The Hammer and the Blade

by Paul S. Kemp

  As best I could. And I learned…

  She had difficulty forming the thought, it seemed so implausible.

  The Pact is endangered. Vik-Thyss is dead.

  "What?" Merelda said, sitting up in bed and shedding her blankets in a cloud of linen.

  The eater grumbled and Merelda sat back, her brown eyes never leaving Rusilla's face.

  How? Merelda projected, her excitement palpable. What does this mean for us? Are we to be freed? Rakon did not–

  Rusilla shook her head. Rakon hopes to honor the Pact another way. He plans to find another son of House Thyss.

  She spared her sister any of the details she'd learned.

  The faintly hopeful tingle that flavored Merelda's thoughts melted before renewed fear, frustration, and anger.

  Perhaps he won't do so in time? The Thin Veil is close. Merelda's eyes flashed to the ceiling, as if she could see Hell's dot in night's vault.

  Even if he doesn't, he would still hold us, Rusilla said. If the house survives, the Veil will thin again in another five, and another five after that. He will try again then. He will never release us, Merelda. Not unless he breaks us first.

  And Rakon would never break them. Never.

  Then what do we do? Merelda said. I can't be like Mother, Rose. I can't.

  Thinking of their mother turned Rusilla's thoughts black.

  "It's only a few nights each year," Mother had once said to Rusilla, as she'd winced with remembered pain. "It's not awful. We must do our duty, dear, we Norristru women. If not, the house will die."

  "I don't care about the line or the house," Rusilla had said.

  The words had triggered something in her mother, dredged up some emotion or memory best left in the dark mud at the bottom of her soul. Rusilla had seen it coming, had tried to run, but too late.

  Mother had shrieked, a wail of rage, and beaten Rusilla unconscious. She vaguely remembered Mother weeping throughout. It was after that when Rusilla's mind magic had first manifested.

  We won't be like Mother, Rusilla projected. Don't worry.

  The words felt like fiction, like something she'd tell Rakon, or stick in his mind for her own amusement.

  She'd learned many things sifting through Rakon's thoughts. And she'd taken what she'd learned and manipulated his ideas, amplified his proclivities, but she'd had to act fast, and she hadn't thought it all the way through before Rakon had sensed her intrusion and forced her out. She dared speak her hopes aloud.

  I think Rakon will soon take us from the house.

  Merelda sounded shocked. What? Why? How do you know? He's never taken us from the house.

  I just know, Rusilla projected. Be calm.

  Merelda shifted on the bed. You pushed something into his mind, didn't you? Didn't you? How did you do it? His defenses… She shook her head. Reading is one thing, but to push…

  The situation was unique. He was preoccupied with thoughts of the Pact. He is very frightened.

  Good, Merelda said, and pounded a fist into a pillow. He'll drug us. Before we leave the house, he'll drug us insensate. He must.

  I know. But we'll fight through it.

  How? And even if we do, then what? How can we escape drugged?

  Rusilla answered honestly. I'm not sure yet.

  Merelda's legs shifted under the covers, as if she were already readying them to run. He's always planning, Rose. Plotting. How do we escape him?

  Rusilla smiled, looked over at the chess game, the toppled white king. She'd never lost a game of chess to Rakon, though they had not played in many years. We plot, too. That's how. It's late, Mere. You should rest. We'll talk more tomorrow.

  Long after Merelda fell into a fitful sleep, Rusilla lay awake in her bed staring up at the ceiling, planning, plotting. In time she quietly rose and went to her chessboard. There, she played a game against herself, formulating her thoughts the while. By the time black had cornered white, she had developed her plan.

  "Check," she whispered.

  The memory eater grunted, shifted on his feet, causing the wood floor to creak. Rusilla eyed him sidelong. He looked upon her without seeing her, his vacant eyes staring, his mouth half-open in a distant smile. Bracing herself, she opened her mind to the fragment of the actual eunuch that still remained within the shell.

  The screams, rage-filled and terrible, hit her in an onslaught of emotion, a sleet of hate and terror and madness. She winced but did not otherwise move. Blood trickled from her nose. The eater defied her magic, but the fragment of the eunuch that still existed provided her a door into the mind, a reserve unoccupied by the eater's alien intellect. Her magic wrapped her consciousness around the eunuch's screams and followed them back into the dually inhabited mind. She perceived there the vast, empty spaces left in the wake of the eater's repasts. Into those, she pushed some of her own thoughts and memories, together with the memories she'd taken from Rakon, shoved them in deep, hoping they would avoid the eater's attention long enough for her plan to unfold.

