The killing didn’t take long to begin.

It didn’t matter how the fighting began. Darro’s memories weren’t clear, the one thing that was clear through the impressions of fury and flying blades, was that it was not the Hair-Vipers who started them. Sub-organizations within the Iblanie family, a sect operating from a factory that stank of welding fumes, and a sub-family that attempted to flee after their failed coup in a swarm of aircabs that smoked and fell as Darro watched the red squads shoot them down with screaming sunflares. The coup might have worked if they’d gotten to the Iblanie leadership in time, but their combined assault on the tower had taken too long, and the memories caught up in the swirling breath of Darro’s sword showed them painting the halls outside Athesh’s office red as their bodies split around the spiritual blades he sent through them. There was no anger in Marroo’s father as he killed them. Only duty, and the overwhelming command of his icon to cut, to part them from the world and cast them into the abyss.

A red squad carried him to the last sub-sect he cleared this way. The family had bet it all, and Darro made sure that the Iblanie family collected all that they had put on the table. They’d fled to a bunker when the coup failed, but one the Iblanie knew about long before the sub-family took over the operations they were responsible for, and the leader of the squad traveling with Darro knew where to find it. They’d been stupid enough to bring their families with them, even their children, a mistake that Darro made them pay for after cutting through the vault door and the inadequate guards stationed to keep the Iblanie out. The mistake disgusted Darro as he finished his task, but that disgust was nothing compared to the rage that rose in him when Dhruv’s familiar found him shortly afterward.

He barely heard the Red-Squad’s leader asking if he’d finished as he opened the familiar in its display mode and read the message. The words, scrawled in Dhruv’s tightly controlled handwriting, stood out in the memory like spiritual objects, knives as sharp as any manifested blade, and each of them pointed straight into Darro’s chest.

“Report of soldiers moving on your home. Not ours. Guards sent to stop them, but cannot be certain they will arrive in time.”

The last line of the message was unnecessary.

“Go home.”

His leap from the hovering air cab sent the vehicle spinning through the air, shedding the red guard through its open doors while the air roared in Darro’s ears and the Midnight plains howled its distant song.

He was too late. His spirit swept the compound of his home long before its walls appeared amidst the urban sprawl. At some point between Dhruv sending his message and Darro sprinting across the city, the soldiers had entered his home and left, leaving their signature scrawled across the walls in bullet holes and blood. Only three flames still burned in the house, three spiritual signatures in a compound that once housed almost two dozen, guards, servants, and his wife’s household staff, made up mostly of her old nurses and their families.

He found them when he leapt the wall. An old man in a guard’s uniform lay on the lawn with a sunflare pinned beneath his chest and three bullet holes perforating his back, a headless torso cooked inside the burning remnants of the security stall in front of his house’s gates. A third decorated the interior of the house’s doorway amidst the scars left by a grenade. He found the head nurse just inside, facedown and apparently fine except for the pool of blood around her and the other bodies of the servants hidden in the shadow cast by the night plains.

His wife and son waited for him at the center of the house. They’d been backed into a closet behind a guard who stood over them with a bugle arquebus that thundered in the confined space when Darro appeared at the door. The spray of shot took chunks out of the wall around Darro and sprayed his robes with sparks where his whirling aura chopped them to fragments, then the guard sprawled across the floor as Darro grabbed the smoking barrel and used it to hurl him out of the closet so that he could see his wife and son cowering in the corner.

His wife, and only one of their sons.

The toddler in Sikhaya’s arms stared at Darro in glassy eyed confusion while his mother clutched Marroo tight and shook. She snarled when Darro touched her and threw herself away from him to crouch in one corner. The snarl didn’t disappear when she saw that it was him.

“Don’t touch me!” She snapped when he took a step towards her.

He stopped and she turned her face away to hide the tears that sparkled on her cheeks in the shadow he cast across the closet.

“This is your fault.” She growled as she turned away from him. “You did this to us.”

His sword hand tightened as he looked down at his wife, but he didn’t move any closer to embrace her.

“Where is Eido?” He growled. “Where is our son?”

She glared up at him over their youngest’s head. “They took him.” She said. “They took him, and they killed everyone else.”

“Who?”

She told him, and Darro felt his rage grow cold as she clutched their remaining boy to her and glared up at him. “Bring him back.” She told him. “Bring him back, or don’t come back at all.”

They were waiting for him when he reached the mouth of the Dregs proper. He dropped in front of them with all the grace of a ton of bricks landing.

The impact sent a wave out from the edge of the ramp that went up to the tangle of pipes that ejected themselves from the gate to this part of the underground. His breath churned through his meridians at the force with which he’d shoved it into his limbs as he leapt tower to tower until he could leap for this spot, and he felt the icon pressing into him like a physical object that distorted his vision and turned every sensation into a knife driven into his mind.

“Give me my son!”

The command blasted dust from cracks in the cement and sent its target stumbling backwards as echoes slammed back over them from nearby towers but the guns pointed in Darro’s direction by some two hundred mercenaries standing around the entrance to the underground never wavered.

