by J. M. Martin
They’d been holed up with Oorgan and Sairsa at a rented manse waiting for the appointed night, all while anticipating the Night Blade’s attack, but nothing had happened, and now Nix just wanted to get things over with. The two days had passed at an interminable pace and they’d seen almost nothing of Oorgan, who remained upstairs doing whatever it was that wizards did.
“I’d rather be bored in the Tunnel’s common room than bored here,” Nix said.
Egil nodded. “There’s good drink there, at least.”
Nix looked over his shoulder at Sairsa, who sat alone with her thoughts and blades in a wooden chair near the large hearth.
“Be better if he’d travel on foot or horseback,” Nix said to her.
“He won’t,” she said. “Beneath him, he’ll say.”
“Then I hope it’s not beneath him to help push the carriage out of the mud,” Nix snapped.
Sairsa only shrugged.
“Fakking wizards,” Egil said half-heartedly.
Nix nodded. “True words.”
They watched the sun set, the rain begin, and passed the time with small things while Ool’s clock tolled the hours of night. An hour past midnight, Oorgan emerged from seclusion and swept down the stairs, his robes like an ochre tent around his corpulence. The runes and symbols embroidered along the robe’s seams shimmered as he moved. His long black hair was pulled into a topknot that hung to his sash. A bone mask covered in tiny mystic runes hid his face from view.
“I’d wager five terns he’s appallingly ugly,” Nix whispered.
“I’d not take that bet,” Egil said.
“We have a half hour to reach Kerfallen,” the wizard said, his voice muffled behind the mask.
“A half hour to get across town in this weather will take some magic indeed, wizard,” Egil said.
Oorgan didn’t deign to respond.
“Just stay alert,” said Sairsa. “If the Night Blade is going to make a play, it’ll be while we’re on the road.”
They’d hired an old man to drive the carriage and found him dozing on the bench, hood pulled up against the rain. Nix nudged him awake.
“Time to go, granther.”
Oorgan disappeared into the passenger compartment, Nix took point, Sairsa and Egil took position to either side of the carriage, and they rolled through the unmanned gates of the manse. Nix felt exposed the moment they hit the road. They hadn’t gone a block before the rain turned to a full-on downpour. The road soon became a slog. They walked the streets at as brisk a pace as the rain and mud allowed. Visibility was shite. Buildings crowded close on all sides, creaking in the wind, windows and porches dark.
Nix darted ahead from time to time to check alleys and side streets. Egil and Sairsa kept eyes on the rooftops. The rain prevented Nix from hearing much. He thought he caught the sight of movement in an alley. He crouched low and darted ahead, falchion in hand. He peeked around the alley’s corner, but saw nothing, so signaled the all clear.
And so they continued, block after block through the rain and dark.
As they rounded the next corner, Nix sensed something amiss.
“There!” Egil called, and pointed to a rooftop.
Nix saw movement there, just a flash.
“Cover!” Nix shouted, as the first crossbow bolt whistled down from the rooftops. A shaft struck the driver’s bench next to the old man’s thigh, another struck the board at his feet, another two thunked into the body of the carriage behind him. The old man cursed and jumped from his perch as fast as his age allowed. He hit the mud, slipped, and fell face down in the road. The horses slowed, stopped.
Nix and Egil and Sairsa crowded close to the carriage, scanning the rooftops. Nix wound up his sling and fired at motion atop a nearby roof, but couldn’t tell if he hit anything. Sairsa fired, too, and immediately reloaded.
“Get back up there and drive, slubber!” Egil shouted at the driver, but the old timer was already crawling through the mud under the wagon.
“Fak’s sake,” Nix said, and climbed up onto the bench. “Get on,” he called to Sairsa and Egil, and snapped the reins.
The horses pulled and Egil and Sairsa clambered onto the side rails. Nix whipped the horses as much as he dared, leaving the old man behind in the road, all the while trying to make himself small on the bench. A bolt slammed into the carriage and vibrated in the wood, three, six, a dozen. He thought about turning around, but it would have taken too long and exposed them to too much fire. There was nothing to do but drive through it as fast as they could.
