Sword of the Scarred

by Jeffrey Hall

  “You sure you’re okay?” said Garp.

  She ignored him, her words caught in her throat as they started to pass the people of the alley. They were a scrawny and malnourished populace, wilted by the shadow and the reasons they had gone to the deepest recess in all of Bothane. Many of them chattered to themselves. Others scratched at itches that weren’t there. Some poked at small pots. Crispy legs stuck out of the brown liquid inside the pots like fingers reaching for help. It smelled sour down there. Like everything was molding or decaying. It was an unfortunate smell, but it was a familiar one.

  “That you, Dash?” An old man looked out from beneath one of the fangs, his face droopy, a crust of snot plastered on his upper lip.

  She kept walking, though she knew the man’s name.

  “How does he know who you are?” said Garp.

  “’Cause. This was my home once.”

  “What? This? A Geomage down here?”

  “A perfect place for someone like you. Go on. Tell him,” said the shadows.

  “It served its purpose at the time,” she said as they arrived at a segment of palladum so large and bent it curled into the floor. A rag was thrown over its side to create a makeshift doorway that led to one of the few things that passed as a home in the alley. A thin trail of smoke snaked out from a crack in the stone, joining the smog that hung just below the ceiling. Upon the side of the stone there were two eyes painted in black.

  Dash went to the rag and tapped four times on the side of the stone. A muffled noise sounded from within. A second later, a young boy with long dark hair appeared on the other side. He was stick-skinny and wore a ragged shirt that barely touched his thighs. His eyes were bloodshot and looked heavy with bags beneath them.

  “How do you know that knock?” said the boy as he looked up at her.

  “Because I once was you,” she said. “You her mouth?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Well, is Mum awake?”

  “Who are you?” said the boy.

  “Tell her Nora is back,” said Dash.

  The boy disappeared behind the rag.

  “Nora?” said Garp.

  Dash shrugged. “She didn’t believe in calling me by what my old family did.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Mum Casara, the relic of the Alley,” said Dash just as the boy reappeared.

  “She’ll see you,” said the boy.

  She nodded and then addressed Garp. “Better wait out here.”

  “Here? Is it safe?” said Garp.

  “You’ve got no weight on you, do you?”

  Garp shook his head. “Not a single shard.”

  “Then you’re safe.”

  Dash snuck in beneath the rag before Garp could answer. The boy took her hand as she did. As her eyes adjusted to the newfound darkness she couldn’t believe how little had changed despite the years it had been since she had called the place home. There was still the small trickle of water exposed thanks to a bore in the rock wall that filled a golden basin crafted to look like the demon head of a brimling. Glimmer stones of unusual colors, purple, red, and green, were set in different locations across the hut to nourish plants that flourished in pots, growths that looked shaggy and maligned like sleeping beasts. There was still even that broken wind chime with the long sail that looked like a cat’s tail. And there, sitting cross-legged amongst the oddities of the place, was Mum Casara.

  She didn’t look older despite the years that had passed and the new strand of grey hair that laced her dark, greasy locks that accumulated at the floor. She looked out with her blind, opaque eyes, mute, her tongue long-removed, Mum Casara had once told her, thanks to a failed experiment of trying to eat some acidic cave fruit to cure her blindness. But her ears, things that almost came to a point, still worked, and she turned slightly to face Dash as she came to stand before her.

  The boy came to Mum Casara’s side and held out his palm. Mum Casara traced into his hand, and as she did the boy spoke. “What are you doing here, Nora? Lost your stones again?”

  “How are you, Mum?”

  Mum Casara frowned and traced an image more hastily into the boy’s hand. The boy matched her tone perfectly. “You know better than to waste my time with pleasantries,” snarled the boy.

  “You’re right. I should have known you were still a busy woman,” said Dash. “I seek refuge.”

  Mum traced. “As you can see the position of mouth has already been filled by Joran here.” The boy blinked. “That’s me.”

  Mum swatted him on the side of his head. He reflexively let out an “Ow” and tried to put his hand to his head, but Mum grabbed it before it could get away. She traced.

  “Though, he’s still learning, as you can see,” said Joran, reluctantly.

  “How’d you come to be in her presence, Joran? Parents had a debt they couldn’t pay? Addiction?”

  Joran’s mouth opened, and he looked amazed that she had asked him a question about himself.

  Mum Casara traced into his palm. “The boy’s parents were lost to the Shamble many moons ago. He found his way down here by himself. Same as you. I’m helping him with his night terrors.”

  “Night terrors?” said Dash, curious.

  “What do you want, Nora?” Mum Casara traced angrily into Joran’s hand.

  “Right,” said Dash, clearing her throat. “I’ve attracted certain… attention.”

  Mum traced, and the boy squinted at his hand. He leaned towards the woman and whispered, and she swatted him again. “Sorry! She says, ‘The black lens again?’”

  “See?” said the shadows. “Even she can still smell your demise.”

  Dashinora flinched. The shadow’s voice was starting to feel like a whip every time it spoke. At last she nodded. “That’s part of it.”

