A Discourse in Steel Read online

  After satisfying himself that he wasn’t tailed, he let himself relax, shedding the mask and emotional armor he habitually wore. Even a liar had to be honest with himself sometimes.

  His boots carried him in the direction of the Warrens, where he’d been born to a mother he didn’t remember. The predawn breeze carried the rotten stink of the Heap, the rotten stink of Nix’s past. He thought of Mamabird, thought of his childhood, most of it spent hungry and scrounging the Heap for food and coin. He thought of his adulthood, most of it spent drunk, scrounging ancient tombs for treasure. Funny how the man hadn’t left the boy too far behind.

  He allowed that for a man who’d done so much, he’d accomplished amazingly little. He supposed that was another regret he’d have to carry. Of course he’d had a good time while accomplishing not much. In the end, maybe that was enough. And maybe it wasn’t. He smiled, knowing he was trying to sell himself shite, lying to himself as always.

  Mamabird had accomplished more with her life than Nix could ever hope to, and she’d never left the Warrens and saw less coin in a month than Nix and Egil spent on one night’s decent drunk. Possibly that’s why he loved her so much. He decided he shouldn’t be walking the streets alone before sunup. Too much thinking got done.

  Eventually dawn lightened the night sky to gray and he tried to let it lighten his mood. He knew why he’d turned maudlin. Taking on the guild was dangerous work. Likely they’d die, and fear of dying turned men sentimental.

  The dung sweepers took to the streets, piles of stink stacked high in their mule-pulled wagons. He walked alongside the Poor Wall, the low, crumbling stone barrier that separated the Warrens from the rest of Dur Follin. The rising sun put its light on the desperate hovels of the poor, the bulky, irregular lines of the Heap. The mountain of Dur Follin’s waste grew more every year, the scat of an entire city. Nix imagined the city collapsing, disappearing forever, and leaving no sign of its existence but the Heap and the Archbridge. Gulls swooped and wheeled around and on the trash. The desperate poor were already picking through the piles, looking for anything they could eat, use, or sell. Nix knew the life well.

  The streets and the shops came back to life, too, resurrected by the dawn. Shutters and doors opened. Morning coughs and calls from neighbor to neighbor cut the silence. Wagons and mules and ponies appeared on the road and soon the streets were alive with activity. Nix donned his mask—Nix the Quick, Nix the Unflappable, always with a ready word and a ready blade—and headed back for the Low Bazaar as Ool’s clock sounded the turn of a new hour.

  To his right, high above the monumental stone sweep of Archbridge, a fusillade of pyrotechnics exploded in the air, expanding flowers of white and green sparks, beautiful but temporary, like everything beautiful. The day must have been holy to some cult or another. He stared at the smoke after the sparks had gone, and reminded himself to get some pyrotechnics, if possible.

  He heard and smelled the Low Bazaar before he saw it. The wind carried the slow beat of drums, the ring of a tambourine, the smell of cooking fires and sizzling meat. The streets grew more crowded as he neared it, the walkways populated with a fringe of vendors who didn’t have a stall in the Bazaar but wanted the benefit of the traffic. Nix fell in with the murmuring crowd, a river of people and animals. They turned a corner and there it was.

  The Low Bazaar straddled a vast, rectangular grassy plaza between Shoddy Way and Endel’s Ride. Like the Warrens, it was its own mini-town, a part of Dur Follin, but separate from it. A low, wooden fence surrounded the entire plaza, the equivalent of the Poor Wall, but no one paid it any heed. Young and old alike sat on it or climbed over it to get into the Bazaar. Tents of all sizes blanketed the plaza, a dizzying quilt of colors. Ponies and goats and sheep grazed in the grass, some in makeshift pens, some ranging free. Smoke rose from scores of braziers and fire pits. A veritable cloud of incense hung over the plaza, the smells often exotic but sometimes offensive. The Low Bazaar collected the odd, the exotic, and those who didn’t fit squarely into any other place in Dur Follin—mostly foreigners like the Narascene, but also recent arrivals to the city, and all manner of entertainers, from musicians and acrobats to deformed freaks and sword swallowers.

  Despite the early hour, scores of people, noble and common and poor, already thronged the worn footpaths between the tents and stalls. The shouts of vendors filled the air, hawking this or that.

