A Conversation in Blood

by Paul S. Kemp

  “Maybe,” Egil said.

  Walking the trash-strewn, packed-earth streets of the Warrens always turned Nix vaguely morose, and discussing Rose and Mere had only amplified the feeling. The maze of tightly packed shacks and huts were the undrained dregs of Dur Follin. They just remained there within the Poor Wall, festering, multiplying, bugs in stagnant water. Poverty begat itself, and was multiplied by debtors and criminals fleeing into the Warrens from creditors and the Watch, by immigrants to Dur Follin being shunted there from the docks and gates unless they were able to pay the required head tax. The Warrens seemed never to change. They were as perpetual as human misery, and seemed to Nix to have existed longer than Dur Follin itself.

  He’d grown up amid the filth, the abandoned child of a prostitute, and he still hated it. But it spoke to him somehow, too, and he refused to move too far away from it out of fear he might not hear its reminders. The core of him would always be the scrawny, perpetually hungry orphan who scoured the Heap, scavenging the trash of his betters for anything he could eat or sell or use. He supposed he’d never leave that behind, no matter where he went, and he was glad for it. He’d killed a man in the Warrens once over bread, an act that could have hardened him or softened him.

  If not for Mamabird, it would certainly have been the former.

  With Mamabird’s help he’d managed to get out of the filth and become who he was, but he knew that he was unusual. Most of the Warren’s denizens would never leave, would never know anything but hunger and violence and deprivation. They’d live in squalor and die the same way, rarely venturing outside the Poor Wall. Their world was small and dirty, and it could have been his, would have been his, if not for Mamabird.

  “I’ve gone from scavenging the Heap to scavenging tombs,” Nix said thoughtfully. “Not much changes, I guess.”

  “Bah,” Egil said, his voice loud in the quiet. “We don’t scavenge tombs. We explore them and liberate their treasures.”

  Nix guffawed. “By scavenging them, though, yeah?”

  “Bah,” Egil said again, but with less conviction. “You twist words to fit your mood. Besides, we do other things, too.”

  “Example, if you please.”

  “Bodyguard work,” Egil said after a moment.

  “And how has that gone for us?” Nix asked, recalling the events with the Night Blade.

  Egil grunted. “Not well, I’ll own. But we’re also property owners.”

  “And I’ll ask again, how is that working out? Without Tesha, we’d have no patrons and would already have lost everything.”

  Egil said, “The point remains, though. We’ve done and do other things. Maybe not as well as tomb robbing—”

  “Scavenging.”

  “Liberating. But we do them. And hiring Tesha shows our skill at spotting talent.”

  “To recap, then,” Nix said, adopting the tone of one of his instructors from his days at the Conclave. “We are excellent tomb robbers, mediocre bodyguards, and property owners who run their property poorly, and at least one of us is a terrible priest. Sound right?”

  “Fak you and your terrible priest,” Egil said, mirth in his tone. “And while you freely utter blasphemous words against my faith, you neglect to mention that at least one of us dropped out of the Conclave and is thus a failed student of wizardry.”

  “I didn’t drop out, but was expelled, which you well know.”

  “So you say.”

  “I do,” Nix said. “I’ll add as a final point in our favor that we at least curse quite well.”

  “No fakking disagreement there,” Egil said, nodding. “We make fair drinkers, too. Points for that.”

  “Points for that,” Nix agreed. “Let’s hang our cloaks on those pegs and consider ourselves once more worthy of the world.”

  He held out a fist and Egil tapped it with his own.

  Thin-walled shacks and decrepit buildings, many just skeletons of old lumber, formed a maze of narrow, crooked streets. Piles of smelly, unrecognizable debris dotted the way. The hour left the unlit streets haunted by poverty but otherwise mostly deserted. Fire pits glowed in the occasional alley, with dark forms huddled on the ground around them. Rats and cats and feral dogs prowled the ruins, fighting the perpetual war among their kinds.

  Nix kept his wits about him as they walked. The denizens of the Warrens were desperate but generally not stupid, as someone would have to be to take a run at him and Egil. Still, he saw no need to take chances.

  A shout sounded from somewhere off in the night, followed by a woman’s scream.

