A Discourse in Steel (5 page)

The rise of Mandin's Way allowed him to see over the low stone ride of the dock wall to the small fishing boats that bobbed near the river's edge. The faint sound of drums and chanting carried from the high arc of the Archbridge, the sounds like voices coming down from the Seven Heavens. Pipe smoke carried from somewhere, the aroma of roasting meat.

Ahead and to his right he saw the familiar low stone wall and hodgepodge structure of the guildhouse. Channis would be waiting for him there in his private wing.

A century earlier the guildhouse had been a public inn called the Squid, a three-story brick-and-wood affair complete with a wall, stable, and terrace that overlooked the Meander. Then it had been the haunt of ferrymen and fishermen and others who made their living on the river.

The guild had started as a small group of rogues running an extortion operation that milked fishermen. The operation had grown quickly and the group soon formalized their relationship and sealed the deal with religion. The very first Committee, worshippers of Aster all, had founded the guild in the common room of the Squid, each taking Aster's sigil while they swore the oaths and threw the prays.

Later, they'd bought the inn and converted it to a private club for their ever-growing criminal operation. Today everyone called the founders the Arch Rogues and the eight of them had been buried in honor in the catacombs under the guildhouse. Their decision to form the guild, to make it a religious as well as criminal enterprise, had made a lot of men rich over the years, and a lot of other men dead. Rusk was angling for the former.

Now the Squid was known simply as the guildhouse. And both guild and house had grown bigger and stronger every year. Rusk figured one day the Committee would put their own man in the office of Lord High Mayor and the city would be theirs.

Meanwhile the guild's operations were a maze, and so too was the house, complete with underground tunnels and secret passages and deadfalls. Only the Upright Man was said to know all the building's secrets, and then only because the knowledge came to him when his tat showed the eighth blade.

Rusk checked his tat. Nothing. Shite.

As the Fifth Blade on the Committee, Rusk managed the guild's business in a large piece of the city in and around the Low Bazaar. If Aster threw him the Sixth Blade, he'd take over the Dock Ward and the Archbridge.

Warehousing and religion. That's where the real coin was.

The current Sixth Blade, Trelgin, would move to Seventh Blade and become the Upright Man's right hand. Trelgin deserved it, prick that he was.

Shite job, Seventh Blade. Much status, little coin.

A Seventh Blade ran nothing on his own, had no independent stream of coin. A Seventh Blade served the Upright Man and depended on his largesse for a cut of guild proceeds. He was a handmaid, nothing more, and the constant hope of a Seventh Blade was to become the new Upright Man, either through death or retirement of the current Upright Man. Where the Seventh Blade was shite, the Eighth Blade was gold. Lots of status, lots of coin. But also lots of threats and lots of murder attempts. And sometimes those attempts succeeded, as Rusk well knew.

No, Sixth Blade was the perch and Rusk wanted to be the bird.

A block from the guildhouse, he felt his tat start to change and almost hooted with joy. He felt it first as a tingle on his skin, but the tingle soon grew to a slight burning. His heart jumped. He darted across the street and stood in the shadow of a cloth merchant, his back to the passersby. He'd handle the bridge and warehouses better than Trelgin, with a more forceful hand, and in the process he'd get very rich. And once he was very rich, he'd build a manse on the Shelf and scandalize the old noble families that lived there. He'd keep a harem of women around, like a Jafari Sultan, and eat well and get fat and be done with guild life.

Wincing at the pain but excited, he watched the tat squirm on his flesh, Aster's will drawn in ink on the skin of one of his stealing priests. The tat sprouted another blade and he clenched his fist in glee to help contain his shout. But the burning did not stop, nor had the tat stopped changing. He stared in dumbfounded disbelief as it grew a seventh blade.

“Shite,” he said, his jaw clenched so tightly that words could barely get between his teeth. He rubbed at the magical ink. “No, no, no. Shite, shite, shite.”

He hadn't earned enough as a Fifth Blade to skip the Sixth and go right to the Seventh. He'd be as broke as an ugly whore. He'd never get out of the life. He'd be stuck serving Channis for a decade. If he ever became the Upright Man himself, he'd be too old to enjoy the coin.

“Godsdammit, no! Trelgin is supposed to be Seventh Blade! Trelgin!”

But no matter how much he rubbed, there it was: a seventh blade. He'd be the right hand to Channis, whom he presumed to be the new Upright Man. Aster had spoken through his ink, and he'd told a bad joke in the process.