  “You left this alley,” Mum Casara traced. “You chose Chendra over it. Why should it give you its protection again?”

  “Because you always said the Alley watches over its own,” said Dash. “That dirt covers dirt. And that’s what we are. The dirt dusted off the boots of upper Bothane, tossed down the shoot and forgotten about. Well, I never forgot you. I never forgot this place. Even after I left it, those short years I was here stayed with me. Besides, you were the one who told me I would rise from my current situation, come back from my loss, and stand once more. Well, here I am, standing.”

  “You didn’t rise too far. I wouldn’t call moving to a better view of the Purple a step up,” said Joran.

  Dash refrained from yelling. “I found Geomagery again. I supported myself and didn’t need to rely on your charity any longer.”

  “Charity? Is that what you call our relationship? You served as my mouth to the Alley and in turn I gave you protection. Food. Water. A safe haven when all your sister offered you was criticism. Yet when she finally got around to finding you, you let yourself be pulled back. Tell me, where is your sister now?”

  Dash stayed silent.

  “As I thought. Still looking down on you from behind her nose. Didn’t need a scholar to tell you that was gonna happen. But instead of running back here, you kept on with your other escape… The one I introduced you to.”

  Dash swallowed. She knew what she meant when she said escape. She could still remember the time she had returned to Mum Casara’s hut from gathering Mum’s tithes from the people of the Alley only to find a man seated beside her. He wore a belt with eight pouches. Each of equal size. Each bulging.

  “Good day,” the man had said, an odd thing to say in the Alley, where day and night was no matter.

  “Who are you?” Dash had said, and Mum had waved her over to her side.

  Mum had grabbed her hand and traced the man’s names in letters in her palm. “Karigan.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said the man named Karigan. “I understand that you have come to be in Mum Casara’s services under rather difficult circumstances.”

  She nodded, not knowing what else to say.

  “And that you refuse to
take any of the medicines that Mum has prescribed.”

  “My, my father said never to eat from the plants that grow off the Abyss.”

  “But your father isn’t here any longer, is he?”

  She swallowed, the truth still hard to hear.

  Karigan had reached into one of his pouches and pulled out a dark nugget of stone, one so black it looked like it was a shard of the night sky.

  “What is it?”

  “A way to escape. A way to see. A way to find.”

  “Find what?” said Dash, tilting her head to see the stone better.

  “Him,” he had said.

  “But I... I don’t understand,” she had said.

  “Take it and you will.”

  She’d looked to Mum Casara, who in turn looked back to her with her blank eyes and nodded.

  That had made her feel better. Mum had taken her in like family when she could not handle her arguing with her sister any longer and her sister had told her to leave. Mum would tell her the truth. Maybe this was a medicine that could help her? And besides, it was a stone, and her father had never said anything bad about stone, only how valuable they were.

  The man placed it in her palm. The jaggedness of the stone pricked her skin like it was the mouth of an insect. “How?”

  “Mum says you are familiar with Geomagery?” said Karigan.

  “I am,” said Dash. She had just started her training before losing their father, and hadn’t done much with it since, but she still knew some spells.

  “Do you remember how to treat with a stone?”

  “I do,” said Dash. It was the first and most important of all the spells in the spell book. By then she had already treated with a handful of stones, and could recite the words by heart.

  Karigan curled his hand around hers. “Then say the words, and say these…”

  He had told her the spell to keep the black lens’ essence, and when she treated with the stone and said the spell she was taken away from her life, put outside the anxiety that constantly stalked her like predatory monster, and it gave her a glimpse of something beyond this world. A gate to a different place. A way into the Abyss and all that it possessed.

  Bolliad. Fallen kingdoms long forgotten. People, like her father, who it had taken…

  When she came to she was lying on Mum Casara’s lap as the woman stroked her hair and traced a question into her cheek. “Does it help?”

  Dash had stayed there, blinking, waiting for that return of despair, but could not find it in the after effects of the Abyss.

  At last she was healed. At last she was free.

  The voices didn’t start until later, and by then it was already too late.

  But she had Mum Casara to thank for that freedom. It allowed her to rise, if not far. And though she resented it, she was thankful that the woman had taken pity on her when she had. And she was thankful for her still.

  “I did not come here to insult you, Mum. I would not be where I am today without your help. Without your guidance.” She swallowed hard after saying that, realizing the irony in her words. But after all the time she’d spent with Mum Casara, she knew her pride and ego were her most important things.

  “I’m glad you haven’t turned your eyes from that at least.” Mum Casara’s finger stalled on Joran’s palm while she thought. “You can find refuge here so long as you work like the others.”

  “What needs to be done?”

  “The feather rod plucked for the season. The lines of athodane trimmed back… Surely you have not forgotten the work needed to tend the garden.”

  “How could I forget the stink of feather rod still on my hands? You will have your extra hands in exchange for a temporary refuge. However, they will not be mine.”

  Mum Casara cupped her ear, a sign that Joran did not need to translate.

