Marroo sat on scuffed wood floor of the spare bedroom turned sparring room a week after the tournament. His lungs moved in a pattern his father had taught him at the start of his training while his breath plunged through his channels. Each cycle invigorated his flesh while the bonfire at the center of his Core Meridian flared as his breath moved through the dense network of spiritual channels that tangled in and around his lungs. He felt powerful, physically, so long as he focused on his breath instead of the man who sat only a few feet in front of him.
“Do you know what they gave the winner of that tournament?”
Marroo opened his eyes to meet his father’s impassive silver gaze. They’re chests moved in rhythm for a moment before Marroo closed his eyes again to focus on his breath.
“When I was your age I would have given anything for a chance to prove my worth at an event like that.” Even quiet, Darro’s voice was harsh with the gravel of an old injury. It grated as it cut through the morning silence.
Marroo did his best not to hear.
“The winner was given a badge.” Darro grated after they’d breathed for a few more moments in silence. “Something they could wear on their familiar.”
Marroo’s breath traveled sluggishly through the unopened meridians of his Sensorium and he heard the rest of the apartment building stirring with morning activity. Pidgeons cooed on the roof, and their neighbor four doors down and a floor below hummed as she chopped something. His mother sat on their balcony with a book she wasn’t reading, and he could smell his father’s acrid morning tea on his breath.
“A badge like that would have saved me a lot of trouble at your age.” Darro added. “If I’d had the familiar to display it.” He touched the clip at his shoulder and his familiar blew out at the summons. A holographic red sword danced around Marroo’s father, pursued by its own mirage until it realized it wasn’t wanted and disappeared back into the clip.
Marroo opened his eyes to watch the display, then met Darro’s silver eyes again.
“Why do you think you lost?” Darro asked.
Marroo held his father’s gaze without answering.
“There was nothing wrong with your abilities.” Darro went on. “There was no child there that could have capable of taking that badge from you. Why then, did you lose?”
Still Marroo said nothing. He’d spent all night up re-reading the book his mother gave him after he returned the dragon book, looking for the hidden meaning his mother said adult books were supposed to contain. The breath he’d collected through their morning exercises battled with the weariness of missing yet another night of sleep. He could have cycled his breath through the knotted channels of his Mentalis meridian to temporarily banish the empty fog that hunger over his thoughts, but he didn’t want to think. He stared at his father instead, and waited for the answer.
“You are soft.” The words were so quiet that they might have been no more than a breath. For the first time, Marroo’s father looked away from Marroo’s gaze, if only for a moment, before returning, hard as ever. “It may have been a mistake, to show you what you can do, what you will have to do, so early. I forget that you haven’t yet killed a man, or seen what life can be like for those unwilling, or unable, to defend themselves.” He snorted and this time he did look away. “Your mother’s books aren’t doing you any favors.” His eyes swiveled towards the woman who sat on a balcony with a book in her hand several rooms away and hung there for a moment before turning back to Marroo.
Marroo found himself glaring into his father’s eyes and looked away.
“Come.” His father stood. “No sparring today. Today’s lesson will be different.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance as Marroo and his father stepped onto the street outside their apartment building. Tall clouds blotted out the horizon as they loomed over the city’s towers. Night crawled up the horizon to spinward while a huge black spindle, so vast that it was impossible to guess at it’s scale, hung in the umber sky, it’s point huge and black beyond the clouds while it’s base receded until it disappeared in the hazy distance, reaching for the core. A damp breeze blew down the street, chasing up leaves and trash and pigeons that beat their wings as though to still the thunder of the approaching storm.
Darro’s familiar appeared once again to flash upward. They waited in silence while the spindle spun slowly towards them through the heavens. A moment later the familiar returned, accompanied by an aircab that rattled deep in its guts as it motored down from the sky to stop on the street in front of them. The door slung open and they climbed in to take padded seats at long windows while the familiar flew into the control interface and took them up, and up, and up, until they were level with the top of the rumbling stormclouds and the city’s towers and tenement buildings looked like toys below.
Up this high, Marroo could see that there was traffic around the head of the spindle, despite the incredible distance they would still have to travel if they wanted to reach it. They came and went from the tip in a swarm, like insects around carrion rotting in a gutter, coming and going in wide streams that diverged to travel anti-turnwards towards the approaching night, or down towards the city on the ground.
The familiar brought the rattling machine to a hover when they were above the clouds.
“Look down.” Marroo’s father told him.
Marroo did as he was told. He followed the curve of the horizon with his eyes, marked the contours of distant oceans and mountain ranges he’d never been able to see before, past the clouds that thundered in indignation at their greater height, until he was looking down at the city where he’d grown up.
His father moved to stand behind Marroo and looked down with him at the world far below.
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“This is a view I never had as a child.” His father grated. Marroo watched an airbarge five times the size of their cab plummet past then catch itself on internal gyros and lumber towards the dark horizon beneath clouds that flashed with lightning. His father tapped on the window. “Do you know how many people live in the Dregs? The city, not the dregs proper.”
Marroo stared down at the city laid out beneath him. It was immense. From this height the towers that blocked his view of the curving walls of the bottom looked like nothing. Like the twigs he’d once used to construct a model of them, like a few grains of sand stacked on top of one another, not the wonders of engineering they should have been. He tried to guess at the number in his head, but had no way to tell. He shook his head.
