A Conversation in Blood

by Paul S. Kemp

  “We see how it is, now, don’t we?” said a voice from behind him, the voice of the big, moon-faced one. “That’s the way you want this to go, then. Taking a run at a drunk man, are you?”

  The puker firmed up to hear his friends backing his play, and a dumb smile split his muddy face. Nix turned to see the puker’s two companions standing on the porch, a promise of violence in their scowls, blades already in their fists.

  “Things took a turn, yeah?” said the puker, grinning.

  Nix nonchalantly drew a dagger to pair with his sword. “Things do often take a turn, I’ve found. Seems to be my luck of late. But listen, I can’t just teach lessons to all three of you. This goes the way it looks and I’ll probably have to kill two of you. You clear on that? You want to talk among yourselves a moment and decide who’ll die?”

  “Listen to this one,” said the big, hairy one to moon-face.

  “He’s got big balls, I’ll give him that,” said moon-face.

  “Bigger than your pukey friend, to that I can attest. Firsthand, as it were.” Nix shrugged. “I guess I need to start working on my explanation to the Guard for the two or three bodies they’ll soon find. I’ll start with something like: They were bunghole slubbers, Goodsir, and no one will miss them, and they got what was coming after a fair warning.”

  The big one smirked and the two started down the two steps of the porch, spacing themselves to come at Nix from different angles, while the puker eased forward from behind.

  Nix spun and flung his dagger. It speared the puker’s thigh and he went down screaming.

  Nix drew a second dagger to replace the first and smiled at the other two. Their confidence and their advance both faltered.

  “You need to move faster,” Nix said. “Because things always seem to take a turn back, yeah? That seems to be my luck, too. You boys maybe rethinking things? It’s not too late. You can get out of here with bruised pride, a stuck leg, and nothing else.”

  “Fakker stabbed my leg!” said the puker.

  “That’s obvious to all of us,” Nix said him. “Gods, man.”

  “Get him!” said the puker, but still the two hesitated.

  Just then a sound came from within the Slick Tunnel, a prolonged howl tinged with madness. The two men tensed, went wide-eyed, and backed quickly away from the doors, but still staying well away from Nix.

  “I may have to take back that bit about it not being too late,” Nix said, and Gadd burst through the double doorway, his pointed teeth bared in a grimace. The tulwar he gripped in his hands was nearly as long as Nix was tall. He raised the sword high and lunged first at one, then at the other of the two men, both of whom immediately turned and bolted in opposite directions. Gadd pursued the big one for a few strides, howling wildly.

  “Don’t leave me, you fakkers!” said the puker, but they didn’t so much as slow and the darkness soon swallowed them.

  Nix looked back on the puker, his face pale from pain and fear and blood loss. “Looks like you need better friends.”

  The man clambered to his feet, favoring his bad leg, Nix’s dagger still half-buried in his thigh. He looked at Gadd as the big man came back, then at Nix, fear in his eyes.

  “Don’t let that savage kill me!” the puker said.

  “I’m not sure I could stop him if he had a mind,” Nix said. “But I think you’ll live to see the sun, at least if you get that leg stanched. Just tie it off above the wound.” Nix reached into a belt pouch, withdrew a silver tern, and tossed it to the man, who caught it despite being drunk and wounded. “Go see one of Orella’s saints. They’ll take care of you, even at this hour. Go on. Limp along out of here and don’t come back. Not ever.”

  The man backed off slowly, favoring his wounded leg. He took a bite of the crown, his eyes registering surprise when the give showed it genuine.

  “And probably you should make some new friends who won’t run off on you,” Nix said, as the man continued his retreat. “And also maybe drink less and in general be less of an arse. No one likes an arse. Oh, and don’t puke on people’s floors. No one likes that, either, least of all me.”

  “It was the fakkin’ eel stew,” the man shot back, backing away now as fast as his wounded leg would allow.

  Gadd growled and the man turned and scrambled away.

  “Keep the dagger,” Nix called. “You pull that out now and you’ll die in the street.” Nix turned to face Gadd, whose pointed teeth glowed white in the dark oval of his face. “You heard him, yeah? It was the eel stew. That makes this whole thing your fault.”