“Darro.” Veshtu said in greeting. Sweat stood out on his forehead and he didn’t meet Darro’s eyes as he straightened after enduring the force of Darro’s order. “Fancy seeing you hear.” He looked up, met Darro’s eyes, and something hardened in him. In his hand, he held a tiny wooden sword which he spun to lay against his shoulder before flickering a smile. “You’ll recognize this I think.”

Darro jerked his sword from its sheath and Veshtu reeled backwards a step as Darro took one step towards him. A handful of the mercenaries surged forward, but Veshtu snapped a hand up and they stilled.

“Give me my son.” Darro said again, this time without enough force to crack stone. He swept his gaze contemptuously over the mercenaries that glared back at him, felt them with his spirit, cultivators, all of them, each wearing the badge of their school, depicting the hammer of the adept who’d founded their organization before they abandoned him to take up freelancing for anyone with the money to pay for an adept’s acolytes.

The pumps beneath their feet thumped like subterranean thunder while the sky howled with the distant passage of the night.

“Your son is safe.” Veshtu said. He kept his arm raised, and Darro could feel him cycling his breath through the two open meridians he had. “He is as much family to us as you are.”

“And the rest of my family?” Darro snarled. “My servants? My wife?” He took another step towards Veshtu but this time Veshtu didn’t move and the mercenaries simply turned their guns to follow him.

Veshtu scowled. “Don’t let their deaths distract you, Darro.” He said. “Your son is the important one here, and we have him, alive, well. Surety, on our part, that you’ll keep the oaths we made when we were children.” He glared at Darro. “You remember those oaths, don’t you? The ones that made our sect, before you decided you wanted to live up here, in the light?” He gestured with the wooden sword at the towers blinking along the edges of the polluted industrial zone that surrounded the tangle of pipes and reservoirs.

Darro pointed his sword at Veshtu’s face. “I made this sect!” He shouted, and again his voice echoed back at them from the towers that bordered the polluted marsh. “I am the power behind this sect, and you will bring me my son, or I will kill, everyone, who ever used the Hair-Viper name.”

The sweat on Veshtu’s head stood out between the points of his widow’s peak as he shook his head. “You would kill Andow’s Kids?” Veshtu asked. He gave a strained half laugh. “No, Darro. You’re a Hair-Viper, like us. You’re one of us, and we have a job to do.” He dropped the wooden sword to tap its point on the ground. “The Iblanie have made enemies, powerful ones, with their meteoric ascension. Enemies whose power is at least a match for your own, if not more. Enemies with the kind of wealth and weapons to make, even you, just one more piece in the Sect’s arsenal.” He tapped a pistol arquebus strapped to his chest, a wide barreled variety used for lobbing grenades as short range artillery in the few engagements Darro had seen them used. “Not even the most powerful piece, not anymore.”

Through the haze of the rage and the overwhelming impression of the sword icon pressed into reality throughout the world within range of Darro’s third eye, his spirit reached out to touch the pistol strapped to Veshtu’s chest. As an adept he could sense the spiritual auras of everything in the world around him to one degree or another. Those parts of the world animated by the sword icon stood out the strongest, but the other laws that ruled existence also resonated with his spirit so that he tasted the blackpowder packed into the base of the pistol, felt the pressure behind the gears and mechanisms of its trigger, and the odd, impenetrable darkness at the heart of whatever shot was stuffed down the barrel and held in place by the retaining magnet clamped across the rear of the weapon. He found other auras like it when he swept his spirit across the mercenaries behind Veshtu, other voids staring at him from the mouths of weapons pointed in his direction.

“Show me my son.” Darro demanded and met Veshtu’s eyes.

Veshtu hesitated, but only for a moment. “He is fine, Darro.” Veshtu said. “Safe, down in the tunnels. He’s with Andow’s kids.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe at the sweat on his forehead and tried to smile. “If you’d stayed loyal, stayed with the sect, we would never have had to take this kind of measure. Kill the Iblanie, bring me the heads of their leadership, Athesh, Dhruv, Pelitow, and we’ll act like none of this ever happened.”

Darro’s spirit moved of its own accord, crawled across his sword blade and across his arms, over his shoulders and down his legs, sharpening everything on a level that didn’t care about the physical shape of his body, until even the dullest parts of his flesh could have parted stone.

“Bring me my son.” Darro whispered. “Or I swear by haunted tunnel, that I’ll kill every last one of you where you stand.”

Veshtu raised the wooden sword in his hand until it was pointed towards Darro in a mockery of the gleaming blade pointed in his direction. “I’m warning you, Darro.” He replied, so quiet Darro wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the thunder the pumps beneath them without the power of his cultivation. “You aren’t the most powerful person here anymore.” Sweat poured from Veshtu’s face, but he looked grim as he put the tip of the wooden sword between himself and Darro. “They are,” he thumbed back at the mercenaries behind him, “and they listen to me. Do as I say, and everything will be okay.”

Darro’s spirit kissed the wood of his son’s sword, and he felt a familiar aura clinging to it near it’s handle. Something red, and viscous, that made Darro’s heart seem to break.

“His blood is on that sword, you piece of shit.”

Veshtu opened his mouth but the sudden fear in his eyes was the only confirmation Darro needed.