A Discourse in Steel

by Paul S. Kemp

  “We’re gaining,” he said. “Faster,” he said to Kherne, and shouted the same order to Dool in the other boat.

  Kherne and Dool, already puffing and sweating from hours at the oars, cursed him, the sky, the water, the boats, the oars, and anything that caught their eye. Hours passed and as they headed south the bush and trees thickened on the east bank. The air got thick with the stink of the Deadmire.

  Rusk could not understand where Egil and Nix thought they’d go. Dun Dorrigan, maybe, deep in the Meander’s delta, near the shore of the southern sea. Nothing else made sense.

  He got his answer a bit later when Trelgin activated the dowsing rod and cursed softly.

  “What is it?” Rusk asked.

  “They’ve turned east.”

  Rusk looked east. Trees, bush, and behind that, swamp.

  “The Deadmire?”

  Trelgin nodded.

  Kherne racked the oars and took a long drink from his waterskin. “Why in the fak would anyone go to the Deadmire?”

  “Because they don’t think we’ll follow,” Trelgin said. “But we will.” He looked at Rusk, his droopy face screwed up in a challenge. “Won’t we, Seventh Blade?”

  “For now,” Rusk said with a nod. “But we’re not going in deep. Too easy to get lost.”

  “Aye,” Kherne said, and retook the oars. He called over to the trailing boat. “Those fakkers are running to ground in the Deadmire.”

  Heads shook.

  “Scared rabbits, is what,” Varn said.

  “Crazy fakkers, more like,” Kherne said.

  Rusk sat in the rear of the boat. He eyed his tat, and, as he suspected, it was unchanged. Channis was alive, at least for the moment. Rusk had to figure a way to make sure the Upright Man went dusty in the Deadmire.

  —

  The water grew choked with roots and pads and rushes and dead wood. Egil navigated them through it as best he could, and Nix and Mere pushed them away from hazards. Still, time and again the bottom of the boat rubbed up against the rocks and mud of the bottom.

  Twisted, droopy trees bordered the waterway, which sometimes expanded to the size of a small lake, sometimes shrank down to a thin stream. Nix was determined to stay in the boat as long as possible.

  Grassy hillocks rose from the landscape here and there, topped with trees and brush. Birds and their songs filled the air, the buzz of bugs, the croaks of frogs. Splashes sounded in the water now and again, fish or frogs jumping. Snakes prowled the shoreline. They heard animals in the thick undergrowth from time to time, but didn’t actually see any.

  As the day waned, the trees cast long shadows on the water. The pungent air cooled and the swamp felt even more ominous. The sunset cast the sky in red. Nix pointed to a distant hillock, upon which stood the crumbling ruins of a tower. Soon thereafter cut stone appeared in the waterway, chunks of timeworn obelisks, broken pieces of statuary. A huge sculpture of a snake head, half buried in the mud, looked upon them from the stream bank as they passed.

  The water grew shallower, the stink of decay worsened. Nix imagined vast numbers of corpses decaying under the veneer of mud and shallow water.

  More and more crumbling buildings and tall columns of dark stone loomed out of the vegetation, half covered in vines and filth. Nix and Mere and Egil watched them as they rowed past, witnesses to a lost civilization.

  “This is the right way,” Nix said.

  Egil and Mere nodded, but said nothing.

  As night fell, the birds and their songs disappeared, leaving only the buzz and croaks and chirping of frogs and insects. A column of bats rose from the roof of some ruins and stained the air black as they wheeled into the sky. The air cooled. They shared bread and cheese and water, did their best to feed Rose, who groaned and sometimes shouted in cant.

  “We should rest soon,” Egil said. “How much farther, you think?”

  Nix wasn’t entirely sure. “Tomorrow, should be. It’s in the middle of the swamp, a tall spire, like the ones we’ve seen, but intact.”

  “And you think that’s where Odrhaal is?” Egil asked.

  “I do,” Nix said with a confidence he didn’t feel. Hinse, his old mentor, had said that Odrhaal laired in the spire, and it was in sight of that spire that Nix had…dreamed odd things. “We’ll need to go on foot, though.”

