A Discourse in Steel

  “Bars?” Nix said. “Bars! Shite.”

  They couldn’t get out through the window with the bars or Nix might have killed the Upright Man, broken through the window, and made a run for the river. Green light from Minnear filtered in through the glass, and beyond the grassy grounds and shrubbery the slow waters of the Meander glistened in the moonlight. Nix pulled off his weapons belt and hurriedly wrapped it around and through the handles on the double doors, just as someone on the other side ran into it. It held but it might not for long. He grabbed a divan and dragged it before the door for good measure.

  “Keep going!” he said to Egil.

  “To where?”

  “I don’t know! Somewhere!” Several doors led out of the lounge. “That door, there. I need a moment to think!” Nix shouted at the door, “You come after us and we kill him!”

  “You’re dead,” Channis gasped, freeing himself enough from Egil’s grasp to mouth some words. “Both of you.”

  “Then so are you,” Nix promised him, and cuffed him on the head. “Egil? You’ve got the map in your head. We need a way out. A big window maybe. Which way?”

  “This way,” Egil said, tightening his grip on Channis and dragging the Upright Man along. They hurried through a door that opened onto another long hallway, then headed up a flight of stairs to the second floor. Before them was a long hallway with doors along its length.

  Voices sounded below them, men calling to one another. Channis worked his throat free enough to utter a hoarse call.

  “Here, lads!”

  Nix punched him in the face, silencing him, but the damage had been done.

  The men below must have heard him, for the voices closed in on them. To Nix they sounded like they were right at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Shite. Where, Egil?”

  “I don’t know,” Egil said, and hustled down the hall, pulling the gagging Upright Man along with him. “Pick a damned room! That slubber Mere read must not have known this area of the house very well.”

  Nix threw open a thick, reinforced wooden door to reveal a large chamber, maybe a reading room. Channis resisted entering the room, grabbing the doorjambs as Egil backed in. Down the hall, a crowd of men thundered up the stairs.

  “There!” one of them shouted. “Got them! Here, men!”

  “Keep coming and he dies!” Nix shouted at them, but wasn’t sure if they heard or cared.

  “Don’t let them take me from the house!” Channis shouted, his voice hoarse due to Egil’s choke. “You heard me—!”

  Egil choked off any further words and they pushed into the room and slammed the door behind them. Egil backed up against it.

  “The key, Nix. Lock it.”

  “Aye,” Nix said. He dropped his satchel, riffled through it, and pulled out the magic key. He awakened it with a word of power.

  “Give us a potato,” the key said.

  “A potato now!” Egil said, as bodies thudded into the thick wooden door. “How does a thrice-damned key have a sophisticated palate?”

  “Sophisticated and palate?” Nix said, pulling a potato out of his satchel and shoving it at the key. “You’ve been reading.”

  “Fak you,” Egil said.

  The key took its price as the men on the other side of the room hammered at the door. Nix shoved the key into the lock. It warmed, changed form to make itself fit, and Nix locked it down. They backed off a step, staring at the door, satisfying themselves that it would hold for a moment. Nix shoved the last of his punch daggers into the lock so the men, had they a key, couldn’t unlock it from their side.

  “They’ll find axes,” Egil said.

  “Aye,” Nix agreed.

  Nix turned and took stock of the room. The only other door in the room opened onto a small storage closet. As before, a barred window looked out on the grounds. There was only one way in, but there was also only one way out.

  “This ain’t good,” Nix said.

  Egil took stock of the room, too, jerking Channis around roughly. “Shite.”

  Nix bent over to look Channis in the eye. “Locks, barred windows, and reinforced doors throughout. You guildboys don’t trust each other much, eh? That or you’re gearing up for a siege.”

  Channis just stared at him.

  “Not the chatty type. Fair enough.”

  Couches lined the walls. High-backed chairs sat before a stone hearth. A desk featured in one corner. Abstract paintings hung on the wall.

  “What in the Eleven Hells kind of guildhouse is this?” Nix asked.

