Weekly Drabble #217: Cusp of Night (Patreon)

With 'at twilight's edge' from LystAiP and 'restore the balance' from Henri Black, we once again return to the endless city of Horrak-Sarn and the humans living in its horrible grandeur, eking out their lives as best they can. In this chapter: night comes.

Enjoy!

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Cusp of Night:

Night was falling in Horrak-Sarn, the alien sun dipping below the highest of the towers, its light already gone from the darkest recesses of the endless urban sprawl. Windows were shuttered, doors locked and barricaded as those with homes of their own hunkered down for the night. For those without domiciles that lived on their own, they sought whatever shelter they could find, from begging for aid from others, to burrowing into heaps of rubble and scrap, blocking over the entrances and hoping that morning would arrive without them being found. For those who dwelt in ragged tent cities, cordons of trash fires and lights were erected, men and women standing in fearful guard of their small communities, hoping to make it through another night in Horrak-Sarn.

Shops and businesses closed. In some regions, their lights were all turned out so as not to draw attention, while in other sectors of the city, those more built-up and ‘safer’ – for what value that had –blazed in the darkness, neon signs shining high up into the night as armed watchmen safeguarded the establishments and their patrons. Music pounded, drinks were poured and the clientele chuckled and whispered to each other, clutching to these small shreds of normalcy amidst the blood-soaked night. Getting home, though – that was your own affair.

Servants and slaves on their last errands of the day quickened their place to make it home before their districts closed, while those who didn’t make it in time sought out shelter of their own, often paying for it from business and home owners with whatever they had – or were willing to offer.

With the setting of the sun first came the baying of tar hounds. They might have once been dogs, but were now something else. They dwelt in the swampy, oozing bounds of the Beneath, where industrial runoff mingled with remnants of floods and broken reservoirs, creating toxic wetlands. From the sickly waters, the tar hounds emerged, their hairless skin dripping with filth. Their calls stirred the other denizens of the City, alerting both residents and creatures of the shift from day to night. In response, other things rose from their slumber, crawling from their lairs and hideaways and slithering through the shadows.

In the roosts and aeries of abandoned buildings, nests of razor-winged, sharp-billed Craven stirred and chittered, waiting for the sun’s last embers to fade from the sky. They were amongst the deadliest of the City’s predators, but so sensitive to light that even the glow from a torch would send their swarms shrieking back into the sky. Without that protection, they would descend upon their prey by the dozens, stripping flesh from bone in moments in a frenzy, or snatching the screaming animal or person into the sky, devouring them while still in-flight.

In the Skyfall District – so named for the time one of the Masters’ barges came crashing down here – the towering ogre known as the Huntsman rose from his abode, one hand holding the leashes of his three hunting hounds while the other clutched to his great axe, so large and kept so sharp that it could cleave a man in two with a single blow. It was said that he never failed in his hunts and that every night he would claim at least one life, dragging his prey, alive or dead, back to his home.

In the Pandom Lowers, a tribe of Uglies retreated from their own prowls to the safety of their stolen homes, the humans that lived there only trading one set of predators for another as night descended.

Up on the Heights, soldiers and guards scanned the dimming horizon with thermal imagers and night-vision scanners, ready to respond to any threat to the towers their families and the other servants of the Masters dwelt within. In the High Towers, the buildings shimmered with arcane technologies to repulse any attack, hidden gun platforms and rapid-response teams prepared to do the same. As powerful as they were, even the Masters respected Horrak-Sarn’s night.

Within the slave quarters and districts, iron gates, barred windows and solid barriers began to close. This time, it was not to keep the prisoners and cattle in, but to keep everything else out. As the distant wails of the tar hounds faded and the cries of other stirring creatures picked up,terrified men and women held each other and their children close. The native-born of Horrak-Sarn and veteran slaves offered what comforting words they could to those nearly seized, but even they felt the same twinges of uncertainty and fear.

Inside his small apartment, pit boss Kepper took a sip of moonshine and passed one to the woman he’d hired for the evening.

In the lowest reaches of the City, Butcher Betty’s men finished setting the last of their traps, running back to their mopeds and ATVs, eager to be gone from the streets until morning. Elsewhere, in a drafty room above their cistern and its algal tank, a band of six children huddled around a small heating unit, waiting for the seventh in their group to return.

