A Discourse in Steel

by Paul S. Kemp

  As they passed out of the shadow of the bridge, Mere gasped, grabbed her head, and exclaimed in pain. Rose whimpered, loosed an outburst of nonsensical guild cant.

  Egil dropped the oars and crawled forward to Mere’s side.

  “What is it?” the priest asked.

  Nix snatched the oars before they fell off the boat. “Mere…”

  Mere looked up, blinking, her eye watering.

  “I…something,” she said.

  “Your nose,” Nix said.

  “What? Oh.” She touched her nose with a finger, held it before her to examine the blood.

  “Mere?” Egil asked. He drew her close.

  “I think…he’s near or…” Mere trailed off and looked at Nix across the boat.

  “Who?” Nix asked.

  “Odrhaal, maybe. He’s near.”

  Nix sat up straight. “Why do you say that?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and waved a hand. “There’s a…regard in the air. It’s hard to explain. But it’s a mindmage. It has to be.”

  Rose moaned and a trickle of blood leaked from her nose. Mere opened her eyes and dabbed it.

  “Are you all right, though?” Egil asked her. She looked tiny beside him.

  She patted his muscular forearm. “I’m all right. And this is a good thing, Egil. It means Nix was right. Now we just have to find him.”

  “Wait,” Nix said. “Can you…contact him?”

  “She’s bleeding, Nix,” Egil snapped.

  “It’s all right,” Mere said, and patted his arm again. “It’s hard to explain but the mental regard is…diffuse. It’s like it’s here but it’s sleeping or not aware or…”

  Nix didn’t pretend to understand. He knew only that they must find Odrhaal and find him soon. But Mere’s words had given him hope.

  Egil kissed the top of Mere’s head, gently touched Rose’s pale face, and retook his place on the rower’s bench.

  The priest set to the oars with renewed vigor and Nix felt lighter by half. They kept moving the rest of the day, Nix kept an eye behind them for the guildsmen but saw no sign, though he couldn’t see very far. The lake narrowed and grew shallower as the sun started to set, became more choked with trees, rushes, and ruins, and finally ended altogether. Egil pulled them up on the muddy shore as darkness started to fall. The priest ascended to the top of a rise and hurriedly came back down.

  “The water picks back up just the other side of this rise,” Egil said. “We drag it over and camp for the night.”

  “Aye,” Nix said.

  Behind them in the distance, another hissing roar sounded. Birds burst from trees at the sound and the incessant croaking of the frogs temporarily abated.

  “Following us,” Nix said.

  “What is?” Egil asked, and Nix could only shrug.

  Nix and Egil each took an end of the boat and lifted, leaving Rose in it, and pushed and pulled it over the muddy rise. They used broken statues for stepping-stones as they ascended. On the other side, the gentle slope of the rise descended to another lake, much larger than the other. Treed hillocks walled it in. Islets and fields of rushes dotted it here and there. The water looked black in the twilight. Nix figured if they could get across the lake and atop the far hillock, he could climb a tree and look around for the spire he remembered. They had to be close. Had to be.

  “The guildsmen will have to camp, too,” Nix said. “They can’t travel the swamp in the dark anymore than we can. We should be all right here.”

  They couldn’t risk a fire so they huddled in the boat. Stars glittered faintly in the vault above them, but the darkness was deep. Ordinary growls, howls, and slitherings sounded out in the darkness, an occasional splash of water from the lake, a shriek of a creature caught by a predator. The air was alive with buzzing and the insects bit and poked constantly. Inspired, Nix took one of the blocks of incense he kept in his satchel and lit it with a match. The smell granted them relief from the reek of the mire and the swarms of insects.

  Merelda sat beside Rose with her arms wrapped around her knees. She turned sharply at this sound or that out in the darkness, obviously uncomfortable. It occurred to Nix that he and Egil had spent the last decade sleeping in tombs and other dark places. They were accustomed to it. Mere was not.

  He reached into his satchel and took out the magical crystal eye he always kept at hand. He crawled over to Merelda, took her hand, and put it in her palm.