  He’d expected to find sparsely furnished quarters, filthy drinking halls, rooms with training dummies, maybe a run-down shrine to Aster, and instead they’d found an organization that had parlayed religion and crime into enormous wealth.

  “Maybe we should have joined these slubbers, after all?” Nix said.

  “Bah,” Egil said, and shook Channis. “They’re murderous bungholes, the lot.”

  Channis tried to say something but it only came out as a gagged grunt.

  “I think he said he agrees with you,” Nix said. He bent over to look Channis in the eye again. “It’s good that you understand your faults.”

  Channis squirmed in Egil’s grasp, legs kicking.

  Egil flexed his arm, tightened the choke. Channis’s eyes rolled. “I’m tired of holding this bunghole. Bind him, would you?”

  “You can cooperate or I can cut you,” Nix said.

  Channis did not resist while Nix, after taking a length of line from his satchel, secured the guildmaster with a double-square knot, hands behind his back, and legs at the ankle. They sat him on his arse on the floor.

  “Not even a chair?” Channis said with a sneer.

  “How about a punch in the mouth?” Egil said.

  “And if you shout to your girls out there, I’ll stab you in the face,” Nix said. “Clear?”

  A knock—a knock!—sounded on the door.

  Egil and Nix shared a look of bewilderment.

  “Uh, who is it?” Nix called.

  A voice from the other side said, “Ain’t no way out of that room. We know it and you know it. This can go hard for you boys, or it can go harder. But it only ends one way. You clear? You hurt the Upright Man and it goes hardest for you.”

  Channis looked smug.

  Egil said, “We already left more than a dozen of you girls bleeding on the floor. You try to come in and it’ll be a dozen more plus your Upright Man. You clear?”

  Murmurs from the hall outside.

  “Don’t hurt yourselves thinking things through, now,” Nix called. He walked to the window and checked the bars. No give in them at all, like a fakkin’ jail. Shite. Minnear, fat and full in the velvet of night, cast the grounds in viridian light.

  “Let me ask you fakkers a question,” Nix called over his shoulder. “Do you have to be ugly to be a guildsman?”

  Angry murmurs.

  “It’s a serious question. Every one of you slubbers looks like you could scare children and couldn’t pay your way into a woman’s favor. What say you? Aster only likes ’em ugly, maybe?”

  “Fak you!” someone shouted.

  “Let us hear Channis,” said the first voice from the other side of the door. “Eighth Blade, you hear us?”

  Channis looked to Nix for permission to speak. Nix nodded.

  “I’m all right,” Channis called. “And I’m gonna be all right.” He glared at Egil and Nix and spoke in a lower tone. “Can’t say the same for these two, though.”

  Dark chuckles from the hall outside.

  “Hells, man,” Nix said to him. “You’re the ugliest of them all. Lord of the Bungholes and King of the Repulsives, as it were.”

  Channis snarled, “I’m looking at dead men. But not fast, no. You came up through the sewers, no? You see that torture chamber—”

  A backhand from Egil split Channis’s lip and sent blood and spit flying.

  “Shut your hole, slubber. I left the fat man who ran that show hanging from his ow
n chains. And if we’re going to die here, you’re going to die first.”

  Channis spit and grinned up at the priest. “Don’t matter none to me. Long as you get what’s coming.”

  “Nix?” Egil said, still staring at Channis. “You got any miracle in that satchel?”

  The priest took out his dice, rattled them in his hand. Nix found the sound reassuring. He licked his lips, rubbed his forefinger and thumb.

  He feared he was all out of miracles. He had only one smoke ball and his key and his amulet and his light and…

  He looked up when an idea struck him, an ugly idea, a desperate idea.

  “What?” Egil said, reading his expression.

  Nix did a quick calculation in his head. He hadn’t been able to hear Ool’s clock while they’d been underground, but they couldn’t have been more than an hour since leaving the Tunnel.

  It could work.

  Channis must have seen him eyeing the window. “You ain’t getting out through that window. All the bars in the house were made special. Graduate of the Conclave even enspelled them.”

