A Discourse in Steel

by Paul S. Kemp

  Don’t use the mindmagic casually, Mere, Rusilla projected, then said aloud, “You know better. And I’m trying to rest.”

  Merelda massaged her temples. “Did you, though?”

  “Not in a while. We don’t have the coin right now and I’m not sure she wants to sell a part interest. I can’t push her, Mere. And I’m not sure it’s right for us.”

  Merelda nodded. Tesha was not one to be pushed around. “I think it is and I’d wager we could buy from the boys.”

  A long silence. “Let’s see how things go, Mere.”

  “Let’s see how things go usually means no.”

  “Let’s just see, all right? I don’t like owing them anything more than we already do.”

  Merelda stayed on her side of the screen. She didn’t want to see Rose’s impatient expression.

  “They’re nice to us, Rose. And they don’t expect anything.”

  In fact, both Egil and Nix seemed so solicitous of the sisters that Merelda sometimes teasingly reminded them that she and Rose weren’t made of glass.

  “Not yet,” Rose said. “But they will. That’s how men think.”

  “That’s how our brother thought,” Merelda said. “But he wasn’t all men.”

  She could imagine the roll of Rose’s eyes.

  “We’ll see, Mere,” Rose said.

  Mere rolled her own eyes and pulled off the headdress she wore. She set it down beside the incense burners, small gong, and various crystals that decorated the table they used for readings. The smell of cooking meat cut through the smell of incense that always lingered in the tent. Merelda realized she was hungry.

  She poked her head around the screen and found Rose just as she expected—reclined on the divan, her long red hair spilling over the arm, her pale skin made even paler by the makeup they wore.

  “I have a headache,” Merelda said. “You take the next one, all right?”

  “A headache?” Rose asked, concern in her pale face. She sat up. “Are you all right?”

  “Just fatigue, I think,” Merelda said.

  Rose stood, came to her side, and put her hand on Merelda’s brow.

  “I’m not sick, Rose,” Merelda said. “Just tired.”

  Rose dropped her hand and hugged Merelda. “I know. The readings are taxing, even the shallow ones. But it’s worked and the coin is coming in steady now.” She held Merelda at arm’s length. “We’re not going to do this forever. Just till we save enough to start something real.”

  “Talk to Tesha again,” Merelda said. “And if she’s not interested, then talk to the boys. Owning part of the Tunnel would be a good thing.” She laughed. “Pits, we could even rename it.”

  “It is a tasteless name,” Rose said. “Fine, I’ll talk with them. And I’ll take the next few readings, too, but you fetch some lunch, then, yeah? Maybe some of Orgul’s sweetbreads? I can smell them all the way in here.”

  “Me, too.”

  As Rose donned her costume, Merelda shed hers, removing the outer robes and the gaudy jewelry. Mere took five commons from the coffer they kept hidden under the divan and winked at Rose.

  “Be back shortly.”

  Before she hurried out the back flap of the tent, the small bells that lined the front flap chimed as someone entered. Rose smiled her crooked smile, fell into character, and stepped out from behind the screen.

  “You’ve come for a reading on a matter of trust,” Rose said to the patron. “Sit here, across from me…”

  Smiling, Merelda ducked out and into the narrow way between their tent and the thin, slatboard walls of Veraal’s smoke-leaf stall beside them. She stepped out into the din and press of the Low Bazaar, turned for Orgul’s stall, and ran headlong into a thin, balding man wrapped in a brown cloak.

  “Sorry, milady, sorry,” the man mumbled, not making eye contact. He sounded drunk.

  Merelda grabbed the man by the cloak and with her other hand checked her pocket to ensure the copper commons were still there. They were, so she released the man.

  “No harm done,” she said, and let the man go.

  A crowd thronged the wool stall, everyone jostling and barking bids for bales of wool. A smaller crowd lingered before Veraal’s smoke-leaf stall, examining bunches of his leaf. Veraal, his thin gray hair crowning a face that looked made from old leather, pulled the pipe from his smoke-stained teeth, blew out a cloud of smoke, and smiled at Merelda.

  “I’ll bring you a bite!” she called to him, and he saluted her with his pipe.

