The boy still didn’t have a name when he left with Veshtu to negotiate with some of the lords of the topside.
They called themselves the Iblanie. Their skin was so discolored that they looked like they’d been burnt by their long exposure to the core that burned at the center of a bright orange sky and their eyes glittered with the unnatural colors of familiars or gemstones instead of the silvers and blues of the other orphans Darro spent his life around.
“If you take over the Dawood’s operation, we can take over the distribution from their pipe at a drachma a ton.”
“We aren’t here to sign a deal, we’re here to make sure we can deal if the Dawood’s network don’t want to work with a new player.”
“But we want to expand our network beneath the city, and we’re willing to pay a tenth on top of what the Dawoods are currently receiving.”
Darro barely paid attention to the negotiations, not even to the two guards that stood behind the three negotiators who’d arrived to speak with Veshtu and the accountant he’d brought along. His attention was taken up entirely by the heavens and the light streaming down across the shattered wasteland where they’d convened to conduct their negotiations.
“I thought that went well.” Veshtu said as they descended back into the network of tunnels that had spat them into the broken city. A familiar in its lantern mode floated behind them, but Darro preceded them, blocking out the light as he used his spirit to navigate. He only grunted as he noted a gang of orphans lurking at an intersection, most likely with the intention of ambushing these strangers as he’d once done in tunnels much like the ones they passed through.
“Do you think we should cut off the Vanaharas once we take the pipe?” Veshtu asked.
“Does it matter what I think?” Darro asked.
Veshtu sighed. “Maybe it doesn’t.” He said. “But maybe I want to make sure my adept is completely on board with the future I’ve set up for us.”
The children did not immediately try to ambush them. One of them stood up at the mouth of the tunnel that would take Darro, Veshtu, and the accountant down a spiraling tunnel deeper into the maze. He was a boy, silver eyed and ragged, dressed no better than Darro ever remembered being dressed when he ran these tunnels. He stank rat meat and trash. The boy raised a hand as the light from the accountant’s familiar washed over him and put himself in their way.
“Stop.” He said.
Darro did. Veshtu did not.
Before the boy could quite finish the word an orange sunflare beam slashed across the tunnel mouth. The fire that punched through his chest seemed to light the boy’s mouth from the inside and he collapsed while smoke rose from his mouth and the line of molten flesh that still clung to incinerated bones. Shadows writhed in the tunnel mouths that branched from the intersection and Veshtu’s pistol gave off the sunflare’s characteristic scream as he chased them with his beam, then Darro’s breath whipped down every corridor around them in a blast that chopped apart every fleeing child before they could scuttle back into the shadows from which they’d emerged.
Heat and vile steam filled the intersection in the aftermath. Veshtu’s sunflare pistol hissed and pinged as it forcibly cooled itself after discharging twice so closely together and the candle flames where those beams had touched slowly died to sparks on the shirts of the dead children.
The accountant scuttled forward with his lantern to inspect the one who’d stopped them, taking the light with him. “He’s just a boy.” The accountant said. “A well armed one though.” He flicked at the wicked looking knife in the hand the dead boy had hidden behind his back.
“Probably only wanted to stop us for our shirts.” Veshtu replied as he surveyed the wreckage with his pistol pointed to the ceiling. He looked at Darro. “Surprised you didn’t get them before they stopped us.”
“They posed no threat.” Darro replied. “I thought I’d give them the chance to run.”
“Yes.” Veshtu tapped the cooling plates on his pistol a few times to test the temperature. “Anything good on them?”
Darro swept his spirit over what little the orphans had dropped as they died, treasures, once, to someone. He shook his head.
“Shame, but not unexpected. The rich don’t hide in tunnels after all.” Veshtu tucked away his pistol. “Where was I?” He asked as they started back down the tunnel.
“I’m going to leave for a couple of days.” Darro told him as he took the lead, stepping over what was left of the dead.
Veshtu did a double take in surprise. “What?”
Darro stepped over a severed hand at least six feet from its original owner and didn’t say anything.
“You aren’t going to disappear on me for this are you?” Veshtu asked.
Darro paced deeper into the darkness at the head of their little band. “Sikhaya has never seen the topside.” He replied as his eyes pierced the shadows ahead. “I want her to see the core.”
“I’m sure she’s seen the core.” Veshtu said. “Hasn’t she been to the eye? Or in the drippings? There’s plenty of corelight there if you go at the right time.”
“I’m going to take her to the bottom.” Darro said again. “We’ll be gone for a couple of days at least. No more.” He glanced over his shoulder at Veshtu while the light bobbed along behind them.
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Vesthu said nothing until they’d rounded a couple of bends but Darro could hear his friend tapping at the pistol in his holster as he thought. “I’ll be honest Darro, this is not a good time.”
“Is there ever a good time?” Darro asked. “Will there ever be?”
Veshtu was quiet. “Alright then.” He said. “If its what you want I can’t stop you, but we can’t start anything with the Dawoods until you return. When did you intend to make this little trip?”
“As soon as we return.” Darro replied.
“Then we’ll start when you come back.”
There were no memories of the trip in the sword. Impressions were all that remained, of the girl, with her face tipped up towards the core with her eyes closed while the crowds coming and going through the huge gates to the underground milled around her. Impressions of her sitting on a bench in the same position, both hands on one of her knees, surrounded by greenery and flowers more vibrant than anything you could find in the pipes, a glimpse of her curling up against him in the hotel after the enormous rectangles of darkness called the midnight plains rotated to block them from the light. “If you love me.” She whispered as she clung to him. “Don’t make me go back.”