  Nix tied off to the root of a cypress and they slept in the boat. Rose muttered guild cant for hours on end, and Channis stared blankly at the sky, an eerie half-smile on his face. His eyeteeth had turned to fangs and Nix found the smile more disconcerting than his previously vacant expression.

  Nix and Egil were on alternate watches, but Nix let the priest sleep. Working the oars all day would have drained even Egil. Nix leaned back against the gunwale and settled in for a long night. He swatted at mosquitoes and bugs, listened to the lap of water, Egil’s snores, Rose’s murmurings, the buzz of insects and croak of frogs. He looked back in the direction they’d come, wondering if the guildsmen were still on their trail. Kulven rose, a ragged silver half-circle. Mist rose off the water.

  In the moonlight the swamp felt surreal, dreamlike. The rhythmic monotony of the night made Nix’s eyes grow heavy. He fought it, fought it, and finally lost.

  A splash awakened him with a start. The boat was rocking. He sat up, his hand on his blade. Egil, too, sat up quickly, his fist around the haft of a hammer.

  It was still the deep of night. Kulven had set and Minnear had risen, painting the swamp with its green brush.

  “What was that?” Egil said.

  “Shite,” Nix said when he saw that Channis was gone.

  “What is it?” Mere said, and Rose whimpered.

  “Channis is gone,” Nix said, and looked out in the direction from which he’d heard the splash.

  Egil grabbed for Mere’s crossbow, cocked it, loaded, and scanned the water behind its sight. Nix held up a hand for silence, listening for the splashing of a swimmer, but he heard nothing.

  “We can’t chase him in the dark,” Mere whispered.

  “No,” Nix agreed. “He’s gone. Shite.”

  “He’ll die out there,” Egil said.

  “He was already dead,” Nix said, thinking of the black veins growing under Channis’s skin, his dark eyes, the weird bulges and ridges forming under his skin. Still, the memory of Channis’s frozen smile troubled Nix.

  “He could find his way back to the guildsmen following us,” Egil said.

  “If they’re still following,” said Mere. “Do you think they are?”

  Nix looked out into the darkness behind, to the still water and the stands of rushes and trees turned ghostly in Minnear’s light. “Best to assume so.”

  Nix and Egil both stayed awake afterward, against the possibility that Channis would return and try to attack. He didn’t, but in the hours before dawn they heard screams out in the darkness, terrible pained roars and angry hisses, but not those of a beast, those of a man.

  Nix and Egil stared out into the black, the stink of the dead in the air, the skeletal ruins of a lost civilization all around them, and wondered what had happened to Channis out in the swamp.

  “Sounds like he got what was coming,” Egil said.

  “Aye,” Nix agreed.

  —

  Rusk, Trelgin, and the rest of the guildsmen came awake with a start.

  “What the fak was that?” Varn asked.

  “A dying beast,” Trelgin said, his diction even worse than usual for having been just awakened.

  “Didn’t sound like no beast,” Mors said in his high-pitched voice.

  They’d camped after dark by pulling up on a small islet in the middle of a shallow pond. Tall cypress and willow bordered the pond, the limbs whispering all night. Ruins stuck from the water, the gravestones of a fallen realm. A toppled statue of a robed man who looked vaguely reptilian lay on the islet, most of the features worn away by the elements.

  “Double watch the rest of the night,” Rusk said. “All eyes, all ears.”

&nbs
p; Trelgin hocked and spit. “We start right at daybreak. We gained on ’em today. We can catch ’em tomorrow.”

  Ayes around, and all but Varn and Mors, both on watch, lay back in the boats to sleep.

  Rusk held his arm before his eyes, staring at the unchanging tat and its seven blades. He soon fell asleep and dreamed of snakes.

  —

  As soon as the false dawn started to eat the stars, Egil shoved them off and started rowing. Mere soon awakened, blinking, yawning, softly coughing. Rose sat up and looked around, her eyes focused with clarity on her surroundings.

  “Where are we?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

  “In the Deadmire,” Mere said. “We’re looking for someone to help you. Do you remember?”

  Rose looked at Mere in confusion, at Egil, at Nix. “I don’t…know.”

