Marroo looked at the Reliquary on his father’s doorstep wordlessly for a moment before he pulled the door open and gestured him inside.

They sat in the kitchen. The reliquary took Marroo’s father’s place and held the cup of tea Marroo heated for him while Marroo sat in his old chair with all the memories of a hundred other meals he’d shared there with his parents and the strange knowledge that he would never, ever, be able to do so again.

“I expect I’m a bit of a surprise.” The reliquary said when Marroo made no indication that he would break the silence. “My showing up here.” His voice carried a faintly androgynous lilt, the hint of an accent that didn’t belong on the city streets, any more than the abnormally tall, pale, and willowy man belonged.

Marroo watched steam rise from his cup and said nothing.

The reliquary adept stirred his tea absently while the silence grew between them again but eventually went on. “What do you know about the reliquaries?”

Marroo knew very little. He knew that there was only one Reliquary Adept in the city, or so they claimed, this one, the one across the table from him, normally attached to the Rose Tower, but with agents everywhere responsible for collecting the dead wherever they could be found for internment on the other side of the Bottom. He knew that all of them were tall pale men like the one before him, blue eyed or grey, with blonde hair that made them stand out amidst the shorter darker population. Marroo looked at the man sitting across the table from him and felt the memories of old meals across from his father dissipate as he met cold blue eyes.

“You aren’t an adept.” Marroo said.

The reliquary raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Marroo shook his head. “I can’t feel your spirit.”

“I could be veiled.” The reliquary replied.

Marroo shrugged and looked down at his cup.

“Does it matter?” The Reliquary asked.

“Not really.” Marroo replied. The heat of the cup in his hand reminded him of the stone he’d splintered in the training room, and he looked in its direction, towards the life he still had to sweep up into a pile for the junk dealer to collect before the day’s end. “It’s not my business, if you want to pretend.” He met the reliquary’s eyes and held them for a long time.

“How then, did I sequester your father’s remains?” The Reliquary asked. “Or protect you from the bite of the beyond? If not with an icon?”

Marroo shrugged. “I fly,” he said, “but I can’t touch the machine icon.”

The reliquary nodded slowly and Marroo looked back at his cup of tea, then towards the room where he could feel his father’s sword like a burning sun to his spiritual eye. He felt something else stir as he looked, and he turned back towards the reliquary as the man’s spirit seemed to peel open.

The Reliquary’s spirit felt nothing like Marroo’s or his father’s. It bloomed as Marroo touched it with his spiritual senses, like a flower blossom, or the Core’s light sliding down the horizon before the dawn. The Reliquary lacked the spiritual edge of the icon that textured his father’s spirit in Marroo’s senses, in it’s place, the Reliquary’s spirit possessed a soft, almost visual quality like the glow of a warm fire somewhere within the man, but deep, deep within, beyond the physical vessel in which it was contained.

“A veil.” The Reliquary said as Marroo looked into the light of the man’s spirit. “I imagine your father did not get a chance to teach you of such while he was alive.”

His spirit seemed to close around the light inside, and Marroo felt oddly hollow as it disappeared from view. He looked up to meet the reliquary’s eyes again, then shook his head.

“I’ve never seen,” he waved at the adept’s chest, “what you can do.”

The reliquary lifted his tea and gave Marroo a very small smile before he sipped from it and set it back on the table. “I felt your father when he came to the rose clinic.” He said. “Veils can, hamper, one’s connection to an icon. Reliquaries who do not veil themselves can often become, withdrawn, silent, distant. Difficult, if you’re task is to order the collection of the dead from a diocese of the interior. I use one to keep myself sane. From his spirit, I suspect that your father rarely used a veil, possibly, because he did not know how to or because he chose not to, I couldn’t say.”

Marroo shook his head and the reliquary nodded and looked at his cup of tea. He rocked it back and forth as he thought and seemed to regard the way the dregs shifted in the bottom of the cup as he did so.

“It brings me back again to my order.” The reliquary said. “What do you know about the Reliquary, my icon, my order?”

Marroo looked at the man and realized that he couldn’t even tell his age. His robes hid any indication his body might have given, and what he might have guessed from his spirit was hidden away behind the veil that turned him into an ordinary mortal, more than ordinary, in fact, without a hint of the breath the no doubt coursed through open meridians within.

Marroo sent a bit of his breath through the meridians outside his body to lick around the adept as he studied the veil up close. Even touching it with his spirit he couldn’t make out the inner workings of the Adept’s soul. “How does the veil work?” Marroo asked.

