A Discourse in Steel

by Paul S. Kemp

  “Aye.” He smiled at some memory. “Well, you tell them Veraal says hello. You tell them if they need something, or if you do, they know where to find me.”

  “Uh, all right. I will.”

  “You be back tomorrow?”

  She smoothed Rose’s hair back from her face. “I…don’t know.”

  He nodded, drew on his pipe. “I’ll watch your tent and things while you’re gone. Remember: you need something, you let me know.”

  The man and the two women came out of the tent, all three smoke-smudged, the man still carrying a bucket of water.

  “All out, dear,” the heavier and older of the two women said to Merelda. “Your stuff is fine, ’cept the one chair.” She nodded at Rose. “She all right?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Thank you.” And then, to Veraal, “And thank you.”

  She hugged him close and he stuttered in surprise. He smelled of smoke and sweat and was all sinew and gristle, and she wondered what he’d done before vending smoke leaf in the Low Bazaar. She’d have to ask Egil.

  The crowd was already dispersing, the regular sounds of the Low Bazaar returning. Still no sign of the Watch. She wondered if they’d come at all.

  “Take care of your sister,” Veraal said. “I’ll take care of all this till you come back.”

  —

  Rusk dodged Watch patrols as he crossed the city, more out of habit than real concern. The Watch wouldn’t be looking for him. Killings were as common as a common in the Low Bazaar. No one would know the murdered man had been the Upright Man. The tat would’ve disappeared with his death, and few knew his face. The former leader of Dur Follin’s Thieves’ Guild was just another nameless body tossed up by the swirl of the Bazaar.

  Rusk checked his own tat obsessively as he walked, trying to will it into adding a blade. He must’ve looked a fool, eyeing the back of his hand every few steps, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t even want to consider the possibility that he’d taken the risk he’d taken and not earned the score he expected.

  He threw a pray at Aster, muttering under his breath, asking for the blessing he’d earned.

  He high-stepped piles of horse manure, slid through gatherings of laborers, peddlers, and teamsters, dodged wagons and mules, and checked the damned tat again and again.

  Still no change.

  As he moved north and east, Dur Follin’s buildings grew taller and less decrepit. Wood and mud-brick buildings gave way to baked brick and mortared stone. The streets became wider, paved with rough cobblestone, and carriages and horses filled them rather than open-top wagons pulled by mules and ponies. Merchants with oiled mustaches seemed everywhere, eyeing various goods while their bodyguards eyed passersby.

  He moved past and through it all, as unobtrusive as a ghost.

  Behind him, Ool’s clock chimed another hour gone. The toll of the clock always summoned memories. He’d grown up in the shadow of the clock spire, not quite in the Warrens, but not too far removed. His father had gone dusty before Rusk had seen six winters, and his mother, who’d been a gimcrack, had provided for them afterward by doing odd jobs. He’d spent much of his childhood hungry. By ten he’d been nimming to eat, cutting buttons in the market, filching cloaks. By fifteen he’d been filching and pummeling nobs because it made things easier, not because he enjoyed it. His mother had gone dusty in a redsmoke den when he was sixteen. He hadn’t even known she’d been a user. By twenty he’d clicked his first man—another non-guildthief who’d double-crossed him on a job—and by twenty-two he’d wormed his way into the guild. At thirty-two he’d earned a spot on the Committee. And now, at forty-five, he was Fifth Blade and looking to move up to Sixth, two steps removed from Channis, whom he presumed was the new Upright Man. He came around the corner of Mandin’s Way, showing a fak-finger to an oncoming carriage that almost hit him.

  Mandin’s Way, a wide street lined with two-story shops and inns and club halls, followed the Meander’s winding bank and ended in the Dur Follin Fish Market, a tent-and-stall-city in the shadow of the Archbridge. Street vendors hawked smoked fish and the ubiquitous river eel. He could hear their calls three blocks away.

  The rise of Mandin’s Way allowed him to see over the low stone ride of the dock wall to the small fishing boats that bobbed near the river’s edge. The faint sound of drums and chanting carried from the high arc of the Archbridge, the sounds like voices coming down from the Seven Heavens. Pipe smoke carried from somewhere, the aroma of roasting meat.

  Ahead and to his right he saw the familiar low stone wall and hodgepodge structure of the guildhouse. Channis would be waiting for him there in his private wing.