  “Gofti!” Gadd said, still grinning. “No one made you pick a fight. But did you see the look in their eyes when I came through the doors? Like children, they looked.”

  Nix grinned. “I saw it. In fairness to them, being charged by a tall dark-skinned man with sharpened teeth and an absurdly large blade would cause any sensible person to move in the other direction.”

  “Hmm. I suppose this is true.”

  “Do you need someone to decapitate to calm yourself down or…? I’m sure we could catch up with that limping puker if need be.”

  Gadd laughed aloud.

  “Anyway,” Nix said as he scabbarded his blades, “obliged for the aid. And gofti? What is that?”

  Gadd’s broad face twisted up with thinking and he said, “It is like when Egil says bah.”

  “Ah. That I know well. ‘Gofti’ it is, then. More from your homeland, yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is where again?”

  Gadd crossed his arms across his chest and shook his head in the negative.

  Before Nix could say anything more, Tesha bustled out of the Tunnel’s doors in a loose nightdress, her long dark hair hanging wildly to her shoulders, questions and anger brewing in her dark eyes. Lis hovered in the doorway behind her. Tesha took in Nix, Gadd, and the tulwar and asked, “Is anyone dead?”

  “No,” Nix said. “And have I told you you look lovely?”

  “Too often. It’s starting to lose its meaning. Have you undermined business with…whatever happened here?”

  Nix looked down the road, back at Tesha. “Maybe with three slubbers, but otherwise, no. I doubt those few drunks inside even woke up. And Gadd and I are unharmed, thank you for asking.”

  Tesha ignored him and said to Gadd, “I’ve told you to keep your distance from them, haven’t I? It’s bad enough I’ve got the two of them intimidating patrons. I don’t need you doing the same or getting caught up in their schemes.”

  “I don’t intimidate anyone,” Nix said. “I’m fakking charming is what. And schemes? Really?”

  Gadd stood up straight and looked at Tesha down the length of his wide nose, a small act of defiance. “He needed aid and I gave it. He’s a friend.”

  Tesha’s mouth tightened.

  “I didn’t need it,” Nix said. “But appreciate the gesture nevertheless.”

  Tesha exhaled loudly. “Is the Watch coming or can I go back to bed?”

  “Watch isn’t coming,” Nix said. “Uh, at least I don’t think.”

  “Fine.” She brushed some stray hairs out of her face. “Good night, then.”

  She started to turn away, but halted when Nix asked, “Are you feeling any better?”

  “What?”

  “I heard you weren’t feeling well,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  She turned and looked unsure of what to say. “I’m…fine. Yes. Thank you. Where’s Egil?”

  “I don’t know,” Nix said. “Drinking somewhere.”

  “Well, maybe you should go find out where?” she said, eyebrows raised. “Being his friend, and all.”

  “Maybe I should,” Nix said.

  She stomped a foot and pursed her lips. “Good.”

  “Good. And I’m not inconstant.”

  That last took her by surprise, to judge from her expression.

  The two drunks who had been sleeping at tables staggered past her, muttering apologies. Once they were past she said to Nix,
“No, you’re not. And I’m glad you’re all right. Both of you. Now I’m going back to bed.” To Gadd, she said, “Close up. Clear the house, give any hobs upstairs notice that we’re closing, and let’s get everyone some rest. Everyone sleeps in an extra hour tomorrow. I’ll make my bread come breakfast.” She looked skyward. “This fakking moon.”

  “That’s what I said!” Nix echoed. “And I’m glad you’re feeling better, if I didn’t say it already.”

  She turned and went back into the Tunnel, leaving Gadd and Nix standing outside.

  “I like her,” Nix said.

  “I know,” Gadd said. “I’ll leave back doors open for you and Egil.”

  “Well enough,” Nix said. “Listen, I feel obliged to say that you’re not lovely when you’re angry. You know that, yeah?”

  Gadd laughed aloud once more.

  Nix headed out. He smiled as he went, pleased that Tesha had acknowledged that he wasn’t inconstant.

  His night had taken another turn for the better. Now he just needed to find Egil and drag him home. Hopefully his luck would hold.

