Ground cars beat a steady rhythm as Marroo and his father moved through tunnels dimly lit by culverts in the street above. The thump and rumble of their passage overhead resonated in the tunnels like a heart beat while rain dripped and ran around them in the underground.

“All the bottom is a dreg.” Marroo’s father grated as they picked their way through streams of runoff and small mounds of trash. “But there is a bottom even to the Bottom.”

The true thunder of the storm crackled far above them, muffled by the intervening layers of cement. New sounds intermingled with the false thunder of the highway above them, indistinct enough to blend with the drip and hiss of running water until they came to the lip of a pipe that let off into a cavern as deep as it was wide, hiding a city that susurrated with the voices of a thousand souls.

Lights danced in the dark void of the cavern, pin-pricks against the immensity of open darkness, filling the city beneath them more in shadow that the illumination they were meant to cast. Here and there pools of light revealed, beneath the float bulbs or standing floodlights, the ramshackle mansions made there from cast aside materials of the more affluent world above. Towers rose three, and even four or five stories tall, shacks stacked on top of the other until they rose like mushrooms or potted plants to crowd around the floating lights. Windows glittered with the lights of the lives lived inside them, the warm luminescence of candles and open flames, the harsh core-light of spiritual lamps, and the pale flickering shadows of ancient fluorescent tubes. Even the people glittered here beneath the ground, jogging, or walking, or riding bikes amidst the sprawl, almost always guided by some light shout out from shoulder clips and head lamps, drifting familiars set in a lantern mode or handheld torches that shot beams of light like knives into the darkness around them.

Marroo’s father gave him time to take it in before he led him down into the city beneath the ground.

“No one knows how many people live beneath the Dregs.” Marroo’s father told him as they passed through the tangled slum. “Perhaps a quarter as many as live above, even half. They’ve never been counted.”

Marroo watched a man walk with a lamp strapped to his head. The way his silver eyes flicked over Marroo made his skin crawl but they lingered on his father’s sword until they flicked away again and he disappeared behind them in the narrow alley that passed for a road amidst the chaos of slumping structures where people lived.

“No one has ever counted the folk that live here.” Marroo’s father said as they passed what must have been a saloon from the booming music and flashing lights visible behind the curtains guarded by big men with pistols at their hips. “But every one of them is ready to kill you to get the shirt off your back, or a pair of shoes without holes in them, or simply for your flesh.” A loud scream that could have been pleasure, or pain, or fear, echoed over the thump of the music behind them and a drone buzzed overhead amidst spinning gyros that made the dank air swirl around them. “There is no law here, or even the pretense that exists above. These are the true Dregs. Here there is only strength, and cleverness, and a willingness to do violence to get what you need to survive.”

Marroo heard children shouting and glimpsed shadows running across the rooftops. He wondered idly how people made their lives down here but didn’t ask, and his father didn’t explain until they’d crossed the little city beneath the pipes and climbed up the cluttered slope of the opposite side to approach more open pipes set into the wall. They seemed to breath the air of the tunnel around them, its breath stirring Marroo’s robes as they approached them. Shadows detached themselves from the wall of the tunnel as they did so and Marroo heard other footsteps approach from behind at an open run, though still quiet enough not to be heard by someone with a mortal’s senses.

They died almost as soon as the attack began. Someone threw an object at Darro that split around a sharpened line in the air then clattered musically behind them. Someone rose behind them then toppled and there was a cry of pain from in front before Marroo felt his father’s breath churn the air in a storm of invisible knives, made even more intangible by the pressing darkness.

Marroo’s father never even slowed his walk. He paced on until he came to a lump which he gave no more than a glance before he continued on his way, with Marroo close behind, grateful for the darkness that made it impossible for him to see the red of the blood that must accompany the severed head they’d just passed.

“How many men attacked us?” Marroo’s father asked as they entered the breathing pipes and let it suck them, with its breath, deeper into the dark.

“Seven.” Marroo replied.

Darro nodded. “We passed their spotter somewhere in the mecca.” he growled. “Do you know what they wanted?”

