A Discourse in Steel Read online

  Nix put a hand on her arm. “That’s enough.”

  She whirled on him, projected, He tried to kill us!

  He winced at the anger in her mental voice. “I know. You’re hurting yourself, though. We have what we need. That’s enough. That’s enough.”

  Egil took her by the arm. “It’s all right. You did good.”

  She stared at them, blinking, her eyes welling with tears. She looked down at the man, who moaned and muttered in a puddle of snot and blood and spit.

  “Fak him,” she said, tears falling down her cheeks.

  “Aye, that,” Egil said softly, and led her to the cellar door. He closed it behind her and he and Nix shared a look. Nix nodded, went to the guildsman and pulled him up and around. Blood smeared his face below his nose.

  “You don’t look half as amused as you did. Huh.”

  The guildsman’s eyes twisted into a glare. “Fak you. You don’t know what you done here. Fak you.”

  Nix sighed. “You’d think more people would fak me. I do have a certain charm. Alas, the world is unfair.”

  The man spit snot and blood. “You keep on with this and it’s gonna get more unfair for you and yours real quick like. You hear? Now let me go.”

  Nix looked over to Egil, eyebrows raised. “He’s an arrogant prick, isn’t he? Even bound and bleeding and after what just happened and he still can’t shut his hole. Is this what it’s like to talk to me?”

  Egil shrugged and grunted, his hard eyes fixed on the guildsman.

  Nix looked back at the guildsman. “Usually I’m on the other end of this, hands bound, bloody, wondering what’s going to happen next. I like this better.”

  “You won’t for long,” the guildsman said.

  “This really is no time to get all cocky, yeah? Makes me irritable. And I’m not even easily irritated. My friend there, though, the big priest, he is easily irritated. He looks downright irritable this very moment. Irked, even. So.” Nix considered, made up his mind, and stood. “He’s going to beat you now.”

  The man’s eyes went to Egil’s hulking form, the priest’s ham fists, and his arrogance crumbled. “What’s that now?”

  “Parts of you are gonna bleed,” Nix said. “Probably that nose again. Other parts will probably break. But unfair is the world, yeah? Woe and alack.”

  “Wait, now. Wait,” the man said, struggling against his bonds as Egil stepped toward him. “That ain’t necessary, is it? We could—”

  “Oh, but it is necessary,” Nix said, his voice the soft, cold sound of a blade slipping its scabbard. “And I’m going to tell you why—because you fakkin’ deserve it for what you did, you slubber prick bunghole.”

  “There’s no need for torture, now!”

  Nix grabbed the man by his shirt and gave him a shake.

  “This isn’t torture, slubber. We already know what we need to know. This is punishment.” He stepped aside to make room for Egil, then put his hands on his hips and glared contempt at the guildsman. “Make it hurt bad, Egil.”

  “They’ll come for you! Both of you for this! And everyone else in this fakkin’ inn.”

  “No, they won’t,” Egil said, grabbing the man by his shirt and jerking him to his feet. “Because we’re coming for them. You boys fakked up, crossing us.”

  The man grinned darkly, his teeth stained with blood. “You go at the guildhouse, you die. You won’t come back from that.”

  Nix said, “I was just telling someone the other day that our lot in life seems to be to go where others say we shouldn’t.”

  Egil’s first punch put a few teeth and a lot of blood on the cellar floor. His second cracked ribs and left the guildsman crumpled on the floor, moaning.

  Nix watched the rest of it unfold, knowing they were both giving themselves more to regret, more they’d someday have to look back on and face squarely.

  He thought of what could have happened—Rose and Tesha and Mere and Kiir burned in a fire—and decided he could live with it.

  “Pigs?” Gadd asked, when they brought the broken, bloodied form of the guildsman out of the cellar.

  Instead Egil and Nix armed Gadd with enough silver terns to make a suitable donation, then had him drop the unconscious guildsman at the temple of Orella. Nix figured if the healer saints of Orella asked any questions, they’d get about as clear an answer out of Gadd as Nix usually got. And the beaten guildsman wouldn’t be talking for at least a day, maybe two, if he lived. Egil hadn’t been gentle. They’d earned themselves some time, but not much.

