Sword of the Scarred

by Jeffrey Hall

  But the further she went, the more she started to suspect that there was nothing there to awaken.

  She shined the glimmer light into the pockets of the cavern, hoping she would find something hidden in the deeper shadows of the tunnel, but all she found were small crumbles of stone and rents in the walls from where pickaxes had struck to make the thing in the first place.

  Eventually she came to a fork in the tunnel with two matching paths diverging in opposite directions, staring back at her empty and dark like the hollowed-out sockets of a skull.

  She took a few steps into one, saw that there was no end in sight and did the same on the other side.

  Nothing.

  She wondered just how deep the tunnel went, and even more, just how long Carry and his men had been swinging to carve such deep corridors into the stone. And as she thought, staring dumbfounded into the utter dark, she noticed an oval-shaped green stone the size of her fist.

  She picked it up and marveled at how smooth it felt, trying to recall her studies to identify the stone, but couldn’t. It was only when she held the glimmer stone closer to it that she felt the thing move.

  She dropped it, and the thing cracked on the side of one of the stone rivets, spilling a lavender-colored liquid onto the ground.

  Dash knelt and pushed aside the fragments to reveal a horrible narrow face within it. It had rows of yellow teeth and puny orange eyes and a matching tongue that looked rough and hard like leather.

  It was the egg to some beast, but none that she knew.

  She stood, confused by her findings, looked back down the way she had come, but did not walk.

  Instead, she turned towards the darkness and kept going, the shadows laughing all the while.

  Chapter 18

  Requiem awoke in pain, a familiar feeling that often chased him from his dreams. He felt it upon his gut, all the way up to his chin. It hurt to move. It was exhausting to even face such pain. All he wanted to do was return to his sleep and attempt to escape the anguish he felt, but as his lids fluttered opened he saw the white fangs of a monster bearing down on him, ready to swallow him whole.

  He sat up, throwing a hand at the beast’s mouth, reaching for his blade at his side, but instead found a hand.

  He dared to take his eyes away, and there beside him sat the girl he had rescued from the cultists, still asleep, lying against a stone wall.

  Above him, the fangs he’d thought belonged to a monster were only stalactites, blanched and glittering with the help of silvery glimmer stones lodged next to them.

  He scanned his surroundings, in disbelief that he was even alive, and saw that he was in a wide streetway surrounded by stone. There was no sign of day or night in either direction. A drab, dark den, yet it was filled with people. Everywhere he looked there were men and women scaling walls, others running baskets of supplies, and even more wandering the tamped-down streetway speaking with themselves and shuddering, clearly afflicted by a drug or illness.

  He was about to try to stand when Garp came into view.

  He definitely wished he had stayed asleep.

  “Wondering when you were gonna pop up,” said Garp. “Sick and tired of squeezing juice onto your lips, especially when all I’ve wanted to do was slap you.”

  “Good to see you too.” Requiem swallowed and tasted a sour residue in his mouth. “Where are we?”

  “Some place called the Alley of Teeth,” said Garp.

  “You mean the Alley of Fangs?” said Requiem.

  “That’s the one,” said Garp.

  Requiem had heard of it before amongst the people of upper Bothane. An avenue occupied by the only most destitute of the city, it was said to have its own laws thanks to the fact that soldiers rarely dared to venture so far low as there weren’t any tithes to collect there. That, and its denizens were often so altered by their addiction to Abysmal fruits and roots that there was no negotiating with them.

  “By the Abyss, what happened?”

  “You don’t remember?” said Garp.

  “I’m asking, ain’t I?”

  “You broke the purple-headed girl free. Girl created a goddam portal through the wall. Wall didn’t lead to anywhere, so you made us a ladder. After that, we hoofed it to her place, grabbed your girl, and came here, carting you both about like royalty in a retinue.”

  Requiem sat upright and said, “Thanks.”

  The admission seemed to disarm Garp, whose shoulders slumped a little as he heard him. Looking at him now more clearly, Requiem could see the sacks of plants tied around his neck.

