They didn’t talk when the man left.

Darro led Marroo through the trash and weed choked walkways of the wasteland until they came to a huge bowl in the midst of absolutely nothing.

Roaches sang amidst the grass that rose from cracks all across the cement basin and trash deposited by rain water layered the bottom. A pipe jutted from the gentle slope, larger than Marroo himself, like a gate into a world of darkness.

Marroo’s father led him to the center of the circle of trash at its bottom, silencing roaches with his passage. The horizon disappeared there, even the tips of the towers that ringed the wasteland, leaving only sky above them, and the gentle slope of cracked cement choked by knee high weeds all around them. No matter how much breath Marroo moved through his Sensorium Marroo could hear nothing but the roaches singing in the weeds and the gentle sight of the breeze moving over the mouth of the bowl, a distant dripping from the tunnel that faced them.

Marroo met his father’s eyes and they looked at one another for a long time before Darro gave the bowl one last glance and led Marroo away.

They didn’t speak the next day. His father gave him one more opportunity to touch the sword icon by swirling his blades around him while they did their breathing exercises, and they did a bit of sparring, but nothing more. They ordered in for lunch and in the afternoon his father did some correspondence with his familiar while Marroo stared out the window and felt time drifting by without him.

When the midnight plains crept out of the haze above the horizon and marched towards them his father entered Marroo’s room and put a hand on Marroo’s shoulder then he took him into the training room where he stopped in front of the sword rack and extended a hand in invitation.

Marroo looked at the hanging weapons. He knew each of them as well as he knew his own hand. His father’s sword was not among them, but there were others touched by his father’s icon, if not as deeply. There were dummy swords of weighted rubber, and dull metal practice swords that could break bones. There were rapiers his father used to knick him with when he graduated to sharpened blades and thick cleaving swords too heavy for anyone but a cultivator to carry let alone effectively use. There were blades of a dozen kinds, all of them, with the exception of the practice swords, made for killing.

When he put his hand into the rack, he came away with one whose edge was rounded for practice. Dull. Incapable of killing. He met his father’s eye as he strapped it around his waist. His father gave no word of comment, only waited for Marroo to finish cinching it around himself, then led his son out an aircab waiting to lift them into the air and take them to the pit.

Marroo refused to kill.

On the first night there were three men, only one of whom wanted to actually fight Marroo until his father informed the other two that the only spectators would be those who fought next. So, he fought three of them, if what he did could be called fighting.

They carried a medley of weapons, a long bar of rusty metal for one, a pair of knives for another, and the third who seemed to prefer throwing stones. None of them were any good. They were slow and awkward. They tripped over the grass when they tried to charge forward or shuffle backwards, even if they didn’t fall, and Marroo didn’t even bother striking at them. He just stepped aside. Stepped aside, stepped aside, stepped aside, until they either gave up or fell and were disqualified by his father.

They left as the night set, stumbled up the slope while Marroo watched and his father descended from the top of the pipe he’d watched from. He stood in front of Marroo as the clowns disappeared over the ledge and they looked at one another again.

Darro cleared his throat and spat. “They were trying to kill you.” He grated.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“Don’t be cute.” Darro growled. “They’ll gut you if you give them a chance, and they’ll be back tomorrow, sure as plain rise. A thousand Drachmae’ll change a man’s life out here. Transform him.”

They looked at one another across a long silence in the fading light.

Only two of the clowns made a second appearance the next day. The rock thrower wasn’t there this time, but two others arrived to take his place, and these ones brought more substantial weapons. One of them brought a pistol which his father turned away until the man came back carrying a long handled axe with a spike on one side. All went as it did before. The old ones moved with more confidence, while the man with the axe swung it with surprising speed and dexterity.

One of them tried to taunt Marroo.

Marroo didn’t run from any of them, but he didn’t fight them either. He stepped around their blows, ducked the wild swings of the axe and appeared behind the men that were supposed to be killing him where he waited for them to turn around and try the attack again.

When they came back the next day there were five, and his father gave them swords from an arsenal he’d brought along then watched grimly from the top of the pipe as Marroo did the same as he’d done before, only this time while straight bands of sharpened steel flashed brightly at him in the twilight.

Sometimes Marroo pushed breath into his limbs as he waited for them to come at him, but he never needed it. The men who came to kill him might have been vicious, even hard experienced men who’d survived a lifetime of scrapping over what little life had to give for those living in a wasteland, but they were untrained, and uncultivated. Without their meridians opened they couldn’t hope to match his speed, and without the training they couldn’t hope to trick him into falling into one of their blades.

When a ten year old boy showed up on the sixth day Marroo’s father looked at him long and hard before he shook his head. He gave the boy a dagger he’d touched with the icon and told him to grow up a little more before coming back, then sent him running up the slope to disappear into the grass while the eyes of the other brigands followed him before focusing on Marroo.

They all fought him that night. Together. At the same time. Five swords in the twilight, and five hard eyed men trying to win the road his father offered them out of their stinking misery.

They stood in a circle around him at the start. One man carried two of the borrowed swords while the others carried only one, only one in view, anyways.

It was a hidden blade that cut Marroo in the end, a short narrow dagger drawn from a hidden pocket as Marroo spun away from a wild slash after dancing amidst their gauntlet for a quarter of an hour. The knife jammed savagely into Marroo’s shoulder and the man who’d got him gave it a twist before Marroo whipped away and left the bloody knife in the man’s hand.

He hissed, more in surprise than pain, as he pressed his hand to the wound and backed away. The Agony Stone was worse than this, but it weakened him, created an opening. Five pairs of eyes glittered around him, the same pale silver as their swords, as they circled and watched him bleed.