  A century earlier the guildhouse had been a public inn called the Squid, a three-story brick-and-wood affair complete with a wall, stable, and terrace that overlooked the Meander. Then it had been the haunt of ferrymen and fishermen and others who made their living on the river.

  The guild had started as a small group of rogues running an extortion operation that milked fishermen. The operation had grown quickly and the group soon formalized their relationship and sealed the deal with religion. The very first Committee, worshippers of Aster all, had founded the guild in the common room of the Squid, each taking Aster’s sigil while they swore the oaths and threw the prays.

  Later, they’d bought the inn and converted it to a private club for their ever-growing criminal operation. Today everyone called the founders the Arch Rogues and the eight of them had been buried in honor in the catacombs under the guildhouse. Their decision to form the guild, to make it a religious as well as criminal enterprise, had made a lot of men rich over the years, and a lot of other men dead. Rusk was angling for the former.

  Now the Squid was known simply as the guildhouse. And both guild and house had grown bigger and stronger every year. Rusk figured one day the Committee would put their own man in the office of Lord High Mayor and the city would be theirs.

  Meanwhile the guild’s operations were a maze, and so too was the house, complete with underground tunnels and secret passages and deadfalls. Only the Upright Man was said to know all the building’s secrets, and then only because the knowledge came to him when his tat showed the eighth blade.

  Rusk checked his tat. Nothing. Shite.

  As the Fifth Blade on the Committee, Rusk managed the guild’s business in a large piece of the city in and around the Low Bazaar. If Aster threw him the Sixth Blade, he’d take over the Dock Ward and the Archbridge.

  Warehousing and religion. That’s where the real coin was.

  The current Sixth Blade, Trelgin, would move to Seventh Blade and become the Upright Man’s right hand. Trelgin deserved it, prick that he was.

  Shite job, Seventh Blade. Much status, little coin.

  A Seventh Blade ran nothing on his own, had no independent stream of coin. A Seventh Blade served the Upright Man and depended on his largesse for a cut of guild proceeds. He was a handmaid, nothing more, and the constant hope of a Seventh Blade was to become the new Upright Man, either through death or retirement of the current Upright Man. Where the Seventh Blade was shite, the Eighth Blade was gold. Lots of status, lots of coin. But also lots of threats and lots of murder attempts. And sometimes those attempts succeeded, as Rusk well knew.

  No, Sixth Blade was the perch and Rusk wanted to be the bird.

  A block from the guildhouse, he felt his tat start to change and almost hooted with joy. He felt it first as a tingle on his skin, but the tingle soon grew to a slight burning. His heart jumped. He darted across the street and stood in the shadow of a cloth merchant, his back to the passersby. He’d handle the bridge and warehouses better than Trelgin, with a more forceful hand, and in the process he’d get very rich. And once he was very rich, he’d build a manse on the Shelf and scandalize the old noble families that lived there. He’d keep a harem of women around, like a Jafari Sultan, and eat well and get fat and be done with guild life.

  Wincing at the pain but excited, he watched the tat squirm on his flesh
, Aster’s will drawn in ink on the skin of one of his stealing priests. The tat sprouted another blade and he clenched his fist in glee to help contain his shout. But the burning did not stop, nor had the tat stopped changing. He stared in dumbfounded disbelief as it grew a seventh blade.

  “Shite,” he said, his jaw clenched so tightly that words could barely get between his teeth. He rubbed at the magical ink. “No, no, no. Shite, shite, shite.”

  He hadn’t earned enough as a Fifth Blade to skip the Sixth and go right to the Seventh. He’d be as broke as an ugly whore. He’d never get out of the life. He’d be stuck serving Channis for a decade. If he ever became the Upright Man himself, he’d be too old to enjoy the coin.

  “Godsdammit, no! Trelgin is supposed to be Seventh Blade! Trelgin!”

  But no matter how much he rubbed, there it was: a seventh blade. He’d be the right hand to Channis, whom he presumed to be the new Upright Man. Aster had spoken through his ink, and he’d told a bad joke in the process.

  “Fak, fakkin’, fak!”

  “You all right, goodsir?” said a passerby, a thirty-something merchant in a fur-lined tailored cloak and polished boots.