  “What are you doing with those?”

  “Earning our keep,” said Garp.

  “Where’s Grey?” said Requiem, looking at the man and suddenly realizing that something was missing.

  “You don’t remember that either? The soldiers nabbed him before he could make it with us. Beat him good from what I saw, might have killed him, and yet here I am, plucking plants like a farmer while she’s off trying to save his old arse.”

  “Who’s trying to save him?” said Requiem.

  “The purple-headed one. Dash.”

  Requiem came hurriedly to his feet and almost lurched from the surge of pain that ran through him. The scar stone had taken greedily from him, he could feel it. He knew the next time he looked at his body there would be new topography of wounds for him to examine.

  “You alright?”

  Requiem spat. “You let her go?”

  “Who? Dash? Why in the heck not? Said she was gonna do some digging, find where that old fool ended up, or at least what’s left of him.” Garp looked sad, if only for a moment.

  “She’s an addict. She’s only got one thing on her mind, and that’s more of the black lens,” said Requiem.

  “Come on, now. You really think that? She seemed damn determined to find out what was going down.”

  “You’re a miner, ain’t you?”

  “Was.”

  “Was. Is. Don’t matter. I’m sure you know enough men and women caught up on something to escape the darkness of those holes. Drink. Smoke. Snuff. Whatever it takes to crawl out of their lives for a while until it becomes the only reason why they swing in the first place.”

  Garp’s eyes widened. “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How was I supposed to know?” said Garp.

  “Purple hair didn’t mean anything to you?” said Requiem.

  “No.”

  “No black lens in Drip then, I take it.”

  “What’s black lens?” said Garp.

  “Stone that makes you see things. From what I hear, it puts you into the Abyss, at least that’s what it makes you think. Geomages have used it for years to try to understand what’s below us, but all it ever leads to is doom. Addiction and then doom.”

  “So where could she have gone?” said Garp, scratching his head as he shook it in disbelief.

  “To find more,” said Requiem. He remembered seeing her reach into her pocket and pull out that small nugget of black lens. Her hesitation. The question that ran through his head, wondering why she hadn’t used it in the first place to escape, but instead allowed herself to dwindle in the dungeon. That was her last piece of it, he was sure.

  He put his hand to his head, wondering why he hadn’t listened to Shint and the others. She wasn’t trustworthy. Her only loyalty was to her drug. He’d ignored it and what had it done for him? It had put him in a street of destitution, given him a new set of scars, and no doubt sent a cadre of soldiers and thugs sniffing down his trail to put an end to him for good.

  All he’d wanted to do in the first place was say goodbye on his own terms.

  In his own way.

  He cursed beneath his breath and looked once more at the girl. So thin now… Surely the poison in her blood was wearing her down. Surely she didn’t have much life left to live. And if she did finally succumb, after all this, then what?

  Then I’ll walk away, and this will have been nothing but a reminder of why I sho
uld have put my feet over the Edge a long time ago.

  “Shit. How the hell was I going to know that?” Garp had dropped the sacks of plants. He was pacing, running his hand through his thinning hair in distress. “So no one is going to find out what happened to Grey?”

  “I know what happened to him,” came a child’s voice.

  Beside them, emerging from a ragged flap of cloth, was a blind old woman with greasy locks of hair swinging over her tattered robe. A young boy held her hand, looking at Grey with full, unblinking eyes.

  “You?” said Requiem, wondering how a child would come across such information.

  “Her. Mum Casara,” said the boy, pointing to the woman. The woman drew something on the boy’s hands, and Requiem understood she was mute. The boy was just a voice for her, and he was translating the symbols she traced in his hand. “I can’t speak or see, but I still have the most important sense about me.” The woman tapped her left ear. “I hear everything. The trickle of the water that drips down the easternmost wall. The wails of our children as they lament their lot in life. The whispers of the transients who walk these ways in search of an escape that will take them away from the catastrophes of their own minds for a bit. And it is in these whispers I have come to know what happened to your man.”