  She swam through the sea of colors, sounds, and smells, following her nose to Orgul’s stall one row over, where four braziers sizzled with small cuts of organ meat.

  Blackalley hung in the air before them. As they approached it, Nix felt its darkness pulling at the reservoirs of regret and sorrow that filled the lonely, late-night places inside him, but he forced his mind to focus on brighter things: Mamabird, the joy the urchins must feel when they found one of the coins he left scattered about the Warrens; he thought of the sisters, Rusilla and Merelda Norristru, whom he and Egil had saved from a dark fate.

  Everything went black and silent the moment they walked into the swirl. Nix could see nothing. He felt stretched thin, a piece of parchment about to be torn. The darkness was oppressive, heavy, and seemed to cling to him, as greasy as lamp oil. He found it hard to breathe. He lost his sense of direction. Nausea twisted his guts. Things forgotten churned up from the muddy bottom of his memories, sins small and large, petty things he’d done, spiteful things, all the things he wished he had never done, that he wished he could undo. He wanted only to curl up on the ground and forget everything, just go to sleep and forget.

  It’ll weigh down on you. Don’t let it.

  He flashed on Mamabird, her smile, and came back to himself.

  “All right? Egil, are you all right?”

  “What?” Egil said, his voice muted. “Yes.”

  “Keep walking and think of happy things,” Nix said. He had an idea of the dark memories Blackalley would dredge up for Egil. “Only happy things, priest.”

  “Right,” Egil said, though without conviction.

  Nix looked behind him, saw the faint green lights of his burning magefire, and it gave him hope. He thought of the moments he’d spent laughing with Egil, Kiir’s long hair flowing down her back, her smile, Mamabird. He thought of Mamabird’s laugh, her stew, her hugs. Mamabird. Mamabird.

  The darkness around them thinned and the silence gave way to weeping, wailing, not from them, but from others. The sound was so plaintive, so hopeless, that Nix wondered if the portal had taken them into one of the Eleven Hells, where the evil were reborn only to suffer.

  He realized that the crystal’s light was faintly penetrating a few paces into the black. The dark earth felt spongy underfoot, organic, like walking on flesh.

  Warmth in his cloak. The journal! They were getting closer to Drugal.

  “We’re getting closer,” he said, but Egil appeared not to hear him.

  “Who’s out there?” Egil shouted, startling Nix.

  “Gods, prie—”

  “Hulda? Asa?”

  Nix hadn’t heard his friend say the names of his wife and daughter in many years. He cursed, pointed the crystal at Egil. The priest’s shadowed face showed wide, unfocused eyes.

  “Egil?” Nix shook him. “Egil?”

  The priest looked past him, nearly shoved him aside. “Asa, where are you? Hulda? I should never have left. I’m sorry.”

  The priest’s speech was slurred when he said “sorry,” as if he were half asleep. He started off through the darkness, trying to shake Nix loose as he went.

  Weeping sounded on all sides of them, forlorn, bereft. Nix lost track of the direction in which they were moving. The journal in his cloak went cold.

  “Egil! Godsdammit, Egil!”

  He tried to pull Egil to a halt, but the priest was a mountain of muscle and Nix could barely slow him down.

  “Hulda! Hulda!”

  “Dammit
, Egil! Your wife and daughter are not here! Egil!”

  Nix glanced over his shoulder and saw the twin points of his magefire growing fainter, like distant, dying stars.

  “We won’t be able to get out!” he said, grunting against Egil’s pull.

  But Egil didn’t hear him and dragged him onward and soon the darkness had swallowed the magefire entirely.

  “Shite!” Nix cursed, and tried to plant his feet. “Stop, Egil! Stop!”

  “Asa!” the priest said, his voice breaking with tears. “Asa, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  The journal against Nix’s chest warmed.

  Egil slumped to the spongy earth, weeping. “Asa. Asa.”

  The darkness around them deepened, perhaps fed by Egil’s thoughts. Nix fought it with thoughts of sun and laughter and love. A presence manifested off in the black. To Nix it felt like a door had opened and something big and dark and terrible was looking through. Nix sensed the weight of an alien regard as it settled on him. His teeth chattered. A breeze picked up, warm and damp, like the breath of something unimaginably huge.