  For a moment Nix had hoped that perhaps Rose had finally cleared her mind of the dead man’s imprint, but even as he thought it her right eye began to blink uncontrollably. Mere eased her back down in the boat and she began to talk about torch jobs and clicks and jingles and members of the council on the guild’s payroll. She spoke so quickly Nix could not follow it all, but he didn’t need to. Rose was no better. Odrhaal was their only hope.

  Egil rowed for hours through winding channels and narrow streams. Islets and thickets forked the waterway again and again. Ruins clogged everything. The trees, thick and overhanging the water, made it like rowing through a tunnel.

  “Those fakkers are going to have a hard go following us through this,” Egil said.

  Nix nodded. The dowsing rod would give them direction and rough distance to Rose, but given the number of forks, it would be impossible for them to track Rose perfectly. Hopefully the guildsmen would have to double back a few times and lose some ground.

  “You think they’re still following?” Egil asked again

  “I’m starting to wonder,” Nix said. He figured he’d have seen a sign of them by now. Maybe they’d given up. Maybe now that Channis was dead, they wouldn’t think chasing Rose was worth it. In any event, they had no other course than to keep going, and so they did.

  Twice Nix and Egil had to portage the boat across short stretches of muddy tangles before they could put it back in enough water to float it. By midday Nix was covered in insect bites and mud up to his waist. The rushes thickened and grew taller, such that they could not see far ahead. But always they maneuvered around and past the broken bones of the realm that had existed there once—dark stone, monumental architecture, and snakes. Lots and lots of snakes in the sculpture, on the columns, in friezes.

  Nix stood in the boat from time to time to look behind them, but the circuitous route and the height of the rushes prevented him from seeing much more than a spear cast back. Nix winced each time Rose had an outburst and shouted guild cant, fearing it could be heard for a league. But there was nothing for it.

  By late afternoon, the choked, tree-lined waterway they moved through gave way to a series of shallow lakes. In the distance, maybe a third of a league, rose the majestic ruins of a bridge. Much smaller than the Archbridge, it nevertheless caused all of them to fall silent at the sight of it. Stone foundation posts jutted from the mud, straddling the lake but no longer linked by the bridge, which had collapsed into the water. Vines and creepers veined the dark stone, and bird shite painted it in streaks of white, but still it looked majestic.

  “Shite,” Nix said softly. “I don’t remember this.”

  He looked left, right, behind, trying to see something that would jog his memory, but in truth he didn’t see how he could have forgotten the ruined bridge.

  “We went the wrong way?” Egil asked. There was no accusation in the question.

  “I don’t know,” Nix said. “I don’t know how I could have…”

  He trailed off.

  “Nix?” Mere asked, and Rose groaned.

  Nix could barely make eye contact with her. “I don’t know, Mere. I thought…I’ll get us there. We’ll be able to see the spire for miles if we can get to some high ground. Even if we took a wrong turn, we’ll see it.”

  “We can’t go back in any event,” Egil said. “The guildsmen could be behind us.”

  Nix agreed and let his gaze linger on Rose. “Just keep going. When we see one of those tall hillocks again, I need to get to the top of it.”

  “Aye.”

  Egil steered them around an islet covered in vines and cypress and closed on the ruined bridge.

  Nix stared ahead, preoccupied, searching his memories, until movement atop the bridge post on the right drew his eye.

  A large animal in the shadows.

  No, something else.

  He leaned forward, having caught the movement for only a moment before whatever it was bounded off the ruins and into the tree line. He lurched up in the boat, trying to spot it in the trees, his sudden movement causing the boat to rock. Egil cursed and Rose groaned.

  “You see that?” Nix said, pointing.

  “See what?” Egil said.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Mere said. “But I was tending to Rose.”

  A hiss, deep and wet, sounded from the thick tangle of cypress near the bridge, the same hiss they’d heard the night Channis had fled. Suspicion about the identity of the creature took root in Nix’s mind.

  Mere took up a crossbow and Nix did the same, and both of them held the weapons ready as Egil rowed them toward the huge stone towers that once had supported the span. Ruins stuck up from the mud on either bank, dark stone bones being slowly overwhelmed by the swamp’s vegetation. Nix imagined the ruins extending out into the lake, imagined an entire lost city below them, hidden under the murky water.

  He watched for movement in the brambles and trees and bush, but saw nothing of the creature he’d seen atop the bridge. Still, it put him on edge.