  “Take this, Mere.”

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  The Deadmire seemed to demand whispers of those who would speak at night.

  “A light,” he said. “A gewgaw, Egil would call it.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “I know that.” He tapped the crystal and spoke a word in the Language of Creation. The etched eye opened, casting a beam of light. It glared at Nix, as if irritated to be awakened. Insects, attracted by the light, started to swarm it.

  “Dim,” Nix said to the crystal, and the light dimmed.

  “It’s going to draw bugs,” he said to Mere. “It’ll stay alight for a while.”

  “How long?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “It’s temperamental so it’s hard to say. Keep it close so the beam doesn’t attract attention from anything but bugs. Try to rest.”

  “All right.”

  Egil nodded appreciatively at him. “I’ll take first watch,” the priest said, and rose from the boat.

  “No argument,” Nix said, and used his satchel as a pillow. He slept fitfully. Rose murmured restlessly through the night, occasionally blurting out a curse or name or cry of pain. When Nix took his watch, he climbed to the top of the rise and looked out on the swamp behind them. In the deep of night it looked like nothing more than a blanket of ink. The guildsmen, too, must have opted against a fire. Nix had no idea how much distance separated them from their pursuers, but he thought not a lot.

  Cracking branches and a serpentine hiss from his right brought him to his feet, falchion and axe in hand. He saw nothing and heard nothing more. He descended the rise and took the remainder of his watch near the boat, near Rose and Mere and Egil.

  “Are you sleeping?” he whispered to Mere.

  “No.”

  “How is she?” Nix asked. He could not see Mere or Rose in the pitch of the night.

  “I think she’s failing,” Mere said.

  Nix did not reply, but the words stayed with him through the rest of the night.

  Nix was on his feet the moment dawn lightened the sky. A mist rose from the lake and crowded the shoreline. Birds called; insects chirped. The wind rustled the trees.

  They needed to get started before the guildsmen. He moved to Egil, snoring as always, and was about to shake him when he realized that Rose was awake and looking at him. Mere was asleep beside her.

  Rose smiled at him. He smiled back.

  She swallowed and whispered, “I feel like I’m disappearing.”

  “I’m not going to let you,” he returned in a whisper.

  “I know,” she said.

  Egil grunted, stirred, and broke the moment’s spell.

  “Time to go,” Nix said to him.

  “Aye,” Egil said. He cleared his throat, spit, and slapped his face a couple times.

  Mere opened her eyes, saw that Rose was awake, and hugged her. She asked a question with her eyes, or maybe her mind, and Rose shook her head. Nix read the substance of the conversation in Mere’s expression: Rose wasn’t better. She’d just had a reprieve.

  Egil slid the boat into the lake, leaped in behind it, and took his place by the oars.

  “You still feel Odrhaal?” Nix asked Mere.

  She nodded.

  “I feel him, too,” Rose said.

  “We have to be close,” Mere said.

  Rose’s face bunched with sudden pain. “I need to lie down.”

  She lay back on her sister’s lap, closed her eyes, and soon was asleep or lost in the swirl of her splintering mind.


  Mere, her jaw set, stared out at the water.

  Egil rowed them over the lake. He used the islets and rushes to block the line of sight from the shore, in case the guildsmen came over the rise. The mist lingered, cloaking the boat, and it was like Egil was rowing them through clouds.

  Within an hour the sun had risen fully, dispelling the mist. Its light dappled the water and Nix saw that where most of the Deadmire’s ponds and pools and streams had been stagnant and murky, the lake was unusually clear and deep. Nix leaned over the back of the boat as Egil pulled them quickly through the water. He could see fish swimming in the depths, long green fronds swaying in unseen currents, and stone obelisks, lots of them. The frequency with which the obelisks and other large, cut stones appeared increased until finally Nix could see entire structures sitting on the bottom of the lake. The water distorted his view, but he made them out as tombs, mausoleums, hundreds of them. Topiary featuring snakes and serpents appeared here and there.

  “Look at this!” he said.

  “What is it?” Egil said, leaning over the side.

