Veshtu stared out the window of the tiny office behind the Dawood’s old center of power in the dregs, lost in thought. “I hate to lose you.” He said at last.
“I hate to leave.” Darro replied. He put both hands on the box containing the spirit stone his friend had given him to celebrate his son’s birth. “I’ll think of you, when I use these.” He nodded towards the books. “And I know you’ll take care of the rest of the sect.”
“It will be harder without you.” Veshtu replied. “But I will. To the best of my ability.” He looked at Darro. “If you could wait a season we could try moving up through the drippings. Capture a bit of the surface near the gate.”
Darro shook his head. “The gates are neutral ground.” He said. “Too many interested parties for us to claim it, even if I spent every waking hour killing anyone who would oppose us. Eventually another adept would get involved. As much as I’d enjoy testing myself against them, I’m not interested in risking my wife or son over it. No, the sooner we go the better.”
“Have you decided who you’ll be joining already then?” Veshtu asked. “The surface organizations are going to fight over you given half the chance, and they’ll have a lot of fighting for you to do, if you join one of the smaller sects.”
“I haven’t.” Darro shook his head. “Jump that pit when we get there.”
Veshtu nodded but his eyes narrowed as Darro lifted the box. “May I make a suggestion then?” He asked.
“I will be negotiating with some of the surface sects for our outflow over the next couple of days. The Iblanie sent a delegation before we’d even put out all the fires started by the fighting here, but I’ve made them wait while the Vanaharas put together an offer of their own. If I can’t keep you here,” he looked hopefully at Darro who shook his head, “then let me include a contract for your hire to the family that purchases our outflow. Those sects aren’t much different than the sects down here. Give them a chance to stab one another in the back and they’ll do it, but if you make a vow of loyalty to the sect you helped build, and then went with the sect we made an agreement with to sell the water, you could serve as the glue that binds them to our organization. Keep them from playing any games with us after we’ve shipped water to their reservoirs, and…” He added when Darro didn’t reply. “We could include stipulations in the contract for your pay and housing arrangements.”
Darroo stared at the box in his hands for a moment before he turned his face to Veshtu. “What kind of oaths would you need me to swear?” Darro asked.
Veshtu smiled. “Nothing you didn’t swear when we were children in the first place.” He replied. “We’re brothers, by oath if not by blood. You could simply repeat the same oaths we made in the tunnels. To keep each other safe, and make sure no one ever got away with crossing us.”
Those were the words, simple boys’ oaths, made in darkness when one of their number was injured long before they called themselves a sect.
“There’s enough of us.” One of them whispered.
They sat in the chamber they’d called their den back then. A circular well cut into the pipes at an intersection between six pipes too narrow for any adult to enter. Its floor was littered with rat bones and the scrap they’d piled up as bedding, and the sobs of the injured boy echoed in the enclosed space. Someone struck their knife against a stone so that sparks lit the grim faced, grime smeared, boys gathered in a circle around the center.
“We could probably kill some of them.” Said another boy as the sparks died.
“It was the Rat-Beaters that did it.” Piped a girl. She’d come with her brother only weeks before he’d disappeared himself and stayed to become a part of their family. No one knew how old she was, no one knew how old they were, but she was half most of their size and sounded like a baby. “They’re big.”
No one had anything to say to this eminent truth, and a moment later someone struck a spark to look around at the faces again.
“There are more of us.” The spark striker said. “And a couple of us have knives.”
“One of them has a club.” Said the girl. “I seen it. He’s got spikes all over it he uses to catch rats.”
In the quiet that followed they all listened to their fellow sobbing in the dark.
“I’m not afraid.” Darro said.
“Me neither.” Said another.
“Or me.”
It went around the chamber in a murmur.
“If we’re going to go and get them, we should have a name.” One of the boys said. “The Rats use theirs to call out to one another where its dark, so they don’t hit each other.”
“What should we call ourselves?”
No one answered.
“How about Hair-Vipers?” One asked at last. “Hair-Vipers eat rats.” Everyone recognized the speaker.
“Just because you’ve got one in a bucket as a pet.” Someone said.
