by Paul S. Kemp
“Didn’t we just say that?” Nix said to him absently. “Are you stupid or just not following along?”
“My coin’s on stupid,” Egil said.
“You yammer a lot, slubber,” Channis said to Nix.
“I die as I lived,” Nix said with a little bow. “And you aren’t walking clear of here, either.”
“That’s truth,” Egil said to Channis, and raised his hammer.
A sudden, cold heaviness suffused the air. The torchlight in the room dimmed. Something blocked Minnear’s viridian light. Channis stared past them, wide-eyed, his pupils huge. Even the guildsmen in the hall must have felt it, for they halted their assay on the door. Egil looked past Nix, his heavy lips set in a hard, straight line. Nix knew what he would see even before he turned.
A curtain of shimmering blackness hung in the air where the window had been, suspended between Nix’s arcane lines and glowing sigils.
“What…?” Channis asked, fear rooted in his voice.
“That’s a death sentence for you, slubber,” Egil said.
“Wait,” Nix said. “Wait, Egil!”
“For what?” the priest said. “We kill him and we go.”
Channis seemed barely to hear him. His eyes didn’t leave Blackalley. He looked mesmerized. “Go…?” he muttered.
“We’ll need him,” Nix said, hating the words as they left his mouth.
“For what? Shite, does this have to do with the idea you mentioned to Mere?”
“Aye.”
“Explain.”
“Now?” Nix asked, eyeing the shredded door, the eyes staring through the growing hole in the wood.
Egil waited, eyebrows raised.
“Odrhaal,” Nix said.
Egil’s brow furrowed. “The Maker? That’s lunacy.”
“Maybe,” Nix conceded. “But it’s all I have. If anyone can help Rose…”
“No one even knows if he exists, Nix.”
“Not for certain, no.” But Nix had been in the Deadmire once, seen some of the ruins. Felt something there. He believed the rumors. “If you have a better idea…”
Egil shook his head, cursing, staring at the back of Channis’s head, no doubt eager to spill its contents. Nix pressed. They were almost out of time.
“Egil, we fakked up here. We both know it. We wanted blood and we got it. But these boys aren’t going to stop. We’d have to put them all in the ground. We have to find some other way to make peace or we’re going to have to leave the city. But that’s neither here nor there because right now we’ve got to get out of here and help Rose, yeah? Yeah?”
Egil’s jaw tightened, chewing on Nix’s logic.
“We take this one as a hostage. Then the guild won’t take runs at us the whole time we’re looking for Odrhaal.”
More of the door splintered. Another huge impact that jarred the furniture before the door.
Egil cursed and jerked the Upright Man to his feet. “Let’s visit the dark together, slubber. I imagine a bunghole that lived a life like yours is going to have a grand time inside.”
Channis shook his head, still staring at the wall of Blackalley, nonplussed.
“No,” he said softly, and tried to drag his feet. “No, no.”
Egil pulled him along as he might a child. Nix slit the binding holding Channis’s ankles and took him by the other arm.
Staring at the dark wall of Blackalley’s promise, a panic seized Channis. He kicked and squirmed frenetically, more desperate with each step.
“No, don’t! Don’t!”
Nix struggled to keep his hold.
Finally Channis got enough wits about him to shout over his shoulder, “Shoot them! Shoot them!”
Instead there was another tremendous crash against the door and Nix heard it give way entirely. Wood splintered, furniture slid over the floor, men shouted and poured into the room. Nix hunched over as crossbow bolts hissed through the air, thumped into his mail.
“What is that?” several of the guildsmen shouted.
“Forget it! Stop them!”
“Aster’s balls!” someone oathed.
Blackalley hung before Egil and Nix, a shroud of ink, of dark water, and within it the thing men hated most to face—themselves.
“Stop, fakkers!”
But they didn’t stop, and they had no time to brace themselves. Without breaking stride they lurched into the black. Silence fell. Nix could see nothing and he was glad of it. All that the light from his magic crystal had done last time was let him see the suggestion of dark things at the edge of his vision, hints of terror. And eventually the light had shown him Professor Drugal, with his dark eyes and his body merged partway with the stuff of Blackalley.