  “No, look at that,” Mere said.

  Nix looked up and saw what Mere was looking at. “Shite.”

  He’d been so preoccupied looking under the water that he’d missed the dome of a metallic tower, the view of it partially obscured by a small islet, poking out above the waterline. The body of the tower reached to the lake’s bottom, a silver cylinder that descended thirty or forty paces down. A stairway made of the same metal spiraled around the exterior of the tower. Like a serpent, Nix thought.

  Egil steered the boat around the smooth dome.

  On the other side of it the stairway terminated in a landing and a smooth metal door. There was no handle on the outside, though there was a round keyhole.

  “Enspelled,” Egil said.

  Nix nodded. “The whole tower, probably. I’ve never seen metal like this.”

  “You didn’t see this last time though?” Egil said.

  “No.”

  Egil kept rowing and they left the drowned graveyard and its unplumbed riches behind them. When they reached the far side of the lake, they pulled the boat onto the muddy shore and prepared to trek up the tall hillock. Egil prepared a makeshift sling to bear Rose, a satchel almost, from the canvas cover that had come with the boat. When it was done, he carried her as one might a child.

  “Your gewgaw is prettier than the ones I carry in my satchel,” Nix said. He touched Rose’s face and she turned her cheek into his hand. She was burning up.

  Frowning with concern, Nix started up the hillock.

  With Egil huffing and sweating under the weight of his burden, the three of them picked their way through the undergrowth and cypress. The sodden landscape was choked with creepers, brush, and willow. Swarms of bugs were everywhere. Toppled and rotting trees blocked their way constantly. The air felt close, pungent with the Deadmire’s reek. But the ground firmed as they ascended, and when they reached the top, Nix picked the tallest willow he could find and climbed it as high as he dared. From there, he looked out and down on the center of the Deadmire.

  A verdant swath of rolling land stretched out before him, as much jungle as swamp. A green blanket of trees covered a rolling, rough landscape of ponds and lakes and streams. Hillocks rose here and there like boils in the terrain. The whole of the land looked broken, scoured, the streams and lakes and ponds old scars covered in a veneer of water. Even from a distance he could see the countless ruins that dotted the landscape, scattered buildings, a plaza, huge toppled columns, monumental sculptures. The verdure had grown over much of it, as if the thick vegetation were trying to hide a shameful secret, but then Nix saw scores of sites scattered across the terrain. And he also saw what he’d sought since entering the swamp.

  The upper half of a thin dark tower rose above the tree line in the rough center of the terrain, a quarrel of dark stone aimed at the sky. He’d seen it from afar once before, when he’d assayed the Deadmire with Hinse, when the dreams had come. The tower was the only intact structure he’d seen then and it was the one he saw now.

  That had to be important. It had to mean that’s where they would find Odrhaal.

  He realized he was hanging a lot of hope on unknowns, but hopes and unknowns were all he had. Besides, Mere had sensed the mindmage. They were on the right path.

  He maneuvered himself across the tree to a limb that allowed a view behind them. The terrain looked much the same, but he did not see their pursuers. Of course the trees and undergrowth and rough terrain could hide an army. He descended.

  “Well?” Egil said.

  “I spotted the tower,” Nix said, and Mere and Egil both looked relieved. Mere touched his arm. Nix looked at Rose. She looked so pale. “It’s not too far.”

  “That’s where we’ll find Odrhaal,” Mere said, her tone hopeful.

  “That’s where we’ll find Odrhaal,” Nix said.

  They started off right away, moving as quickly as possible through terrain choked with ruins and fallen trees and enormous willows. When the vegetation allowed them to see ahead, they sometimes caught a tantalizing glimpse of the tower, looming ever larger as they closed the distance. The sun slid across the sky as they sweated and cursed their way through the mud and undergrowth and bugs.

  Nix’s burgeoning hopes began to falter as they neared the tower and he saw it more clearly. Egil did him the courtesy of saying nothing, but Nix’s eyes told a story he did not want to hear. From afar, the tower looked intact but, through the occasional breaks in the trees, Nix saw that was an illusion, a trick of distance and false hopes. Mere seemed not to have realized it yet, and Nix did not have the mettle to tell her. As they broke through the tree line, Mere’s doubts manifested.

