THE EPIC GILGAMEK: CHAPTER 8 - THE TRENCH
WHAT WAS DONE TO THE BOY - CITY ON THE EDGE OF TOMORROW - A DANGEROUS DESCENT
8
And the boy within? How is he?
He is changed, that’s certain. The shy young Gilgamesh from long ago is now very far away indeed.
His anger increases, which is saying something. Anyone who so much as looks at him wrong could catch a pounding. He often finds himself scanning faces in the crowd, looking for the older mek who betrayed him, but he never catches sight of him again — which is all for the best.
He is sure he would have killed him and then the Autarch’s justice would have had him killed.
He doesn’t speak to either Lonqo or Feckles about what happened to him in the gaol and they return the favor by never bringing it up. Sometimes Feckles touches his back where the scars braille up beneath his t-shirts, a child’s frenzied drawing of a tree, and he pulls away angrily but that’s it.
He passes by the site of the barricade often enough, now reverted to a market square, and on some days wonders about the girl with the flowers in her hair who no one remembers seeing and who was the real reason he ended up in the goal with his back destroyed.
Mostly though, Gilgamek works. He works like someone running from something, like he would kill the world with his labor. He works like there’s nothing else. He works to cover the loans Lonqo took out to support them while he was laid up. The interest alone makes Gilgamek’s eyes water but that is the way the world ran in those days. In the Stacks they always say it isn’t the hunger or the poverty that kills you but the interest, and they aren’t wrong.
Plans? He’s no longer interested in protests or the little rebel groups that continue to agitate at night, from the shadows. He hates them like he hates the Orderers and the Enforcers. (But he can’t yet bring himself to hate the Auturch — the indoctrination is strong.) He doesn’t have Feckles' brain, couldn’t sit for the Imperial Exam even if he’d had the fees, which he doesn’t.
Gilgamek figures he’ll work until next year and then he’ll be fourteen, old enough to enlist in the Autarch’s Legions or try out for the Mortuary Games.
“Back in the old days they used to let children of all ages fight in the games,” Lonqo recalls. “As long as you could walk, you could enroll.”
“I wish they’d still do that.”
“No, you don’t, Gilgamek,” Lonqo says quietly. “The slaughter was terrible.”
In the Trench he finds his luck has deserted him. No matter how deep he delves, what risks he takes, he only pulls up grade-z junk. With the salvage rate being what it is his loads barely pay his elevator fees and his lumes. Feckles has calculated the daily minimum he has to earn to beat the interest on the loans and he isn’t even meeting that.
“If we have to move, we have to move,” Lonqo says resolutely. “It’s not the end of the world.”
To get his mind off his troubles Gilgamek takes to practicing his “skills” by walking up to neighbors at random and trying out wrestling holds on them.
“Try to break free,” he urges. “All your strength!”
“Come on, Gilgamek, I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Break out or you’ll piss yourself.”
“I’ll piss on you, damn fleshy bastard!”
And so it goes.
And so it goes all across New Urk City. With the riots squashed and the boiling non-peace restored, everything marches on as it has for a thousand years. The Autarch in his Tower, the Tensiles in their palaces, the Legion and the Paragon on the front, and the poor and the hungry and fleshy in the stacks.
No one, above or below, knowing that the great change is upon them.
No one knowing that the beginning is near.
The change finds Gilgamek on Level 3 of the Trench. Level 2 is bad enough, but Level 3…Not good at all. Level 2 is half a mile down and Level 3 a mile down but they might as well be different planets. Level 2 is lit and mostly mapped — not a ton of seams left, sure, but not a death trap, either. Level 3 is not lit and not mapped and is thick with untapped seams but it’s also Lurker territory, which means in effect that it’s death trappish. Gilgamek would prefer to be working seams in Level 2 with the rest of the mobs. But Gilgamek doesn’t have a choice. He’s in a pickle.
(Truth is Gilgamek has no idea what a pickle actually is, but Lonqo uses that word all the time and from what Gilgamek gathers it means really bad trouble. There’s Level 3 trouble and what-brought-him-there trouble so maybe he’s in a double pickle.)
Gilgamek and Feckles are alone in a section of Level 3 that is a long wander from the central access screw. Anyone desperate enough to work Level 3 stays near the main screw if they know what’s good for them but if you’re really going for broke you need to wander away from those sickly lights into Level 3 proper — into the true bowels of that ruined underworld.
If a tomb, a labyrinth, and a haunted mine had a baby it might look like this place. Deadly quiet except for the drip of moisture and the occasional alarming clatter of sifting debris. The noise and camaraderie of Level 2 a long tough hike up the central screw.
“Years since anyone’s been down in this seam,” Gilgamek whispers.
Feckles keeps swiveling her spectacles at every little noise.
“For good reason. This is Lurker territory.”
She ain’t wrong, either. The sector smells wrong, feels wrong, and they both spot plenty of claw marks on some of the nearby floors and walls. If this sector isn’t Lurker thick, it is Lurker curious.
(Feckles, of course, shouldn’t be in the Trench. She should be studying or helping her mother fry fish. But Gilgamek needed a second for his little expedition down to Level 3 and no one else would go with him, with all the trouble he was in with the collectors, so she volunteered. Because she hated the thought of him all alone in the underdark. Because she always had his back. We would all be so lucky to have someone like Feckles in our life.)
Fortunately Feckles worked the Trench when she was a kid, in that time before her parents opened their shop, and so she knows the drills. Once a Trencher always a Trencher, so they say. Doesn’t mean she ain’t scared.
She’s more than scared. She’s nearly petrified.
But she grew up tough enough that she knows how not to show it.
Gilgamek stands at the edge of a wide pit, peering into its dark depths. Their weak lumes only reach about twenty feet down. Some ancient reclaimer had blown this seam into the Trench a long time ago and then abandoned it. The question is: abandoned for its lack or because something happened to the reclaimer?
“Whatcha think?” he whispers.
“I don’t think we should be here,” Feckles whispers back for the umpteenth time,
If not for the pickle Gilgamek wouldn’t be down on Level 3 with just Feckles. In the Trench it’s always smarter to work near other teams in case the Lurkers show and then you could fight them off together. Sometimes. Maybe. But real finds are few and far between where there are a lot of other reclaimers, which is why Gilgamek and Feckles are here on Level 3 with the nearest other scavenger team a long hard hike away.
Gilgamek makes up his up mind, fastens his grip-line to a nearby wall. “Let me know if we get company. But no false alarms.”
Feckles has to clamp both hands over her mouth to keep from shouting. “You can’t leave me alone here!”
Gilgamek stops his descent. Motors back up to nearly eye-level. “Do you want to be the one to check out this pit?”
Feckles shuts her eyes at the thought. Lurkers prefer nesting at the bottom of pits and crevasses.
“I’ll be quick,” Gilgamek whisper-promises. “But get ready to run, just in case.”
“Believe me, inside I’m already running.”
.
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Next: A deep dark pit - a mineral miracle - Feckles on the line.
it was a BIG yuk.
"death trappish"!!!