A Discourse in Steel Read online

  Through the rear entrance to the tent he could make out the other fortune-teller’s voice, together with that of the Upright Man himself. He smiled, thinking of the jest he’d been making since the guildseers had given them auspicious omens and he and Channis had gone forward with the click.

  Gonna turn the Upright Man into a dustman.

  He glanced back the way he’d come to ensure he was unobserved, then drew his crossbow from where it hung behind his back. He took a boiled leather bottle from his belt pouch and unwound the tie that kept it closed. The acridity of the bloodleaf paste within stung his nostrils and made his eyes water but he blinked it away and swallowed a curse. He drew a single bolt from the low-capacity quiver on his thigh and dipped the tip into the bottle. Then he laid the poisoned bolt in its groove in the crossbow and placed the crossbow on the ground. He retied the bottle and placed it back in his belt pouch. Couldn’t be too careful with bloodleaf.

  Ready, he nodded at a shadowy corner between the tent and stall, held his hands before him, palms out, and threw a pray to the Lord of Stealth.

  “Fly true,” he whispered, then, to ensure the assassination went right. “And don’t queer the click, yeah?”

  His eyes fell on the holy sigil on the back of his hand: five blades sticking out at different angles from a central circle that looked like a coin. He grinned, thinking how the Committee’s tats would shift after today, the ink, once changed, showing a new hierarchy.

  He pulled up the hood of his cloak, hiding his features, picked up the crossbow, and crept into the tent.

  —

  The man who sat across from Rusilla wore a loose green cloak over fitted leathers. The thin blade of a gentleman hung from a snakeskin scabbard at his belt. He wore a silver chain from which hung a tarnished silver charm—a stiletto with a coin balanced on its tip, the symbol of Aster, god of merchants and thieves. Gray whiskers dotted the man’s sharp-featured face and his small dark eyes seemed to miss little. He immediately struck Rusilla as coiled, tense.

  “Word is you’re a genuine faytor, not a zany like these others in the Bazaar.”

  The man’s manner of speech took her aback. He didn’t speak at all like a gentleman, despite his attire.

  “You mean ‘seer’?” she asked.

  “Ain’t that what I said?” He smiled. One of his front teeth was chipped. “So or not?”

  “Yes,” Rusilla lied, and reminded herself to be careful with this hard-speaking man with a wealthy man’s weapons. He was not what he appeared.

  The man leaned forward and put his gloved hands on the table and interlaced his fingers, a gesture Rusilla found vaguely threatening.

  “ ’Cause I’ll pay for the genuine thing. Fact is, I’ll give you a lot of work if what you say happens, right? We can always use a true seer.”

  “We?” she asked.

  He ignored the question, reached into an inner pocket of his cloak, removed a gold crown, and laid it on the table next to the gong. Rusilla was born to a noble family—albeit a cursed one—and had seen more than a fair share of gold coins, so the reveal of a crown perhaps didn’t have the effect the man had hoped. He leaned back in his chair, brow furrowed.

  “You see this is gold, yeah? It ain’t ’feit. Bite it, if you need.”

  “That’s very generous, but a silver tern is all that’s required. Or two if you find the reading particularly useful.”

  He looked baffled at her response.

  “Ain’t I in the Low Bazaar? You a queen slummin’ with your subjects?”

  She smiled tightly. “Shall we begin?”

  “Right, then,” he said. “Right.”

  Rusilla rang the small gong once, waved incense smoke into her face and then into his. She reached across the table and took his gloved hands in hers while she extended her mental fingers and gently sifted the surface thoughts of the man.

  He was worried.

  “You are concerned about someone close to you.”

  His expression remained neutral, his eyes fixed on her, studying her.

  She closed her eyes and furrowed her brow, part of the routine she used to impress patrons. She reached deeper into his thoughts.

  “You question the loyalty of those close to you.”

  He tried to hide it, but she felt him tense.

  “You fear they plot against you.” She opened her eyes. “You’re right to fear. They do.”

  He stared into her face and she stared back. Finally he gave a forced smile.

