Burning Night: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 8, Part 2: Natalina

If a report was missing, for whatever reason, a Bureau could easily leave a reporter hanging for weeks on news. She didn't have weeks, or any trust that the Army wouldn't snatch her up as soon as they had a legal pretext, so her only other option was to find the authors of the missing report. That had her stepping off an underground cargo train in the upper mines, in what was politely termed the 'Undercity'.

Much of the City had a romantic, almost scandalous impression of what the Undercity was; a den on thieves and cutthroats where romance and drama abounded and the denizens were free to live the way men and women lived before the Gloam.

The truth was less glamorous, dirtier, and somehow both more dangerous and duller.

Law and order was maintained by a wary truce between the most successful gangs, so long as they managed to supply enough of what the Bureau of Resources demanded to keep them happy. How those gangs managed to get their district quotas met was not asked about, so long as they succeeded.

But that lawlessness made it difficult to provide a constant supply of what the rest of the City took for granted, especially deeper into the Undercity. Running water was scarce except in the mines themselves, food was rationed out by the Gangs irregularly, sewage was simply burned, and medical services were rare.

Thankfully, she reflected as she walked through the crowded street to her destination, she wasn't going very deep. She was only here, after all, to find The Derelect Inspector, a bar frequented by the Undertakers.

The Undertakers were a branch of the Orderlies, the City's police force, that dealt with dead bodies. They dealt primarily with identification, storage, disposal, and investigation for any potentially suspicious deaths,

Undertakers, despite being a very analytical occupation, were not well liked in the upper echelons of society, and its members were frequently found in dives and the seedier bars of the lower City. They were reclusive, kept to themselves, and cultivated an internal culture of being victims of quiet persecution. That some of its membership was made of rejected Crafter candidates lent a lot of credibility to that presumption.

Oddly enough, Oversight didn't seem particularly concerned about the rejects in the Undertakers. When she entered the 'Derelect Inspector', a distinctly unwashed little drink hole near the highest levels of the Undercity, the only evaluator in the room was sitting and drinking with the Undertakers she was supposed to be watching over.

For the first time in years, Natalina glanced at her white shirt and worried it was too clean. The few dozen people nursing drinks inside all looked to be miners and labourers of various trades, all bearing the faint but distinct dusting of dirt and ash that came from doing real work. Men and women who did hard manual labour for a living tended to resent those who didn't have to.

There was a civil war here that would never happen. She had written about it once, had even published a watered-down version. An uprising from the people who actually held the City up, that wouldn't happen so long as the Gloam besieged the City.

She immediately went to the bar, and offered the barkeep two small tokens. "I'd like two pitchers of whatever they're drinking," she said, gesturing to the undertakers sitting at the round table behind her.

The barkeep, a surly looking man with meaty arms and a sour disposition, looked at the tokens she set on the table and his eyes widened slightly. "I don't see lottery tokens issued directly from Distribution much down here. And I'm not much inclined to take stolen tokens," he said in a quiet rasp of voice.

He glanced down at them again, and looked back at her. "Or forgeries."

The next thing she set down on the bar was her press credential, a small slip of hardened steel with her name, occupation, and the paper she worked for on it. "If it's a forgery, I've been fooled. My paper is issued these for work-related issues, and I'm paying entirely too much for what I'm asking for. You can use the rest to make up for the freebies you hand out to keep fights from breaking out."