  In the bottom of the boat, Rose groaned. Blood leaked in a thin rivulet from her nose. Mere looked up from her sister at Nix, her expression plaintive. Nix took her meaning.

  They were running out of time.

  And somewhere along the way Nix had led them astray.

  —

  The distant roar they’d heard from somewhere out in the swamp had coiled all the guildsmen. Everyone except Trelgin and the men on the oars had crossbows at the ready, scanning the banks. Rusk thought the sound was the same one they’d heard the night before, and it wasn’t the sound of any animal he’d ever heard.

  Towering cypresses and dense undergrowth rose like walls to either side of the narrow waterway, green curtains that blocked out most of the daylight. But now and again Rusk could see far enough into the vegetation to spot ruined structures between the tree trunks and roots: toppled stones and obelisks, pieces of sculpture half-buried in the humus or sticking out of pools of stagnant water. A serpent motif appeared in one way or another on most of it.

  A crash and splash from deep in the underbrush to their right brought the crossbows up, and Mors loosed a shot at nothing Rusk could see.

  “There!” Mors shouted.

  “Where?” shouted another man.

  “Close your holes,” Rusk barked.

  The sound faded and there was nothing more.

  An animal, Rusk supposed.

  “You saw something?” Rusk called.

  “Thought I did,” Mors said, his high-pitched voice chagrined. “Must have just been a shadow or something.”

  “Eyes sharp,” Rusk said. “Don’t be edgy, though.”

  “Aye,” said the men.

  Trelgin leaned forward in the bow of the boat, the dowsing rod in his hands, its glyphs shining as it worked. He looked to Rusk like some kind of droop-faced figurehead and Rusk had to resist the impulse to crawl across the boat and push him headfirst into the dark, shite-stinking water. He could see the magic of the dowsing rod pulling Trelgin in the direction they were going.

  “Still on ’em?” Kherne asked Trelgin over his shoulder. The big man, sweating with exertion, stank almost as much as the swa
mp.

  Trelgin’s receding chin vanished into his neck for the moment it took him to nod.

  “Still on them,” he said. “And they’re not far.”

  All of the men, and not just Trelgin, had taken the bit for the chase. They wouldn’t have stopped pursuit even if Rusk ordered it. Not now. He’d just have to play things out. He still held out hope that Channis would end up dead, but for the moment, the seven blades on his tat said otherwise.

  The water deepened and the two boats maneuvered through a series of jagged dark stones that jutted above the waterline, Kherne and Varn cursing throughout. They broke through the undergrowth, and emerged into a wide lake, almost a league long and dotted with treed islets here and there, and stands of rushes. Rusk blinked in the late afternoon light.

  Lilypads and weeds covered much of the surface of the lake but the structure at its far end drew his eye. What must once have been a grand bridge stood in ruins. Chunks of it had fallen into the shallow water and lay there still, like half-toppled grave markers. But the thick support posts that once had supported the span straddled the lake at even intervals, like the severed legs of giants.

  Trelgin still held the dowsing rod, its glyphs still glowing.

  “That way,” he said, nodding at the broken bridge and sucking at some wayward drool. “They’re that way.”

  A distant shout, faint but unmistakable, turned Nix around and spiked his heart rate. A man’s voice, not a beast’s growl—the guildsmen.

  “I heard it,” Egil said, still rowing.

  Nix wanted to shout, “We don’t even have Channis anymore! He’s dead!” but that would have done no good. The guild owed Egil and Nix payback and they wanted Rose dead. If they’d come this far, they’d keep coming.

  “Stubborn bunch,” Egil said.

  Nix nodded. “We should ambush them. Can’t be that many of them.”

  “We get Rose what she needs first,” Mere said, and her tone brooked no contradiction.

  “Aye,” Egil said.

  “Aye,” Nix agreed. “But then they die.”

  To that, Mere said nothing, but returned to ministering to her sister.

  Nix looked back across the lake, but the distance and trees and islets blocked his view. A shadow fell on the boat as Egil rowed them between the bridge posts, steering them around the remnants of the span that had fallen into the lake. Nix examined them as the boat passed by, noted the repeated appearance of serpents and snakes.