  “Every day is market day at the Low Bazaar!” called a tall, horse-faced man with a scraggly mustache who minded the gate. He wore a ratty, collared cape and used it to play hide-and-seek with passing children. He collected a copper common from anyone who brought in a wagon or cart and dropped it into the strongbox upon which he sat.

  Nix nodded at the man and picked his way through the smoky throng. He asked a few vendors for the location of Veraal’s stall and soon had it. He cut through a circle of tents surrounding a fire pit over which hung a spit pig, already roasting, and soon found Veraal, tending his sturdy stall.

  Veraal, thinner and grayer than Nix remembered, but no doubt still as tough as old leather, had his back to Nix. He placed tied bunches of smoke leaf on the table that fronted his stall. A long wooden pipe dangled from his mouth, leaking an unbroken line of smoke that looked to tether Veraal to something invisible in the air above him. Nix’s experienced eye noted the blades secreted on Veraal’s person: left boot, small of the back, each wrist.

  A few locals eyed his wares and Veraal chatted them up with a smile. He exhaled smoke as he talked, like some kind of amiable dragon. Nix approached and put a hand on his shoulder.

  Veraal whirled at the touch, a hand going for the blade behind his back.

  “I don’t remember you being such a smoker,” Nix said.

  Veraal’s eyes flashed recognition and he stopped himself before drawing. His smile deepened the wrinkles on his weathered face. “An old man is allowed his vices.” To the two customers, he said, “Pardon me, goodfolks.”

  He pulled Nix to the side. “You get yourself cut grabbing a man like that.”

  “Doubtful,” Nix said, grinning. Veraal grinned in turn, his teeth stained yellow from smoke leaf.

  “How you been, Nixxy?”

  “Well enough,” Nix said. He made a show of eyeing Veraal’s stall, which looked like a small cabin. “I’m hoping smoking’s not your only vice these days, yeah?”

  Veraal chuckled. “Like the stall? Looks legit, don’t it?”

  “It does,” Nix said, noting the bags of leaf inside. “Swag goes in and out in bags of leaf. Can’t be moving much, though, yeah?”

  Veraal puffed his pipe. “I’m more selective these days. Work only with folks I know and like. I do some legit work, too, and it ain’t bad. You ought to try it.”

  “One day, maybe,” Nix said. “Listen, I’m gonna need to call in a marker.”

  Veraal’s face grew serious. He drew on his pipe. “Shite, man, those are some old markers. Have to do with those nice girls from the tent there? The murder?” He nodded at the colorful tent beside his stall. “Merelda said she knew you.”

  “It does, aye,” Nix said. Nix had never actually been to Mere and Rose’s tent. They’d done it up well: painted the dyed yellow canvas with nonsense but arcane-looking sigils, the all-seeing eye, the flame of truth, and so forth.

  “They’re in trouble, then?” Veraal asked.

  “Aye, and it looks serious,” Nix said.

  Veraal nodded. “Well, I’ll help if I can. I like those girls. They’re too nice for the likes of you.”

  “Truth,” Nix said.

  “And I owe you and Egil. How is that brute of a priest, anyway? Somber as always?”

  “Better than when you saw him last.”

  Egil had been heavier into his alecups when last they’d had dealings with Veraal.

  Veraal pointed at Nix with his pipe. “That I’m glad to hear. That man’s got some pain in him.”

  Nix thought of Blackalley, of Egil’s sobs. “Aye.”

  Ver
aal asked, “I take it that hit was guild work?”

  They fell silent for a moment as a nobleman shopped Veraal’s wares. Nix made as though he were considering some leaf while Veraal made his pitch. The nobleman left two terns lighter and several bunches of smoke leaf heavier.

  Nix and Veraal stood side by side, facing the ever-changing crowd of passersby. A pair of drummers strode by, an acrobat flipping and dancing to their rhythm. Pedestrians stopped and applauded, dropped commons into the open containers the drummers wore on belts at their waists.

  “It was guild work, yeah,” Nix said, picking up the conversation. “So you’re going to need some men.”

  “Men?” Veraal removed his pipe from his mouth, uncorking his thoughts. “What do you have in mind? I trust it’s reasonable?”