  “Odd to see you with no hammers,” he said to Egil, lowering his tone instinctively.

  “I own it feels odd to be unarmed.”

  “If we get sideways of someone, maybe just clench your fists and shake them in earnest.”

  “Aye,” Egil said.

  As was his habit, Nix did his part to ease the life of some lucky few by dropping silver terns now and again as he walked. He thought of the coins as seeds, and hoped they sprouted something in whoever found them, even if it was only a moment of relief.

  “Terns or royals?” Egil asked.

  “Terns,” Nix said. “People would kill each other over gold. Nowhere to spend it here, anyway. Guards at the gate caught them with it, they’d never be able to explain it. Silver’s hard enough. I’d do more but…you know.”

  He made a gesture that took in the whole of the Warrens.

  Egil nodded somberly. “Things are what they are, Nix. We can’t change the world.”

  “No,” Nix said. “We just live in it and make our way. But being the charming fakker I am, it seems to me I ought to be able to change it.”

  “Well, that ‘fakker’ part has the right of it, anyway,” Egil said.

  “You’re saying I’m not charming, priest? As though you could judge?”

  “I am so saying and so judging.”

  “Fak you,” Nix said.

  “So much for charming, eh? And thus my point is made.”

  “Hardly,” Nix said, “seeing as how I offered that well-deserved curse with a rakish, nay charming, raise of my eyebrow.”

  “So you say.”

  “I am so saying,” Nix said with a nod, imitating Egil’s tone. Nix thumped the priest on the shoulder. “See? Things getting well back into square with you already. I like it. You get those hammers back on your waist and I’ll vow all’s well in the world.”

  “ ‘All’s well’ goes too far, but I take the point. You know, every time we enter the Warrens you talk incessantly.”

  “I do,” Nix acknowledged. Talking kept him from thinking too much, remembering too much.

  “Though I guess that’s little different from just about anywhere we are,” Egil said.

  “And here we are,” Nix said, gesturing ahead.

  Mamabird’s neatly kept, if slightly decrepit home stood like an island of order in the chaotic desolation of the Warrens. An ancient wooden fence delineated her small plot and garden, and even thugs treated it as sacred ground. Nix worried often that someone would break the unwritten rule of the Warrens—that Mama was untouchable—but his concerns so far had proven unfounded. Perhaps no one wanted to get on the wrong side of him and Egil, or perhaps Mama commanded that much love and respect. Nix figured it was probably the latter. He and Egil had long ago stopped encouraging her to move out of the Warrens; she would not even consider it.

  A lantern burned on the wooden porch of her home, casting its light out into the darkness, a beacon for the lost children of the Warrens. Mamabird lit it every night. A gray cat sat in the glow, cleaning its paws. Another two lounged on the roof eaves. No doubt another dozen that Nix couldn’t see lurked about the house. Mama loved her cats second only to her chicks.

  Lamplight leaked through the slats of the home’s closed shutters.

  “See?” Nix said, nodding at the light inside the house. “Didn’t I say?”

  “You did.”

  By unspoken rule, before approaching the house t
hey stopped in the street and faced each other.

  “So?” Egil asked, squaring up to Nix so that Nix could see him clearly in the moonlight.

  Nix looked him over. The priest looked disheveled, tired, and unshaven. “You look not quite yourself but not so far from it that she’ll worry overmuch. There’s nothing for the stubble, but tuck in your shirt, maybe button your vest, and straighten the cloak. You stink only a bit, so that’s something. You have smudges on your head that look vaguely like an eye.”

  “Fak off.”

  Nix smiled. “Me?”

  Egil looked down on Nix. “Close up the top button on your shirt. Run a hand through your hair. That’s better, though you still look vaguely rodentish.”

  “And fak off to you, too.”

  With that, they walked to Mamabird’s house and took the three steps up to the porch, where Nix rapped lightly on the door. The cat on the porch looked upon them with indifference.

  Inside, the floorboards creaked and Mamabird’s voice carried through the wooden door. “Who’s out there now? You need help, little one?”

  Nix smiled, as that was the same question she’d asked years ago when he’d first knocked on her door.