  “Graduates of the Conclave are bungholes,” Nix said absently, and riffled through his satchel. He quickly found the tallow sticks and the scribing wand and pulled them out. He also anticipated Egil’s jest and cut if off. “I didn’t graduate, priest, as you know.”

  “Possibly still a bunghole, though.”

  “Conceded,” Nix said, with a tilt of his head. He held up the grease sticks for Egil to see.

  The priest’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You aren’t…?”

  “I am,” Nix said.

  “You don’t come out,” said a shout from the other side. “And we’re coming in.”

  “You come in and the Upright Man dies first!” Egil shouted back, then to Channis, “And you best believe that.”

  Nix drew fat lines down either side of the large window.

  “How can that even work?” Egil asked in a hissed whisper.

  Nix spoke over his shoulder. “Might not, but I’m ever an optimist. Minnear’s full and the time’s right. Or maybe the time’s right.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Unless you’re going to pull a door out of your arse, ‘maybe’ is the best we’ve got.”

  Nix whispered a word in the Language of Creation to activate the wand. The green flame ignited in the wand’s mouth and Nix used it to scribe summoning sigils in the air.

  “What’re you doing?” Channis asked, his cocksure tone fading. He shouted, “There’s sorcery in here! Get in here, men!”

  Egil shut him up with a knock to the head, but he’d been heard. The men in the hall attacked the door with renewed effort. The jambs and even the wall vibrated under the impact. A painting fell from the wall. Nix ignored the tumult and stayed focused on his task.

  “It’s not an alley,” Egil said. “I don’t see—”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Nix said, completing the sigils. “An alley is just easiest. But all it needs is an aperture of some kind. A doorway or window will do. What’s with all the questions?”

  Then Nix remembered what Egil had experienced in Blackalley, his sobbing calls for Hulda and Asa, reliving moments he’d spent most of his adulthood trying to forget. Nix had relived only a few dark moments from his past. Egil had faced the single experience that overwhelmed everything that came afterward.

  While the guildsmen hacked at the door with their blades, Nix turned around to look at his friend. Egil, blood-spattered and haunted, looked at him, past him, at the window, through it, at a hateful point in his past, at the wife and daughter he’d been unable to save.

  “I don’t see another way,” Nix said softly. “Can you bear it?”

  If Egil said he couldn’t, Nix would stand in the room with his back to his friend and fight every guildsman who came through the door. They’d die eventually, but they’d send a score of guildboys to the Hells before them.

  Egil swallowed, blinked. He put his dice in his belt pouch, ran his hand over Ebenor’s eye, and came back to himself. He focused his heavy-lidded eyes on Nix.

  “I’ll bear it,” the priest said, one of his huge hands opening and closing reflexively.

  Nix nodded, turned, and lit the grease lines with the special matchsticks. They caught right away.

  “Let’s block the door better,” he said.

  Working together, they scooted the chairs and divan before the doors, even as the wood splintered and an axe head popped through.

  “There’s that axe at last,” Nix said, and stabbed his falchion through the gash in the wood. He was rewarded with a scream and a curse. He backed off just as a crossbow bolt whistled through the hole and sank into the far wall.

  “We’re using your guildmaster for cover, you stupid fakkers!”

  “Stop shooting!” Channis shouted. “Just get in here and round up these boys so we can send them down to the hooks.”

  “He’s dead the moment you come through that door!” Nix shouted.

  Curses and a long series of oaths.

  “Your people have shite manners,” Nix said to Channis, then at the door, “You have shite manners!”

  “They’re unforgiving, too,” Channis said.

  “So am I,” Egil promised darkly.

  “If it comes,” Nix said to Egil, nodding at the sigils and burning lines, “try to think only of hopeful things. Remember how we got out last time? Same game. Should be easier this time. And it’ll spit us out somewhere else in the city.”

  “You boys are fooling yourselves,” Channis said. “The only thing coming in here is my men.”

  “And if it comes, what about him?” Egil asked, nodding at Channis, looming over him like a dark promise.