  “This is it?” she asked. “Are you certain, Nix?”

  The tower was more intact than most of the other ruined structures, but cracks lined its crumbling façade, and chunks of facing stone had fallen over the years to collect in dark piles at the tower’s base. The spike of stone rose from what once would have been a grand plaza, but which was now a scattering of cracked stones overgrown with creepers and trees and undergrowth. A few toppled, half-buried statues of serpents and serpent men littered the ground around the tower. One statue alone remained standing, though only because it leaned against the side of the tower: a robed serpent man, arms upraised, mouth open, tongue extended in a hiss. The statue stood next to the doorway at the base of the tower. The double doors were long gone, the hole of the doorway like a missing tooth.

  “I’m not certain of anything,” Nix said softly. He walked for the double doors, jogged for them, ran for them.

  “Nix,” Egil called, but Nix would have none of it.

  He sprinted across the plaza, nearly tripping on a loose stone. He took the stone stairs two at a time and ran past the statue.

  “Nix!” Egil called.

  Nix stopped cold two steps into the tower, chest heaving, hopes failing. He’d wanted a miracle; he’d gotten shite.

  Loose stones lay in a few scattered piles and the remnants of what once had been a ramp or circular staircase clung here and there to the crumbling walls. Undergrowth grew out of the foundation, shrubs and trees. Mud had leaked in over the years, coating the floor in grime. Vines veined the walls. Birds cooed in the heights.

  “No,” Nix said. “Come on. No.”

  He was standing in a cylinder as hollow as his hopes. Rays of light from the setting sun reached through the open top—it had collapsed long ago—and filtered down the tower’s length.

  He’d failed Rose and his failure stripped away his mask. He pretended to feel things or to not feel things so often that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to genuinely feel something.

  And what he felt was empty.

  He’d failed her. She’d die in the thrice-damned Deadmire because Nix the Quick, Nix the Lucky, had thought himself so damned clever.

  Tears tried to fall but he kept them in. He would not grant his grief the
relief of release. He’d carry it, as he should, as penance for his failure. He stood there for a long while with nothing but his mistake for company.

  At length Egil and Mere came in to stand beside him. Their presence made everything worse. They’d believed in him and they shouldn’t have. At first no one said anything. Mere finally put the situation into words. “He’s not here,” she said. “Odrhaal. And we don’t know how to find him.”

  Nix opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and just shook his head.

  Rose whimpered in her sling and Nix could only clench his jaw and chew on his failure.

  “You’re not at fault,” Egil said and put a hand on Nix’s shoulder.

  “No, you’re not. We had to try,” Mere said, then, “Oh, Rose.”

  She turned away, covering her face, weeping.

  Nix looked at Mere’s shaking back, at Rose’s pale, fever-blotched face, and his anger escaped his control.

  “Fak all this!” Nix said, and stalked outside. “Fak it all!”

  “Nix?” Egil asked.

  “What are you doing?” Mere called. “Nix, what are you doing?”

  Nix didn’t bother with an answer. He knew he was being careless, foolish even, because the guildsmen might hear him, but he didn’t care. He needed to give voice to his anger, anger at himself, at the guild, at Odrhaal. He paced around the godsdamned tower, shouting.

  “Odrhaal! We know you’re here! We need your help! You fakkin’ answer us or I promise by all the gods…”

  He left the rest of the threat unvoiced. The sounds of the swamp had fallen silent at his outburst.

  “Odrhaal!”

  Light filtered down through the canopy. Bird wings fluttered among the treetops.

  “Odrhaal!”

  Nothing.

  Mere and Egil walked out of the ruined tower, the priest bearing the unconscious Rose, the Rose they were soon to lose.

  “Nix—” Egil said.

  “No!” Nix snapped, waving the priest off. “Mere can sense him. He’s here somewhere. He has to be. Odrhaal!”