With his full backpack, Robert made the climb up through the tower. It was his turn. He didn’t mind this so much as the others. This skyscraper wasn’t particularly big, barely a hundred stories. Some of the Masters’ towers were two and three hundred floors, with the Great Throne even bigger than that. It was still a long way to climb, though. The lifts were rickety and jammed on certain floors, so ascending or descending the building meant you had take three different cars, along with several flights of stairs and even some ladders and gantries.

It was almost completely dark inside, failing lights flickering and glowing dully. The building was still partially connected to the City’s power grid, and solar panels on the upper levels drank what they could from the dim sun overhead. Robert had a small knife – a gift from his father on his ninth birthday – that he had with him, but he wouldn’t need it here. This tower had been abandoned years ago. He wasn’t sure what function it had had, but there was evidence that someone had lived here; most likely a band of survivors or a gang. They’d taken this place over, changing it fit a small community instead of whatever it had once done.

Robert often thought that it had had something to do with the water system. It was built over the cistern, and the lower levels all connected to the waterways, sewage systems and the rest of the Beneath– those entrances now all blocked, booby-trapped and monitored – but he wasn’t sure. Whatever its purpose had been, there were now bedrooms, common areas, storage chambers and more, like a little town had been built inside the tower, but with no sign of its former inhabitants. There were no signs of violence inside the tower and no indications of plague, so the people here had either moved on, or died off outside its walls. Either was equally possible, and without its inhabitants, it had just become one more silent, brooding tooth that bit into the City’s sky.

The building hadn’t stayed vacant for long, though. Robert had often thought about suggesting to his group that they move up into the lower floors, but he knew that wouldn’t go over well. Their small underground domain was safe enough. It was clean, with no infestation of mold or other poisonous growths to worry about, there was no sickness-causing dampness to cause rotlung. Even more important, the few routes in and out weren’t close to, and didn’t lead back to, the tower, making it harder for anyone who followed them to know just where they were holed up. At least once someone or something had searched the area around one of their tunnel entrances, looking for where the children were hiding. Thankfully, it had been a fruitless search.

Robert continued his ascent, careful to mind the many traps in the building. He and everyone else knew how to look out for them. This one was a series of thin wires laid along the floor between two piles of overturned furniture blocking the hall. The stained, rough tiling hid the wires from sight. When you stepped between those piles and you set your foot on any of those wires, a nearby wall panel fell down and a hidden weapon sprayed you and anyone behind you with razor mesh. If it didn’t slice you to ribbons, you were left bound and bleeding inside the netting, every struggle just making the hideously sharp cords cut deeper into you.

Robert knew better and he climbed over the leftmost heap. The right pile actually looked sturdier, but that was a trap, too. If you tried to climb over it, sensors would trigger and from the debris, hidden spikes would shoot up, impaling you against the ceiling. There were a lot of traps to navigate, but he remembered where each of them was, and if he didn’t, they’d been marked. Not so anyone else could figure it out, though. They’d had to agree to that and it had taken some brainstorming among the group to develop the system, but Tuyen and Enzo had come up with something. Those two were the smartest of the group. Enzo was almost Robert’s age; he’d been born on Earth and only lived here in the City for a few years. Tuyen was small and frail and she wouldn’t have latest as long as she had without this place.

The boy made his way up the last set of stairs. Even with the working lifts, it was a long climb and he was close to exhausted. They didn’t have to do this. He didn’t have to do this. He knew that, but they did it anyways, every day. Just as the sun started to set. He paused at the end of the stairs – not the top, the last flight of stairs of the stairs were gone, leaving only a chasm too wide for anyone to jump to reach the entrance to the uppermost floor, and even if they could, the landing was rigged to collapse, plunging them down into an abyss that ran almost the full height of the tower.

Robert didn’t need to make the jump. Avoiding the last few traps, he made his way to a hidden ladder that went up to the maintenance area just under the roof. He climbed the rungs, his little arms and legs burning from the exertion. The hatched above him was sealed. Locked and the handle had been cut off, making it impossible to open from this side.