  Ool’s clock chimed the third hour past midnight, the sound deep and resonant in the quiet darkness of streets long ago abandoned to night’s small hours. The towering stone spire of the clock rose high above the city’s skyline, an ancient finger pointed at the stars. Minnear had nearly set, surrendering the sky to its sister moon, Kulven, and its soft silver glow. Likewise, the linkboys had surrendered their charges and the charcoal in the torch cages atop the streetlamps had burned down to glowing nubs as Nix made his way along Dur Follin’s shadowed streets.

  The faint, slow beat of drums carried from somewhere to the south, probably from the Low Bazaar, which never slept. The sound reminded Nix of a heartbeat, like the city’s pulse. Most of Dur Follin was either abed or drunkenly ensconced at their taproom of choice, though the occasional pedestrian or carriage moved slowly through the cobblestone streets.

  Nix spotted furtive, cloaked figures on business he assumed to be illicit, passed two smiling but fatigued parties of wealthy scions slumming until dawn on this side of the Meander. Nix kept his distance from the hard-eyed, suspicious bodyguards orbiting the entourage. From time to time he saw a teamster moving goods across town to the river markets, taking advantage of streets unclogged with traffic, and Nix twice spotted members of the Watch in their orange tabards.

  As ever, drunks and the poor lay here and there at the mouths of alleys or in darkened doorways, little more than human jetsam trying to catch some rest before the poke of a watchman’s truncheon awakened them and ordered them along. Dogs barked in the distance; rats skulked in alleyways.

  Nix hit several of the taverns and inns along the Dock Ward in which Egil sometimes drank or picked a fight, but the priest wasn’t at any of them. They all smelled of fish and seaweed and sweat and Nix cursed Egil for making him abide the stink. The one-eyed tapkeep at the Rotted Onion said Egil had been there until about midnight.

  “Drunk?” Nix asked, wincing as he burped up Gadd’s stew yet again.

  “More sad’n drunk, I’d say.”

  Nix laid a couple of commons on the scarred wood of the bar before leaving, then worked his way east through a few more establishments. Each one took him farther from the river and the Archbridge, farther from the wealthier west side of Dur Follin and closer to the Poor Wall and the Warrens. It was as though he were tracking the movement of poverty. As he moved east, each establishment was a bit more run-down than the last.

  Egil was in none of them. As Nix exited Tevin’s Taphouse, a breeze from the south bore the faint, charnel reek of the distant Deadmire, recalling to Nix’s memory Rose and Mere and Odrhaal.

  Once more his dream tried to surface and once more it failed.

  He was soon sweaty and tired and irritable, and by the time the more immediate stink of the Heap did battle with and defeated the fainter, rotting smell of the Deadmire, he’d about had enough. He resolved to check a couple more places and leave off for the night. Egil knew how to take care of himself, and Nix was not his keeper.

  He was close to the Poor Wall by then, the high, crumbling stone line that separated the desperate poverty of the Warrens from the rest of the city. Through a break in the buildings ahead he saw the rise of the Heap framed against the moonlit sky—a huge mound of rubbish that looked and smelled like a giant had shat on the city.

  Nix stopped in the middle of the street, put his hands on his hips, and stared at it. He had spent his youth living hand to mouth in the Warrens, picking through the refuse of the Heap, wallowing in its stink. The mound seemed to him to have shrunk over the years, but that couldn’t be right. It had to be just that he’d grown. Either way, seeing it put him in mind of his childhood, which put him in mind of Mamabird. She’d been ill of late. He’d been meaning to check on her. Might do Egil good to see her, too, if Nix could find him.

  Nix turned a corner down a narrow, dimly lit street that ran parallel to the Poor Wall. Two-story buildings lined it, all of them built so close together they might as well have been joined. Nix smelled chimney smoke, a skunk’s spray, and spotted a cat as it darted out from under the skeleton of a dying tree and crossed the street ahead. Farther down the block he caught sight of a lone man walking down the opposite side of the thoroughfare. The man, too small and not stumbling enough to be Egil, seemed to register Nix at about the same time.

  Nix thought nothing of it until the man hooked his left thumb on his belt while putting his right hand in his trouser pocket, one of the signals guild thieves used to identify themselves to one another. Nix always made it a point to know the identifying gestures, which changed from month to month.