  He and Egil sat the bar, the smell of the fire still heavy in the air. Egil rattled his bone dice in his fist. Both of them understood the weight of their situation.

  “The sun’ll be up soon,” Nix said, for no reason in particular.

  “Aye.”

  “They must think Rose saw something. Or maybe they know she read the clicked Upright’s mind. Either way…”

  “Either way,” Egil said, nodding. “The guild’ll keep coming. Especially now. They got one burned dead and one in the temple.”

  “Aye,” Nix agreed. “Limits our play. We could try a sit-down with the new Upright Man. Explain the situation. Get them to back off.”

  Egil was already shaking his head. “They tried to burn down the inn, Nix. There were twenty people in here, including Kiir and Rose and Mere and Lis. And they won’t let up on Rose if they think she knows guild business.”

  Tesha came down the stairs and they fell silent. She wore a nightdress and no makeup and her hair was mussed and she looked more vulnerable than Nix ever wanted to see her again. She slipped onto the stool between them.

  “How are you doing?” Nix asked her.

  “Fine,” she said. “Merelda finally fell asleep. Will we have trouble with the Watch?”

  Nix shrugged. “Doubtful. No bodies and a fire that was quickly contained. They’ll come tomorrow. Maybe. If so, just tell them it was an accident.”

  She nodded, ran a hand through her thick black hair. She looked like she wished she had her pipe. “What do we do now?”

  “Huh? We have the damage repaired. It’s not that bad. Then we—”

  “That’s not what I mean, Nix.”

  “Ah,” Nix said. “I forgot I was talking to you. Well, Egil and I were just talking about that.”

  “Mere said this was the guild.”

  “It was.”

  “That’s not good. They won’t come back tonight?”

  “Not how they are,” Nix said. “Word won’t even get back until later this morning probably. They’ll plan, consider, then come again.”

  “Shite,” she said. “And that man you two brought in?”

  Nix nodded. “Guild.”

  “Shite,” she said again.

  “We have two days,” Egil said. “Maybe three.”

  “They want Rose?” Tesha asked.

  Nix nodded.

  “I’m not even going to ask why,” she said. “But they can’t have her.”

  “Aye, that,” Nix said.

  For a time the three of them sat at the bar in silence. Nix knew what they had to do, but he didn’t want to say it aloud.

  “We’ll have to go at the guildhouse,” Egil said, saying it for him. “Tonight, I’d say. This new Upright Man must have ordered the burn and click. For that, we kill him and anyone else we find there. Maybe the next Upright Man gets reasonable about things. They want a fight, we give them all they can handle.”

  “Attacking the guild?” Tesha asked. “Is that wise?”

  “You’re asking that of us?” Nix said, grinning. “Us?”

  Egil said, “They come at ours. We go harder at theirs. That’s all they understand. We put a bunch of them in the ground and maybe they see that coming at us is bad business. But they’ve got to be taught that lesson with steel. Not even Nix can talk us out of this one.”

  “I’ve talked us out of worse,” Nix protested.

  “You’ve talked us into worse, too,” Egil said, smiling.

 
“This is so,” Nix conceded. To Tesha, he said, “You ought to send everyone away from the Tunnel, until things are resolved.”

  Her mouth formed a hard line and she shook her head. “I don’t run. And even if I did, I don’t have anywhere else to go. I think the same’s true of Rose and Mere. Gadd will stay, too. I’ll send the rest off somewhere for a time. They won’t like it, though.”

  “We ought to get some men here in the meanwhile,” Egil said to Nix.

  Nix nodded, and both of them spoke a name at the same time.

  “Veraal.”

  “Veraal?” Tesha said.

  “He’ll have some men he can trust,” Nix said.

  “But how do you know you can trust him?” Tesha asked. “Who is he?”

  “Veraal? He’s an old colleague. And uncle. And he owes us one.”

  “Or several,” Egil added.

  Nix nodded. “Or several. And he has no love for the guild. They’re the reason he runs out of the Low Bazaar.”

  “We’ll need armor, too,” Egil said. “Chain shirts, anyway.”

  “He can help us there, too.”

  “What do you have in that satchel?” Egil asked Nix, nodding at Nix’s bag of needful things. “A few miracles, I trust?”