The reliquary smiled. “That doesn’t answer my question.” He replied. “But I can tell you, if you’ll answer me first.”

Marroo hesitated. “You collect the dead.” He said. “Take them to the beyond.”

The reliquary nodded. “Is that all?”

Marroo looked at his tea. He shrugged.

“The reliquary preserves,” The tall man said in the sort of tone one used for the ritual mantras of their cultivation, “and presents.” He took another drink from his tea. “A rather useless icon, really.” He went on. “I’ve known less useful. There aren’t many schools under the Beyond. The Watchers are really the only comparable one from… the compound I was born in. We called it the Eye-con.” He tapped his eye with a sad smile. “But there are always people looking for new icons. Icons for every conceivable item. Shoes, chairs, money. Books of possible icons not yet touched were popular when I was young, and I knew one boy who claimed he would touch the mop icon if he was made to clean out the temple one more time. A punishment, among acolytes of the reliquary. The temple is a reliquary you see. Time spent there helps to touch its icon, if you pay attention in the right way.” He put the cup down and looked at it as though at the memories. “We do serve a purpose though. An important one, which is why almost all of the folk on the other side become one, one way or another, adept or otherwise.” He looked at Marroo.

Marroo looked back.

“The worlds are not a natural phenomenon.” The reliquary said. “Have you ever paused to consider it? Our star, the core, is a dying thing. It would be a dying thing, like all the universe beyond the veil, if we did not contain it. The bottom is a shell, a reliquary in its own right that preserves human life against the chaos of the beyond. The core used to be a smaller thing, but it has expanded over the millennia. It would expand still, without the bottom, until it were no more than wisps of gas floating in the oblivion while we clung to cold stones and hoped that the chaos would not dissipate the reality of our dying star’s last gasp. The bottom is a relic, a construct, touched and maintained by breath, but so much breath. If all the trillions that live within the worlds today poured out their spirits at the same time there would not be enough breath to keep the core alive for a single day. We depend upon our ancestors, all the trillions upon trillions, all the generations from the day the Bottom was formed, before the Night Plains were given flight or the worlds adjusted in their orbits, all the generations since the first Adept. They sleep with us, in reliquaries that look out into the beyond so that they can keep watch, and lend what little breath remains with them after death to keep us safe from the beyond.”

Marroo thought of his mother’s corpse as the crystalline coffin closed over her, locking her away beneath the stars. “I thought people’s breath dissipated when they died.”

“Oh it does.” The reliquary replied. “All breath dissipates if it is not preserved, given time, but always, a little bit remains. Even a bone fragment contains a bit of its original spirit, though so little that you would hardly notice if you did not know to look for it. One of the effects of a reliquary is to keep such breath from dissipating. To preserve. Caught in time, say, within a few moments of death, as your father was, we can preserve almost all of a person’s breath for use in the centuries to come, but even ancient remains have value. Even the long dead are holy.”

The reliquary sipped from his cup, studied Marroo.

“Your father.” He finally said. “Your father was empty, when he came to us. Empty of all but the lowest spark, as though he’d been dead for centuries, instead of seconds.”

Marroo looked down at his cup.

“May I see the sword?” The reliquary asked.

Marroo spun his cup in indecision, then stood and went into the training room. When he pulled the blade from the bag and straightened, he found that the reliquary behind him beside the pile of sweepings from the room’s floor, staring at the sword.

Marroo offered it to him and he took it as though it were a child. He sighed as he slid it from its sheath, and Marroo felt his spirit touch the blade, turning the golden breath of the Reliquary into a shimmering imitation of it’s own razored edge.

“His spirit was strong.” The adept sighed as his breath turned to whirling spiritual razors not quite manifested into reality at the edges of the room. He put two fingers on the flat of the blade and ran them down it. “His spirit has hardly faded from the steel.” He lifted it to his eye and studied the reflection there as the breath rippled within the sword, spilling memories into Marroo’s open spirit like water from a disturbed tub.

After a moment, the reliquary turned to look at Marroo. “It will.” He whispered. “In time. Unless…” He turned his attention back to the blade and his spirit opened, like the Core coming out from behind the Midnight Plains. He looked at Marroo at the last moment, as Marroo felt the man’s strange icon fold itself around the sharp edges of his father’s sword.

“May I preserve your father’s last breath?” He asked. The light of his icon seemed to glow golden from his every surface of him, from his mouth, his eyes, the interior of his ears, and beneath the nails of the fingers that touched the sword. From the depths of his eyes.

