16) The Nightly Grind
“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”
Robek clenched his eyes shut for a moment as he sighed and set his Purity lantern down onto the worn stone floor. The light of the holy device immediately began to break down the filth all around it far faster with that contact than its light normally would.
It would also weaken all creatures that the Immaculate One considered vermin, but it would do nothing to the still smoldering charred corpse making its way along the middling south eastern drainage tunnel.
The dead belonged to his sister, She who renews the soil. They didn’t touch each other's stuff.
The reptilian Loricata continued talking to itself even as it began working the long handled mace out of the loop it was tucked into by his side. The thick tube of sturdy leather was threaded through a heavy work belt that wrapped around his waist but was held up mainly by a set of suspenders to keep the belt from slipping down his narrow hips. Both the belt and its supports were covered in additional bits of leather and hooks to hold the dozens of various tools in place as well as many various pouches and sacks holding the other supplies of his profession.
A Cloacineer. Those who maintain the flow.
Some call them mere sewage workers. Some also have their drains somehow end up blocked up for the next few years by sheer coincidence.
Any and all of his tools could be needed on any and all of his shifts, dealing with anything that could block the drains of the city. “Including some idiot indulging into the Vile.”
The various cultists, witches, and renegade alchemists huddled in their so called secret lairs below the city proper were bad enough, but new players always meant more work for the Cloacineers.
“Easy there extra crispy. I’m just going to hit you until your bones are broken enough it’s not worth making you get up again.”
As the reptilian drain worker swung the battered rounded head of his mace back and forth on the end of its long handle, he worked his way around to where he could take a wide swing at the corpse’s head. The shortness of his race’s limbs meant he couldn't put much power into his attack without space to swing and build up momentum.
Biting would work better, his jaws could snap bones, but no Cloacinar was stupid enough to put anything from down here into their mouths. That way led to a path of either being dead or waking up with three eyes and tentacles.
“Not that I judge. That sort of thing is fine if you were born like that, or wanted to end like that.”
The corpse simply stared at him with the smoldering black flame sitting behind the burnt out sockets in its skull. Those flames still somehow tracked his movements, slowly turning its head to track him as it stood there with both of its arms hanging limply by its side.
One arm hung limp because its shoulder was shattered, while the other was nearly hacked off at the shoulder joint. As if the very tip of a blade had caught it but had still cut almost all the way through.
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“Someone hits pretty hard.”
Robek eyed the thing’s belly. A short blade had been used to gut the corpse after it had burned. Like someone looking for the magical stone by digging in to look rather than feeling around for the lump and then going for the Core.
“And yet the thing is still walking.” Like someone spent the magic to create a second Core in the same corpse even after someone had killed it again and then harvested the first.
The Loricata clicked his teeth together a few times in thought. “Someone wanted you to do something really badly… Nope. Don’t care.”
The first hit snapped the corpse’s neck and smashed it up against the wall of the drain, smearing gore and filth across the walls of the tunnel which his lantern had slowly been cleaning of mold and spattered droplets from the drain pipes.
The second hit snapped several bones deep inside the corpse's burned torso.
The next few dozen hits proceeded to break every bone in the thing's body.
Huffing a little, and reaching over to massage the very front of his overworked shoulder, the farthest he could get to by reaching other with his other hand, the drain cleaner prodded the broken corpse with his attitude adjuster one more time. “That ought to do it.”
Sliding his mace back through the wide loop on his belt in stages, he next pulled free another long tool which ended in a hook just below a long spike. “Looks like a burial at sea for you my friend. May some god claim your soul, and may your mortal remains rot away without anyone else causing you problems.”
Hooking onto what remained of the dead man’s clothes, the Loricata dragged it the central channel and dumped it into the swift flowing… fluids, from where it would be carried along to the south eastern cascade and from there it would carried through Low Town and then out to sea.
“If it makes it that far.” More than likely the Mudlarks would drag the remains from the channel to strip the burnt cloths to sell as rags, and what was left of the corpse for dog food.
Robek shrugged, as long as it was out of his assigned area, it wasn’t his problem anymore. Tessero was a big city, possibly the biggest, and definitely the oldest. It had more problems than one Cloacineer could try to solve.
Instead. “Someone got the Dread Roaches all stirred up, and my Lantern only irritates Dread creatures. I got some idiot bounty hunter poking around for a renegade named Nipbob or something like that, and now I got someone calling up the dead, twice over, and calling on them to wander around down here.”
For a moment he considered trying to track down where the corpse's hand came from, but in the end, he had to shake his head as himself. “Why go looking for trouble?”
Still, “I hate newcomers. New people, nothing but new problems.”
Spitting into the channel, Robek picked his lantern up and moved on. He had miles of drains to check that night before he could return to his home and his family, and now he was running behind.