  “Is he still alive?” said Garp, squaring up to the old woman and child, his hand clenched as if he was already ready to fight to get his uncle back if the answer was yes.

  “For now,” said Mum Casara by way of the boy. “Word is that the Elder is enraged. Your man. His brother’s emissaries, the ones he allowed into his own doors were nothing but spies. The Elder is telling his people that the Younger’s troop were nothing but thugs meant to help the bandits hijack the king’s own caravan, an attack to use as an excuse to raise the taxes on the Elder’s land. Now the Elder’s threatening to hang his brother’s people over Bothane Rock in the direction of Glimmer.”

  “But it was the Elder’s man that we saw working with the bandits,” said Garp.

  “The Elder must not know what’s going on,” said Requiem. “Benglar must be up to something right under his nose.”

  “So Grey and the others are caged like beasts to work up the Younger?”

  “If he does that they’ll start the Shamble all over again,” said Requiem.

  “Not sure that the Elder cares anymore,” said Mum Casara. “A man, a country, can only take the prodding of a hard hand for so long. And the new King Larken has been jabbing Bothane and his brother’s kingdom too aggressively. He defeated the Elder, but didn’t kill him. It was only a matter of time before he would rise again. And more taxes? The Younger working with criminals to excuse it? Too much for any man to bear.”

  “The Younger wasn’t working with any criminals,” said Garp.

  “Then someone is lying,” said Mum Casara.

  “Lying, or not being fed the right information,” said Requiem. “The people he has captured? Is there a woman with them? Commander Glassius’s wife?”

  The woman nodded.

  The pain Requiem felt on his torso found its way into his gut.

  “He can’t start another war,” said Garp. “His people have barely recovered.”

  “He didn’t start this,” said Requiem. “You did.”

  “Me?”

  “You. You couldn’t have just stayed hidden. You had to charge Benglar like a fool and blow our cover,” said Requiem.

  “He was getting away. He was harboring the damn thug who jumped the caravan in the first place. I was just trying to help,” said Garp.

  “Help? I’ve seen you try to help a dozen times now and all your help has ever led to is people trying to help clean up your mess,” said Requiem, furious. He imagined Sasha behind bars, a noose around her neck, waiting for her legs to kick out over the Abyss. How could he go to the Edge now knowing she was nothing but ammunition about to be spent to start a new war? And the man before him was to blame.

  “Maybe if you didn’t take my hand!” said Garp.

  “A missing hand has little to do with it,” snapped Requiem. “With both hands you were still about as good as a stump of a man.”

  Garp opened his mouth to argue, but no words came out. He hesitated for a moment, thinking, and then stooped down to pick up the sack of plants he had thrown over his shoulders. With them, he wandered over to one of the nearby walls to join others who were picking at a row of the stuff growing on the stone.

  Requiem stared at him until he was out of sight. “Where did they put the emissaries? Do you know?”

  “Of course I do,” said the boy. “All of upper Bothane does. They’re hanging from cages on Ivy Bridge.”

  “The spoke facing Glimmer…”

  “The Elder is not hiding making a statement. Rumor has it that he has rounded up the Glimmerian soldiers too. Everyone who has anything to do with his brother is swinging in bars now. Now all he needs is all of you.”

  “Us?”

  “Surely you don’t think he would turn the other way to what you’ve done.”

  “All we were trying to do is expose the truth. One of his advisors was working with the same men that hijacked his caravan.”

  “Do you think he knows that?” said Mum Casara.

  “He will after I tell him,” said Requiem. He stood fully, no longer leaning on the stone. The wounds from the scar stone were healing, but slowly. “Watch over the girl.”

  “She is not ours to watch. It’s his duty.” She pointed to Garp.

  “Him?” said Requiem. “He can’t even watch himself. You’ll watch her until I get back.”

  “And if we refuse?” said Mum Casara.

  “Then I’ll make whatever happens to her happen to you, ten times over.”