  Nix didn’t answer the identifier in kind but picked up his pace and cut across the street to intercept the man. The man slowed at Nix’s approach. He put a hand to a hilt on his weapon belt and looked past Nix, head cocked, sniffing for an ambush. Nix did the same and saw no sign of anyone else. He kept his hands at his sides and free of steel for the moment.

  “No danger here, friend,” Nix called, his voice carrying in the quiet. He stopped five paces from the man, who stood a head taller than Nix and looked almost as wide as Egil under his hooded cloak.

  The man stopped, too, keeping the distance between them.

  “Nix?” the man asked, and Nix recognized the sloppy, wet tone.

  “Trelgin?”

  Trelgin was Seventh Blade on the Guild’s Committee, answering directly to the Upright Man, Rusk. Egil and Nix had played a role in Rusk’s ascension to head the guild—though Rusk wouldn’t remember it that way—but they’d also killed a good number of guild men in the process, so feelings remained raw.

  “You’re a long way from home, Trelgin,” Nix said, staying coiled. “Guild house is back in the Dock Ward. Aster whispering mysteries in your ear and telling you to come across town? Or did Rusk just run you off, finally?

  Trelgin took his hand from the hilt of his sword and lowered his hood. A palsy had afflicted Trelgin at some point in his life and caused the left half of his face to droop like melted wax. His speech was halting and every fourth or fifth word came out wet and loose.

  “I’d say the same about you being far from home but then I can smell the Heap in the air plain, so I guess a little Warrens rat like you ain’t quite so far from your den after all, huh?”

  Nix smiled. “I’d reckon what you smell is the drool leaking out of the corner of your mouth, or maybe it’s your upper lip, smelling, as it does, of shite, which is what comes of having your nose up Rusk’s arsehole more hours of the day than not. Isn’t that about the state of things? Seventh Blade’s a shite job, isn’t that what you guild boys say? I just didn’t know you meant it literally.”

  Trelgin’s droopy face spasmed, as if trying and failing to look angry. “Fak off, Nix Fall. I’ll be on my way, if you don’t mind.”

  “No need to run off, Trelgin,” Nix said, sidestepping to put himself in Trelgin’s path. “I’m just in a mood, is all. L
isten, you or any of your boys see Egil tonight?”

  Trelgin tried to look sly behind his droopy features. “I saw him, sure.”

  Nix waited a beat before saying, “You going to tell me where, or do I need to knock out your teeth and inquire of them individually?”

  Trelgin’s face managed to twist itself into a scowl. “You try that sometime, Nix. Things might not end as you think. And I’ll tell you, certain. Your boy’s at the Masquerade last I saw. Drunk. Got some difficulties, too.”

  Nix understood his point. “How many difficulties?”

  “Five when I left. Neighborhood toughs. Just slubbers. Been building up in there awhile. He should have just walked on, though maybe walking’s not something he can manage at the moment. Or maybe a scrum is what he’s looking for. Why don’t you go there and get in the mix? Maybe you and Egil both get clicked, save me some trouble. I’ll throw a pray to Aster that things end just so. Anyway…”

  Trelgin started to walk forward, as though he’d push through Nix, but Nix gave no ground. He put a palm on Trelgin’s chest, halting him, and stared into his face.

  “You could have lent a hand, Trelgin. Sent a guild man to come get me. Even walked him out of there. Either would’ve gone a long way with me.”

  Trelgin’s lips curled into something Nix figured was a sneer, though it was hard to tell. “I’m not some second-story man you can intimidate or a two-common fen you can sweet-talk. You and him are nothing to me until you’re not. And right now, you’re still not. So fak you and your way, and take your hand off me.”

  Nix pointedly did not remove his hand. “No, fak you, you droop-faced bunghole. I could slit you open right now, unzip your stomach before your hand ever went to blade. Maybe you ought to throw a pray I don’t?”

  Trelgin held Nix’s eyes but swallowed hard. “Try and we’ll see.”

  A long moment passed before Nix said, “You owe him and me for not leaving you dead that last time on the street.”

  “Seemed more the opposite to me,” Trelgin said, leaning into Nix’s hand. His breath smelled of onions and beer. “I had twenty boys with crossbows aimed at that carriage you were guarding. And anyways, I just paid on that debt by spilling where he was.”