The Rotten Few, Episode 5: The Bad Bargain

Varek has checked the same fold in the blue-black cloth nine times. He presses one corner flat, lifts his hand, then presses it again. The Finger remains wrapped between them. He never touches what lies inside. Instead, his thumb keeps finding the scar in his palm.

Outside the rust sheets, Rag Court wakes badly. Wet cloth slaps stone. A pot scrapes. Someone coughs until another voice tells them to die quieter. Boiled fungus, ash soap, and old smoke creep through the seams.

“You are nervous,” Senn says.

Varek smiles without showing his teeth. Senn remembers Hessa’s rule. If Varek smiles with no teeth, he is still lying. If he smiles with teeth, he wants you to know.

“This little parcel has grown expensive,” he says.

Senn waits. So does Varek. The pipe behind the wall ticks once, and water hits metal somewhere above them.

“You have not counted money,” Senn says.

“I count money in my sleep.”

“You counted the side crawl twice. You scraped the mark beside the furnace route. You asked Hob Nail about names used at the lower ladders.”

Varek’s thumb stops on the scar.

Senn continues because the facts are still open. “You asked Mother Kelch how long dried root keeps if wrapped in wax. You did not ask what it costs.”

“Maybe I’m planning a feast.”

“You do not plan food before stealing it.”

“That hurts.”

“You plan to leave.”

Varek looks at him. Senn looks back. He does not know what expression Varek is making. The mouth is familiar. The eyes are not.

“You are carrying the Finger,” Varek says.

“That does not answer.”

“It was not a question.” Varek tucks the cloth under Senn’s coat. “The package leaves tonight.”

“Where?”

“Far, I hope.”

“The gray masks found the Greasehouse before we brought it there.”

“Yes.”

“They knew your cloth before the dead man came.”

“Yes.”

“They asked for both of us.”

“Yes.”

Senn places two fingers over the hidden bundle. “The dead man stopped searching when he saw me.”

Varek’s bright eye shifts to him. “He gave it to the first person he found.”

“No. I am sure.”

Varek’s face closes a little.

“The sweet soap was behind him,” Senn says. “It belonged to whoever followed. He saw me. He saw the small crack behind me. Then he stopped searching.”

“And what do you think it means?”

Senn studies the line of the wrapping beneath his coat. One corner is folded wrong. Varek folded it that way after seeing the matching strip in his old hiding place.

“It means he did not want the person behind him to receive it.”

Varek scratches his beard. “That’s one meaning.”

“It is the order.”

“Order is not meaning.”

“It is when someone is dying.”

Varek says nothing. Senn waits for the joke. It does not come.

“Who are you trading it to?” Senn asks.

“A man who knows a man who once lied successfully to another man.”

“That is not a person.”

“It is most people.”

“Do they have gray masks?”

“No.”

The answer comes too fast.

Senn repeats, “No.”

Varek points at him. “Do not do that.”

Senn does not move.

“Rules. You stand where I put you. You keep the cloth closed. You answer only what is asked.”

“If they ask badly?”

“You answer worse.”

“That is not useful.”

“It keeps you alive.”

“Hessa says say less first.”

“Hessa is a genius in all matters involving silence and my suffering.”

Senn takes the bundle. It is cold through the cloth.

Varek lifts one rust sheet and ducks through the gap. Before the sheet falls, Senn says, “If you begin lying in groups, I will count.”

Varek does not look back. “Good.”

They leave where the cloth hangs low.

Rag Court watches them go without turning its whole face. A woman stirring a pot sees Varek’s boots in the water. Two children stop arguing until he passes. A curtain opens one finger’s width, then closes.

Pip Three-Cuts sits beneath a rope bed with a copper balanced on one knuckle. Varek flicks him another.

Pip catches it and frowns. “Too much shine.”

“Then hide it under your honesty.”

Pip rubs the coin in soot. His eyes settle on Senn’s coat where the blue-black cloth makes no visible shape. Senn notices. Pip notices Senn noticing. Neither says anything.

They pass the fish stink after Leakmarket. A little later Varek says, “Fish ahead.”

Senn turns his head. The smell is behind them.

Varek keeps walking.

At South Bend, black water curls beneath the narrow crossing. The wall shines with moisture.

“Dry stone,” Varek says.

Senn touches it. Water coats his fingertips. He wipes them on his coat.

Beyond the bend, the third rung of a maintenance ladder is dry. That is wrong. The chalk debt beside it has also been scraped away, leaving a pale smear on the wall.

Senn stops. Varek takes two more steps before noticing.

“The rung,” Senn says.

“I see it.”

“The debt is gone.”

“I see that too.”

“You said this route was not known.”

“I say many educational things.”