  “It is,” Nix said. “All I need you to do is sit on the Tunnel. That’s it. Make sure no harm comes to it.”

  Veraal drew on his pipe. “Rose and Mere are at the Tunnel?”

  “And others. Guild tried to torch it last night.”

  Veraal sniffed. “Caught ’em, did you? You and Egil?”

  Nix nodded. “One burned by his own fuel. Pig food. One…questioned by Egil.”

  Veraal whistled. “That would not be fun.”

  “No,” Nix agreed. “But deserved. Well?”

  “I’m there for you, Nixxy,” Veraal said. He drew on the pipe, exhaled through his nose. “Got some men I can use.”

  “Appreciated, Veraal,” Nix said. “Only going to need you for tonight. I don’t think anything will go down that fast. And after tonight this’ll be resolved one way or another.”

  Veraal studied him over the length of his pipe as if taking aim. “You and Egil doing something stupid?”

  Nix shrugged, tossed a common to a dancing girl who strode by playing finger cymbals. “Stupid’s where the fun is.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Listen, if it goes bad and we don’t come back, I’d be grateful if you’d get Rose and Mere out of Dur Follin. Maybe set them up in New Dineen.”

  Veraal nodded. “Don’t believe I’ve ever heard you talk about not getting clear of a scrape. But yeah, I can do that. Or take a pass on whatever you’re planning and take them yourself. Just run. Shite, Dur Follin’s just a city, Nix. It’ll get along fine without you and Egil.”

  “We both know that’s a filthy lie,” Nix said, and smiled. “Besides, Egil’s got his ire up, and you know how he gets. And we don’t run, especially from guild slubbers.”

  “Figured,” Veraal said, nodded. “Share a smoke, then? Ain’t that customary for a condemned man?”

  “No time. There’ll be eyes on the Tunnel by now, so bring your men in piecemeal, yeah? Like you’re just patrons coming for a drink. I don’t want them to know we’re wise to them. Everybody in before dark, too.”

  Veraal put a hand on Nix’s shoulder. “It’s done. Think no more on it.”

  Nix tossed a tern to Veraal, who snatched it out of midair. “Bring some of that leaf to the madam who runs the Tunnel. Tesha’s her name. She appreciates a good smoke. Oh, and I need chain shirts for Egil and me. Can you do that?”

  “Maybe you’d like me to rub your feet, too?”

  Nix grinned. “You’d like that. See you this eve.”

  Veraal called after him. “You get the shirts only if you swear to bring them back, yeah?”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Nix said.

  After Nix left Veraal, he grabbed some sweetmeats from Orgul and walked to the Narascene portion of the Bazaar, a world within a world where everyone wore colored robes and veils, incense smoked the air like a spring fog, and gongs and chimes made a continuous ring. He was known there, and nodded to familiar faces.

  He soon found the tent of the hunched, yellow-robed harridan from whom he routinely purchased some of his gewgaws. He never knew what she’d have for him—sometimes she had nothing—but he figured the fun was in finding out. The beaded curtain gave way to an interior filled with stacked jars of pickled creatures, bunches of dried roots, piles of crystals, and various other items of arcane significance. Most were junk for the hobs, but not all.

  She must have heard him enter for she emerged from the rear of the tent, hobbling on a bad hip, smelling of incense and sweat. She cackled when she saw him, and spoke in heavily accented Narascene.

  “Always you come to me when in danger.”

  “And you always protect me, lovely lady,” he said, and bowed.

  She cackled at that and the cackling turned to a phlegmy cough. He waited for it to subside before asking, “Do you have anything new?”

  She looked at him with soft eyes—he always charmed her.

  “I have something for you, small man,” she said. “Cost is twenty terns.”

  He knew better than to haggle with her. He dug the coins out of his purse and placed them in her wrinkled, veiny hand. She secreted them in her robes, went to a shelf, and removed two amulets on leather lanyards. Tiny amethysts, four on each amulet, glittered in plain silver settings. When she handed them to him, the enchantments in them caused the hairs on his arms to stand on end.

  “Protective,” he observed.