“Fak, fakkin', fak!”

“You all right, goodsir?” said a passerby, a thirty-something merchant in a fur-lined tailored cloak and polished boots.

Rusk whirled on the man. The fakker's oiled mustache irked him. Everything irked him. He shoved the prick to the muddy ground, kicked him once, and spat at his feet.

“Worry after your own business, bunghole!”

The man scurried back crabwise, wide-eyed, and almost got trampled by a passing horse.

“I meant nothing,” the man said. “Apologies. Apologies.”

Other onlookers gave them a wide berth, though Rusk heard a woman say to her companion that someone should summon the Watch.

He wanted no part of the Watch, not at the moment. He was the godsdamned Seventh Blade. He couldn't have a run-in with the Watch.

“If you mean nothing, then say nothing, fakker,” he said to the merchant, and the man nodded fearfully.

Rusk stepped past the man, seething, and stalked down Mandin's Way. Channis was neither generous nor forgiving. And worse, he wasn't careless. Seventh to Channis was a shite job even by the measure of shite jobs.

“Fak!”

He was so preoccupied with Aster's little jest that he almost forgot to give the hand signs as he walked through the low, outer wall of the guildhouse. The snipers in the gatehouse probably would have recognized him and held their fire, but maybe not. As it was, he remembered at the last moment and made the intricate symbols with his fingers.

“I already got shot in the arse once today. What's another few to me?”

He tried to get himself under control as he approached the raised porch and front double doors of the guildhouse, still painted with the image of a black squid and marked “members only.” He wondered if word of the Upright Man's death had beaten him back.

He opened the reinforced metal-banded doors—every door in the guildhouse was reinforced and with its own lock—and nodded at Kherne and Dool, the muscle on duty. They were Channis's men.

“The Man wants to see you,” Kherne said, his lazy eye looking off to Rusk's left.

“The Man does?” Rusk said, not wanting to tip his knowledge.

“Channis,” Kherne said.

Dool nodded a head as large as a slop bucket. “Committee got reordered today.”

Channis must have let out word that he'd sprouted an eighth blade. The rogues would be moving, trying to figure out who was who and what was what.

“I know,” Rusk said, nodding at his tat.

“What about you, then?” Kherne asked, trying to see Rusk's tattoo. “You move up to Sixth?”

“No,” Rusk said, and walked off.

“You're not Sixth Blade?” Dool called after him.

“No,” Rusk muttered as he made his way through the labyrinthine corridors and stairways of the guildhouse. “I'm fakked is what I am.”

Egil and Nix sat alone at the Tunnel's bar, the stink of Gadd's pipe smoke in their noses, the memory of Blackalley on their minds. Tankards of ale sat on the time-scarred bar before them, untouched. Nix could not shake what he'd seen and felt, the old man he'd killed for bread, the pettiness he'd been reminded of, the spite. The words he'd heard as Blackalley spat them out haunted him still.

Free us.

He wasn't even sure anymore that he hadn't said the words himself. He tapped his fingers on the bar, agitated. Gadd's smoke agitated him. The stink of the Tunnel agitated him, being, as it was, all sweat and sex and smoke. Everything agitated him.

Behind them a few laborers and merchants sat at the tables, talking and laughing. The men and women who sold their bodies in the Tunnel lingered on the staircase—their tight, revealing clothing an open invitation.

“So,” Nix said, turning his back to the bar and drumming his fingers.

“So,” Egil agreed.

“You're irritable.”

Egil stared up at the picture of Lord Mayor Hyram Mung. “I haven't said anything.”

“It's your silence that shows your irritability.”

Egil glanced over at him. “You make no sense.”

“See!” Nix said, and pointed a finger at his friend. “Irritable.”

Egil shook his head and took the virginity of his ale.

“Didn't I tell Gadd to take down that thrice-damned picture of Mung?” Nix said. “He looks like a sow. And his beady eyes annoy me.”

Nix drew one of the many throwing daggers he kept secreted on his person and threw. The blade pierced Mung's eye.

“Better,” Nix muttered.

“Who's irritable again?” Egil asked.

Nix glared at the priest. “You're just trying to irk me, aren't you?”

Egil shrugged. “You seem irked already.”

“Me? No! If I were irked I'd…” He trailed off, took a drink of his own ale, set the tankard back down hard enough to slosh some over the edge. “All right, aye. I'm irked.”