Marroo didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either. He just looked at his father’s sword as the reliquary turned his attention back to the steel and Marroo felt the icon manifest itself, truly this time, around the sword.

The reliquary felt like glass, like the coffin his was laid to rest within, or the windows of the reliquary temple that looked out at the stars. Like the threshold he’d once stood on between the life he didn’t want and the death he didn’t prefer, like the light reflected into his mother’s room as she read him stories of a woman who spoke with her daughter’s ghost long after her death.

The sword’s icon faded as the reliquary icon folded itself around the blade. His father’s breath surged and bubbled from the sword as the reliquary enfolded it. Knicks appeared in the loose folds of the reliquary adepts robes and memories poured from the blade like smoke, the razor edges of spiritual techniques baked into his father’s spirit by repetition, visions of slaughter, a pair of silver eyes reflected in a dark mirror, the mental image of the icon his father spent his life pursuing. They disappeared as the Reliquary Adept continued his work until the reliquary no longer held the embodiment of his father’s last impartment of breath. He just held a sword, brighter, perhaps, where it caught the light, sharper, perhaps, if you tried to cut with it, but from a distance, just a sword, invisible to the spiritual senses as anything but another blade, even if it seemed to glint with a subtle sense of golden spiritual light.

The adept’s spirit folded itself back away into its veil as he finished and he stood for a long moment simply holding the blade in front of him before he finally knelt to lift the scabbard from the floor and slid it reverently back into its sheath. He held it out to Marroo, still kneeling, one hand at each end of the long blade.

Marroo felt his father’s spirit still within as he took the blade, not erased, as he’d hoped, but hidden, tucked away and sleeping, ready for the spirit that reached for it to call forth the storm of swords that marked each of his father’s old techniques.

“It is a true relic now.” The reliquary said as Marroo took it from him. “It would have been anyways, for a little while at least. It might have lost a quarter of its spirit in a few years, and even then, still been a potent sample of the path your father took. Now though, your father’s spirit will survive for centuries in that blade.”

Marroo looked at the sword in his hands as the reliquary stood.

“Holding that sword would make anyone with an open extremis the equivalent of an adept, and any adept would give their only child to obtain it, if you told them what it was.” The adept said. “The reliquary will hide it from them, as long as you don’t let them touch it, or tell them how it came to be, but you’ll have to keep it safe.”

Marroo looked up at the reliquary. “You take it.” He said. He shoved the sword towards the reliquary but the reliquary didn’t move.

“You said you protect things.” Marroo said. “You take it.” He held it out again.

“This is as much your father’s final resting place as his grave.” The Adept replied.

“Then you should take it.” Marroo said, “I don’t want it.” He thought of all the times he’d seen his father use the sword to kill, of all the blood it spilled, and the memories that haunted the blade still. “I don’t have any use for it.”

The adept hesitated, then put two fingers on the sword. He pushed it back towards Marroo’s chest. “Your father’s spirit lives in that sword.” He said. “It was his final gift to you, and that gifting is a part of its identity, the spirit that animates it.” The sword pressed to Marroo’s chest as silver eyes met pale blue above it. “I came only to see that his breath was preserved. It is best that I do the same for the intention that put it in that blade.”

---

Marroo heard the family’s real concern during the reception that followed his father’s funeral. They whispered it, Athesh, his father’s lawyer, the man with the girl on his arm, but Marroo was, as they said, an adept. He heard them regardless of the precautions their precautions.

“The Kotem are going to take advantage of this when they find out.”

“We’re going to lose the towers if the kid can’t take his father’s place, and the Rose said he wasn’t killed by any normal bullet. That means there’s another adept in play. Someone new, working for someone new.”

“If the boy hasn’t touched the icon, we’ll need to help him get there. We may need him, and soon.”

Athesh approached him as he stood again in the window looking out at the stars. Marroo heard him coming, heard his heartbeat slow and steady in his chest, the catered snacks gurgling in his belly and the slide of his expensive suit against the robes he wore underneath. He didn’t turn, and the older man put a dark hand on Marroo’s shoulder big and heavy as the man was himself, as he joined Marroo in the window looking out at the stars.

“I hope Dhruv has already expressed to you how much we’re sorry about your father’s death.”

Marroo nodded. He’d heard their sorrow in the whispering, what they expected to lose with the adept they’d used to prop up their power in their corner of the Dregs.

Athesh had a deep baritone and a fatherly way about him so when he told Marroo “You’re family to us.” It had a tone that Marroo thought must seem sincere taken outside the context of all of his experience, watching and listening to the man while he apprenticed as a bodyguard beside his father. “I hope you know that.”