“Can you two kill someone please?” he shouted. “I’m taking a lot of fakkin’ fire!”
“Hurry,” Oorgan called from the passenger compartment. “I cannot be late.”
Sairsa’s crossbow twanged and a body fell from a rooftop, but the bolts continued to rain down. Nix made at least a dozen men on rooftops on either side of the street. He simply stayed low and kept the horses moving.
“Egil, two on the porch to the right. See ‘em?”
“I see them,” Egil said, and bounded off the carriage toward the building.
“Cover him, Sairsa!” Nix shouted, and she fired at the two men atop the porch. They ducked and by the time they poked up their heads, Egil had slammed his hammers into the support posts holding up the roof and the whole of it came crashing down, carrying the two men with it. Egil stomped on one’s head with his boot and slammed his hammer into the other, finishing both men.
Curses and shouts and more shots came from the rooftops across the street from Egil. The priest picked up one of the corpses and used it as a shield as he stumbled and ran back toward the carriage.
“Cover the other side!” Nix said to Sairsa, as Egil climbed aboard.
They came around a corner and found the road blocked by three farm wagons plainly set there intentionally.
“Shite!” Nix said. He considered forcing the horses to ram through, but didn’t think they could make it.
“You’re going to have to get out, wizard!” he said to Oorgan.
“I’m not getting out. I’m paying you to handle this!”
“Suit yourself,” Nix said, and bounded off the wagon. “Cover me,” he said, and Sairsa did. So did Egil, hurling a hammer at a man on the rooftop and felling him with a single blow.
Nix zig-zagged his way through crossbow fire until he reached the side of the building where Egil had felled his target. He leaped up and scaled the wall with the practiced ease of one used to using the Thieves’ Highway. Once he reached the top, he found the dead man, his chest caved in by Egil’s hammer. Bolts skittered off the roof tiles around him. He grabbed Egil’s hammer, pausing a beat to appreciate its weight, and heaved it back down to the priest with grunt.
“How in the Hells do you even swing that thing?” he shouted down.
“I’m not diminutive,” Egil called back, darting out into the road for a moment to retrieve his weapon from the mud.
Nix crouched along the roof’s eave, loaded a lead bullet in his sling pouch, and wound it up as he sought a target. He spotted movement on the rooftop across the street, a man rising and taking aim with a crossbow at Egil. Nix stood and loosed. The lead bullet struck the man in the face, and he fell back with a shout. A crossbow bolt thudded into the roof next to Nix’s boot and vibrated there.
“Fakker,” Nix said. He grabbed the crossbow from the corpse at his feet, grabbed a bolt, and prepared to load. Nix glanced at the corpse’s face, did a double take, and cursed—the dead man was Varnel, a member of Dur Follin’s Thieves’ Guild.
“Egil,” he shouted down and across the street. “These here are guild slubbers.”
“What?”
Egil knew as well as Nix that they had a truce with the guild.
“Hey, you fakkers,” Nix shouted. “Hold your fakkin’ fire. Do you know who we are? Egil and Nix. You hear me? Are you all guild boys? The Upright Man knows us and owes us.”
“Come on out,” someone shouted from one of the rooftops across the way. �
�We’ll give you what you’re owed.”
Another voice shouted from another rooftop. “Nix? That really you?”
Nix recognized the voice. “Trelgin, that you?”
“Aye. What are you doing out here? ”
“Me? What the fak are you doing out here?”
“Muscle work, we thought. Delay a carriage was the goal.”
Nix and Egil shared a look.
“Delay?” Nix asked. “Shite. Listen, how about you go your way, and we’ll go ours. We’ll call this a misunderstanding, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Trelgin said. “Apologies.” Then, to his fellows, Trelgin said, “Night’s done, boys.”
Nix leaped from the rooftop onto a bale of hay, rolled, came to his feet, and jogged out to the carriage.
“Fak,” Egil said.
Nix turned to Sairsa. “You see what’s happened?”
Her expression told him she didn’t, so he explained.
“The Night Blade played you. This was all set up. First the Jafari and now these guild boys.”
“What are you on about?”
