Chapter 11 #3
There are constant branchings and convergings, but he follows the dimly luminescent arrows on the walls because he doesn’t want trouble with the locals.
Small tunnels, too—a raccoon can just squeeze through on all fours.
The local Strains are larger than their originating species but still smaller than he.
He sees them every so often, staring at him in the gloom.
The phosphorescence of the lights—just glowing terminals of the great fungal system they oversee—glistens wetly on damp, soft skins.
Wide, bulbous eyes goggle at him. They most definitely have a look, the Wasservolk of Gasthofmund.
Skotch, the outsider, is marked and kept track of as he winds his way into their domain.
Up above, the guilds jostle over service work, and the armies and gangs jostle over the guilds, a landscape of shifting alliances and contracts going from hand to hand.
Here where the water goes, though, things are more stable.
Because if another guild decided to move in on this turf its personnel would end up drowned.
There are a handful of services like that, so intertwined with the capabilities of particular Strains that they become little fiefdoms of their own that can afford to be distant and dismissive about the wider city.
The bats who have the nightside maintenance shift for the city’s rooftop wireless transmitters are a weird and cultish bunch, Skotch has heard.
And the water reclamation Strains are fiercely protective of their way of life, secretive and distrustful.
And yet he has an in, as he always does.
Because when there is friction—when Gasthofmund needs something from the wider city, or trouble comes to the Waste Sectors—it’s to freelancers like him that the Wasservolk come.
They don’t trust guilds or corporations or Rattenkonige to act as go-betweens; that would be too much of a gap for outsiders to set their prybars in.
Better to have some lone operator who knows not to ask questions.
Skotch fetches up at a gate, knowing that today he will be asking questions, and hoping his credit will bear it.
He tells the newt on the other side, “I’m here to see the Baron.
” The pause that follows is longer than he’d like, the amphibian just staring at him past the bars.
There’s an old human saying, about the presence of newts guaranteeing clean water, and nowhere is that truer than in Neuwien-Grunstadt.
The newt itself—Skotch cannot tell amphibian genders most of the time, and they tend not to be permanent fixtures anyway—just lies on its belly in a centimetre of water as though nobody’s paying it to move.
Eventually the gate opens, though, the word passed back through some means or other, and at least a qualifiedly positive response being received.
Skotch ducks in, tries to get past the newt without brushing its clammy skin and mostly fails.
The creature barely reacts. Cold-blooded Gehirner have a very different energy economy.
Skotch has heard it saves a lot in meals.
Has heard they only need Plangent once a month or less.
Isn’t sure what to believe, given the way the Gasthofmund folks’ slimy lips tend to stay closed about their living arrangements.
“I’ll just … explore, shall I?” he asks it.
“Just find my own way to the Baron, or…?” But then there’s an escort come to him.
A pair of frogs, gazing upon him with enormous eyes.
Surprised? Outraged? Probably neither, but there’s a fixity of regard you get from amphibians that’s a bit off-putting to a mammal.
He’d been getting it from Fischer and he’s getting it from these worthies too.
And he’ll get it from most of the Gasthofmund crowd because it’s an amphibian world down here.
A handful of mostly waterproof voles, but the rest are all cold-blooded and goggle-eyed.
Skotch shivers. “Just get me to the Baron,” he invites then, knowing that neither they nor he want him down here longer than he has to be.
The Baron adopted the title back when she was going through a male phase.
There’s a certain fluidity of gender built into frogs, and the Gehirner engineering only loosened it up further.
She’s the biggest frog around, and receives Skotch at her workstation, a gantry overlooking a great rushing nexus of water.
Part-treated, thankfully—still a bit ripe but his nose can stand it.
There are a score of separate inflow pipes, each one of them bearded with a tangled mat of hyphae that the water filters through.
The water runs and drips, collects, a whole tributary system in miniature, until it becomes a great funnelling whirlpool roaring down to the next stage of the process.
Up on the gantry, the Baron and her froggy assistants have a whole bank of readouts confirming the gradated purity of the waters from each pipe, ready to intervene if the balance tilts the wrong way.
The readouts make almost zero sense to Skotch’s eyes, displaying information not in colours or words but flickers of movement and shape, the data frog eyes respond best to.
That was something he dared ask about, when he was here doing his favours for the Wasservolk community.
It seemed an odd thing for the humans to provide for their faithful servants.
Which was when he discovered that certain technically adept sectors of the Gehirner community weren’t just making do with what they’d been given.
The displays the Baron watches over are designed for and by her people, with help from the keen rodent minds over at Ratlabs, always the frontrunners in Gehirner innovation.
She doesn’t turn to look at him. She doesn’t need to, given the wide angle of her eyes.
“Skotch,” she says. A warm, lugubrious voice, deep and rich. Resonating through the metal of the gantry, coming to him through his feet as much as his ears. Despite the rumble of the water she has no difficulty making herself heard. He has to shout in response.
“Sly said to drop by.” And how she and Sly ended up so tight he has no idea, but the pair of them have been trading favours since before Skotch hit the scene.
And the Baron has run Waste Sector Three for as long as anyone can remember, from a keen little froglet to the single largest amphibian Skotch ever saw.
She’s smaller than he is, but maybe not by so much.
That broad mouth could swallow a rat or a squirrel whole.
Frogs live a long time and, in their Gehirner incarnation, don’t stop growing.
When she moves her feet to face him, he feels the whole gantry shift with her weight.
“The old fox,” she says, “put out some whiskers.” Her talk comes in gulps and gasps. He can see her puff up to give vent to each utterance. “A mouse, he says. My old friend Doctor Meece.”
Skotch gets a nasty feeling about that, because if the Baron wants Meece too, that’s a whole other problem.
“Your old friend’s been causing problems,” he says.
“So Sly tells me,” she confirms. “He finally made a break from the farms, then. That a problem, to you, Skotch?”
“Baron, that ain’t nothing to me. What’s a problem is he chose to come here. Sly reckons you’ve gotten sight of him?” Because if the Wasservolk have traced Meece to where he’s hiding, that could get awkward.
“Oh he’s in some hole I’m sure, Skotch.” The Baron lurches away from the controls abruptly, an assistant newt slithering up to take over.
She heads off across a distressingly narrow bridge over the cataract.
It creaks and shudders as she progresses—no hop in this frog, just a stately trudge.
Skotch is decidedly leery about following her, both because he feels the architecture wasn’t built with such a weight of frog in mind, and because he’d be ever so vulnerable out in the middle of that bridge.
But if the Wasservolk want to screw him over, it’s not like he isn’t already in the heart of their power.
“Sly thinks I should give you the lowdown on just what Meece is,” the Baron tells him. Crawling away from him, still watching him from both eyes, and her voice just shuddering along the bridge to him as he dares put a foot on it.
“So give it to me,” he invites her. Following one hand or foot at a time, the other three clenched tight as anchors. She’s waiting for him. She’s come out here to talk, he realises, because even here in her fiefdom she doesn’t want anyone overhearing. Not even her own people.
“This Meece, he’s known to us. Has been for a year. Long time in mice, a year.”