“We’ll come back.” He promised. “I’ll bring you back.” but she still wept as she looked over her shoulder while he led her back into the tunnels towards their home. They seemed far darker after their day in the light, just as the silence that fell over her seemed far more impenetrable after they returned, and blood ran through his hands like water.
The head nurse found him in the midst of that blood. She waited for him in the entryway to his home. Killing lay to either side of the memory, the glare of sunflare beams and the stink of black powder as Darro and the rest of the Hair-Vipers tore through the Dawood’s fortifications around their territory.
“Have you decided upon a name for the boy yet?” The head nurse asked him as he hung up his sword. The icon hung heavily upon him after so many days of killing with it, and he saw the flame of her inner breath in his spiritual vision the way a true hair-viper might have seen its prey in the dark.
“We have not discussed it.” Darro replied. It was easier, the killing, easier to ram his spirit through locked doors and intercept the beams of fire from his sect’s enemies than to face his wife’s unhappiness after returning to their silent home. Easier, if he meant to control his anger.
“We will wean him soon.” The nurse told him. “If he had a name, he would start to recognize it soon.”
He was always the first one through, in the dark. The Dawoods initially set traps for him. They’d known, if they were going to fight the Hair-Vipers, that they would face an adept, and they attempted to lure him with false retreats through narrow tunnels blocked by six or seven sunflares at one end, or strips of explosives taped along the walls and ceilings to catch him as he shot down it. He knew how to handle them. He cut down the bait in the midst of their traps, advanced through fire and smoke, split doors apart and spread the defenders blood across the walls while they attempted to run. There was frequently very little for the men behind him to do when they caught up except gawk at the destruction before rebuilding the defences facing in the opposite direction.
But he didn’t know how to answer the nurse.
They stood facing one another across the entryway as though for a duel. She looked to his face, but he could only study the intricate tiling of the floor while memories of blood and fire and breath swirled in his past, portending his future.
“If she’s picked a name you don’t like,” the old woman said, “then I recommend letting go of your pride. It hardly matters what he is named, so long as he has been. He will decide, ultimately, what the name you give him means.”
Darro looked up to glare at the woman in front of him. There’d been women in one of the fortresses at a junction between some of the larger tunnels in Dawood territory. Young women with babes and old women like the nurse now glaring at him. When he leapt the wall to slaughter its defenders they’d died with their men, sometimes on top of them in the press to get out of the gates that suddenly trapped them inside, with him, sometimes holding weapons that were as useless in their hands as they’d been in their men’s.
“She has not picked a name.” Darro growled.
The old woman pursed her lips. “And what about you?” She asked. “Have you picked a name.”
The water pipe that formed the wealth of the Dawood family pulsed like an immense heartbeat when Darro and the half dozen men of the Hair-Viper’s vanguard finally pushed into the cavern they used as a headquarter. The cavern was a sprawl of structures, markets, hovels, homes, and ramshackle towers built from shipping containers imported from the outside. The pipe rose over all of it like a wall, tall enough to completely fill all but the narrowest crack of the huge gate at one side. Light filtered through that crack to cast skeletal shadows through the scaffolding that climbed the pipe and outline the fortress that sat at its base in twilight. Sharpshooters fired down at them from the scaffolding as Darro and the rest of the Hair-Vipers advanced through the city, until beams from the rest of the sect knocked them, burning, from the heights while the pulse of the water boomed on, and on, and the scaffolds fell, and the city burned.
“She is his mother.” Darro told the nurse.
“And you are his father.” The old woman replied. “Do you think you are exempt from caring for him?”
“Why bring this to me?” He asked. “Why not ask her?” He waved a hand into the silent house. He could feel her, above, in one of the rooms she’d taken over for the mountains of books she’d used to replace her life.
“I did.” The nurse replied, and her lips grew even tighter. “Since you came back from your trip she has not spoken to anyone.”
Darro put a hand to his face and pushed against the sword icon. It pushed back, half manifesting in the edges of his aura as though it intended to solve these problems on its own. He pulled his hand away when he felt the nurse’s hand on his arm. “Your boy needs you.” She said. Blue eyes looked up at him from a pale winkled face as she pulled him with her. “Come.”
Darro followed her to his son. He held the boy, and looked down at him, into the budding candle-flame of his spirit. He had his mother’s features, mostly her nose and hair, but Darro’s eyes. “We should be naming him together.” Darro said.
“As long as he receives a name.” The head nurse replied.
“He’s a sweet child.” The wet nurse said from her chair nearby. “I’d thought to name him myself if he wasn’t named soon.”
Darro looked at the woman. Her eyes were alive with the dancing lights of the room, Small pseudo-familiars that his son tracked sleepily as they orbited overhead, the same liveliness he’d cut from a hundred others before returning from the battles over the Dawood’s territories.
“What would you call him?” Darro asked.
The wet-nurse flushed at the question and glanced at the head nurse. “It wouldn’t be right, me naming him.” She replied as she looked away. “I’ve my own kids, and, it’s not my place.”
Darro looked back at his son whose eyes had drooped after the long feed Darro had interrupted. “Your suggestions then.” He said.
“Well…” The wet-nurse said with some hesitation, “if it’s only my suggestions, I always liked Eidamku, or Aielepo, or maybe Eido.”
The boy’s eye’s flickered at the last name, and two silver disks, like coins, looked up at Darro before they slipped closed once more.
“Eido then.” Darro replied. He stared down at the tiny babe in his arms for a few more minutes before handing the sleeping boy carefully back to his wet-nurse. “His name will be Eido.”
“A good name.” The wet-nurse said. She took him and rocked him gently to keep him asleep while she smiled up at Darro. “He’s a sweet boy.”
The head nurse caught Darro’s eyes before he left. “You’d best go and tell his mother.”