“These boys were paid to delay the carriage. Delay. The Night Blade is on his way to Kerfallen’s manse right now, probably in a carriage not unlike this one, probably dressed in robes and a mask, too. Oorgan was never the target. Kerfallen was.”
“What?” she said, coloring. “How do you know that?”
“Because it fits,” Nix said. “And that’s how I’d do it.” .
“Shite,” she said, looking off in the direction of Kerfallen’s manse.
“Seconded,” Nix said.
“Done is done,” said Egil, and slung his hammers. “I didn’t sign on to save two wizards. One was one too many.”
Oorgan’s masked face poked out of the window of the lacquered carriage, his voice a hiss from under the mask.
“I need him alive to renew my pact, you shiftless, ignorant asses! Sairsa, save him. I’ll double your pay. Go!”
She eyed Egil and Nix, eyebrows raised in a question. “He doubles mine, I’ll double yours.”
“Now!” Oorgan said.
“Shut your hole,” Egil said to the wizard. “You talk too much for someone who can’t even cast a spell.”
“We wanted a run at this Night Blade anyway,” Nix said to Egil.
“True,” Egil said. He frowned, looked from Nix to Sairsa then back to Nix. “Fine. Done.” To Sairsa he said, “But this is just to help you. Fak Oorgan and his mask and pacts and the rest of the wizard shite. We know where we’re going?”
“I know,” Sairsa said with a nod.
“Hurry!” Oorgan said. “Where’s that old man? I’ll follow in the carriage.”
“That’s very comforting,” Nix said, as the three sprinted along Dur Follin’s muddy roads.
#
They were winded and coated in road grime by the time they reached the gate of Kerfallen’s walled, two story manse. The metal gate stood open. The Night Blade was probably already through.
Two of the wizard’s sexless, hairless, humanoid-looking automatons stepped out from the gatehouse to arrest their approach. The constructs, stitched together by Kerfallen’s magic, were made mostly of metal and hide and wood, their forms covered in straps and buckles. Some bound spirit or demon or elemental must have animated them.
“Stop,” one of the automatons said. “You are unwelcome here and are trespassing at the residence of—”
Egil slammed his shoulder into it, driving it hard against a gate post, then spun and slammed his hammer into the head of the second automaton, knocking its metal and leather head from its shoulders. Meanwhile Nix drew a poniard and drove it through the chest of the automaton Egil had driven against the post. Nix pushed the blade through the construct’s body and into the wooden post, pinioning it in place.
“Stop,” the automaton said without inflection, grabbing for Nix. “Stop.”
Nix slipped the construct’s grasp and fell in with Egil and Sairsa, who were sprinting toward the porch that wrapped Kerfallen’s manse. A carriage sat not far from the grand stairs that led up to the porch and rune-inscribed doors of the wizard’s home.
“You are betrayed, wizard!” Egil shouted, his voice booming over the sound of the rain.
Nix took the stairs of the porch three at a time, Egil at his side, Sairsa trailing. He stopped Egil at the door and felt it with the tips of his fingers, trying to sense of the tingle of a ward. Sensing none, he nodded at Egil and the priest shouldered the huge doors open.
They stood in a large foyer, tiled in stones scribed with symbols of power. Hundreds of colored crystals hung from the ceiling on metal filaments as thin as hairs. Dozens of birds or bats flapped off in the darkness. The home smelled of spice and decay. A dim green light suffused the room, but Nix could discern no source. A stairway snaked its way up into an upper floor that was lost to darkness. The stairway turned at an odd angle that made Nix’s eyes hurt.
“Wizard!” Egil called. “Speak!”
The deep bass of Egil’s voice caused the hanging crystals to chime softly and, as they did, they showered motes of light, a rain of red, green, and blue fireflies.
“Kerfallen!” Nix shouted, summoning more motes. “Beware!”
A carved wooden door that Nix was certain hadn’t been there a moment before opened to their right and robed figure emerged. He stood only the height of a young boy. He threw back his hood to reveal a man’s face, though: a sharp, lined mien covered in tattoos of tiny magical symbols, not dissimilar from those on Oorgan’s mask. Three silver studs pieced his protuberant nose, and his stern eyes missed nothing.