“This one is false.”

Varek looks back. His smile shows no teeth. “Yes.”

He takes a different edge around the water.

At Broken Cistern, sound arrives in pieces. A drip lands near Senn’s left foot, but its echo comes from the dry vent ahead. A scrape above becomes a scrape behind. The old ladders climb into water stains and dark.

“Honest room,” Varek says.

Senn does not answer.

A boot settles on iron. The echo comes afterward.

Senn looks toward the dry vent.

“Eyes down,” Varek says.

Senn lowers his gaze. One clean heel mark crosses the grit near the vent. A second set ends before the grease line. A third is too faint to belong to the same person. More than two outsiders are already ahead.

The warm pipe groans above the Old Greasehouse entrance. It exhales once, then again. A third cough comes late.

“Maybe three,” Varek says.

Senn counts four.

The Old Greasehouse smells of sour heat and old fat. Broken vats squat against blackened brick. Grease shines in the floor cracks where no light should reach, and a narrow maintenance walk runs beneath the pipes.

Four people wait inside.

One stands in the middle of the floor wearing a coat that has not yet learned the Drain’s smell. Another controls the wide exit without looking like he guards it. A woman waits above them on the pipe walk with one hand hidden behind the rusted rail. The last man stands beside the dry vent at the Broken Cistern approach.

He is standing in the right place. That is the problem.

No outsider should know how sound carries from that vent.

Varek sees him too. His smile widens, showing teeth, and he wanders into the open space as though the room belongs to him. “Lovely,” he says. “You brought enough boots to start a government.”

The clean man looks past him to Senn. “Where’s the package?”

“Close enough to hear the price.”

“The trade has changed.”

Varek glances at the empty belts, the clean hands, and the man beside the vent. Then he gives up the safest wall. He steps between Senn and the four strangers, turns his weak side toward the Knife, and leaves the furnace at Senn’s back. His left hand hangs open beside his coat. His bright eye stays on the clean man.

Senn understands. There is no payment. There will be no release. The furnace is the only door they do not know. Varek has placed himself where he can keep all four looking away from it.

Danger. Run. I stay.

“Changed into what?” Varek asks.

“There is no trade.”

“Ah.” Varek scratches his cheek with two fingers and lets them fall toward the cracked grease drain. The gesture means nothing to the strangers. Senn has watched those fingers choose latches, pockets, throats, and exits for years. They stop over the drain, then shift one handspan toward the furnace plate.

The clean man says, “The boy puts the package down and steps away.”

Varek laughs softly. “You came into my hole with no coin, no witness, and no story worth stealing. Now you want the boy to do the walking?” He eases closer to the furnace, blocking their view of Senn’s feet. “Poor manners, even for clean boots.”

Senn hears cloth drag behind the Cistern entrance. A lighter step follows, uneven on the right side.

Varek hears it too. His joke dies before his mouth closes.

“Senn.”

Hessa stands at the Broken Cistern entrance.

Pip Three-Cuts must have shown her the soot-blackened copper. Hessa knows Varek never pays a child twice unless he wants the child to remember nothing, and she knows Senn’s stress routes better than anyone: the dry edge at South Bend, the Cistern wall, the warm pipe. She has followed the signs he leaves without knowing he leaves them.

For one breath, her arrival changes the room. The man by the vent turns. The Knife looks away from Varek. Even the woman above shifts to find a new line. Hessa sees the clean boots, the empty hands, and Varek standing where only a fool would stand. She understands enough.

“Senn. Feet. Now.”

She crosses the threshold and catches the back of his coat. Her grip turns him toward the furnace.

For that single movement, it almost works.

Then the Thrower releases the knife.

Varek moves before the blade reaches Hessa. His hand snaps toward it, and the knife jerks sideways as though luck itself has stumbled. It misses Senn’s neck.

It strikes Hessa high in the back.

She completes the turn before her knees give way.

The clean man says, “Take them.”

Everything happens at once.

Varek’s shortsword appears in his hand. The Knife reaches him first and loses blood before Senn sees the cut. A sharp prayer leaves Varek’s mouth, too quick to sound holy, and a hard burst of pale force catches the clean man in the chest. He crashes into one of the broken vats.

The woman above throws again. Varek is in front of Senn, then beside the furnace, then somewhere else in the steam. His voice comes from the wrong corner.

“Here.”

Two of them turn toward it.

Varek kicks the grease drain open. Black fat spreads across the floor. His blade flashes once more, low and fast, while his free hand closes around the crouching-cat token beneath his coat.

The nearest lamp bends toward the grease.

Fire runs.

The warm pipe coughs. Steam slams across the maintenance walk. Someone shouts. Steel strikes brick. A body falls, but Senn cannot see whose.