When Marroo didn’t answer Darro stopped and looked down at his son. “They could not know the value of my sword.” he told Marroo, one hand on the handle that protruded from his robes. A sword touched by the icon and carried every day by an adept like his father would hold a piece of his father’s breath in it like a soul all its own. It would be sharp enough to cut any object and seem to pull itself through the air in the hands of even the least experienced. It was a peerless weapon, a fortune to anyone who knew the value of such an item, capable of allowing even the lowliest cultivator touch the icon of the sword if they spent enough time in meditation with it.

“Seven men are too many to rob us for our clothing,” his father went on, “so what can you guess has greater value in a place like this?” He gestured at the narrow pipe they stood in. It echoed with his voice and the drip of distant water and more distant still, with the ghostly voices and footsteps of the people that made their life here beneath the city’s streets.

Marroo met his father’s silver eyes, and for the first time, realized what they meant, why they were so different from the people that lived above, with their dark skin and curling hair, but he couldn’t answer his father’s question so he simply waited in silence for it to come.

“Think on this.” his father said as he turned back to the tunnel to lead them on, “What would become of you if their thrown pipe split my skull as they intended?”

Marroo didn’t want to. He shivered at the damp breeze that moved in the breathing pipe.

They carried on.

They visited a half dozen different spots in the labyrinth of the “proper Dregs”. They visited a nest of interlacing pipes where they could have circled endlessly through narrow pipes that dripped with water without ever leaving the nightmare maze if his father didn’t know the way. They passed another mecca in a cistern that dripped with rainwater from vents visible in the ceiling like dimly glinting stars while thunder whispered through them above the din of the human population pinned beneath. They purchased rancid kabobs at a shop there and ate them beneath an umbrella raised above a platform that kept their feet out of the six inches of murky water that filled the city. They stopped at a tangled mess of broken wood and twisted plate steel that must once have been a house from which new huts sprouted like mushrooms from a rotting log. There his father stared for a long time before leading Marroo onward.

They were attacked, again, in a cistern that looked ravaged by war when they wandered down an alley that stopped at a dead end. A floodlight flashed on in an attempt to blind them as a man told them they’d be shot if they so much as moved. Darro disappeared in a surge of water before he’d even finished, followed by cries of pain, and rage, and then a silence that echoed with the drip of water falling from the ceiling.

When the lamp switched off, Marroo walked towards it to find his father cleaning his sword on a rag no doubt cut from one of the slain. His silver eyes glinted in the dark.

“How long do you think they would have given us before they shot us?” Darro asked when Marroo stood in front of him. Marroo’s eyes snagged on a light that shone red through the murky water, still attached to its owner’s head. He didn’t answer his father.

“There are many boys who run through these streets alone, or in groups.” Darro grated as he sheathed his sword. “Even girls can survive the pipe ways if they are quick. You can be quick, you can even be stronger than these men.” He tossed the rag back into the water they were standing in so that it flopped wetly next to the body, or body part, where the water swirled with red around the submerged light. “But not if you continue to hesitate when it is time for the sword.”

When they came into a wide open cistern with a circular opening at the center of its ceiling perhaps a hundred yards across and a thousand yards above them Maroo’s father leapt to the top of a rickety building several stories tall and called down for Marroo to follow him. A breath infused leap carried him to a balcony at the second story, and a second one took him to the top to stand beside his father. They squatted down on the roof of the tower and looked down over the slums that filled this cistern. Rain sluiced through the hole at it’s center to rain down on a heap of trash while thunder resonated from the walls.

“Do you know why the burning tree school was so eager to recruit you?” Darro asked.

Marroo cracked his lips to say that he’d been strong, but knew how his father would answer such a claim and closed his mouth to watch the rain fall instead.

Darro cleared his throat and spat. “You beat every boy they sent against you.” He grated. “And they respect strength.”

Below them, beneath the roof they’d settled on, Marroo could hear the angry noises of a man and woman at the start of some argument while a child cried on a floor below. The voices seemed small from their vantage point, small and unhappy, and as dirty as the hundred pipes and slums they’d passed in getting here.

“Do you know why you so outstripped the other children your age in the tournament?”

Marroo picked at a bit of rust on the roof beneath him. “My meridians are open.” He said, “I was faster. Stronger.” He scowled.