  “You’re good, yeah? But maybe I get to ask a question now? Ain’t that how it works?”

  She nodded, kept her delicate hold on his thoughts. If she were to reach deeper into his mind, she’d need to distract him. “Let me have your palms. Without the gloves.”

  He hesitated and she saw in his thoughts why: He had a tattoo on his hands, a tattoo that was special somehow, and that looked like a compass rose, eight blades sticking out from a central circle. It was significant somehow, magical.

  “The tattoo needn’t concern you,” she said, to further amaze him.

  He surprised her by seizing her hands in his. His expression went hard.

  “How do you know about that?” He looked around the tent as if enemies might be closing in. He shook her hands, shaking the table, nearly toppling a clay incense burner. “Who are you?”

  She kept her voice calm. “I’m the seer you came to see. And I’m seeing.”

  He stared at her a long while, some kind of calculation going on behind his dead, cold eyes. She tried to see it but couldn’t. He was practiced as a matter of course at keeping thoughts from his face, which had the effect of compartmentalizing them in his thoughts. And she didn’t want to pry too far. She needed to cut this reading short.

  “Release my hands,” she said.

  He stared at her a moment longer, then opened his fingers, releasing his grip.

  “Ain’t you a gimcrack.”

  She cleared her throat. “I think I’m not the seer for you. And this is not a good day. It’s inauspicious. We should end it now.”

  “That ain’t happenin’,” he said, and peeled off his gloves, staring into her face all the while. “You read, and you tell me what I want to hear, yeah?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yeah?”

  With his gloves off, she could see the tattoo on the back of his hand, the tattoo that she’d seen moments before in his thoughts. He noticed her looking at it, held his hands before his face, and acted as if he were playing peekaboo with a child.

  “Boo,” he said with a mean grin.

  The tattoo had no more effect on her than had the gold crown—she didn’t know what it meant—and once more he seemed surprised at her lack of reaction.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” he asked.

  “I don’t need to for a reading. In fact it can get in the way.”

  He shrugged, seemed to accept that. He stared at the tattoo. “It moves about, see. The sigil. It’s on my hand today, which usually means…well, it usually means I’ll be using my hands for a certain kind of work. Tomorrow it might be somewhere else on my skin.”

  She nodded as if she cared and held out her hands once more.

  “Shall we continue?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and allowed her to take his hands in hers. With her thumbs, she traced the lines of his hands, to distract his mind from her mental intrusion.

  “Ask your question,” she said.

  “Right, then.” He cleared his throat, tried to gesture with his hands as he spoke, but she held them tight. “I have men, see, lieutenants you might say, and a couple of them I think might intend me ill.” He chuckled as if at some private joke.

  She saw in his thoughts the faces of the men he meant, each with a tattoo similar to his own but slightly different. She squeezed his hands and snuck further into his thoughts, beyond some of the barriers he’d unconsciously erected. She saw the man he worried after most, a whip-thin, hard-eyed man with long dark hair and a f
ace so scarred it looked like an old man’s wrinkles. He had a tattoo with seven pointed blades sticking out from a central circle.

  “The scarred man,” she said, pulling out his thoughts and holding them up for him to see. “And seven points.”

  “Aye, him. And others. So if they intend something, I need to know. I’ll need to do them ill first, you follow? And I can’t trust the guildseers no more.”

  She nodded, digging deeper than she should into his twisting, paranoid thoughts, looking for the bricks she’d use to build a plausible answer to whatever he asked.

  “So what I need to know,” he said, “is when and where they—”

  His eyes went wide and he gagged on his words as his throat sprouted the feathered end of a crossbow bolt. Blood spattered Rusilla’s face, the table, warm crimson dots. The man wheezed, flailed, gurgled, and toppled back in his chair, his hands clutching at the air as if to pull himself back up.

