Podmandu threw himself at the guards with a strangled shout as the door to the narrow closet where they’d kept him opened. He had his hands tied behind his back, just like Marroo’s and he karomed off of one of the guards only to trip and sprawl across the floor where he wriggled violently as a guard grabbed his arm and lifted him to toss him back in the closet.
Podmandu’s voice broke as he screamed at them. “No man! Let us go!” He thrashed in the closet, knocking down hangars of clothes and spilling boxes across the floor in his attempt to fling himself back at the open door. “We’re just the messengers man! You can’t do this!”
The guard who’d greeted Marroo at the door stepped in front of Pod and lifted the pistol. There was an ominous click and Podmandu scrambled backwards in the closet to shrink against the opposite wall.
“Fuss one more time,” the gunman said, “I dare ya.”
Pod just looked up at him and shook.
The guard nodded to Marroo.
“Go on,” he said, “If he makes a noise, I’m killing both of you. You understand?”
Marroo met the guard’s red eyes.
He had to duck to get under the closet’s door but the ceiling beyond was much higher and stacked with boxes that smelled of cardboard, dust, and old leather. The door closed behind him, and only Marroo’s cultivation allowed him to make out the racks of shirts hung in the closet by the light filtering through the cracks around the door. He felt the guards leave, all but one who stayed by the closet door, heard, in another room on the far end of the house, the leadership of this subsect confer as they opened the boxes and found the bloody tokens Marroo had felt inside the packages before they’d even left the tower.
“I think they’re going to kill us,” Podmandu said, “Oh man. They’re going to kill us!” He rocked back and forth on the floor where he’d fallen and began to cry. “Oh man, oh man. Oh man. I don’t want to die.”
Marroo closed his eyes.
His first day as a courier was not spent solely flying around during Podmandu’s “orientation”. Before he went to the roof to meet the boy and the bike he would learn to fly he was met at the ground floor of the Iblanie tower by the secretary that held down a desk in front of Athesh’s office. The man was as dark as every other member of the Iblanie family with close cropped black hair and brown eyes that matched his skin color. His face bore absolutely no indication that he ever smiled for any reason and he indicated for Marroo to follow him to an elevator. Instead of going up, as Marroo expected when he was met by the man, he touched the control that sent it down into the basements of the tower.
He felt each floor as the elevator passed. Voices and spiritual signatures, the muffled report of guns on a subterranean firing range, what sounded like guards and the gurgle of pipes and utilities in the floors between, all sounds the mortal next to him could never hear without his cultivation or open meridians.
When they reached the very bottom of the elevator, several stories beneath the tower, the secretary pulled out a key he stuck into the elevator panel and turned before taking them even further below.
They stopped several hundred yards below street level. Marroo felt two guards beyond the doors before they slid aside to reveal a thick slab of a vault door propped open in an otherwise featureless room. The guards burned with telltale spiritual signatures of cultivators, the one on the left with his core and extremis meridians opened while the one on the right had his sensorium and mentalis open as well, both short the Externalis and the Icon that made Marroo an Adept.
“I must return to the tower.” The secretary said as Marroo stepped out and stared at the guards while the guards stared back. Marroo turned, and the secretary gestured to the vault door. “Athesh is waiting.”
The elevator doors slid closed and they listened to it rising well beyond the limits of normal hearing. All three of them.
Marroo turned back to the guards and gave them a measuring look while they returned it in kind. Eventualy he stepped through the vault door and each of the guards turned to follow him inside.
A cavernous warehouse waited beyond the door. A tunnel shot through the foundation here, one as cavernous and massive as the one Marroo followed when his father introduced him to the dregs proper, but plugged at both ends with walls of rubble to turn it into a vast underground room. The floor sloped downwards at a gentle angle, but instead of the collected trash and runoff of the pipes Marroo saw when he visited the dregs, drifting floodlights illuminated row upon row of pallets stacked with good while men with familiars unfurled as clipboards wandered among them counting and tallying their contents.
Athesh stood just within the door of the vault on a small raised section of the floor where he watched the men at work.