  The woman laughed, a snicker that barely sounded like a noise at all. “How many people will you step on as you lumber across your life? You think you can trample through them and never trip?”

  “I’m still standing,” said Requiem.

  “You are,” said Mum Casara. “But look who’s beside you.”

  Requiem stopped. He stood in the middle of the alley. Only a few of the alley-dwellers were anywhere close to him, and they were busy trading secrets and drugs.

  “Even without my sight I can still see a lost creature, crying out for help in the woods of this world.” She pulled the boy in closer to her. “Known plenty in my day. They cry out in their silence, in what they do, flailing and staggering along hoping that someone will find them. They are helpless, lost things. Yet if they were to just stop throwing their tantrums and reach out they would be found.” She pointed across the alley to where Garp quietly picked at the plants growing from the walls.

  “He ain’t my people,” said Requiem.

  “Then who is?” said Mum Casara.

  Requiem eyed the man, the way his shoulders slumped and his head hung low. The man was a fool, but was Requiem even more so? He was the one who had roped him into this mess in the first place, and here he was casting out with his anger like usual, pushing aside a man who had been on his side once upon a time when Requiem himself wasn’t innocent. Garp was right. He was just as guilty for getting them into this mess.

  Requiem sighed. “Will you watch over the girl? Please?”

  “That’s a much more pleasant tone,” said Mum Casara.

  “Will you?”

  “We’ll see to it she is watered,” said Mum Casara. “That’s the best we can do down here without a thing in return.”

  “We won’t be long,” said Requiem, taking the offer.

  “We?” said Mum Casara.

  “Guess it’s too much to ask you to watch over someone else too?”

  The woman smiled. “Try for once to build with that stone of yours rather than destroy. You may be surprised by the results.”

  Requiem nodded, took one last look at the girl, and went to Garp.

  Garp was scaling a small wall to reach the droopy leaves dangling over a ledge, fighting with his body and bad arm to s
tay perched as he reached with his one hand. He noticed Requiem coming, but didn’t say anything.

  “You gonna come down from there?”

  “What for? So you can tell me how useless I am? Can’t you see I’m actually trying to do something?”

  “You ain’t useless,” said Requiem.

  “Yes, I am.” Garp reached for a plant growing high above. “You and everyone else has laid out plenty of reasons why that’s true.”

  “Well, you gonna come down from there and try to prove me wrong?”

  Garp kept reaching. His footing shifted and he fell. Requiem tried to grab him, but he hit the ground, the impact forcing the air from his lungs.

  Requiem knelt beside him. “You hurt?”

  Garp balled his one fist and slammed it on the ground. “Leave me the hell alone,” said Garp. “Don’t you have people to go save? A lord to speak with?”

  Requiem stood and put out his hand. “And so do you. I misspoke is all back there. Tough waking up with a scar as deep as your thumb on your belly and think right. You made some mistakes. So have I. Everyone should get a chance to fix them.”

  Garp stared up at the ceiling. “Even when fixing them will only lead to more?”

  “So long as you keep trying to fix it they’ll eventually be fixed.”

  Garp sat up, refusing his hand. He shrugged off the sack of plants along his shoulders. “Wasn’t meant to be no farmer. Especially not some drug picker.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I’m trying,” said Garp. “I’ve been trying. Just can’t seem to find anything that sticks.”

  “Then keep trying.”

  “I will,” said Garp, wiping his nose. “Just stay out of my way while I’m doing it.”

  Requiem nodded. “Understood.”

  Garp rose without the help of Requiem’s hand and walked towards the exit.

  Requiem followed, smiling to himself, allowing the man to show him the way.

  They arrived at the Ivy Bridge by a long and winding way. They stuck to the shadows and quiet streets, climbing up the ramps and stairwells carved into Bothane Rock, slowly ascending to the top, avoiding the groups of soldiers that prowled the city like packs of dogs hungry and on their scents. It was a difficult ascent, especially with how poor Requiem felt.