  “Favor my gewgaws now, do you?” Nix said.

  “I favor anything that puts my hands around the throat of the Upright Man. Put the flame to my inn? My friends? That demands recompense.”

  Nix leaned back on his stool. “Recompense? You’ve been reading again, haven’t you?”

  Egil chuckled.

  Nix turned to Tesha. “If by some unbelievable chance we don’t come back from this by dawn tomorrow, Rose and Mere need to get out of the city. Veraal can help with that. Then you and everyone here just lay low. You’re all in the cross shot. The guild will lay off if we’re dead and Rose is gone.”

  She bit her lip. “This is that serious?”

  “It is,” Egil said.

  “Bah,” Nix said, imitating Egil. He stood, stretched, and hit Egil on the shoulder. “This is fun. We’ll be laughing about it two days from now, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We go in through the sewers, I think.”

  “Yeah,” Egil said.

  “That’s it, then,” Nix said, and turned to face Tesha. “So…this would be the time to declare your secret love for me. You might not get another chance.”

  She stared at him, expressionless, and he told himself she was trying to hold back a smile.

  “Secret lust, at least?”

  Her smile won through at last.

  “That’ll do fine,” he said, and winked at her. To Egil he said, “I’ll head out now. They’ll get eyes on the inn by sunup. I want to be gone before that.”

  “Plan?” Egil asked.

  “I’ll go to the Bazaar and try to buy a few miracles. I’ll get Veraal in motion, too. You stay here in case something happens during the day. Then tonight we sneak into the guildhouse and kill everyone that gets between us and the Upright Man.”

  “That’s a good plan.”

  “That’s not a plan,” Tesha said.

  “That’s as good as our plans get,” Egil said.

  “You,” Nix said to Tesha. “If something happens during the day, you keep everyone near Egil. The man’s a tree and I haven’t seen an axeman yet who can fell him.”

  “Nix…” she said.

  “Say it,” he prompted, smiling. “Come on. Say it.”

  She smiled again. “Be careful.”

  “Damn,” he said, and snapped his fingers. “Almost had it.”

  “See you soon,” Egil said to him.

  “Aye.”

  —

  Dool sidled up to Rusk just before morning chapel. Rusk could tell something had gone hinky from the slump of Dool’s shoulders, the way he avoided eye contact.

  “It was a cock-up,” Dool said, finding his boots interesting.

  “A cock-up?” Rusk said. “You telling me you fakked a simple burn job?”

  Dool lifted his huge head, which melded seamlessly with his thick neck. “There were complications, Seventh Blade.”

  “Spill it,” Rusk said, and his jaw got tighter and tighter as Dool related events in his slow monotone. They had one man down, burned to death, body’s whereabouts unknown, and another missing altogether.

  Dool looked into Rusk’s face and licked his lips. “I can take a team back there today, right now. Walk in there and click the faytor and those two fakkers.”

  “No,” Rusk said, his mind working on the problem. “The Watch will be looking into things today. And maybe tomorrow, too. Keep eyes on the inn and keep me informed, but otherwise stay clear.”

  “Seventh Blade, they clicked Lenil—”

  Rusk stuck his face in Dool’s. “Lenil’s dust because he was an incompetent member of an incompetent team that couldn’t even put a match to an unguarded building.”

  Dool swallowed hard and looked away.

  Rusk put a hand on his shoulder. “They owe us a debt, yeah? And we’ll collect, Dool. But it ain’t gonna be today or tonight. Because now it’s not just about the faytor.”

  “Now it’s about those two fakkers,” Dool said.

  “Aye.”

  Rusk had told Channis that Egil and Nix were players, but all Channis would hear was that the job had gone wrong and that the faytor still lived. Not a good start to Rusk’s run as Seventh Blade.

  “They know it was guild work?” he asked.

  Dool shrugged. “I don’t know how they could.”

  Rusk had a missing man and a faytor with knowledge of the guild, so he thought it best to assume Egil and Nix knew the torch job was guild-ordered and that they knew why.

  “They may try to sneak the faytor out. You have your eyes let me know right away if things look like that.”

  Dool nodded. “Sorry, Seventh Blade.”