“Your first three meridians are open.” Darro replied. He ticked them off on his fingers. “Core, Extremis, Sensorium.” He fell silent with his third finger ticked. They watched the rain for a moment while Marroo’s father marshalled his thoughts. “The schools are a joke.” He finally grated. “They exist on the topside to separate wealthy men and women who dream their children might advance from their money. They train their charges in the rudiments and cultivate their best talent in order to sell them, eventually, to the lower academies of the heavens when they send their own recruiters for whatever geniuses might exist to be discovered in the dregs of the bottom’s population. The Academies pay well, the kind of money that you can’t make doing anything else in the dregs, and the schools scrape and fight for any student that shows an ounce of promise while family’s and larger sects fight over what little else we have that the heavens require. Water, mostly, and talent. They train them endlessly in their katas, but have little experience with the real uses of those kata except as a show piece to attract a heavenly agent’s interest. So. Do you know why you outstripped the other children your age, even those who’d trained as long and as hard as you have?”

Marroo watched the rain fall on the impoverished city beneath them and wondered when they would leave the damp and misery behind.

Eventually his father spread an arm to point, first to one corner of the cistern, then to the other, as though to encompass all the deeps they could see. “This.” He growled over the echoing thunder. “Was my school, and all of the places we’ve come through today. This is where I learned to touch the icon of the sword before I even knew how to cultivate my breath.”

Thunder roared outside. It echoed inside the cavern as though it were really echoing inside Marroo’s own skull.

“It will become your school as well.” Darroo grated. “You are stronger than I was at your age. It is time you learned the uses of such strength.”

Rain fell through the hole in the center of the roof like a pillar and flashed briefly with lightning.

“It is time for your first mission.”

Marroo turned to his father. “What will it be?” He asked.

Darro’s silver eyes glinted as they found Marroo’s in the twilight darkness. “Mercy.” He replied, and somehow, it didn’t sound all that merciful.

Darro leapt from the makeshift tower and Marroo followed him. He followed him down streets that were little more than dikes cut through the compacted trash of the cistern’s floor, past bottomless pits where the dikes dumped their water into the abyss, followed him until they were close enough to the circular opening in the ceiling that occasional gusts knocked rain to patter against the steel rooves of the slum built up below and the thunder that split the air above made Marroo’s ears ring briefly before his shifting breath repaired the damage so that he could hear with his normal sharpness once again. There his father stopped at a ramshackle open hut beside a dike where a balding old man with stringy gray hair sat coughing on a pallet.

Marroo’s father knelt in front of him and put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. The man hacked loudly into his hand and gave Darro a weak apology, but Darro growled at him not to mention it, then reached to his sword belt and removed a few objects from it which he handed to the man. The old man almost whimpered as clumsy fingers scrabbled at the lid of a can and Marroo watched in horrified fascination as his father smiled, actually smiled, and took the can to open it for him before gently handing it back. Thunder boomed above them and Marroo thought that he must have lost his father somewhere along the way and followed a stranger to this old man’s hut instead.

Darro returned to Marroo’s side and gestured for his son to follow him away while the beggar shoveled the contents of the can into his mouth with his fingers.

When they were hidden by the twilight and a bit of distance down the narrow dike that served as a road between the slanting hovels Marroo’s father stopped and looked back at the old man. Marroo turned to watch him too and heard his cough rattle in his chest as he peeled open a second can and continued to eat.

When Marroo turned back to his father he met two silver eyes that seemed to glow in the gloom. “You’re going to kill him.” his father said.

In a long slow motion Darro pulled out his sword and offered it to Marroo. Marroo took it, more on reflex than through any conscious thought, too stunned to fully comprehend what he’d just been ordered to do. “Let him finish eating first.” Darro said, glancing back at the old man. “A few minutes anyways. He won’t take long.”

Marroo’s sword hand trembled as he looked up at his father. “Why?” Marroo asked.

Darro glanced at him. “Would you deny him a last meal?”

Marroo shook his head, then realized very suddenly how heavy the sword felt in his hand and the way it gleamed with the reflected light of the lightning.

“Your mission is mercy.” Darro grated. “One cut.” He looked back down the street to the old man still shoveling food into his mouth. “One cut is easier than two.”

Thunder boomed and resonated at a deafening volume in the cistern around them.