Holding on with one arm around the top run, the boy beat his fist against the hatch with his other. A few moments passed and then he heard the telltale clicks and clacks as the hatch was unlocked and opened. He found himself looking into the face of a Watcher. She wasn’t armed; there were sensors within the tower that had monitored him from the moment he’d entered the sub-basement all the way to this point. She’d known he was coming and waited for him. He’d wondered why she did that. He’d asked her once. She’d told Robert that none of them had to do this, but if they were going to, they needed to do it themselves. Every day they survived the City was proof that they deserved to and every time one of them made this climb, it was proof how much this arrangement meant to them.

“I have your cut,” Robert told the Watcher. Enzo had told them that on Earth there were dangerous birds called cassowaries, so the children called her Cass.

With one hand, the Watcher hoisted him out of the accessway and set him back down on the floor. As he caught his breath, she walked away. She was dressed in a bodyglove, the connection ports for her armour the only details Robert could make out on the dark fabric. She was getting ready for the night’s hunt. Soon she’d be back in the skies, soaring across the never-ending cityscape of Horrak-Sarn in search of prey or whatever else it was that Watchers did.

There was a soft feminine murmur from a nearby room. Robert didn’t say anything. Cass wasn’t always alone when he or any of the other children came with the tribute. Before the accident, he’d see Cass flying with a male Watcher. After, she’d been alone for a long time, but recently they’d spotted another Watcher spending time with Cass. This one they called Snowy, partly for her pale blonde hair and white-speckled wings, but also because Enzo said snowy owls were also dangerous birds on Earth. Enzo knew a lot about birds.

Snowy had been coming around more and more of late, and on those rare occasions that she encountered them, she treated the children – if she even acknowledged their presence – with slight curiousity masked with disdain. Robert didn’t know if Cass and Snowy were just sharing a roost, or that was going on. It was none of his business.

He emptied the pack on the floor. Just like any gang, everyone got a cut of anything you salvaged or caught. There were some good pieces of scrap in there – working electronics, several bullets and a perfectly fine knife. Robert knew Cass didn’t – as his father would say – give a rat’s ass about any of it, and a lot of the things they gave her just turned up again close to their home, where they could easily find them and pretend it was something new that they could keep.

He liked that; thought they all knew the truth Cass acted that what they gave her was useful, letting them have this custom. They were only children, but even children had pride. They didn’t want to be a burden. They paid their own way, with whatever they could scrounge up, barter for or steal. That was how it worked in the City. Even with this odd situation, Robert and the others held to that tradition. They paid their own way.

The Watcher didn’t discard everything they gave her, though. Sometimes they found things that she kept. One of them was part of another Watcher’s helm. They’d stolen that from one of the shopkeepers in the Narrows who dealt in curios. He was also a right prick, so Robert didn’t feel bad at all about the theft. It was even now sitting on a nearby shelf, given pride of place in the room. Robert thought it belonged to the male Cass had once flown with.

Another thing Cass kept was food. The snares had been good today. They’d caught five rabbits. Three made for a good dinner for the group of children and Robert removed the other two from his bag. The Watcher licked her lips as she looked over the dead animals. “That’s all for today,” Robert said. “We’ll bring you your cut tomorrow, same as always.”

Cass rolled her eyes at that, but Robert caught the brief smile on her face. It was quick, but he thought he saw some kind of pride there. Another day we prove that we deserve to live, he thought.

The Watcher picked up the rabbits, knocking on the closed door. There was a reply from inside that Robert didn’t catch, but sounded snippy. Cass opened the door and threw one of the animals in, biting the head off hers. There was a similar-sounding crunch from inside as the occupant – Robert assumed it was Snowy – accepted the snack.

The other Watcher looked back at Robert, trilling and chirping. She bit a leg off her rabbit, the bones cracking in her mouth.

He nodded. It was time to go back down. He was tired, and night was almost here. He should be back in bed with the others, resting up for tomorrow. Another day in Horrak-Sarn, where they did their best to stay alive. And the day after that. And the day after that.

“Be safe,” he told Cass as she opened the hatch for him, half the rabbit already gone, her lips and teeth stained red.

She chirruped at him in similar sentiment. Robert heard the hatch lock again and began his descent back through the tower.

He paused at a set of windows, tinted so dark that it was impossible to see in. He waited there until he saw two figures pass by overhead, Cass and Snowy, the pair dipping their wings as they banked up and to the east, towards the last faint glimmers of light. In minutes the City would once again be swallowed in darkness and belong entirely to the predators. Everyone who survived this night earned themselves the right to live one more day.

And then the day after that.

And the day after that...