  Rusk whirled on the man. The fakker’s oiled mustache irked him. Everything irked him. He shoved the prick to the muddy ground, kicked him once, and spat at his feet.

  “Worry after your own business, bunghole!”

  The man scurried back crabwise, wide-eyed, and almost got trampled by a passing horse.

  “I meant nothing,” the man said. “Apologies. Apologies.”

  Other onlookers gave them a wide berth, though Rusk heard a woman say to her companion that someone should summon the Watch.

  He wanted no part of the Watch, not at the moment. He was the godsdamned Seventh Blade. He couldn’t have a run-in with the Watch.

  “If you mean nothing, then say nothing, fakker,” he said to the merchant, and the man nodded fearfully.

  Rusk stepped past the man, seething, and stalked down Mandin’s Way. Channis was neither generous nor forgiving. And worse, he wasn’t careless. Seventh to Channis was a shite job even by the measure of shite jobs.

  “Fak!”

  He was so preoccupied with Aster’s little jest that he almost forgot to give the hand signs as he walked through the low, outer wall of the guildhouse. The snipers in the gatehouse probably would have recognized him and held their fire, but maybe not. As it was, he remembered at the last moment and made the intricate symbols with his fingers.

  “I already got shot in the arse once today. What’s another few to me?”

  He tried to get himself under control as he approached the raised porch and front double doors of the guildhouse, still painted with the image of a black squid and marked “members only.” He wondered if word of the Upright Man’s death had beaten him back.

  He opened the reinforced metal-banded doors—every door in the guildhouse was reinforced and with its own lock—and nodded at Kherne and Dool, the muscle on duty. They were Channis’s men.

  “The Man wants to see you,” Kherne said, his lazy eye looking off to Rusk’s left.

  “The Man does?” Rusk said, not wanting to tip his knowledge.

  “Channis,” Kherne said.

  Dool nodded a head as large as a slop bucket. “Committee got reordered today.”

  Channis must have let out word that he’d sprouted an eighth blade. The rogues would be moving, trying to figure out who was who and what was what.

  “I know,” Rusk said, nodding at his tat.

  “What about you, then?” Kherne asked, trying to see Rusk’s tattoo. “You move up to Sixth?”

  “No,” Rusk said, and walked off.

  “You’re not Sixth Blade?” Dool called after him.

  “No,” Rusk muttered as he made his way through the labyrinthine corridors and stairways of the guildhouse. “I’m fakked is what I am.”

  Egil and Nix sat alone at the Tunnel’s bar, the stink of Gadd’s pipe smoke in their noses, the memory of Blackalley on their minds. Tankards of ale sat on the time-scarred bar before them, untouched. Nix could not shake what he’d seen and felt, the old man he’d killed for bread, the pettiness he’d been reminded of, the spite. The words he’d heard as Blackalley spat them out haunted him still.

  Free us.

  He wasn’t even sure anymore that he hadn’t said the words himself. He tapped his fingers on the bar, agitated. Gadd’s smoke agitated him. The stink of the Tunnel agitated him, being, as it was, all sweat and sex and smoke. Everything agitated him.

  Behind them a few laborers and merchants sat at the tables, talking and laughing. The men and women who sold their bodies in the Tunnel lingered on the staircase—their tight, revealing clothing an open invitation.

  “So,” Nix said, turning his back to the bar and drumming his fingers.

  “So,” Egil agreed.

  “You’re irritable.”

  Egil stared up at the picture of Lord Mayor Hyram Mung. “I haven’t said anything.”

  “It’s your silence that shows your irritability.”

  Egil glanced over at him. “You make no sense.”

  “See!” Nix said, and pointed a finger at his friend. “Irritable.”

  Egil shook his head and took the virginity of his ale.

  “Didn’t I tell Gadd to take down that thrice-damned picture of Mung?” Nix said. “He looks like a sow. And his beady eyes annoy me.”

  Nix drew one of the many throwing daggers he kept secreted on his person and threw. The blade pierced Mung’s eye.

  “Better,” Nix muttered.

  “Who’s irritable again?” Egil asked.

  Nix glared at the priest. “You’re just trying to irk me, aren’t you?”

  Egil shrugged. “You seem irked already.”

  “Me? No! If I were irked I’d…” He trailed off, took a drink of his own ale, set the tankard back down hard enough to slosh some over the edge. “All right, aye. I’m irked.”