  “Him?” Nix said. “Fak him. Him we kill. Hells, kill him now. One less bunghole in the world.”

  Channis licked his lips, looked from Nix to Egil. He must have seen their resolve for he paled, his facial scars becoming livid lines.

  “Get through that door!” he shouted to his men, veins and tendons visible on his neck and forehead. “Now!” He struggled against his bonds, rocking back and forth, all to no avail. No one slipped Nix’s knots.

  The guildsmen beat and chopped frenetically on the door. A blade opened another slit in the thick wood, worried at it to make it wider.

  “They’re not coming through in time to save you,” Nix said.

  The guildsmen’s onslaught against the door stopped for a moment and a few crossbow bolts whistled into the room, all of them off the mark.

  Egil stepped before Channis, hammers in hand, and looked him in the face. “The people in that inn you ordered torched were people we care about. You try to hurt ours and we come at you. That’s the game, yeah?”

  Channis said nothing and the priest grabbed him by his collar, lifted him from the ground.

  “That’s the game, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Channis said, and stuck out his jaw, apparently resigned to his fate. “I just wanted the faytor. That was all.”

  Nix grabbed him by his hair. “You think that helps you? You’d be gettin’ the same if you’d tried to harm only her. You hurt ours, we hurt you, but worse. That’s the game.” He loosed his grip on Channis’s hair and shouted at the door, now starting to splinter. “You hurt ours, we hurt you worse! The first dozen of you fakkers through that door are dead men! Count on it!”

  Dur Follin’s guildhouse was as good a place as any to die, he figured. He was glad Egil had chalked their names on the street before they’d entered the sewers. They’d left some kind of mark, however transitory.

  “Do it,” he said to Egil. Then, to Channis, “See you in the Hells, fakker.”

  Egil dropped Channis to the floor and raised his hammer for a killing blow.

  Before it fell a sudden pain stabbed Nix behind the eyes. He exclaimed, cursed, rubbed his eyes, his temples. Egil did the same, backing a half step away from Channis, lowering his hammer. Something…opened in Nix’s head and he recognized it even before Mere
lda’s mental voice penetrated his mind.

  Egil, Nix, please come back! Rose is worse! I think…she might die if we don’t do something! Come back now!

  Nix hadn’t known Merelda could reach into his mind without seeing him. The fact she could left him vaguely disconcerted. He’d had his thoughts guided by the sisters before and though it had been justified, he still disliked it.

  Channis, perhaps seeing an opportunity, struggled frantically against his bonds. His men opened a hand-sized hole in the door.

  “Get in here!” Channis shouted. “Or shoot them, godsdammit!”

  Nix kicked Channis in the stomach, turning his shouts for aid into a wheezing, pained gasp.

  Mere, I don’t think we can get back, Nix projected.

  No, you have to come back.

  Listen to me, Mere. I have an idea about how to help her. Veraal can take you.

  His idea for how to help Rose was no less desperate than his idea to resummon Blackalley.

  No, you come back. Both of you. Egil, you make him come back.

  The guildsmen were almost through the door. The furniture Egil and Nix had piled in front of it didn’t give them much of a shooting angle.

  Mere, I don’t think we can. Listen now…

  Nix, I can’t keep the contact any longer. It hurts too much. Come back, dammit. Come back.

  Mere—

  The mental connection closed. Nix cursed, blinking away the pain behind his eyes. His thoughts were racing. Channis saw them recover and knew what it meant for him.

  “Get in here now!” Channis shouted to his men.

  Nix glanced back at the burning lines and the glowing sigils. There was just the window, no Blackalley. He shook his head.

  “Sorry about this, Egil.”

  Egil put the head of a hammer in one of his palms. “Bah! It was my idea. Besides, I didn’t come here expecting to leave.”

  “I had some doubts, but I’m me, so…” He shrugged. “I figured we’d come through all right. I feel bad not being able to help Rose.”

  “That’s the faytor, yeah?” Channis said with a sneer. “I heard she came back to you broken. You both see it now, eh? You ain’t walking clear of here.”