  “It’s Nix and Egil, Mama,” Nix said. “Sorry for the hour—”

  The door opened immediately—as ever, she did not lock it—and there Mamabird stood, covered in a faded smock and stained apron, her girth filling the doorway, her thick gray hair pulled up in a bun. A wide smile deepened the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, and her chin pulled back into its folds. Nix could not help but smile in return.

  Like the Warrens, Mamabird seemed never to change. Nix liked to think the light in her spirit froze her age in place. She held out her arms, stepped forward, and embraced them both at once. She smelled of garlic and sweat and home.

  “My boys! Now what brings you here this early?” She released her embrace but kept a protective hand on each of them. “Some trouble?”

  “No trouble, Mama,” Nix said.

  “Well, ain’t that a first?” she said.

  “Everybody’s funny tonight,” Nix said, and Egil chuckled. “Something in the wind maybe. Anyway, we just wanted to see you is all.”

  A cat darted out as they stood there. Another darted in, an orange tabby.

  “And maybe have some soup,” Egil added, breathing in the aroma of Mama’s soup, the smell drifting through the doorway.

  “Well, you get on in here and see me then,” she said, pulling them by their hands into the house and closing the door behind them. “I’ll serve some soup directly. My chicks are still asleep upstairs so we’ll keep our voices low.”

  A ragged oval carpet covered the stained, age-worn wooden floor of Mamabird’s front room, and a hodgepodge of chairs sat about the room or faced the small hearth. Mama went to the large soup kettle hanging from a hook over the fire. “I was just reheating the soup from last night. I’ll make a new pot later this morning. Onions are thriving this year. Potatoes, too. Sit, boys. Or we can eat in the kitchen?”

  “Here’s fine, Mama,” Nix said.

  They sat in the chairs before the hearth while Mama ladled soup into two wooden bowls, then handed one to each of them. Nix’s chair had uneven legs and Egil’s creaked ominously upon taking his weight, but neither of them cared. They were as much at home here as they were anywhere, and the soup—tepid potato and onion—sent Nix back into his past.

  “Delicious,” Egil said, and Nix agreed.

  For a long time they simply sat together in the glow of the firelight, talking of the Warrens, Nix’s childhood, Mama’s herd of cats, the garden…and nothing else mattered. Nix felt a twinge of sadness when the light of the rising sun started to creep through the shutters.

  He summoned his courage and finally asked, “How are you feeling, Mama?”

  “Me? You always ask that, Nixxie, and I’m as healthy as ever. How’re you two?” She reached over and took Egil’s hand in her own. “Especially you, young man? You always seem weighed down by something. More so than usual this visit. You could tell me, you know, let me share the burden. That’s why Mama’s here.”

  Egil smiled and placed his huge hand over hers. “Just being here lightens the burden, Mama. It’s enough.”

  “You should’ve seen him hours ago,” Nix said. “The priest wears his melancholy like armor.”

  She never took her rheumy eyes from Egil. “You weren’t one of my chicks when you were a boy, Egil. Not like Nixxie. But you are now. And you know my door is always open.”

  Egil nodded and smiled, a genuine smile that Nix was pleased to see.

  “A crack in the armor, mayhap,” Nix said, and drained the last of his third bowl of soup.

  Before Egil could answer, a thin waif of a girl descended the narrow, creaky stairs into the room, yawning as she came. She stopped cold when she saw Egil and Nix and Mama.

  “It’s all right, Kinnen,” Mamabird said. “These are friends of Mama’s.”

  “Hello,” Egil said, turning in his seat, testing the wood’s resolve.

  “Why are you up so early?” Mama asked her.

  “Bav is snoring,” she said, but kept her eyes on Egil. “Is he a giant, Mama?”

  Mamabird laughed, and it turned into a raspy cough. “Well, I guess he is, but he’s a nice one. That I know for certain. You go straighten your pallet now, and try not to wake the other chicks. Breakfast soon.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Kinnen said, and turned to go, eyeballing Egil over her shoulder as she went up the stairs as though he were some creature of myth. Egil stared after her a long moment, thoughts churning behind his eyes. When he turned back, his face was thoughtful.

  “You do so much here,” the priest said to Mamabird.