“You have accompanied your father in his work for us for some time.” Athesh rumbled when Marroo stepped inside and stopped to wait for the family executive to turn around. The man was huge with hands like slabs of meat and a void that rumbled when he spoke. He glanced over his shoulder and smiled at Marroo while Marroo tucked his hands behind his back. “I thought you might like to see what exactly it is we do for this city.”
Marroo gave no reply.
“Would you like to see what we do?” Athesh rumbled.
Marroo watched the counting men as hovering floodlights followed them from forty yards overhead. He shrugged and Athesh smiled and nodded towards the pallets.
“Do you know what all that is?” He asked.
Marroo swept his senses across the room, as he’d done through habit when he first arrived. “It’s a lot of things.” He replied. A lot of which he couldn’t identify.
Athesh nodded slowly. “It is, but it’s mostly one thing.” He looked out at the men moving among the pallets then nodded for Marroo to follow him down a small ramp to the tunnel floor. “Given the challeng, what do you think the most important thing would be, in a city like ours?” He asked.
Marroo didn’t answer and Athesh stopped next to one of the pallets. He bent to heft one of the bags on it upright.
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“It isn’t what most people think,” he said, “not money, not power,” he pulled on a string and the bag seemed to zipper open so that Athesh could scoop out a handful of its contents and show them to Marroo, “It’s beans,” he said, “Food. Food of any kind.” He dumped the beans back into the bag and leaned it against the stack so that it wouldn’t tip over and spill everywhere while they went on.
“Flour,” Athesh said, pointing to another pallet of sacks, “Rice, Corn, Protein.” He did not, Marroo noticed, point to the stacked crates of bullets that glittered in his spiritual vision in another corner of the immense warehouse.
“A couple of centuries ago you would never have recognized this city,” Athesh went on, leading Marroo and the trailing cultivators through the winding stacks of pallets, “A dozen centuries ago, if the stories are true, the salt dunes would have all been underneath a vast sea, water that covered this entire section of the bottom back when they say the sky was clear and the core smaller. Back when you could look clear across to the other side of the bottom and see the tops of the midnight plains as they spun around the core.”
He waved a hand. “That’s all in the distant past, but a few centuries ago, long after all that, you’d have found the equivalent of a little village here stuck between the dunes where the old pipes came out of the ground and there was a little land that could be farmed despite the salt. It was a refuge of sorts, poor, but a good place to hide since you couldn’t get there except by dropping from one of the midnight plains, and even then, no one was likely to come looking for you. Dregs, in the social sense, but it was the dregs, the true dregs of the ocean locked away in the down under ground that would eventually turn our little village into this bustling metropolis.”
They stopped in the middle of the tunnel where they could look again over the vast collection of pallets stacked with food and other goods. “Did your father ever tell you the story?” Athesh asked. “The city’s history?”
Marroo shook his head. “My mother.”
“Then I won’t bore you.” Athesh turned back to the hoard. “There are close to a Billion people living here now. The land that used to be farmed has long been used up, and while we can live amidst the salt dunes, there is no way for us to feed so many. Every bite we eat, every box of noodles, every vegetable bar or piece of fruit, all of it has to be purchased from the midnight plains. There is only one resource they want badly enough to feed a Billion mouths, but fortunately it is one of only two resources the Dregs holds in abundance.”
He turned to Marroo and ticked them off on fingers like sausages. “Salt, which nobody wants, at least in the quantities we can get it, and water, which the midnight plains have a thirst for we will never be able to satisfy. That water is locked up though, deep deep in the pipes, the dregs of that old ocean I told you about, and only accessible through a few dozen pipes, though there are a few others where your people say there is more water locked in ice hard as rock or steel.” He turned again and led Marroo further in the pallets. “Where do you think the families come in?” He asked.
“You fight over the water.” Marroo replied.
Athesh tipped a hand to give a “so so” gesture.
“Once that might have been true. No one ever lived in the tunnels until the Dabo, your father’s people, came. There were a few, certainly, but never an entire community, and as the importance of access to the port and the midnight plains grew, we spread out across the salt fields. My old lessons say the Dabo came here fleeing some disaster among the plains, dropped from the sky like rain and fled into the pipes before anyone thought to stop them. Those were the water wars, you can still see scars from that today if you’ve ever been to the wasteland.”