“It's Blackalley,” Egil said.

“It is!” Nix said, raising his arms and nearly leaping from his seat. “What
was
that? Regrets and sorrow and…”

Egil shook his head and took another pull of ale. “A fakkin' horror is what it was. Bleak.”

The words Nix had been holding back came rushing out of him. “Making us see everything we've done and didn't do and should've done? No one should have to face that. I been running from that my whole life. Everyone does. The past is the past. I don't want to live inside my own head.”

“None'd blame you for that,” Egil said. “Empty place, likely.”

“Now you're funny?”

“No. Apologies. But the past isn't the past, Nix. The past is us. It's the series of moments that led up to who we are right now.” He jabbed a finger on the bar. “Everything that went before led up to this moment.”

“Gods, man! Getting all priestly, now, are we? Why would you do that?” He shook his head. “Fak.”

Egil ran his palm over the Eye of Ebenor.

Nix couldn't let it go. He picked up his ale, put it back down, fiddling with the handle. “You telling me we can't leave the past behind us? 'Cause there are some moments I'd rather forget. Lots of them, really.”

“You can forget them, but they're still you. Everything you've done and seen and felt, it all sums to you, it adds up to this moment. It doesn't matter if you can remember the individual moments that lead up to it. Because they're all in you right now.”

“Stop that,” Nix said.

“Stop what?”

“I don't know, saying profound things. They irritate. They irk.”

Egil sighed. “Well enough.”

Nix sighed, too. “I say we get drunk and forget Blackalley.”

Egil started to speak, probably to once more say something about how it wouldn't matter if they forgot it because it was in them now.

Nix held up a hand. “Don't you say it!”

Egil stared at Nix. “Right, then. Drunk it is.”

Having said the words, Egil set to making them true. He slammed his ale in one long pull. Nix matched him and they sat there for a time in silence, empty tankards before them.

“Everything we've done, Egil. All those…moments. Fakking moments. And what do we have to show for it? This place and some coin. That's it.”

“This is what you wanted. When we left the tomb of Abn Thuset, you said you wanted this.”

“I did. I do. But there's gotta be something else, something more.”

Egil smiled but it was halfhearted. “Now who's saying profound things? And you're right. They do irritate. Irk, too.”

“I don't know what I want. It's always the next thing, something I don't have. What do you want, Egil?”

Egil's expression fell. He stared into his empty tankard. “I want to forget, Nix. That's what I want.”

Nix flashed on Egil's weeping face in Blackalley, his teary apologies to his daughter and wife. There was nothing Nix could say so he put his hand on his friend's shoulder, just for a moment.

“So, drunk, then,” Nix said, trying to lighten the mood. “Where's Gadd? Gadd!”

Egil sat up and exhaled, as though exorcising a ghost. He thumped his fist on the bar and called into the taproom in the back. “Return to your altar, priest. Bring forth libations.”

“Libations?” Nix said, and tapped Egil's tankard with his own. “Nice.”

Gadd hurried out of the taproom, his eyes wide, white, and alarmed in his narrow, hawkish face.

Egil and Nix were on their feet at once.

“What is it?” Nix asked.

Gadd rushed forward and grabbed them by their wrists. “Come! Rose hurt!”

At first the words didn't register with Nix. “Rose? Our Rose?”

“Where's Merelda?” Egil said, and grabbed Gadd by his thin, tattooed arm. “Speak, man.”

“She's with Rose,” Gadd said, and shook himself loose.

Egil and Nix both leaped over the bar. Nix grabbed his dagger out of Hyram Mung's eye as he ran by. They hurried through the taproom, the storeroom, and out into the fenced area in the back of the Tunnel, littered with old barrels, a bucket, an old door, and the weekly rubbish pile. The wooden gate was open to the street, where sat a rickety, open-topped, straw-filled wagon. Rose lay in the straw propped against a bale, still dressed in the elaborate green robes and costume jewelry she wore when performing readings in the Low Bazaar. Her eyes were closed and her head drooped and she looked to Nix like a broken flower. The sight of her so vulnerable hurt his heart.

Mere sat on her knees beside her sister, cradling Rose's hand between her own. Mere looked over at them, her eyes swollen and red.

“Help us, Egil,” she said.

Nix, Egil, and Gadd rushed to the wagon and leaped into it.

“Rose,” Nix said, touching her cheek. It was warm, thankfully. “Rose.”