As before, the darkness, cold and greasy, tried to seep into him. He felt it gliding over his skin, taking his measure, summoning his self-loathing.
“Just walk a bit,” he said, his voice hollow and small in the darkness. “Doesn’t matter where. We just want to change the spatial relationship so it throws us out somewhere away from the guildhouse. You hear me, Egil?”
“Aye.”
The substance under his feet, giving and spongy, felt like flesh. His mind tried to fill the silence with imagined sounds, or were they imagined? The flutter of wings, the rasping breath of something huge, the slithering undulation of an enormous, unimaginable form. He pushed the thoughts from his mind, focused on the sound of his breathing, his footfalls.
He felt it when the regard fell on him, a weight on his shoulders, a tightness in his chest. He faltered, stopped walking.
“I feel it, too,” Egil said.
They’d been noticed by…whatever lived in Blackalley. The hair on Nix’s arms stood on end. The air thickened and he found it hard to breathe.
“What is that?” Channis said, panic in his voice.
Nix thought he heard distant shouting behind him, faint but terrified. He imagined some of the fool guildsmen following them in, getting lost, and…enduring what Drugal had endured. He put them out of his mind and focused.
“Think of Mamabird’s stew,” Nix said to Egil, as much to distract himself as to distract the priest. “Think of your smiling daughter, the day she was born, the day you married Hulda.”
“Aye,” Egil said, his voice steady.
Nix struggled not to drown in the dark pool of his past misdeeds. Those he’d killed flashed before his eyes, those he’d left to fates worse than death, those to whom he’d lied, those whom he’d cheated. He faced the reality that he’d accomplished nothing, lived a purposeless life that meant nothing to anyone, that he could die and his only mark on the world would be a chalk message on Broadstreet that the rain would soon wash away—
Egil’s hand was on his shoulder, shaking him. “You’re my friend, Nix. My brother. I’d be dead without you. You’ve saved me and many others, too many to count. Focus. Focus.”
Nix grabbed onto Egil’s words, rode them out of the darkness to thoughts of Mamabird, to the urchins he’d helped in the Warrens, the lives he’d saved. He’d made a mark, a real one that meant something to at least some people.
He patted Egil’s hand to signal that he was all right. Egil gave him one final shake and squeeze.
“This is far enough,” Nix said. “Time to leave.”
A rush like rolling surf sounded out in the darkness, a deep thrum that pressured Nix’s eardrums. It grew louder as it closed on them, some huge, dark wave that they couldn’t see but could feel. A breeze went before it and carried on it the stink of ruined dreams and lost hope and something else…a dry reptilian pungence.
Nix thought of the good things he’d done with his life, none to grand purpose, but all heartfelt and true. He allowed nothing else to enter his mind. He thought of his friendship with Egil, their brotherhood, the trust they’d built over the years, the things they’d done, the things they’d chosen not to do. They left a dozen corpses behind them in the guildhouse, but not the boy. The boy they’d left alone and maybe, maybe, he’d find another lif
e for himself.
Beside him, Channis shook as if with ague. He made small, frightened animal sounds that reminded Nix of the sound earthbound nestlings made when kicked from the nest while still unable to fly.
“It’s coming,” Channis said. “I can feel it looking at me. I can hear it. It’s coming. Its eyes! Its eyes!”
Nix heard it and felt it, but he focused on matters of love and hope. Blackalley dredged his mind for self-loathing and regret, found plenty, but Nix refused to pay it heed. He wondered in passing what Blackalley forced a murderous slubber like Channis to see.
“Egil?” Nix said.
“I’m all right,” the priest said softly, steadily. “I’m all right.”
The rushing sound grew louder, closer. The stink grew more intense. The wind stirred Nix’s hair, tunic.
Free us, Nix heard in his head, the sound an uncomfortable rumble deep in his skull. Free us.
“I hear it!” Channis said. “It’s speaking to me!”