“Anyways, that was also a long time ago. Back then access was controlled by a larger organization. There were too many people here to feed, and so water had to be extracted and the food purchased from the plains, distributed. It was all very public. Patriotic. Whatever.” Athesh waved a hand. “After the pipe wars the families took over. My people realized your people weren’t going to leave the pipes and weren’t going to share access to the water, and your people realized they couldn’t feed themselves without access to the air. In the chaos a few families or political groups organized themselves into sects, and the families were born.”
There were shelves stacked against one wall of the cavern and Athesh led Marroo through the pallets to them. Weapons sat on the racks, neatly organized in some places and simply tossed in a heap at others. A few pallets literally had stacks of guns on them, swords, clubs, and more powerful weapons Marroo could feel infused with breath touched by half a dozen different icons. Athesh ran a hand over a rack of black rifles that shone in the overhead lights then lifted one and manipulated the controls until a red tinted familiar appeared standing on the clip attached to the weapon’s side.
“This was made for the pipe wars.” He said as he hefted it and the weapon’s familiar fluttered around him in a violent zig zag of color. “Some adept touched it a century ago. Your father once told me which, but I couldn’t tell you now. The beam is no more than you’d expect from a sunflare, but the familiar is bonded to the weapon. Where you point, it will chase men out of cover or incapacitate them so that you can make the kill. Very useful, when fighting around corners deep in the dark.”
He dropped the weapon and the violent little sprite flit back into its clip. Even quiescent Marroo could still feel its icon burning inside, ancient and unfamiliar except from books. “It’s not very useful in complex environments.” Athesh said as he put the rifle away. “But we have other tools for fighting in the city.” He moved down the rack, fingering other tools of death, other rifles as ancient, or as malevolently touched as the one he’d hefted to show Marroo.
“Our family,” Athesh rumbled, “the Iblanie, did not emerge during the pipe wars. We came much later. We were, in fact, less than a minor sub-sect of the Yokenemassa family responsible for a handful of their smaller factories turning scrap metal into tin cans and other consumer goods for the rest of the city. That was only a few generations ago. It was my grandfather, Athenmar, who took us the first step, expanded our portfolio by overtaking a few competitors from other sects and families, and eventually even from among the Yokenemassa sub-sects. My father did the same, but the take over I eventually helped my father execute over the Yokenemassa themselves would never have been possible without violence.”
He stopped as his fingers touched the hilt of a sword in which Marroo could feel his icon smoldering like an ember deep beneath a heap of ash.
“It would not be an exaggeration to say that your father helped to make this family what it is today.” Athesh pulled the sword from the rack and slowly unsheathed it. As it left the sheath the sword icon seemed to catch fire in Marroo’s mind, resonating with the icon he still struggled to keep from sinking into his spirit the way it had sunk into his father’s when he became an adept.
“There are not many adepts in the Dregs anymore.” Athesh continued. “Every now and again a new one is born, but there are almost two hundred families in this city of a billion people. Each of them has at least two million mouths to feed, and another two or three million in the tunnels below. More, if you’re a larger family like ours, and we all pay dues to the city governor to maintain the few public services we all want. We all keep schools to cultivate or purchase talent from the independent schools, but when a school from the midnight plains comes and offers to buy a promising student from us with enough food to feed a sub-sect for a month, or enough weapons to arm a few hundred men and take out a rival in a week instead of in the years it would take for that child to become an adept, if they survive to become an adept at all?” He looked at Marroo. “I don’t think I need to spell out why the adepts in this city are as old as they are, or why there are so few of them.”
Marroo met Athesh’s eyes as he held the sword which gleamed with a supernatural sharpness. He thought he recognized the icon pressed into the blade, its shape, the techniques layered into it along with the vague outline of the memories the adept had left in the steel when he’d made it. The adept’s ghost was not as strong in this sword as the one he’d poured his spirit into before giving it to Marroo on his death bed. It looked, somehow, absurd in the Athesh’s hand, like a burning flame thrower in the hands of a blind man without the wit to understand that he was burning down the world around him, or the spirit to understand what it was he held.
“Are you thinking of selling me?” Marroo asked.
Athesh looked at the sword in his hand. “No.” He said, then slid it back into it’s sheath.