“According to census records, there are more than a hundred million people living in that city.” His father grated. He snorted. “Official records are mostly a waste of time. The Mayor can only count those officially living in the city, and only among the territories he is allowed to count. At least a third of those living above ground refuse to be counted, and for every million living above ground, there are at least a half a million living in the sewers that gave the city it’s name.” Darro tapped the glass of the window as though to point at the city below. “Even with so many, The Dregs does not even occupy a percentage of a percentage of the Bottom’s floor or even rival the empires of the Midnight Plains, or the Spokes, or the Drifting Spheres.”
His father paused, and Marroo followed the outline of the city’s edges, visible where the buildings and cultivated greenery gave way before the white and trackless desert that surrounded it, where stories told of shifting dunes that could consume towers, or where heroes were abandoned to die of exposure and thirst. From this vantage Marroo could see where the deserts ended, but not until they’d moved part way up the turnward curve of the horizon, into the trailing shadow of the previous night, and too far away to make out any detail but the change in color from bone white to a mottling or white and gray and dark green hazed by the mmense distances involved.
There was a flash in the cloud next to them and a boom of thunder, like a reminder that they were supposed to be tied to the ground.
“If our city disappeared today,” Darro went on. “Millions upon millions of people, the heavens, and even the rest of the Bottom itself, would never notice. Our city is nothing to the heavens, any more than we are to a city of a hundred million. Just a stain in an endless desert. But even we are worth more than some people in that city.”
Darro fed the cab more coins from a purse at his side and they hovered for a while, watching lightning vein the clouds beside them and the shadow of the storm inch inexorably across the city while the Spindle inched inexorably across the heavens above.
Eventually the coins ran out and they dropped. Darro used the control interface on his familiar to steer them towards the advancing edge of the stormcloud. The wind picked up as they fell, and the cloud seemed to turn to regard them until they touched down in a ragged section of the city just outside its shadow. Rain heavy wind howled through hollowed out towers around them, and the thunder boomed and echoed in the chasm like confines of the street.
The cab rose under its own power once they’d stepped out and Darro led Marroo deeper into the storm cloud’s shadow.
“Look around you.” Marroo’s father told him. “Use what I taught you to see.”
Marroo’s heart pounded in his chest at the reminder, and Marroo found himself edging closer to his father as he followed through the tangled roads. Decrepit towers stared down at them from the edges of streets clogged with trash. Printed fliers and plastic bags drifted in the wind while card board and shattered pallets shifted under their feet. Old nails and bottle caps filled the gutters alongside rusted cans, all of it pounded flat by the handful of run down old ground transports that made an occasional appearance crunching through the matted layers of trash behind the twin beams of smudged headlights. A few airbikes swung through the air above them as lightning crackled in the sky and the cloud lowered over them.
Makeshift hovels sprouted like mushrooms along the base of the towers to either side and slowly closed in on the center of the road, and soon passage down the streets was too narrow for anything but foot traffic to pass in to the darker depths of the cloud’s shadow. Bright eyes watched from the shadow of corrugated steel rooves and ragged tarps as they tread through the broken glass and discarded packaging that littered the path between hovels. Marroo heard voices amidst the squalor as women calmed children frightened by the storm and men made arrangements that would wait until the rain was past. Children ran from the rumbling thunder while old men and women tied down roofing or gathered in supplies. A few voices called to them as they passed, warning them to get off the street before the floods came, or offering them a dry place to stay or even more if they had the copper to pay.
A one eyed man with a steel bar tried to charge them for the use of a makeshift bridge across a stinking ditch of human trash and effluence. He scurried out of the way when Marroo’s father gave him a look. Marroo glanced into the hovel set next to the bridge, and four sets of silver eyes that might have been his reflection if they hadn’t been sunk in the pale dirty faces of children gathered around a glaring woman’s skirt met his own.
They moved on. Deeper and deeper into the storm, and the cloying poverty of the hovels scattered at the bases of towers that looked like they’d been abandoned beyond the bottom floors. Thunder rolled and the darkness loomed, until they came to an open plaza in front of a gaping hole set into the side of a hill, blacker than the blackest nights Marroo had ever known. He could hear the distant hiss of rain as the approached the tunnel mouth, but by the time it arrived he and his father were already deep beneath the ground, following streets that could not be seen from above.
The pipe that served as their entrance into the labyrinth beneath the city was octagonal, and large enough that its flattened roof could easily have stood above the apartment building Marroo shared with his parents with a bit of room to spare. Water ran down the center of the dark tube in a long glittering stream ahead of them, illuminated by the light that still fell from the open mouth of the behind them. The river swelled as the rain began to fall and thunder boomed and echoed down the open mouth, but his father led him up one side of the tunnel to a narrow hole partway up that led deeper into the underground. They stopped at the aperture and Darro looked behind them at the surging floodwaters. The river hissed as it pulled trash and bits of flotsam deeper underground and Marroo’s father watched it all for a couple of moments before he broke their long silence.
“The Dregs used to sit on an ocean floor.” He said over the echoing roar of the rushing water “Centuries ago, maybe a Millennia, who knows. Before the water was drained away to water some other wasteland on the bottom anyways. These pipes,” He gestured around them, “Used to maintain the ocean, before whatever powers that be decided it wasn’t needed anymore. These,” he told his son, and looked at him, eyes glittering in the darkness, “are the real Dregs, the object the larger city was eventually built upon when drifters and exiles from the heavens who’d turned it into their hideaway became too numerous to remain below ground. They left, but people have always needed a place to disappear, or to run to, places where they won’t be charged for the roof over their head. So, the Dregs, the real Dregs, have always remained populated, even as the more prosperous among them spread their stain across the desert that was once an ocean floor.” He glanced at the rushing stream again. “It’s where your mother and I grew up.” He took a long breath. “It still smells like home.”
That statement was not accompanied by a smile.