  Nix’s mind roiled, memories assaulting him, hateful things, matters he regretted, things that made him loathe himself. The darkness grew more profound. He could barely see. The light of his crystal was dying. He wanted to cry, to curl up and cry. He ran his finger over his falchion’s edge, drew blood, and hissed at the pain.

  “Keep yourself, keep yourself, keep yourself,” he said over and over. He dug a fingernail into the cut on his thumb and the pain gave him focus. The darkness relented a bit. But something was coming, something dark and spiteful and beyond Nix.

  “Asa,” Egil pleaded, sobbing. “Oh, Asa.”

  Nix kneeled over the priest and smacked him hard, once, twice, a third time.

  “Egil! Egil!”

  The priest bled from his nose and Nix hit him again and again.

  “Egil! There’s something in here, something that feeds on sorrow and hate and regret. It’s coming for us now and we have to get out! Get up! Get up!”

  “What?” the priest’s eyes gained focus. He daubed at his nose. “What? Oh gods, Nix.”

  With the priest freed from the cage of his thoughts, the darkness lifted still more. Nix thought he heard a slithering out in the black, something huge and serpentine sliding over the spongy earth.

  “Come on!” he said, and they staggered through the dark, nearly blind, both terrified, as something awful squirmed after them.

  The journal in Nix’s chest went from warm to hot. He wanted to ignore it, but he couldn’t.

  “Wait, wait! He’s close, Egil.”

  “I know!”

  “No, I mean Drugal! Professor Drugal! Quiet.”

  They fell silent and tried to listen over the sounds of their own beating hearts and gasps. Sobs from the left.

  “There,” Nix said, and pulled Egil along behind him. He pointed with the light, its beam a faint, diffuse glow, and saw Drugal. The professor lay on the ground on his side, half submerged in the dark, spongy earth. Tendrils of it snaked up his arms and face like black veins, like roots. It was as if he were being slowly absorbed by the ground. He had his hands over his eyes and his body shook with sobs. He murmured something unintelligible.

  “Gods,” Nix said. He kneeled and put his hand on the professor’s shoulder. “Professor Drugal!”

  The presence grew closer, stronger, darker.

  “Nix!” Egil warned.

  “I know.” Nix shook Drugal. “Drugal!”

  Nix tried to roll the professor over but he was stuck. Nix tried harder, heard a wet ripping sound, and the professor screamed with agony. Nix put the crystal eye right up to the professor’s body and almost puked.

  The earth—or whatever it was—had merged with his flesh, the spongy, black substance growing into his skin and into his body. Nix pried one of the professor’s hands from his face. His eyes were gone, replaced by a nest of black, scaly tendrils that presumably snaked up into his brain. Much of his body must have been filled by the writhing appendages.

  Nix thought of himself and Egil going out that way and the idea nearly overwhelmed him, but he pushed it away.

  “Nix, it’s coming,” Egil said.

  “I can’t leave him like this,” Nix said.

  “So don’t,” Egil said meaningfully. “Don’t.”

  Nix took his point.

  “Sorry,” he said to his old professor. He stood and stabbed Drugal through the chest. The professor’s entire body spasmed, and black ichor rather than blood oozed from the wound. But at least the weeping stopped. Nix hoped he found peace.

  Nix looked back into the darkness where lurked a horror. He saw nothing, but he sensed it there, awesome and terrible and sinister.

  “Come on,” he said to Egil.

  Together, they hurried off but Nix quickly realized he had no idea where his magefire beacons were. He didn’t know in which direction they were heading. They could’ve been going in circles.

  “Nix,” Egil said, tension thick in his voice.

  “I know.”

  “We have to go.”

  “I know.”

  “Which way?” Egil said. “Which way?”

  “I don’t know! I can’t see the damned lights! I need to think!”

  The presence closed on them. Another warm breeze blew over them, the exhalation of reified terror. Nix fought down thoughts that bubbled from the dark parts of himself.

  “Then think on the run!” Egil said, and grabbed him and pulled him along. They staggered and stumbled along in the darkness, the lurker looming large in their thoughts.