  Rusk nodded. “Just keep it to yourself until I spill it to the Upright Man. We can fix this. Go on, now.”

  Dool nodded and went into the chapel. Rusk stood alone in the corridor, thinking of how to present things to Channis.

  In the end, there was no way to pretty things up. They’d had a cock-up. They’d just have to clean it. Rusk’s knot to untie was that Channis didn’t like messes, and would like them even less when they occurred just after he took the position as Upright Man.

  Rusk held the news until after chapel, throwing prays at Aster throughout that the Upright Man would be reasonable. He met him in his wing of the guildhouse in the late morning. As usual, Channis had his back to him as he entered. The Upright Man stared out at the slow current of the Meander, the boats, the swoop of the river gulls around and under the Archbridge.

  Rusk could tell from the visible tension in Channis’s posture that he already knew. But he was going to make Rusk say it and own it, which made Channis a bunghole. Rusk decided he might as well jump in.

  “The torch job went wrong.”

  Channis turned to regard him across the expanse of wood floor. “Wrong how?”

  “Went cock-up is how. Lenil was killed and his body’s missing. Feegas is missing and no one knows what happened to him.”

  Channis walked toward him, that predatory stride, his hands crossed behind his back. “And?”

  “And the place didn’t light. The girl, that faytor, is still alive.”

  Channis came in close and circled him and Rusk could do nothing but stand there, as still as a sculpture. He felt like a condemned slubber at the scragging post.

  “You chose that team, didn’t you, Seventh Blade?”

  Rusk nodded and did not give in to the temptation to tell Channis that three of the men on the team were part of Channis’s personal crew before he’d become the Upright Man.

  “Didn’t lead it yourself, though?”

  Rusk shook his head, resisting the impulse to tell the Upright Man that the Seventh Blade did not traditionally perform street work.

  A punch to the stomach s
ent Rusk to his knees, gasping.

  “Why the fak not?” Channis asked. He still hadn’t raised his voice.

  Rusk knew there was no right answer, so he held his tongue and shook his head. Let Channis interpret that as he would.

  He interpreted it the way he interpreted everything else, and loosed a kick to Rusk’s side. The impact drove Rusk sideways onto his back and the pain made him gasp. For a moment he couldn’t breathe and he lay there, staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling and the emotionless oval of Channis’s scarred face.

  “When I order something done, you get it done. Clear?”

  Rusk nodded.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Clear,” Rusk said between gasps.

  Channis reached down and pulled him to his feet. Rusk refused to wince in anticipation of another blow, and stared into Channis’s face.

  “You got eyes on that inn?” Channis asked.

  “They’ll be there as of sunup, yeah. Good ones.”

  “Can’t move on it for a day or two.”

  “ ’Cause the Watch’ll make it too hot.”

  “Yeah. But I want that faytor dead and I want them two pricks dead and I want it done within the week. They know the score, you think?”

  “I think maybe.”

  Channis nodded. “If they’re smart, they’ll run. But if they run, we run them down. Can’t have a member going down and unavenged after I first become the Man, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Channis smiled his fake smile, took Rusk by the shoulders, dusted off his shirt.

  “I told you Seventh Blade to my Eighth is a shite job, and now you know it certain. That ain’t gonna change. But you and me, we’re all right. But don’t bring me any more cock-ups, yeah?”

  Rusk swallowed, nodded.

  “Committee meeting tonight at midnight. Double the usual guards outside, but you see to it the house is cleared except for one personal bodyguard for each Committeeman. All but you. You go solo. Kherne will be my muscle. And you. Clear?”

  Rusk nodded.

  “That’s it, then. Get it done.”

  Rusk left the room, cursing Aster for putting seven points on his tat and a bunghole in charge of the guild.

  —

  The great water clock of Ool the Mad rang the sixth hour. Nix exited through the front door of the Tunnel before the sun rose and walked down Shoddy Way. The streets were empty of everything except Nix and the breeze. Charcoal embers burned fitfully in street torches lit by the city’s linkboys hours earlier. Nix meandered through the streets, following the wind, wasting time, circling back and stopping now and again to determine if he’d been followed. It was unlikely the guild had put eyes on the Tunnel so quickly after the botched torch job, but he wanted to be certain.