  “As much as I can,” she said cheerfully. “That girl, Kinnen, she had a rough go but she’ll be fine now. You all right, Egil?”

  “I am,” Egil said with a nod. “I think I am.”

  After finishing another half bowl of soup and a bit more conversation, Egil and Nix stood. Nix would have sworn Egil’s chair sighed with relief.

  “You don’t want to stay and see the rest of the chicks when they rise? They grumble about their chores more’n even you did, Nixxie.”

  “I doubt that,” Nix said. He knew well that the boys and girls Mama fed and housed worked for their keep, sweeping, patching, tidying, and otherwise keeping the flotsam of the Warrens away from the island of Mamabird’s home. He’d hated it in his youth, but it had taught him valuable lessons. “But we do need to head out. Deeds to be done, adventures to be had; you know how we are.”

  “You are the same silly boy as ever,” she said. She stood and hugged him hard. “I miss you.”

  “And I, you,” Nix said. “Which is why I return here when I need to set my world right.”

  She hugged Egil in turn, and Egil held on to her longer than Nix had ever before seen.

  “You remember what I said now,” she said to him. “And remember that the world needs its giants, too. Don’t you let it beat you down to size.”

  “All right,” the priest answered. “Thank you, Mama.”

  Before leaving, they each emptied their pockets of terns and commons and handed them to Mamabird. She would not take them, so they placed them on the hearth, as was their habit.

  “Hear now, you can’t keep giving me all your earnings,” she protested. “How will you eat, yourselves?”

  Nix smiled. “Does Egil look like he’s missed meals, Mama? We’re fine. And it pleases us both to help you some so you can help them some.”

  “Aye,” Egil said. “Very much so. Maybe Kinnen can have a dress?”

  “Maybe she can,” Mama said with a smile. “I love you both.”

  They answered in kind and after leaving, they walked in silence for several blocks. A few denizens of the Warrens, up with the dawn, watched them pass. Dogs skulked out of their path. The Heap rose to their right, gulls wheeling around it like a snowstorm in the morning air. The dungsweepers
would be coming through the Slum Gate in their wagons within an hour, bringing the night’s refuse. The Warrens would be waiting to receive it, as ever.

  Nix shook his head. “Odd that that run-down home and an old woman in the Warrens feels like the center of the world.”

  “We all need a place,” Egil said. “This is yours.”

  “Yours, too, I’d say.”

  “Maybe,” Egil said. “Anyway, I needed that. Should’ve come sooner. Better than another tankard. Thanks, Nix.”

  Unused to the priest’s sincere thanks, Nix managed only, “Yeah. Of course. Uh, anyway, always good to see Mama.”

  Egil nodded. “It is. That woman never sets foot outside the Slum Gate, lives in a hovel, will barely take our money, and yet does more good than us.”

  Nix pursed his lips. “We back to this again? I won’t dispute she does more good than us or anyone I’ve ever known. But we do some good.”

  “Example, rogue.”

  “Shite, man, I don’t know. We treat the working women and men in the Tunnel fairer than they used to get. We’ve beat a few arseholes who’d earned it. We saved Rose and Mere from their brother and…”

  The moment Nix said it, he wished he hadn’t. He trailed off, cursing himself in silence, wary of Egil slipping back into despondence.

  “It’s all right,” Egil said, reading Nix’s silence. “We did save them. And then we didn’t, and maybe they saved us. Either way…”

  “Either way,” Nix agreed, nodding. “You know, our lives revolve around a handful of women. That seem right to you? Odd at all?”

  Egil shrugged. “Seems mostly right to me.”

  “Seems right to me, too,” Nix said. “Just struck me of a sudden, is all. And speaking of, let’s go see one of them. I’m sure she has some anger to vent on us. Maybe the sun will have dissipated it some. I’m going to blame you for everything. Fair enough?”

  Egil chuckled and they moved through their waking city toward Tesha and the Slick Tunnel.

  The same group of guards remained at the Slum Gate, dark circles under their eyes, faces slack. The potbellied one elbowed his fellow as Egil and Nix approached. The sergeant was not in view. Nix figured he was probably sleeping in the small guardhouse, one of the benefits of rank.