  His dying thoughts rushed into Rusilla, a lightning storm of images, feelings, regrets, faces, deeds, friends, enemies. She lurched up, toppling her own chair and slamming her knee into the table. The gong, crystals, and incense burners scattered to the floor. She screamed, stumbled back a step, bumped into the wooden screen, clutching her head and trying to pull her mind back from his. But the rush of his thoughts and emotions and memories held her, caught her up in its current, forced her to see, to know. The expiring man’s thoughts exploded out of him like a wild blunderbuss shot, spraying her own mind, bits and pieces of his past and present lodging in her consciousness.

  She lost her footing on something—a crystal—and fell and hit the floor hard. She was certain that her head would explode. It had to; it was filling too fast. She screamed out some of the images flooding her mind, calling out names and places, trying to expiate the memories and thoughts and feelings by giving them voice, but her shouted words soon turned to nothing but a long wail of pain.

  She was dimly aware of smoke rising from somewhere in the tent, collecting near the billowing ceiling. She heard movement behind her but could not turn her head. Snot and blood poured out of her nose, ran down her cheeks. Her skull was going to crack open to let her swollen brain leak out. Her vision reduced down to a tunnel, narrowing, narrowing, narrowing…

  Rusk cursed, backed off a step, and with his free hand signed against sorcery. The fortune-teller was shouting things she couldn’t possibly know, names and places and jobs and payments—guild business. But she did know somehow. Sorcery. Had to be. “Shite,” he whispered.

  He turned to bolt but she fell silent, and he held for a moment behind the wooden screen, uncertain. He could smell smoke rising and Bazaar slubbers would smell it, too, and come. He needed to clear the tent, but the fortune-teller knew guild business…

  He made up his mind, hung his crossbow, drew his pig poker, and peeked around the screen. Two small fires burned, started by the overturned incense burners. The flames caught a blanket and a tasseled pillow. The whole tent would go up soon…

  The Upright Man lay on his back in a pool of crimson, his legs tangled with the fallen chair, as much a dustman as a man could be. The faytor crumpled on her side near the screen, dead or unconscious. Rusk couldn’t be sure.

  But he could pick one and make it sure. And he should, given what she seemed to know.

  He took a half step forward, blade at his side, when the tiny bells on the flap of the tent chimed as someone parted them. Rusk darted back behind the screen.

  “Here!” said a male voice, shouting back into the Bazaar. “In here! There’s fire! Rose! Are you all right? Rose!”

  More shouts and exclamations from outside. A crowd must have been gathering.

  Rusk stood on the other side of the wooden screen, mentally cursing.

  “Gods! A man’s dead in here! Rose, where are you?”

  Another voice: “Check the back!”

  Rusk cursed and dashed out the rear of the tent, sheathing his blade as he went. As he slid out from between the smoking tent and the smoke-leaf stall, he pulled up his hood, slowed his pace, and mingled with the crowd. People thronged the area near the tent, pushing and shoving, standing on tiptoes to get a better view. Lots of shouting from the front.

  “What happened?” Rusk asked a veiled Narascene woman in a bright blue robe.

  She shook her head, her hoop earrings swinging. “Fire, I think.”

  “Awful,” Rusk said, and swam against the current of the crowd.

  As soon as he broke loose of it, he cut right and headed out of the Low Bazaar. Now and again as he walked, he eyed his hand, waiting for the tat to change.

  That was the swag that he wanted out of this click, the only thing that made the murder worth the effort: a sixth blade on his skin.

  “Come on, dammit,” he said.

  —

  Merelda’s smile and light mood faltered when she saw the plume of smoke and the gathered crowd near their tent. If it had been pyrotechnics, there would have been applause and smiles. Instead, the ordinary sounds of bazaar life were gone, replaced by muted conversation, sagging shoulders, shared whispers, and an expectant hush. She hurried forward, concerned, and when she saw that the smoke was actually leaking from the top and front flaps of her and Rusilla’s tent, her concern turned to alarm. She dropped the sweetbreads she was carrying and ran.

  Rose? Rose?

  Unable to feel the reciprocal touch of her sister’s mind, she shoved frantically through the wall of people.

  “Out of my way! Get out of the way! That’s my tent! Get out of the way!”

  Her voice sounded panicked, even to herself.

  Rose? Please answer, Rose!