  “It’s for my friends. I have other things that need tending to.”

  “What do you mean I’ll have to work? Where are you going?” said Garp.

  “There’s something I need to take care of,” said Dash.

  “What?” said Garp, pacing, touching his wrist near his stump. “What would you need to do that you would need to leave me here with these two? My uncle is captured. By the Abyss, he might be dead for all I know. We need to go see, or did you forget?”

  “That’s exactly what I plan on doing,” said Dash. “Finding out where he’s being kept.”

  Garp raised his eyebrows. “Really? Why? You don’t even know him.”

  “I know the Elder is up to something. That entire keep is full of secrets. I plan on cracking it open like a nut.”

  “Then let me help,” said Garp.

  “You can help by staying here. Out of sight.”

  Dash turned, thinking that would be the end of it, but she heard a loud thud at her back. When she turned, she saw Garp shaking his hand as if he had just punched the rock.

  “What are you trying to do? Lose another hand?”

  “I’m sick of it,” said Garp.

  “Sick of what?” said Dash.

  “People treating me like I’m some fool incapable of doing a damn thing save watching over stuff like some lazy guard dog.”

  “I, I didn’t mean for it to come off like that.”

  “What did you mean then?”

  “We can’t leave these two here unattended. Mum Casara, the people of the Alley, they’ll protect us, but they won’t tend to us. I thought since I have a sack of stones”—she tapped the overstuffed purse on her hip—“I would be better equipped for this type of job.”

  Garp nursed his hand, looking down.

  “Besides, I’m just going to poke around a bit. When I find him, I wasn’t planning on trying to free him without your help.”

  “You mean that?” said Garp.

  Dash nodded.

  “Well then, hurry up,” said Garp. “Plucking feather rod sounds even more boring than swinging a pickaxe.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Dash, and as she spoke the shadows rose again, laughing.

  “Your best?” said the shadows. “We know where you’re going.”

  “Shut up!” she snapped, and before she could think twice about what she was doing, she was hurrying out of the Alley of Fangs, back along the path she had taken, towards the entrance to Proth Prodigy’s hideout.

  “What are you doing here?” said the Abyss, a question she had asked herself many times.

  The black door to Proth’s Prodigy stood before her like an imperfection in the stone, as if whatever god had put the rock together forgot to seal it shut and keep the wickedness from pervading its heart.

  Her hands clenched as the laughter once more rang in her head. All she wanted to do was escape it, and her own situation. This was the longest she had ever been without black lens, and now it seemed the voices and the laughter were constant. That constant sense of befuddlement, even worse.

  There was only one thing that would alleviate such symptoms, and she knew of only one place that would have it.

  “Come then. See what you can do here,” said the shadows.

  And Dash obliged. She reached into her pouch and pulled out the lone nugget of fire bone she had scavenged from her floor—a piece she probably should have handed over to Carry—and placed it on the door. She activated it and stepped back onto the bridge.

  She should have been more scared than she felt, but all she could think of was what awaited on the other side of the door. She grabbed hold of two pieces of manochite and held them in her hands, and the door blew to pieces. The shrapnel fell and scattered like insects disturbed from their home, and before the smoke settled from the fire bone’s reaction she was inside the tunnel, her mouth ready to utter the spell that would release the essence of manochite and burn the eyes of the thugs who dared to stand in her way.

  But as she breached the entrance and the darkness swallowed her there was no one waiting for her. Only the images painted on the stalactites stared back at her, unblinking, curious even.


  “Go further then, Dashinora,” said the shadows. “Do not let a single member escape your retribution.”

  She hurried on. She was so tired. She couldn’t remember the last time she had slept, yet still she felt electrified. Fueled by her hunt.

  She went deeper, peeking into rooms and snaking corridors, expecting to see members of Proth’s Prodigy around every corner, but every place she looked was empty.

  “They run from you,” said the shadows, and she couldn’t tell if they were mocking her or encouraging her.

  It only made her go faster.

  She busted into the main chamber expecting to confront Carry and take the black lens from his own hands, but that too was empty. All the boxes. The piles of stones and weapons… All of it was gone. The black lens included.

  “No,” she muttered.

  “Uh oh,” said the shadows.

  She fell to her knees as a wave of desperation fell over her, but she caught herself on the table. From her vantage point she gazed into the darkness of a tunnel that ran off from the chamber. A place she had only glimpsed when she’d shuffled in to make her delivery and run away with her reward like some backstreet messenger girl.

  There was no light back there.

  “Go on,” said the shadows. “It calls to you.”

  Dash climbed upon the table, stood, and dislodged one of the glimmer stones providing light overhead. She held it out in front of her as she climbed down and entered the tunnel.

  She walked slowly at first, careful of what the light might reveal from the darkness, but all it unveiled was more tunnel, more stone.

  Where was it going? What was it taking her to?

  “This will be your doom,” said the shadows.

  “Shut up,” she muttered, trying not to speak too loud for fear of what she could awaken in the darkness.