There were snickers but they fell silent as the knife striker struck up sparks again. “No.” Veshtu’s said. He’d seen daylight once, or so he claimed, and in moments of bravado he claimed he’d come down here to show them all what a real man looked like, even if his chest hair hadn’t yet grown in. He struck sparks again and this time Darro saw the steel in the boy’s dark eyes. “It’s a good name.” Veshtu said when it was dark again. “Any name is a good name, if we’re going to be a family.”
“We aren’t family.” One of them pointed out.
“The way you smell, no one’d want to be your family.” Another replied, eliciting chuckles at the boy’s expense.
“You smell just as bad.” The boy retorted, but Veshtu’s knife brought silence again.
“We’re family.” Veshtu said again. “We swear it, here and now. That we look out for one another.” He struck sparks again. “That we stick together.” Sparks lit grim faces. “That we make sure anyone crosses us regrets it.” He didn’t strike sparks this time, and they all waited in the tense silence for him to go on.
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“There should be an initiation.” One of them said. “The Yeddoo’s wanted me to drink piss if I wanted to join them.”
“I’m not drinking piss.” A horrified boy objected.
“Just sitting down here with you is enough of an initiation.” Another said.
“You have to touch the Hair-Viper.” The one with the pet said. “Put your hand in and stroke its hair.”
No one spoke until Veshtu intoned. “Bring the bucket.”
The boy did, and one of the boys lit one of their few valuable candles so that they could peer in at the ugly little creature slithering around at its bottom. It hissed at the light and coiled against itself to glare up at them with beady black eyes.
“Is it safe?” Someone asked.
“I been bit before. Didn’t do anything to me.”
“Just made you dumb.”
This time the joker went spinning as the insulted boy gave him a shove.
“Alright.” Veshtu said. He looked around at them all, then reached down into the bucket.
The viper struck as he reached in and his face contorted as the serpent’s fangs sunk into his palm.
“I so swear.” He said through gritted teeth. He shook his hand until the viper fell back into the bucket and the other boys stared in. “Swear.” Veshtu said. “Like I did, or you’ll be thrown down the piss-pipe.”
One of the boys reached in but jerked back when the viper tried to bite him. “It’s not safe!” He said.
The girl pushed her way to the front of the group. “Coward.” She told the boy, and stuck her hand into the bucket without looking. She didn’t even flinch as the serpent bit her but glared around at them. “I swear that if you don’t hurt anyone who hurts me, that you’re a bunch of pussies.” She said. “And so swear.” She peeled the serpent off of her arm with her free hand and tossed it back into the bucket.
“Careful with him.” The owner said, but by then they’d all crowded a bit closer to take their turn enduring its fangs.
There was no serpent when Darro made his oaths for a second time, this time beneath the light of the core while the Iblanie representatives stood in a semi-circle around them. Instead, he knelt in front of Veshtu while Veshtu held his sword in front, and ceremoniously presented it to him after his short recital of the vows. “You’ve used this to make our sect.” Veshtu told him. “Use it to defend our future, and the future of our allies.”
Veshtu pulled him aside before he left with his new sect and put a hand on his shoulder. “It won’t be the same without you.” He smiled sadly at Darro. “They’re paying us enough to build a small army for your contract, but still, it won’t be the same.”
Darro smiled. “Of course.”
“We’ve come a long way.” Veshtu told him. He slapped his shoulder. “Don’t forget about us up here.”
“I won’t.”
Veshtu squeezed the arm he had his hand on. “I know you won’t.” He said. “And we’ll still call on you, if we need you.”
Veshtu’s face blurred, in the memory, sped by, blended into others as alien faced flowed through the timeline, alien both for their unfamiliarity and the coloring that made them look like walking shadows beneath the core’s orange light.
Much changed. Aircabs, enormous towers, crowded slums, fireworks, festivals, and the vast shapes moving through the skies to mark the days and seasons never remarked upon in the underground.
Much changed, but much stayed the same.
Men still bled. The sword still cut, and the icon remained pressed into his spirit like a blade buried in his chest and manifested in his breath.
For all the alien world he found himself surrounded by, it was Sikhaya’s smile that seemed the strangest part of all. The palace the Iblanie gave him barely mattered. His wife filled it with books and with light, and, in their second year above the ground, their second child.
This time she named the boy before Darro even got to meet him. He heard it for the first time as he took the squalling babe from his mother’s arms to gaze into silver eyes like a reflection of his own.