Nix opened his eyes, faced the black, the dark, but allowed himself to see only the memories in his head—Mamabird, Rose and Mere, Tesha, Kiir.
“Focus, Egil!”
“I am!”
Beside him, Channis sagged. The guildmaster was weeping.
“It’s coming!” Channis said through his sobs. “It’s coming for me! It wants me!”
The weight of the darkness’s regard fell away from Nix and he gasped, realized that he’d hardly been breathing. Channis went entirely slack in his grasp, laughing and crying by turns.
“I’m empty and it loves me and it’s beautiful and I’ll help and—”
“Shut him up, Egil!”
A heavy thud and Channis went silent.
Nix felt the eyes out in the dark fix on him once more, but with less intensity. The rushing sound filled his ears, the roll of a dark surf trying to catch them up in its currents. He resisted the lure of regret and stayed focused on the bright times in his life, the small moments of grace, the smiles, the people he loved and the people who loved him, and the rush grew to a roar and the wind gusted over them, threatened to knock them from their feet, and the voices carried by the wind shouted in his head, as loud as Ool’s clock, gonging, gonging…
The darkness abated to that of a normal night in Dur Follin and the rush of approaching doom faded to silence. Ool’s clock gonged the hour.
Nix was shaking. His legs were weak.
“Fak,” Egil said beside him.
They still held the guildmaster between them.
“Fak, aye,” Nix echoed.
He blinked away tears—had he been crying?—and glanced around, half dazed. Decrepit buildings, sagging roofs, narrow packed earth streets, rusty, ancient street torches that hadn’t seen a linkboy in years. They were in the Warrens.
He put a hand to the alley wall to keep from falling.
“That was well conceived,” Egil said.
Nix smiled, nodded. “Luckily conceived, at least.”
“You credit yourself too little,” Egil said. “We should be dead. We’re not—because of you.”
Nix never received praise from his friend without embarrassment, so he changed the subject. He shook his arm to shake Channis, who hung limp between them, suspended on their arms like drying laundry. The Upright Man didn’t so much as groan.
“He still alive?” Nix asked. “He’s only useful to us alive.”
Egil checked him. “He’s alive. Cold as a warlock’s heart, though. You still set on Odrhaal?”
“I don’t see any other way.”
“Me either,” Egil said. “Fakking Deadmire, though.”
“Aye, that.”
Nix took a deep breath, cleared his lungs and his thoughts of Blackalley’s pollution.
“Right, then. The guild’ll be on the move. They saw us go in and some of their boys might have followed. They won’t be coming out, likely.”
“Good,” Egil said.
“They’ll be looking for us, though,” Nix said. “They may hit the Tunnel. We need to get there before they do.”
Egil said, “There’s probably another pair of guildboys with eyes on the Tunnel, or maybe that same pair, if they woke up by now. But they won’t know what happened at the guildhouse.”
“Not yet,” Nix agreed. “We need to get Rose and Mere and get clear. Fast.”
“Getting out of the Warrens is easy, but exiting the gates is a problem at this hour,” Egil said.
Nix knew. “Let’s solve one problem at a time, yeah?”
“Yeah. First thing I do when we get back to the Tunnel is strip off this fakking armor.”
“Aye.”
Bearing the unconscious guildmaster between them, they hustled through the dark streets.
Rusk pushed his way through the throng of muttering men in the hallway. Trelgin, wearing the sixth blade that Rusk had coveted, fell in beside him, cursing with every step. Both of them still wore their ceremonial robes.
At least a dozen dead guildsmen littered the floor of the guildhouse. They’d been hit, and hit hard.
“What in Aster’s name happened here?” Trelgin snapped, spraying spittle. A palsy had afflicted Trelgin at some point in his life and caused half his face to droop like an old ma’am’s tits. Every fourth or fifth word exited his mouth wet and sloppy. It aggravated Rusk no end, but that didn’t keep Trelgin from yapping.
“The night after Channis gets the eighth blade the guildhouse gets hit? Feels like inside work, I’d say.”