  Up close, the pores in her nose looked like they’d been dug out with a shovel. “Your schooling not tell you from what?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s because you quit too soon.”

  “I was expelled,” he corrected.

  “If you hadn’t quit,” she said, ignoring his correction, “then you’d know enchanted amethyst protects from venom, stomach gas, piles of the arse, and ugly girls.”

  She cackled at her own joke.

  “I’ve never in my life met an ugly girl, milady,” Nix said, slipping the amulets into one of the many pockets in his satchel. “And never once in this tent.”

  She colored, murmured something, and turned away.

  He smiled and turned to go, but her voice froze him in the bead curtain.

  “Small man! What you’re doing? It will end with you swimming among the dead.”

  Nix knew the crone was a legitimate seer. Her words reached through his mask and crashed his false cheer. His expression fell but he rallied quickly.

  “A surprising number of my days end just so, milady.”

  And with that he left her. Her words troubled him though, and he sought only halfheartedly for the cloaked, vacant-eyed, sexless agent of Kerfallen the Gray. The wizard’s servant maintained no tent or stall, merely walked the Bazaar, seemingly at random, vending his master’s gewgaws to those in the know.

  Nix spotted him or her or it, jogged to catch up, and stepped directly in front of it. It stopped, staring at him with wide, unblinking eyes. The androgynous, hairless face did not change expression. Nix recited the required greeting in a whisper, trying not to roll his eyes at the silliness of wizards.

  “The magery of Kerfallen is without peer in the Seven Cities of the Meander. I offer coin for his boon.”

  The agent held forth a hand.

  Nix hefted a pouch holding a handful of terns and a few royals, placed it in the agent’s palm. The creature tucked the pouch into its clothing, studied Nix’s face for a time, as if reading something in his expression, then reached into its satchel and withdrew a bronze skeleton key as long as Nix’s hand. The bit that hung from the end of the key’s hollow blade was shaped like a tiny fanged mouth.

  “I already have lots of keys,” Nix said. “Another will—”

  The mouth at the end of the key spoke in a tiny voice. “Give us a bite of apple. We lock and unlock for eats. Give us some apple.”

  “Burn me,” Nix said, eyeing the mouth. He looked up to tell the agent he’d take the key, but it had already moved on, continuing its wanderings through the Bazaar.

  “Apple!” the key said.

  “Patience,” Nix said, and tucked the key into his satchel. He quickly found a fruit seller, traded a copper for a half dozen red apples, and put one of them in his satchel with the magic ke
y. The key munched away on the feast.

  Nix lifted the satchel’s flap. “You earn the next one.”

  The Narascene seer’s words bounced around his skull, resurrecting his melancholy. He retraced his actions of the last couple hours—evaluating his life, walking the Poor Wall, visiting the Low Bazaar, the Narascene seer, Kerfallen’s agent, all of it a long good-bye.

  “Should’ve had that smoke with Veraal, after all,” he said with a rueful smile.

  On his way out of the Bazaar, he spotted a wagon full of pyrotechnics—tubes made from a special paper, small balls of clay, rods coated in some kind of metallic substance, all of them made by Vathari alchemists, the methods unknown even to the wizards of the Conclave. The short, long-haired, well-dressed Vathari merchant who vended them probably sold them most often to the various cults and philosophical movements that squatted on the Archbridge, and indeed the shaven-head cultists of some god or other milled around the wagon. For his part, Nix always figured that if pyrotechnics impressed a person’s god, the person needed a better god. Nix, however, could imagine a few uses beyond impressing country hobs.

  He nodded and smiled his way through the bald zealots. The Vathari took in his blades but never lost his smile, false as it was.

  “You don’t strike me as the religious sort, young sir.”

  “I’m neither religious nor a sir. I worship good ale, which I find answers prayers about as well as any god, and have coin that spends as well as any priest’s. Suffice?”

  The cultists overheard him, shot him glares. He ignored them.

  The man gave a slight bow. “Your faith is appealing to many and well known to me.”

  “Excellent,” Nix said, taking a liking to the man already. “I’d like a few of your…gewgaws.” He smiled. It felt good to hear the word used in reference to something other than the contents of his satchel. “Not the ones for the sky, mind, but something that I can use indoors, maybe smoke up a room.”