Marroo.
She slept with the babe, set up a cot in his room and would not even allow the nurses Darro brought with them from the depths to change him. On days when Darro had no duties to perform for the Iblanie they took the children on trips around the city, to zoos crowded with fabulous creatures, to gardens where they could run or crawl with other children, to street theaters where familiars danced beside handheld puppets to make their audience of three and four year olds giggle.
Everywhere they went, they were different, with their pale skin and bright eyes, but everywhere, Darro’s sword, worn openly as a symbol of his powers, won them easy acceptance among the people who knew what he was capable of.
They occasionally had visitors from the original members of the Hair-Viper sect, and when that happened Sikhaya took the women and children into the yard while Darro and the men went onto the balcony to smoke or drink or just to watch the air traffic weaving between the tunnels.
“Ah, you had the right idea coming here.” Andow said as they listened to his gaggle of children yelling as they ran in the grass beneath the balcony and their mother shouted at them to behave. He’d put on weight since having kids and what hair he still had was going gray. He rubbed at his temples and sniffed loudly. “This light is making my head pound, but the children barely seem to notice.”
Darro nodded. He could feel them below, tiny flames of breath bubbling with the energy of children as they ran from a giggling Eido.
“There’s nothing so precious as kids.” Andow went on after a silence in which they’d both listened to their children running below them while they watched a barge passing along the upward curve of the horizon. “Didn’t realize how much it effected us, growing up the way we did, until we had kids.”
“How do you mean?” Darro asked.
“Ah, well, just think. My little Anzedma, he’s twelve seasons old now. Thinks himself a man. Walks around behind me everywhere with his chest puffed out because he thinks he’ll be as tough as me, but… I was, probably, eight? When I, killed, for the first time? I can’t hardly say. No way to really tell, not in them tunnels, but I’d not been, alone, for long. Man I killed couldn’t have been that old either. Got him in the eye with a piece of glass, nearly cut my own finger off. Still have the scars to prove it.” He looked down at his hand. “Anzie’s never killed no one. Never had to. Didn’t grow up like you and me.”
Darro grunted. Remembered something much the same, a boy, alone in the dark, hands, a cry, and the warmth of sticky blood when his frantic knife found his assailant’s face, and then his neck.
“You know the part that always rubbed me raw?” Andow asked.
“No.” Darro replied.
“It’s my own damn fault.” The old man shook his head. “I had my Ma, my Da. Set up a place in the pipes somewhere, had some kind of business cause I remember they kept a light out so people could find their way to them, then one day I just, wandered away, got lost. Spent the rest of my life looking for that light until I found you.”
Darro remembered Andow joining their little tribe, before they’d taken the Viper’s teeth and sworn an oath to watch out for one another. He’d been scared and half starved and he’d needed the rest of them to teach him how to live.
“I’ve heard how Veshtu and Yichts found their way to the tunnels, and Brinda’s no secret, but I never heard how you got there.”
Darro stood from the lounger he’d taken when they reached the balcony and went to a cold box set against one railing. He didn’t keep liquor there, didn’t keep any in the house, but there was cold tea, and he offered one to Andow before taking one himself and standing at the balcony to look down at his son running after the visiting children with a wooden sword he’d taken to carrying everywhere with him, just like his father.
He remembered running at that age, or an age near it, remembered pitch darkness and the echo of his own footsteps as he splashed through fetid puddles, his voice coming back to him endlessly as he called for the woman who’d set him at the mouth of one of the maze’s narrow entrances off a main tunnel and told him to run, “And don’t look back.”
The tea he sipped as he stood at his balcony beneath a sky he could never have dreamed of at that age tasted like the rat meat in his memories.
“Just luck.” He said at last. “Just luck.”
“Hair-Vipers is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Andow went on. “Kept me alive down there, kept Brinda alive, got us out so we could have kids, made us rich so we could build a place we didn’t have to worry about them wandering off and never coming back. Nothing so precious, kids, you know. I want to give my kids the world, but it’s such a scary place, down there. Think about my parents sometimes, what it was like to lose me. Think I’d tear down the world to keep my kids safe, but, not much you can do, if the big dark decides to take them. Not much you can do.”