She opened her eyes but they drifted in their sockets, unable to focus. They closed again and her head lolled. Nix took Rose's face in his palms.

“What happened?” Egil asked.

“Rose?” Nix said, his heart in his throat. “Rose?”

He flashed on how she'd looked months earlier when her brother had kept her drugged. He lifted her arms, checked her for wounds, saw none.

“She smells like smoke,” Nix said to Mere.

“What happened?” Egil asked again.

“At the Low Bazaar,” Mere said. “She was reading and…”

Her eyes welled again. Egil drew her close, covering her in his embrace.

“It's going to be all right,” the priest said to her.

“Let's get her inside,” Nix said. He tossed a silver to Gadd. “Pay the driver, Gadd. No, wait. I'll pay the driver. You go clear the bar. Tell Tesha what happened.”

But Tesha was already there. She must have seen Egil and Nix leap over the bar and come out to investigate. In her embroidered green dress, she stood with her hand on her hip near the gate, her dark eyes concerned.

“I'll handle the bar. Is she going to be all right?”

Nix looked at Rose, at Mere, back at Tesha. “I don't know.”

“She's been in and out, Nix,” Mere said. “She's been talking the whole ride back. Sometimes she seems herself, other times not.”

Nix tossed a silver tern to the old, grizzled man who drove the wagon.

“Obliged, granther.”

Nix put his arms under Rose and lifted her from the wagon. Egil offered his aid, but Nix shook it off.

“I've got her.”

“Aye,” Egil said.

Nix stepped down out of the wagon, grunting with exertion. He looked down at Rose and her green eyes were open and focused, looking up at him. She looked wan, her eyes pained, furrows in her brow.

Nix swallowed, said softly, “How do you feel?”

“Bad,” Rose said. “My head is just…”

Mere was at their side, brushing her sister's hair from her brow. “You need to rest, Rose.”

Rose nodded, but winced at the pain even that small motion caused her.

Together, they took her inside, carried her through a now empty bar while Tesha looked on.

“I'll bring up some warm broth,” Tesha said.

“Thank you, Tesha,” Mere said.

Tesha's men and women had retreated to their rooms—presumably at her orders—and Nix carried Rose to the small bedroom on the second floor that she and Mere shared. After laying her down on the bed, Nix kissed her on the brow. She seemed asleep, so he covered her with a blanket, closed the door behind him, and gathered in the hallway with Mere and Egil.

“So what happened?” Nix asked her.

“She was reading someone as he died,” Mere said, as though that were an explanation.

Nix looked first at Egil, then back at her, not understanding. “And?”

Heads poked out of doors down the long hallway, Tesha's workers giving in to curiosity. Nix waved them back into the rooms.

Mere said, “And that's why she's like that. It's dangerous to be in the mind of someone as they die.”

“Dangerous how?” Egil asked.

Mere shook her head. Her short, dark hair was mussed and the makeup she wore to tell fortunes was smeared by tears. She looked lost. Nix wondered how she'd fare in the world if she lost her sister. Probably much as Nix would fare if he lost Egil.

“I don't know for sure,” she said. “I've never had it happen before. Neither of us have. We've just heard that it's…bad.”

Egil stood behind her and placed his hands gently on her shoulders. His touch seemed to calm her. She took a deep breath.

“Sorry,” she said.

Nix waved it off. “In theory, then, dangerous how?”

She put her hand on Egil's. “A dying person's mind…explodes. Things can get jumbled.”

Nix had some experience with the sisters' mindmagic. “Jumbled? Thoughts get mixed up?”

She nodded. “Thoughts, memories, feelings. Everything. It can overwhelm because it all comes at once. You can become…not yourself.”

Nix flashed on Egil's words earlier about the sum of past moments making people who they were in the present. Rose had just inherited moments that weren't her own. What would that do to her? To Mere, he said, “Maybe you could use your mindmagic to help her? Remove what's not hers?”

Mere shook her head and looked back at the door to Rose's room. “I can't. It would take a real mindmage. I can do what I can do because of…lineage.”

“The only real mindmages are in Oremal,” Egil said. “And we're a long way from there.”

“We are,” Nix agreed. He knew of another mindmage, though, or at least the rumor of one. But he had no desire to walk that path unless absolutely necessary.

“It could fix itself,” Mere said, a flash of hope in her eyes. “I think we just need to let her rest.”

“Aye,” Nix said, nodding slowly as his thoughts turned. “Let us know if there's anything we can do.”