One night, while the Midnight Plains howled distantly in the sky above the city, Marroo snuck onto the balcony to look down at the cement several stories below.
“We’ve focused on your cultivation for too long.” His father told him when they’d returned from his attempt to run away. “I touched the sword Icon long before I learned to cultivate. You’ve progressed quickly, but I wonder now, if it wasn’t at the expense of your access to the spiritual world.”
Marroo, who’d spent all night running away from home, followed his father mutely into the training room where he was ordered to take up his cultivation seat and sat down across from him.
He pulled out his sword, set it in his son’s lap.
“What does the sword do?” Darro grated.
Marroo’s tongue felt thick as he answered. “It cuts.”
The fall wouldn’t kill him.
That was his only thought as he stood on the balcony overlooking the crater where his mother died while the Midnight Plains slid by overhead.
It probably wasn’t more than twenty feet. Even a bad fall probably wouldn’t break one of his bones thanks to his cultivation.
So he went higher.
Marroo leapt from the balcony and caught hold of the one above. One hand was all he needed to propel himself upwards towards the next, then the next, and the next, until he flew over the edge of the roof. He twisted in the air and landed on the gravel strewn across the roof.
Antennae and broad dishes ringed the building on wires that sank like roots into the tenements below. Small status lights blinked anxiously amidst their controls as though to tell the world, desperately, that everything was okay.
Familiars flew past the ceiling in a flurry of multicolored lights, momentarily illuminating the rooftop as Marroo circled it and studied the cement now some sixty yards below. He found a dish with it’s antennae pointed towards the sky as though waiting for the Core to return and he leapt onto the long arm it projected into space until he stood at its end with nothing but air beneath him.
He looked down at the drop, then up at the midnight plains.
He wondered what allowed the vast constructs to break the rules that might, just might, kill him if he just… let go…
He remembered the men he’d killed.
“You’re not trying hard enough.” His father grated when they sat in the training room weeks before. Spiritual blades spun in his father’s manifested aura around them, whispering to Marroo’s aura about the meaning of the sword. They’d done this before, dozens of times, and Marroo had taken to reciting the stories his mother told him in his head in order to ignore the insidious spiritual impression of the swords around him.
Marroo opened his eyes when his father spoke, but he didn’t reply.
“You’re holding back.”
Marroo closed his eyes again, but he felt the invisible blades vanish as his father stood and plucked the sword out of Marroo’s lap.
Marroo relaxed as his father sheathed the sword and its aura receded from his spiritual vision. Silver eyes watched Marroo as he stretched and got to his feet. He kept his face as impassive and wooden as his father’s as he met them.
His father snorted.
“Only a fool holds back when strength is offered to him.”
Marroo didn’t speak.
They stared at one another for a moment longer.
“Soft.” His father finally decided. He turned away to put his sword back in its case. “Still soft.” He turned back to Marroo and reached for his chin but Marroo blocked him and stepped back as he looked away.
“You’ve seen what happens to the weak.” Darro told him.
Death. His father showed him death, over and over again on the jobs he was required to take for the “family” that he worked for. Murder, regardless of the political realities that made it “necessary”.
Marroo didn’t answer.
“I thought the experience would motivate you more.” His father grated. He coughed to clear his throat. “Though,” he added, “I suppose it never worked for me either.” He turned away. “I’ll have to think of something more.”
Evening fell across the city like a blanket of gloom as the Night fell from the anti-turnward horizon along the curve of the Bottom’s wall. Marroo watched it from the street with his father as they waited for an aircab, then from the sky as they traversed the city, still in daylight, but darker, more full of shadows, more distant than at the height of day.
A wasteland appeared beneath them as they flew, a dark patch of open ground and ruins in the midst of towering sky-scrapers and many-stories factories. Grass filled the streets when they landed. It rose to their knees from cracks in the pavement and the matted piles of trash that hid beneath their swaying leaves. Bent trees grew in tight patches across piles of rubble, like the forests of fairytale in miniature or a city, like their own, wrought all in green. Ruins hid beneath the green, in crumbling walls and broken brickwork, fountains filled up with green slime and shattered towers that rose like stumps from the wasteland.
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A spiritual tainted drifted on the wind that stirred the grass here, one Marroo couldn’t quite identify but that grated on his spirit like nails on a chalkboard.
The place should have been abandoned. Should have…
Here and there tents were visible amidst the ruins, sheltered in thickets of twisted trees or hidden amongst the crumbling towers. Hovels crowded together beneath the ruins like mushrooms built out of the wreckage of communities long lost to time and decay.
They landed amidst the grass as the Midnight plains first touched the Core and picked their way through the grass and debris strewn remnant of an ancient highway by the pale reflected light of the horizon still beyond the touch of Night.
A gang of pale faced boys appeared in a stand of trees that jutted out of the side of a rubble hill as they walked. Darro stopped pointed at them. “You there.” He grated. “Come here.” He crooked a finger. The children began to fade back into the brush until Maroo’s father flashed something at them and one little boy darted through the tall garbage strewn grass to appear just a few feet in front of him.
“Aah-ah.”, Marroo’s father said when the boy reached for the thing in his hand, “I want to talk to your Sef.”
The boy skipped back a step and eyed Darro. He looked back and forth between him and Marroo.
“How do you know what a Sef is?” The girl, not a boy, asked.
“I grew up here.” Darro told her.
The girl wiped grimy hair from her eyes and gave him a skeptical look.