  She burst through the front edge of the crowd and stopped, her hand to her mouth, as Veraal came through the tent flaps, coughing, stumbling, carrying Rose in his arms, his wooden pipe still clamped between his teeth.

  Rose hung limp in his grasp, her long red hair brushing the ground, and Merelda’s legs went weak under her. She stopped in her steps. She couldn’t breathe. She’d only been gone a few moments, only a few moments.

  Veraal lowered Rose down on the packed earth. People edged closer.

  “Get some water!” he shouted to them. “Afore the fire spreads!”

  Everyone with a stall or tent kept full buckets and barrels near to hand, both for drinking and for the inevitable small fires that bred in the Bazaar.

  Merelda hurried forward, shouting at some of the men and women gathered around Veraal.

  “There’s a half barrel of water behind the screen! In the tent!”

  Veraal looked up at the sound of her voice, and his heavy expression did nothing to put her mind at ease. A man and two women darted into the tent, presumably to get at the water.

  “What happened? How is she?” Merelda said, sagging to the ground beside her sister. “Is she?”

  “She’s breathin’,” Veraal said around his pipe.

  Mere’s eyes welled with relief.

  “Rose,” she said, and touched her sister’s hand, tapped her cheek. “Rose.”

  “I think she might’ve fainted,” Veraal said. “Smoke and fire didn’t harm her none. I got in there fast. Heard her shouting and ran over.”

  “Shouting?”

  Veraal nodded. “She was shouting something.”

  Merelda cradled one of Rose’s hands between hers. “Thank you, Veraal. We owe you.”

  He waved it away. “Nothing to it, little sister.” Over his shoulder, he shouted, “How’s that fire now?”

  “Out,” came the answering shout. “Not much damage.”

  Some scattered applause from onlookers.

  “It was just a couple small ones,” Veraal said to Merelda. “Lotta smoke. Not much flame.” He shouted again over his shoulder. “Don’t move that body none!”

  “Body?” Merelda asked.

  “Dead man in there,” Veraal said, nodding. He took his pipe from his mouth and put the mouthpiece to his neck. “Shot through the throat. Very clean. Professi
onal, looks to me.”

  “Dead man? You mean the one she was reading?” Merelda asked.

  Veraal shrugged. “He was dead on the other side of the table, so probably. Looked like he got shot by someone from behind that wood screen. I didn’t see anyone go in, though, but I was occupied. Like I said, probably Rose saw the click and fainted. Shocking sometimes, seeing someone clicked.”

  Merelda’s hold on Rose’s hand tightened, and her alarm redoubled. If Rose had been reading the man when he died…

  Rose? Rose?

  “You gotta matchstick?” Veraal asked, feeling around in his tunic. “Never mind.”

  He found a matchstick in an inner pocket of his tunic, struck it with his thumb, and lit his pipe.

  Rose? Can you hear me?

  No response. She could have fainted, though that seemed unlike Rose. Merelda considered reaching into her sister’s mind, but out in the open Bazaar seemed hardly the place. Besides, if she had been reading the man as he died, when he died, her mind could be damaged. Merelda could worsen things by forcibly poking around.

  “I need to get her home, Veraal,” Merelda said. “Right now. Can you…handle the Watch?”

  He exhaled a cloud of pipe smoke and grinned. “How long you been here, little sister? Shite, ain’t nothing to handle. Gotta have at least three dead regular folk or one dead rich one to get the Watch interested in what happens in the Bazaar. If there ain’t neither of those, we’re on our own. And that man in there”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“he’s only one body and he ain’t rich, though he don’t look poor neither. The Watch’ll be along to get the body before Ool rings another hour, maybe two, but that’s about it. They’ll ask a question or three and be on their way with the corpse. You take your sister on home. I’ll get you a wagon or carriage or something. Where you headin’?”

  Merelda stared down at her sister’s wan, slack face. “The Slick Tunnel.”

  “The Tunnel? You know the two slubbers who own that now? Egil and Nix? Big man and little one?”

  “Yes, I know them. You do, too?”