smothered. His memory snuffed away in less time than it too-

“HA!”

Bal jumped at the sound of Ico’s sharp laughter.

The old man had a sliver of charcoal between his fingers and was on the verge of setting it to the parchment when he stopped and palmed them both. “No,” said Ico, and pointed at Bal. “You tell that dumpy fuck he can waddle his fat ass across the sticks if he’s got something to say to me.”

“Somehow I don’t see that happening…” said Bal, looking at the folded parchment and wondering at its contents.

“You think?” Ico shook his head, and looked away.

“…so did you want to write that down, or…”

“You got a mouth don’t you?” snapped Ico. “Want to earn your rai, yea?”

“Sure.”

“Then I’ll keep the parchment and you’ll take the message.”

“So, to confirm, it was ‘tell that dumpy fuck to waddle his ass across the sticks if he’s got something to say.’ Did I get that right?”

Ico grinned, the lines on his face deepening in shadow. “Perfect.”

Grinning back, Bal shook his head. The contents of the message didn’t matter to him. He would send it along, pocket his rai, and call it a day. Though he imagined Dalbo would be less than pleased to receive it…

Closed fist out in front of him, the shirtless Ico beckoned Bal over.

“Yea?”

Ico grabbed Bal’s wrist and dropped a handful stone into his palm. “That’s for you.”

Nodding his thanks for the rai, Bal turned to go.

“There’s more.” Ico pulled Bal close, suddenly serious. “Tell Dalbo that no self-respecting Pittdweller is going to sell themselves for a few chits. Tell him he’ll need a dirt-urchin to get what he wants. And tell him that even should Kareus gallop down from the heavens to bless such an endeavor with luck, still Dalbo’s attempt would fail.” Ico released him and stepped back. “Will you remember all that or do I have to waste this scrap of parchment on you after all?”

“I’ll remember.”

“Good. Get out of here then, you’ve got company.”

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