  “I don’t see any lights!” Egil said.

  “We don’t need the lights,” Nix said, and stopped.

  “What?”

  “It feeds on sorrow, on self-loathing, regret. We’re going to give it the opposite.”

  “What? You’re not making sense.”

  “Yes I am. Turn around. Face it. And shove everything pleasing and happy back into its face.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re going to make it spit us out, Egil.”

  “The fak?”

  “Do it.”

  As one, they stopped, turned around, and faced the emptiness, faced the fact that they’d done things and thought things that shamed them.

  The darkness was utter, a black curtain, and cold, and coming, and the something that lurked within it was terrible and old and hateful, the embodiment and sum of the regrets and spite and shame of who knew how many poor souls trapped within.

  Nix realized all that, realized the force of the creature he faced, held his ground, and smiled. He turned his thoughts mostly to Mamabird, but he thought too of friends he’d known and loved and with whom he’d laughed, he thought of Kiir’s smile, of Tesha’s well-intentioned anger, he thought of a stray dog he’d befriended in adolescence, of lives he’d saved over the years. He thought of Egil, of a friendship that had weathered the worst the world could do and endured.

  The darkness howled at him, a deep rumble that carried a city’s worth of spite in its bass tone. It came closer, closer, picking up speed. Nix imagined a great mouth, filled with fangs and hate and rage.

  “Don’t move, Egil. Think of the day your daughter was born, her first smile, think of the first girl you loved, your first kiss, the day you married your wife, think of that time we got over on that one-eyed sorcerer and his familiar, think of Lis when she touched your arm at the Tunnel…”

  The darkness streaked toward them, a howling, shrieking black wind that cloaked them in cold and night. They screamed in answer, braced against its onslaught, shielding their faces and blinking in the ink, and Nix heard something in the shriek, a plaintive wail that sounded like…

  The gong of Ool’s clock.

  A cool drizzle fell. Nix looked around, startled, the echo of Blackalley’s howl still in his ears. He stood at the mouth of an alley, but not the alley in the Warrens. He grabbed Egil by his biceps.

  “
We’re out! You did it! You all right?”

  Egil shook his huge head, looked around as if he’d just awakened from a three-day drunk. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. Where are we? Not in the Warrens.”

  “No.” Nix searched the skyline for Ool’s clock, for the Archbridge. He could smell the Meander in the wind, fish and sewage.

  “Near the Dock Ward, I think.”

  “What happened?”

  “I guess it spat us out.” Nix answered.

  “It’s a good thing you taste like shite,” Egil said.

  “You’re not the first to say that.”

  The sun was up, though hidden by a blanket of rain clouds. It was early morning. How long had they been trapped in Blackalley? It had seemed less than an hour, yet many hours had passed.

  “Gods,” Egil said, and ran his hand over his tattoo. “Gods.”

  “Thirded,” Nix said.

  Egil gathered himself. “Well done, my friend.”

  Nix nodded, pleased with the ordinarily stoic priest’s praise.

  Egil blew out a breath, dusted himself off. “Who’s going to tell Enora about Drugal?”

  “You are.”

  “Why me?”

  Nix dropped his voice an octave to imitate Egil’s deeper voice. “Because sometimes you have to do the right thing, Nix.”

  Egil sagged. “Shite. All right.”

  “But first a drink, yeah?”

  “Aye,” Egil said.

  “Then a visit to Mamabird, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Be more than good to see her.”

  As they walked away, Nix couldn’t help but glance back at the alley: shadowed but not black, not Blackalley. He thought of the sound he’d heard in Blackalley’s shriek, the plaintive words that had come not from those trapped inside but from Blackalley itself.

  Free us.

  He shivered and blamed the rain. Seemed better that way. He pulled his cloak tight about him and they made their way to the Slick Tunnel.

  —

  Rusk lingered among the crowd and watched the fortune-teller—Merelda was her name, the younger of the two faytors—disappear into the swirl of color and noise. She’d just made his work easier and for that he tossed a pray at Aster, god of the guild. Wasting no time, he ducked down the narrow opening between the fortune-teller’s tent and the adjacent smoke-leaf stall.