“The Dregs are all the same.” Darro said. He lowered the hand he’d offered her, then tucked the thing in it into his pocket. “Bring me to your sef and you can have the coin.”
“The sef is a secretive type.” The girl replied. “Not too keen on strangers walking into his hideout. It’s why he hires us kids.”
“Then bring him here.” Marroo’s father said, “And the Drachma is yours.”
The girl eyed him with suspicion, her eyes a muddy imitation of the man’s silver in the darkening light. “How do I know you won’t just kill him and keep the money?” she asked.
“Your sef isn’t important enough to kill.” Darro replied.
“And you think he’ll believe that?”
“You can tell him I said so.” Darro replied. “I just have a little news I want him to spread. No murder.”
The girl held out her hand. “Give me the Drachma and I’ll take him the news myself, or spread it for you if you throw in one for all the crew.”
The other children had inched forward by now, emboldened by the girls’ lead, they’d stolen up into the grass to sit on their haunches or stand no more than ten yards behind, well away from the diminutive jungle they’d materialized from.
“You’re Sef.” Darro informed her. “Or nothing.”
The girl crossed her arms. “Fine then.”, she said, “Buying or selling? Sef’ll want to know.”
“A bit of both.” Darro said. “And I know what you really want with that question.”
The girl, who looked like a boy in her rags and with her grimy hair cropped short, shook her head then turned and darted away across the broken cement, headed for the ruins of an old tower that once might have stood as tall as the towers visible in the distance. Lights blinked from the peaks of the still intact towers ringed around the wasteland like guards at the edge of an enclosure in a zoo, or a prison.
They waited. Darro found a chunk of time worn masonry to sit on and Marroo stared up at the ruins and tried to imagine what might have led to their destruction, if they’d been destroyed or simply abandoned. Eventually, as the light began to fade from the horizon, Marroo sensed movement far along the shattered road they’d parked their aircab on, approaching them.
Darro lifted himself from the stone with a grunt and dropped onto the road. “He’s got a guard.” Darro grated. “On the mound. Do you see him?”
The boy was too far for Marroo to sense with his breath, but he could see him when he pushed breath into his sensorium. He was smaller even than the girl had been, and holding an ancient beam rifle that looked bigger than he was.
“And here comes the leader.” Darro grated.
Figures appeared amidst the heaped ruins and hovels of the wasteland in front of them. They moved rapidly down the street towards them, manifesting as the children only as they got closer, one taller shadow in the shape of a man.
The girl was panting and out of breath when she arrived in front of Darro. He flipped her the coin and she gave him a grim smile before she disappeared into the weeds and shadows along with the crowd of other children. That left only the man, bent and balding as he pushed towards them through the grass. He couldn’t have been more than forty.
“We’ll let the boy live.” Darro grated as the sef came closer. “As a sign of good will. We won’t be making any trouble here.”
“I don’t like when strangers pay my kids.” The man said as he approached. He had a nasal voice, though it was marred by some of the same gravel that destroyed Marroo’s father’s. The sef glared at them, grey eyes glinting in the last of the evening light. “How much did you give her?”
“She’ll keep her money.” Darro growled. “She’ll make better use of it than you if she can keep it.”
“Aye.”, the bent man in front of them said, “Or one of the other kids’lll stab her in the kidney to get it.”
Darro grunted, then nodded in Marroo’s direction. “Do you see that boy?” he asked.
The sef turned to Marroo and gave him an appraising look. “Why?” He asked. “You looking to sell him?”
Marroo felt something cold slide down his spine and shivered.
“How old would you say he is?” Darro asked.
The man bent his head to the side and pursed his lips. “Can’t say as it matters.” He said after a moment, “Thirteen. Maybe fourteen. Why?” He turned back to Marroo’s father.
“I and the boy will be holding court in the leftmost pit from this spot for the next five months.”, his father said, “Anyone who comes will be given a chance to fight him.”
“Slumming then.” The odd little man said and bent his head again to regard Marroo’s father. “If you want an audience I know a couple of better places where you can get that kind of entertainment. Even get a bit of action yourself, if you’re looking to. Any action, mind you.” He grinned.
In a heartbeat, the grass and weeds around them for twenty yards disintegrated. The chunk of masonry his father had been sitting on fell to splinters with a sigh and the sleeves of both of the man’s arms slumped then fell away. The man grew very pale.
“This will be… private. Do you understand?” Darro’s father looked at the man as though nothing had happened.
The man pressed his hands together and blithered something unintelligible, then cleared his throat. “I understand.”, he said, “Though, I would like to know what it all has to do with me, without getting my tongue cut out and my eyes scooped from my skull, that is.” His voice almost squeaked as he asked the question. “Not much incentive to fight, a, well, a child. See?”
“There is a purse of one thousand Drachmae to go to the man that kills him.” Darro replied. “And five hundred Drachmae for you, if it that occurs.”
The bent little man’s eyes went wide and his thumbs began to twiddle where his hands were still pressed together, “But, ah,” he seemed to have trouble getting out words, “None before?”, he asked, and smiled hopefully, “To spread the word, as it were.”
“None.”
The bent man frowned. “There are expenses you know.”, he said, “Many little mouths that need feeding if you want them taking this news to the sort of folk you’ll want showin up for this sort of thing.” A single patch of flyaway hair next to the man’s ear parted silently from his head. He twitched involuntarily as the hair slid down his neck.
“Best send the best then.” Darro grated. “Cuts down on your expenses.”