  “It’s Blackalley,” Egil said.

  “It is!” Nix said, raising his arms and nearly leaping from his seat. “What was that? Regrets and sorrow and…”

  Egil shook his head and took another pull of ale. “A fakkin’ horror is what it was. Bleak.”

  The words Nix had been holding back came rushing out of him. “Making us see everything we’ve done and didn’t do and should’ve done? No one should have to face that. I been running from that my whole life. Everyone does. The past is the past. I don’t want to live inside my own head.”

  “None’d blame you for that,” Egil said. “Empty place, likely.”

  “Now you’re funny?”

  “No. Apologies. But the past isn’t the past, Nix. The past is us. It’s the series of moments that led up to who we are right now.” He jabbed a finger on the bar. “Everything that went before led up to this moment.”

  “Gods, man! Getting all priestly, now, are we? Why would you do that?” He shook his head. “Fak.”

  Egil ran his palm over the Eye of Ebenor.

  Nix couldn’t let it go. He picked up his ale, put it back down, fiddling with the handle. “You telling me we can’t leave the past behind us? ’Cause there are some moments I’d rather forget. Lots of them, really.”

  “You can forget them, but they’re still you. Everything you’ve done and seen and felt, it all sums to you, it adds up to this moment. It doesn’t matter if you can remember the individual moments that lead up to it. Because they’re all in you right now.”

  “Stop that,” Nix said.

  “Stop what?”

  “I don’t know, saying profound things. They irritate. They irk.”

  Egil sighed. “Well enough.”

  Nix sighed, too. “I say we get drunk and forget Blackalley.”

  Egil started to speak, probably to once more say something about how it wouldn’t matter if they forgot it because it was in them now.

  Nix held up a hand. “Don’t you say it!”

  Egil stared at Nix. �
��Right, then. Drunk it is.”

  Having said the words, Egil set to making them true. He slammed his ale in one long pull. Nix matched him and they sat there for a time in silence, empty tankards before them.

  “Everything we’ve done, Egil. All those…moments. Fakking moments. And what do we have to show for it? This place and some coin. That’s it.”

  “This is what you wanted. When we left the tomb of Abn Thuset, you said you wanted this.”

  “I did. I do. But there’s gotta be something else, something more.”

  Egil smiled but it was halfhearted. “Now who’s saying profound things? And you’re right. They do irritate. Irk, too.”

  “I don’t know what I want. It’s always the next thing, something I don’t have. What do you want, Egil?”

  Egil’s expression fell. He stared into his empty tankard. “I want to forget, Nix. That’s what I want.”

  Nix flashed on Egil’s weeping face in Blackalley, his teary apologies to his daughter and wife. There was nothing Nix could say so he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, just for a moment.

  “So, drunk, then,” Nix said, trying to lighten the mood. “Where’s Gadd? Gadd!”

  Egil sat up and exhaled, as though exorcising a ghost. He thumped his fist on the bar and called into the taproom in the back. “Return to your altar, priest. Bring forth libations.”

  “Libations?” Nix said, and tapped Egil’s tankard with his own. “Nice.”

  Gadd hurried out of the taproom, his eyes wide, white, and alarmed in his narrow, hawkish face.

  Egil and Nix were on their feet at once.

  “What is it?” Nix asked.

  Gadd rushed forward and grabbed them by their wrists. “Come! Rose hurt!”

  At first the words didn’t register with Nix. “Rose? Our Rose?”

  “Where’s Merelda?” Egil said, and grabbed Gadd by his thin, tattooed arm. “Speak, man.”

  “She’s with Rose,” Gadd said, and shook himself loose.

  Egil and Nix both leaped over the bar. Nix grabbed his dagger out of Hyram Mung’s eye as he ran by. They hurried through the taproom, the storeroom, and out into the fenced area in the back of the Tunnel, littered with old barrels, a bucket, an old door, and the weekly rubbish pile. The wooden gate was open to the street, where sat a rickety, open-topped, straw-filled wagon. Rose lay in the straw propped against a bale, still dressed in the elaborate green robes and costume jewelry she wore when performing readings in the Low Bazaar. Her eyes were closed and her head drooped and she looked to Nix like a broken flower. The sight of her so vulnerable hurt his heart.