His father’s spirit sang in the spirituality of the sword in Marroo’s hand as Marroo stood in the dark alley and stared at the man his father wanted him to kill. The breath locked in the sword resonated against his own spirit where his palm touched the grip. It whispered to him through the connection, told him, as though it were a piece of himself, of the ways he could use the sword to manifest the same powers his father did when he manifested his icon.
He wanted to hurl the sword into the darkness.
Instead he stood riveted by his father’s attention and the sight of the beggar. The old man scraped the last dregs of the can his father had given him into his mouth then dropped the can and reclined on his pallet as he pulled the cork from a bottle and took a long pull. He coughed raggedly as he set the bottle beside him and slumped as though the meal had been a long hard race and he’d finally come to the end.
“He does not have long to live.” Darro said, watching from behind Marroo. “He has a wasting disease that will make his dying a slow and painful, agony, in a place like this. Killing him will only ease his passing. A mercy, in the dregs.”
When the old man finished the bottle he tossed it into the trash filled dike at the center of the street then slumped on the pallet with his hands over his slowly heaving chest. The bottle drifted in the current and thunder rumbled beyond the hundred yard hole in the cavern ceiling nearby and Marroo’s father looked down at him and nodded.
“It is time.” He grated. “Make it quick and we can go home.”
The weight of the sword seemed to double in Marroo’s hand as he stepped out of the narrow alley they’d hidden in to watch the old man eat. The old man didn’t seem to notice as he wheezed rhythmically on his pallet. Lightning flashed beyond the hole in the roof as thunder resonated in the cistern. The brief flash of light revealed the old man in front of him in all his squalid details. Pale skin, creased by age, features sharp and angular where the bone pressed against his skin as the wasting disease claimed his flesh. His wheezing stabilized as he lay with his hands on his chest until he seemed to be asleep, despite the rumble of thunder that echoed in the chamber or the occasional shower of rain swept from the central pillar by the errant breezes of the subterranean slum.
Marroo watched the old man sleep for a long time before he turned and walked back to his father. He offered his father the sword without a word.
After a couple of minutes of silence his father took the sword and slid it back into his sheath. He said nothing, but his eyes glittered as hard and as bright as steel in the darkness.
They returned to the apartment via the circular hole in the cistern’s ceiling. They stood in the rain surrounded by drowning slums as the aircab dropped and opened its door for them to climb inside, then rode in silence for the short hop back to their tenement building.
The sky boomed as they marched up the stairs to their apartment. It rumbled distantly through the walls as Darro ordered Marroo to sit, then pulled the stone from its shelf.
“In a world where a billion people are little more than a stain in the sands,” he said as he paced towards Marroo, “the life of a single man means nothing.” He held the stone for a moment in front of Marroo, as though to show it to him while proving how little it meant to him to hold an object that did nothing except deliver pain. “If your cowardice will not allow you to free him from his final suffering, then you can experience a bit of that pain yourself.”
He dropped the stone into Marroo’s palms and for a moment Marroo felt the familiar all consuming agony radiate through his limbs. His indrawn breath hissed at the first shock of it and he pushed his breath down the channels of his extremis meridian as he’d been taught, wrapping his hands in a spiritual cocoon.
It did nothing to alleviate the pain, but it distracted him, gave him a focus that allowed him to slip mentally above the agony that burrowed back down his arms to penetrate his lungs.
“You will hold the stone until,” his father referenced his familiar “Third pass. That’s two hours. In the morning we will return, and you will finish your mission or we will repeat the process until you are ready to do as you’ve been told.”
Marroo closed his eyes and let out his breath as the agony found his core and radiated out from his center. He cycled his breath and tried to pretend he was just at the end of a particular gruesome breathing exercise while his father watched.
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“Perhaps the pain will get you past your cowardice.” His father grated.
Marroo felt his eyes prick with involuntary tears from the pain as it moved up his neck. It made his skin prickle and his hair stand on end. It felt like fire as it radiated into his sinuses. He blinked away the tears and glared at his father as the man sat down in front of him.
“You said pain doesn’t matter.” Marroo said. He tried to speak normally, as though it truly didn’t matter, but failed to keep a slight tremor from his voice as the pain moved into his gums and poured down his throat.
Darro looked at him without expression for a long moment.
