Zotikas: Episode 1: Clash of Heirs by Rob Storey, Tom Bruno

neither forward nor back. With a jar of light lugs on a necklace, he
could look around but could not get leverage on the wall of debris to dig out. Ahead
of him he'd heard a scurrying sound and looked to see a brown slink about nine
inches tall, standing on its hind legs on a shelf of broken material.
    It had cocked its head, inquisitively, much like the
trennek now, waiting. Slinks were scavengers and normally stayed away. But
young Kieler, trapped like one of his light lugs, was very scared of this
confident looking rodent.
    For over an hour, it just waited, watching, as Kieler
bloodied his hands digging out packed rubble from behind him until finally,
body bruised and fingers raw, he squeezed forward and toward the creature and
freedom.
    As the boy-Kieler had moved toward the rodent, the
slink had looked him in the eye, looked away, looked back , then dropped
to all fours and slithered away.
    This bird was the same way. Many things on Zotikas,
and especially under it, were ancient and mysterious. Kieler, for all his love
of learning how things worked, didn't pretend to understand everything.
    “Well, trennek,” he now spoke to the bird. “We’ll both
find freedom on the other side of this door. Let’s go.” He hauled back the
lever the rest of the way, and the gate pivoted downward, becoming a ramp.
Counterweights rose along a truss-piece next to him, offsetting the weight of
the massive gate.
    He squinted and his eyes adjusted. Then he walked up
the ramp into Avertori.
    The bird fluttered around his head and up into the
shadows above the Plate. As he followed it with his eyes, Kieler noted
how dimly Rei penetrated these lower levels. Even so, it was much brighter than
the preternatural light of the nethercity. The winter solstice and the lateness
of the afternoon cast the lower city into a prolonged twilight.
    He stood in the middle of a shabby plaza in The Glums,
the lowest section of Avertori built directly on the Plate. Party-goers were in
full force and even this dreary plaza was already busy. That was why Kieler had
chosen this place; if the Cortattis or anyone else had hired mercenaries to
kill him, they’d have to sort him out of a crowd first. He grinned to himself
that agents of the prime houses rarely ventured under the Plate while
“criminals” like himself came up more than occasionally.
    One reason was that agents of the Coin dissuaded
intrusion into the shadowy realm below, often violently. Besides, there was
nothing to gain from Karst’s poverty-infested populace. But there was another
reason as well. The nethercity wasn’t always as “tame” as it was now. Wild
animals and other creatures had reign over the darker regions below the Plate
until even a hundred years ago. Kieler knew the stories of Devolay and Tesaran,
heroes of that era that had killed many strange creatures or driven them deeper
into regions not inhabited by humankind. As things above continued to
deteriorate, more people were exiled below and sheer need raised up men to
conquer the regions closer to the Plate.
    But though the creatures had died, the rumors did not.
And residents of the light were easily frightened by the dark.
    Kieler turned and pulled another rust-begrimed lever,
raising the hatch and eliciting another groan. It closed with a heavy thump.
Then he surveyed the surrounding buildings, looking for the creatures Feleanna
may have loosed—the low-life mercenaries with no cause but a few dras.
    The Isle of Threes had little real vegetation; instead
it was covered with a forest of colossal buildings. Kieler had only been in a
real forest once, on the continent of Govian to the northwest. It was two years
before his mother died and he still remembered the immensity of the towering
trees, magnified by his six-year-old perception.
    These man-made skytowers needed no magnification. The
tallest columns thrust upward through the Plate and soared over two hundred
stories into the sky. From here, however, the sky was mostly