He is kneeling beside Hessa.

He does not remember crossing the space between them.

Her fingers remain closed in his coat though her weight has fallen away. He leans over far enough to see her face. Her mouth is open. Nothing enters. Nothing leaves.

“Mum?”

He puts two fingers beneath her nose. No air touches them. He moves the same fingers to her throat, presses too hard, releases, and tries beneath her nose again because the first test may have been wrong.

“Mum?”

He counts four breaths.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

There are none, so he begins again.

“Mum is hurt.”

Entrance. Voice. Hand. Turn.

There should be another step before the fall. He searches for it in the angle of her shoulders, in the bend of her knee, in the grip that has not released his coat. The step is missing. The order is still active.

“Mum is hurt. Mum is hurt.”

“Senn!”

Varek’s voice comes through the fire. It reaches Senn as sound without meaning.

“Mum is hurt.”

“Senn, get up!”

A blade scrapes brick. Someone screams. The floor shakes beneath a falling body.

Senn presses his fingers beneath Hessa’s nose again.

“Teacher. Hessa is hurt.”

“Move your bones, you grate-stuck little bastard!” Varek roars. “Furnace! Now!”

The words strike the closed place inside Senn and fall away. Furnace is a thing. Now is a time. Neither belongs to the missing step.

“Mum is hurt. Teacher, make her breathe. Mum is hurt.”

Her blood reaches his hand. Beneath his coat, the blue-black wrapping tightens, and something curls once inside it.

That movement is wrong too.

Varek calls his name again. Then again. Each time it comes from a different part of the Greasehouse. Senn hears the syllable without finding the person attached to it.

“Senn!”

He counts four breaths that do not happen.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

“Mum is hurt.”

The steam thins for a moment. Varek sees him.

He stops shouting.

The Knife closes from his left. The clean man has found his feet again. Above them, the Thrower draws another blade.

Varek tears the crouching-cat token from beneath his coat and crushes it in his fist.

The prayer he spits sounds like a theft.

Every lamp in the Greasehouse flares white. The room breaks into false doors, doubled walls, and six Vareks moving in six directions. The four strangers stagger. The Thrower hurls her knife at an empty furnace. The Knife cuts at a body made of light. The clean man drops to one knee with both hands over his eyes.

Varek had kept that miracle through steel, fire, and blood. He spends all of it on one stolen breath.

He crosses the room through his own lies and catches Senn by the back of the coat. Senn folds around Hessa’s hand rather than leave it.

“Teacher, Mum is hurt.”

Varek hauls him upright. Hessa’s fingers pull against the cloth.

“Varek, Mum is hurt. Mum is—”

“Senn.”

Varek says it close to his face. No joke. No anger. Just the name.

Then he remembers Hessa’s last command.

“Feet.”

The word enters.

It is not a new instruction. It belongs to Hessa. It has been waiting inside the broken sequence since she fell.

Senn’s left foot moves.

“Mum is hurt,” he says.

His right foot follows.

Varek drives him toward the furnace while the false room begins to collapse. On the first step, Hessa’s fingers tighten in Senn’s coat. On the second, they slide. On the third, her hand falls back to the floor.

“Mum is hurt.”

Varek tears the warped plate free. A narrow service crack opens behind it, full of soot, brick, and darkness.

“Down.”

Senn crouches because Feet has become movement and movement has become sequence.

“Inside.”

“Mum is hurt.”

Varek grabs the back of his neck and forces him sideways into the crack. Senn reaches behind him for Hessa, but his hand finds only air and the edge of the plate.

For one breath, the opening remains clear behind Varek.

He could enter first.

Senn sees the possibility because possibilities have shapes. Varek sees it too.

He shoves Senn deeper instead.

The false doors vanish. The Greasehouse becomes one room again.

The four strangers are still moving.

One limps. One burns at the sleeve. The clean man is on his feet.

Varek releases the plate. Brick dust falls between him and Senn.

Senn is half inside the crack. Hessa’s blood covers his fingers. He is still saying it.

“Mum is hurt.”

Through the narrowing gap, he sees Varek turn away from the opening.

Toward them.

Varek looks back once. Blood runs down his arm. His pale eye catches the firelight. He smiles with every tooth he has left.

“Both thieves home, Senn,” he says. “Cat swore it.”

Maskarr never swore that.

The plate falls.

Senn recognizes the ninth lie.

About this serial

The Rotten Few is a serialized dark fantasy novel set in La Notte Eterna, a world trapped beneath eternal night, where ancient gods, broken faiths, monsters, and desperate survivors endure in the ruins of divine war.

This is the fifth episode of the story. Future chapters will be published in installments on Portal Log, the blog of mycatportal.com.