“I’m Kerfallen the Grey,” he said, his voice much deeper than Nix would have expected, given his stature. “Who dares this intrusion?”
Nix opened his mouth to speak but the words gave way to a scream. Agonizing pain lit up his back. Metal scraped a rib and warm fluid soaked him. A word jumped to his mind: kidney. He’d been stabbed and he’d bleed out in moments. He tried to say Egil’s name but the priest was already down, too, on all fours, bleeding from his back, the blood already pooling on the floor. A figure was standing over him: Sairsa, two bloody blades in her fist.
“The High Magister sends his regards,” she snarled and bounded at Kerfallen.
The wizard stumbled backward, fumbled at an amulet at his throat, and managed to utter only a single word in the Language of Creation before Sairsa was on him, driving him to the tiled floor, her blades rising and falling so fast and often that she’d punctured his chest and abdomen a dozen times in two breaths. He spat blood once, feebly, then died.
Sairsa seized the amulet he wore on a chain around his neck, wiped her blades on his robe, stood, and turned to go.
“It was business, boys,” she said to them. “Not personal.”
Nix could barely hear her over the sound of his own slowing heartbeat. Flat on his stomach, he turned to look at Egil. The priest collapsed from all fours, slipping in his own blood.
“Fak you,” Egil said to her, his voice breaking.
She sneered. “You wanted a run at the Night Blade. You had it.”
With that, she stepped over them, past them, and left them to die.
Nix found it hard to breathe. He tried to reach for Egil but his arm would not answer his command. “A poor end to a good run,” he said, unsure Egil heard him.
But Egil had. “Aye,” the priest said. “Fak.”
They lay there on the tiled floor of a wizard’s manse, bleeding and dying. Nix realized of a sudden that the world would go on without him. It didn’t seem fair.
“Shite,” he said, his voice breaking. “Shite.”
A door opened from their left, where a door hadn’t been before, and slippered feet approached. Nix was too weak to turn. Egil groaned. The feet stopped outside the pool of blood in which Nix lay.
“Sorry about this,” said a voice. “It will hurt, but you’ll live.”
Nix hissed with pain as something—a healing elixir, he realized—
was poured on his back. He felt the skin knit closed, felt the magic of the balm restore his strength. The slippers moved off, did the same for Egil. Nix clambered to his feet, his clothes soaked with rain and blood and turned to face his savior. For a moment, he couldn’t speak.
“Kerfallen?” he managed at last.
“What is this?” Egil said, as he, too, rose.
Before them stood what appeared to be a copy of the Kerfallen whom Sairsa had just stabbed to death—pierced nose, tattoos, all of it. Nix looked at the body, back at the person before him, back at the body.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Wizard shite,” Egil said, but there was no conviction behind it.
Kerfallen grinned, showing a mouthful of silvery, metal teeth. “The High Magister of the Ochre Order stripped Oorgan of his magic, the worst punishment he can mete out, since members of the Order are prohibited from killing one another. He forbade anyone from helping Oorgan regain it, but Oorgan and I have a relationship that goes back…a long way. And I have a dislike of the High Magister. He’s a prick, to speak plainly. “
Egil looked back at the corpse of Kerfallen, then to the living man. “But…what the fak is that, then?”
The tiny wizard beamed. “That? That’s one of my finer works, quite unlike the crude constructs I use at the gates and in the Low Bazaar to sell my wares.”
Nix marveled at the similarities. “It’s a construct? Then how do we even know we’re talking to the real you now?”
Kerfallen smiled. “I suppose you don’t.” He gestured at his form. “But that would be finer work still, don’t you think?”
Nix put the pieces together. “So you knew she was coming for you?”
“The Night Blade? I knew the High Magister had retained her.”
“Why not just kill her then?” Nix asked.
“Aye, that,” Egil said, rubbing the spot on his back where he’d taken Sairsa’s blade.
Kerfallen pursed his lips. “She bears a device that wards her against magic. She might as well be invisible to it.”
“Go on and say it, Egil,” Nix said.
“Fakkin’ gewgaws,” the priest said.
But Nix knew then why Sairsa had never worried about the candle back at the Tunnel. Ieve if it had been magical, it would not have detected her lies.