Marroo didn’t reply this time but it didn’t stop Athesh from going on. “I know you’ve fallen behind on your rent a little ways working at that little bookstore.” Athesh smiled when Marroo glanced at him. “We keep track of our own.” They both looked out the window but Athesh’s hand didn’t leave Marroo’s shoulder. “We’ll clear that debt for you, of course, even pay your rent a few months out. The least we can do, after what your father did for us. The very least.”

Marroo didn’t want their charity, but he also didn’t have the money to pay for next month’s rent, on top of the rent already due, not with the days he’d taken off to put his father beneath the Beyond. “Thank you.” He replied.

Athesh’s hand rose and fell on Marroo’s shoulder as though they were old friends. “It’s no trouble.” He said. “No trouble at all, though, if you’d like, I’m sure we could find some work for you. Something that pays a little better than that pensioner’s shop ever could. We could even help you find a better place, if you wanted.”

Marroo watched a star fade as some fold in the darkness of the beyond shifted to occlude it. He listened to snippets of conversation going on in the room behind him and felt candle flames of the guest’s breath flickering in his spiritual sense all around him. “I won’t kill anyone.” He said at last, without turning to the man he’d watched command his father to slaughter men in cold blood.

Athesh was quiet for a moment. “Your father,” he said slowly, “before he died, said that you’d touch the icon soon.”

Marroo turned and met the purple irises of the old man’s eyes.

“If you have, you won’t be able to hide from it.”

Marroo turned back to the stars. “I won’t kill,” he said again, “but I do need the money.” He glanced at Athesh. “And, since we’re family…”

Athesh’s hand slid from Marroo’s shoulder and he nodded as he looked out at the fading star. “Alright then.” He said without looking at Marroo. “We’ll find something. A courier maybe.”

“No killing.” Marroo reminded him.

“No killing.” Athesh replied.

On the howling train ride back to the interior he heard Dhruv ask about the result at the very back of the train while the woman on his arm held her hands over her ears to block out the howling that accompanied the transit.

“We’ll keep him close.” Athesh shouted over the noise. “He may still change his mind.”

---

Marroo stood at the top of the tenement building, after the funeral, and after the Reliquary Adept left, while he waited for the junk dealer to arrive. He balanced on the dish antennae where he’d once contemplated taking his own life and watched the tail end of the fleet that darkened the sky the day of his father’s death fade into the umber sky like a vast school of angular leviathans migrating into the dark depths of some sea. The Night Plains stood beneath their shadow in serried ranks as they swept down the horizon in the normal progression of days.

He’d had one last question before the reliquary left, one whose answer stuck with him as he watched the clouds part and tumble beneath the approaching night, and one he asked only as the reliquary was stepping out the door after teaching him to use the veil his father never learned, or never used, while he was alive.

“Do people live on after death?” He asked.

The reliquary stopped in the hallway and turned to look at Marroo.

“I just thought,” Marroo said, “that you, ought to know.”

They looked at one another across the threshold and the bits and the leftover bits of a dead man’s life.

The reliquary looked around. “We walk inside a world kept alive because of them.” He said. “How could they not?”

“I don’t mean… their breath.” Marroo replied, and looked at the sword buckled once again at his hip, “I mean, really live. Somewhere else.” He looked up and met the reliquary’s eyes.

The reliquary nodded slowly. “I have always believed so.” He said. “Though who can, really know. To me, there is too much of the spirit connected to their bones, even long long after death, even after decay has turned much of them to dirt, too much for me to believe there is not someone touched by the objects we preserve beneath the beyond, and you hear stories among the older reliquaries, those that aren’t the recluse our icon often compels us to become. Stories of ghosts walking among the graves, and miracles that accompany the invocation of certain names, or the touching of certain relics. Some say it’s their souls that really protect the worlds from the chaos of the beyond, not the breath we harvest from them to keep the core from going nova.”

“What’s out there to protect against?” Marroo asked.

The reliquary shrugged and half turned as he resumed his exit. “It’s supposed to be primordial chaos.” He replied. “Who knows. I’m no watcher, but if you ask me, anything could be out there.”

Marroo felt as though he stood among those graves as he stood on the antennae and watched the approach of night, like a vessel in which all his father’s memories and scars were left behind, trapped, locked inside the coffin of his life staring out at an enveloping darkness from which anything could come. Even peace.

He could hope for peace.

Even if it seemed a very long ways away.