Rusk stopped, turned, and stared Trelgin in his droopy face. They stood about the same height, but where Rusk was lean gristle, Trelgin was a thick layer of fat over bulky muscles. The Sixth Blade would’ve had an almost boyish face if it weren’t for the droop. His skin was as pale as candle wax except where a bruise was rising on one cheek, his long hair as dark as a crow.
“You implying something?” Rusk said to him.
“I’m merely observing.” “Observing” came out in the company of some drool.
“That big fakker nearly killed me, too,” Rusk said.
Trelgin made a point with a long pause. “Didn’t though, did he?”
Rusk made his own point with a long stare. “No. But then I’m hard to kill, ain’t I?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
With that, they walked on.
“Make way for the Sixth and Seventh,” shouted some of the men, and the crowd parted for them.
They walked through a shattered door, bits of it still hanging from the hinges, and entered one of the Committeemen lounges. Furniture, some of it toppled, stood massed near the door. A dozen sets of eyes turned to face Rusk and Trelgin, and beyond the crowd of men…
“What the fak is that?” Trelgin asked.
A curtain of black, somehow shimmering but reflecting no light, hung in the air where the window should have been. Two guildsmen stood near it, poking at it with their blades.
“Stop!” Rusk commanded. “Don’t touch it! Don’t go near it!”
One of the guildsmen said, “Nim, Gorse, and Deenis went in already, Seventh Blade. They was chasing them two that pinched the Upright Man.”
Them two. The men from the Tunnel, Egil and Nix. Probably they wanted revenge for the botched arson, and maybe for breaking that faytor. Rusk decided to keep that information to himself for the moment.
“It was them boys from the Slick Tunnel,” Trelgin said, making sure everyone heard, his words a wet mess. “Can’t miss the big one with the eye tat on his head.”
Rusk cursed inwardly, but outwardly said, “You’re sure?”
“Had to be,” said another man. “I seen that tat and that fakker was big. No mistaking him. They came up through the sewers. Left a bunch of good men dusty down there.” He named off a few, including Zren the Blade, which caused murmurs of disbelief.
Several men threw prays at Aster on behalf of the fallen men.
“And then those slubbers came up here and attacked the Committee while it was in session,” Trelgin s
aid. “That’s blasphemy and then some.”
Nods around, lots of men touching the charms of Aster they wore as signs of their faith. Trelgin continued: “For that we make ’em both dustmen, yeah?”
Angry murmurs, nods.
Rusk had seen almost nothing of the attack after the small one, Nix, had put on his show to distract them. The grand room had filled with smoke and fire so quickly that he’d not gotten a clean look at the big priest, who’d thumped him from behind while pinching Channis. Rusk had an egg-sized lump on his skull to show for it. By the time he’d regained consciousness, everything had already gone down.
“Thought you boys had ’em pinned in here,” said one of the men to another.
“We did,” said the other, and pointed at the black wall. “They went through there as we broke through. Took Channis, too. I saw it. Just stepped in and poof, they was gone. The three of ours that went hard after them are gone, too.”
A third man said to Rusk, “We can’t just leave ’em, Seventh Blade. We should be going through, too.”
Nods around.
“Them’re good men went through,” said another man.
“Went through to where?” Rusk said, eyeing the dark wall. He’d seen some sorcery in his life, but nothing like this. “Eh? Where? Where does it go? What is it, even?”
His words got through. Eyes found the floor. The mutters died down.
“Let’s not be fakkin’ idiots,” he said. “I want them men and Channis back, too, but that don’t mean we all jump off the Archbridge now, does it?”
“What then, Seventh Blade?”
Before Rusk could answer, the black curtain started to pull back in on itself, a dark blanket being drawn back through a hole in the world that none of them could see. The men near it backed away, exclamations of surprise and fear running through them like the trots. In moments the black curtain disappeared entirely, revealing the window, the green glow of a low-slung but full Mage’s Moon.
Soft curses all around the room. Wide eyes.
Rusk glanced surreptitiously at his tattoo, hoping to see it announce Channis’s death by sprouting an eighth blade. He’d aimed for Sixth Blade, with the wealth that it brought, but he’d do even better as Eighth.