They surrounded him, legs scraping through the grass. Blood ran through Marroo’s fingers and he closed his eyes as he felt the weakness begin to spread from the wound. He felt the one behind him begin the attack and he flowed around them once more, like the wind, untouchable.

This time, when he retreated from their circle, they didn’t let him choose the next place he would stand. They came after him. Two men chopping at him at once while the other three moved around to encircle him again. Marroo ducked out of the half formed circle, then twisted past a thrown sword and felt blood ooze across his chest from his shoulder while pain rolled through him like wind through a dusty street.

The man who stabbed him tried to catch Marroo witht eh same trick and this time Marroo gave up on dodging out of the way. He slammed his fist into the man’s waist along with a full measure of the breath blazing through his meridians.

His attacker gagged as the force of the blow snapped him backwards. He flopped head over heels into a boneless heap in the grass. One of the others tried to smack Marroo in the head with his sword but Marroo ducked then broke his wrist with a chop of his hand and a second sloppy gust of his breath. As the man screamed the other three came at Marroo. He gave each them the same treatment. By the time it was over five swords lay in the blood flecked grass beside five men that moaned or choked in their effort to breathe.

Roaches sang distantly from the grass along the lip of the basin while they screamed.

Marroo ignored the men at his feet. Blood still leaked between the fingers he’d clamped over his shoulder wound. It soaked his robes, turned them dark and red in the fading light. Marroo’s father jumped down from the pipe and collected the five swords from the grass. When one of the men, clutching his wrist, begged him to get help, Darro told him to help himself. “You took the risk. This is the price. It could have been higher.”

Then he stood in front of Marroo with the swords. “Show me.” He said.

Marroo peeled his hand away and showed him the wound. He could feel fresh blood gush from into his robes as he removed the pressure. His father grunted, then tucked the swords methodically back into the bag before yelling at the injured men that they needed to be out of the pit by the following night. “We’ll be back.” Then he led Marroo back up the slope to the aircab and away.

A woman in the red and white robes of a rose adept tended to his shoulder in a hospital at the top of one of the towers overlooking the wasteland where Marroo received the injury. She peppered him with cheerful commentary as she looked over his wound, then told him it was a clean cut “very clean”, and that he’d feel good as new, even better, by the time she was done with him.

He sensed, something, when she invoked her icon, not like the normal spiritual aura that accompanied adepts, but something that seemed somehow alive as it settled on his shoulder. Where his father’s blades were sharp cuts manifested in the world, the sprites born across the wound by the woman’s use of her icon felt like little seeds of vast potential that spread roots within his very flesh to drink up the breath he had stored there.

When she opened her eyes after concentrating on the application and found him looking up at her she gave him a bright smile that seemed brighter for the darkness of her skin.

“There you are.” She said, and tapped the wound as though knocking on a door. “Your spirit is very strong.” She told him. “You healed up better than I expected.” She turned to pull down a form which she handed to his father while Marroo examined the wound, or what was left of it. He could barely find a scar.

“It will be a little stiff for a day or two.” The woman said. “If it starts to bleed you can take a red pill if you have the cash for it, but if you don’t it won’t mean anything serious. It’s just the little touch I put in there dying off and leaving your spirit to do the healing on its own. It will heal normally in time if it happens, but it will still be partially healed and I don’t think you’ll have that problem. You have a very strong spirit, like I said. Just in case though, I want you to stay here for an hour while we wait to make sure the healing takes, and in case anything else goes astray. Is that going to be a problem?” She didn’t look at Marroo but gave his father a pointed look that seemed to bounce off of him like rain.

“We’ll wait.” He replied, handing her back the paperwork.

“Good.” She smiled at him, then turned the smile on Marroo before bustling out with an “I’ll be back.”

Marroo settled into the chair she’d given him to sit in and his father took a seat at the opposite side of the room. His silver eyes glinted in the shadows at the corner of the room the same way the men’s eyes glinted in the twilight before Marroo… broke them.

“They won’t be coming back.” His father told him in the long silence before the red robed adept returned. “But there will be others. There are only two sorts in the Dregs, butchers and meat. These have been the meat, the men willing to split the pot with the Sef if they managed to overpower you, but word will get out now. Eventually their enforcer will find out, then he’ll either come, or he won’t. Either way, eventually someone who can challenge you will find out, and I won’t be sending the meat at you one at a time anymore.”

Marroo looked at his hands, still soaked in the blood that drained from his wound and down his arm before they reached the tower.

“Eventually you’re going to have to decide who you’re going to be.”

That night, Marroo snuck out onto the balcony, then up the tenement building until he stood on the long arm of a radio dish and looked down at the cement far, far, below him.

His pinky finger was all that balanced him on the pole.

He imagined what it would be like to bleed out onto the street. Something like bleeding out in the bowl, he imagined.

He thought of the man, a boy, really, he’d cut in half in the underground, and the way his opponent screamed when he broke his wrist.

The pain didn’t matter.

Broken bones, wheezing cough, bleeding arm. Blood on the sidewalk beside his mother’s purse.

The pain didn’t matter.

He hung there, on the precipice, and remembered the agony stone pressed between his palms while traffic moved in the night sky and a breeze ruffled his hair.

He let go, jumped. His feet landed on the roof.

The pain didn’t matter, so, why make it easy when his father was already paying to have him killed?

He made his decision.

He would let them kill him, if they could, and show his father that he would never, never, have the satisfaction of knowing that he’d made his son just like him. Even if it cost him his life.