“Nothing matters” He said at last. “Nothing but strength.”
They returned to the cistern every day for a week, not by the circuitous path they’d taken when his father first introduced him to the “true Dregs”, but directly by aircab. The hole in the city gaped at them whenever they came over it, like a huge eye hidden amongst the towers of the city center where wealthy men and organizations kept their headquarters, unaware or without a care for the hidden city that lay beneath their own.
Every day for a week his father led him through the underground slum until they came to the old man’s hovel then put his sword into Marroo’s hand and told him to kill, and every day they returned from the city by the same way they’d come and his father closeted him in the training room to sweat and push breath into his hands while the agony stone blazed between his palms and his father sat across the room from him and watched.
By the fifth day of this Marroo’s hands shook as he was led into the underground. He’d been denied meals since the third day which began a simmering silence between his parents punctuated by brief spats he heard only through the walls late at night when they thought he was asleep.
He’d listened, when he heard them, used his breath to amplify his hearing despite the still clogged meridians of his Sensorium.
“He’s soft. I wasn’t soft at his age.”
“I know. You were so hard. Such a warrior.”
Silence. With his senses heightened by his breath Marroo could hear the occupants of other apartments as well as his own, men and women variously talking, singing, making jokes, or making noises that, at ten years old, he couldn’t interpret properly. The sounds of their lives filtered past as he focused on the minute shufflings of the people in the room just down the hall from his own.
“I will not be mocked in my own house.” His father growled. If his voice had been a blade it would have cut, and for a moment Marroo thought about letting his breath drop and falling back to sleep, but his mother’s voice drew him back in.
“Am I supposed to be scared of you?”
“You would be if you were wise.”
“Why? Because you can kill me with the flick of your mind?”
“I can do more than that.”
“What more could you possibly do?” There was grief in his mother’s voice.
His father’s aura pulsed and something crashed to the floor in pieces.
“Don’t you forget who brought you out of that hole.”
“And look what it did for me!”
Marroo felt his father’s breath roil throughout the apartment as the two fell silent. He held his breath, but there were no more crashes and eventually Darro’s presence withdrew folded back around the man as though it hadn’t just threatened to level the entire building.
“He won’t survive if he isn’t hardened.”
Silence.
“You take everything.” She said finally, in a quiet voice Marroo almost couldn’t make out despite his cultivation.
“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.”
“Not for your sons?”
“And for my sons. The one that’s left.”
His mother dress rustled as she turned away from him. Marroo could see her in his mind’s eye, standing at the mouth of the hallway to their bedroom, a book probably in her hand, that distant look she sometimes got when helping him with his test-work or standing over the stovetop beside the window.
Marroo rolled over when nothing else happened and let his breath dribble back through his channels away from his senses. The effect lingered long enough for him to hear her whisper; “What kind of father doesn’t feed his son?”
Core light fell through the mouth of the cavern’s roof like a pillar of light at the center of the slum when Marroo and his father arrived the next day. This time Darro didn’t lead his son into the labyrinth of hovels and ramshackle towers of stacked homes, he stopped at the top of the ramp as Marroo made his descent and he unstrapped his sword belt from around his waist.
Marroo caught it when it was tossed to him. He just held the sheathed blade as he looked up at his father.
“One way or another, this ends today.” Darro growled. There was a bang in the darkness and his silver eyes swiveled up to the sound before they turned back to Marroo. “You’re staying.” He told him. “Alone, until you’ve decided to become a man and not just the child your mother thinks you are.” He turned to the aircab’s interior but put a hand on the door as he stopped to look back. “Kill him, and you can come home. Let him live, and you can remain with him, here, until you’ve learned what a life is worth in a world where you no longer have my protection to keep you safe.”
He looked around in disgust at the cistern filled by a slum. “This is where you decide who you want to be. “Your mother.” He looked at Marroo. “Or me. Your mother is weak.” He raised one hand to Marroo and made a fist. “Show me that you can be strong.”
Then he was gone, the aircab no more than a speck against the hazy luminescence of the core beyond the surface, and Marroo was alone.
He stood in the compacted pile of trash at the center of the slum for a long time, sword held loosely in numb hands as he looked up, until furtive footsteps approached through the trash behind him. He quickly cinched the sword belt around his waist and made his way into the slum, away from the old man and his pallet.