  When it was done, she pulled out and once more walled off the eunuch's screams. She dabbed her nose of blood, her heart racing, her head aching, and returned to bed.

  The pieces were in place. There was nothing more for her to do except play them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Warrens. The bunghole of Dur Follin.

  Nix could remember the street torches in the Warrens being lit only once, years earlier when the Lord Mayor came through with his entourage of sycophants and guards to view the Heap.

  Now the rusty burn cages of the lamps sat askew atop weathered, tilted posts, empty of fuel, untended, surrendered to poverty like everything else in the Warrens. Linkboys dared the narrow alleys and dilapidated shacks no more often than did the watch, and the Warrens saw a watchman about as often as it saw an honest man, which was to say almost never. The only non-residents who regularly braved the alleys were rubbish men on their way to or from the Heap, and dung collectors with their wagons of shite. Other than that, only predators, victims, and hopelessness populated the Warrens.

  Here and there fire pits dug in the narrow streets burned dried dung, the smoke dark and reeking. Thin, ill-dressed people crowded like shadows around the flames, people worn down by time and the world until they looked as crumbled and dilapidated as the buildings in which they would later squat. The odor of open latrines and the stink of the Deadmire, whose waters lay just beyond the walls, polluted the air.

  Ool's clock tolled eight deep notes, signifying the passage of another desperate hour for the residents of the Warrens. Nix could see the great clock in the distance, its spire a dark line silhouetted by the thin silver crescent of Kulven, Mad Ool's device looming over the filth like a doom.

  The sky cleared its throat with a low, prolonged rumble of thunder. Rain was coming; it would turn the Warrens into a morass, an extension of the Deadmire.

  Nix prowled the alleys and narrow roads, tense, all eyes and ears. He held his bared blade in his fist. The ubiquitous and canny rats squeaked indignantly at his approach, slunk into dens and dark hidey-holes. Urchins eyed him sidelong as they melted into shadows and alleys. The rotted body of a dead dog lay in the street, its ribs like jail bars.

  The men and women of the Warrens regarded him with hooded eyes and wary glances, but kept their distance. He felt their eyes on him, whores, pimps, addicts, would-be street thugs, and the merely unfortunate, all of them evaluating him as either potential prey or possible savior. His blade and hard expression, however, pronounced him neither. He had no business with them, and only someone very stupid or more desperate than usual would dare a run at him.

  He'd worn the same look once, a hard, brittle veneer of hostility that coated the terror and desperation beneath. His mind flashed back on deeds he'd rather have forgotten. Guilt dredged the depths of his past and in his mind's eye he saw the wan, sunken-eyed face of the thin old man he'd killed with a rusty piece of sharp metal. They'd fought over a chunk of bread Nix had found in a rubbish drop, the who
le of it more mold than grain. Nix had killed many men since, but he regretted that one still, and probably always would. They'd both just been hungry, and Nix had been too young to stain his hands with blood and carry it well. He still saw the old man in dreams sometimes, eyes wide and fearful, mouth moving as he chewed on his last breath.

  He rounded a nameless corner onto another nameless street, waving off a haggard prostitute in a tattered dress who looked like she might approach him. Two blocks ahead he saw the lesion of the Heap, a mountain of rubbish rising in a huge lumpy arc over the uneven, sagging roofs of nearby buildings. The Heap served as final resting place for most of Dur Follin's daily trash (and many of its murdered, as Nix had learned later), and each dawn and dusk brought a steady stream of rubbish men and their carts through the Warrens. The mountain grew every year, accreting waste and stink the way the Warrens accreted the hopeless. Nix figured that one day the Warrens would be nothing more than the Heap.

  Though after dark, hundreds of river gulls still dotted the Heap's surface, wheeling in the air over and around it, their calls from dawn to midnight as much a timekeeper for the Warrens as Mad Ool's clock spire. Their shite painted large swaths of the Heap white.

  Shacks, makeshift tents, and lean-tos clung to the base of the Heap like malformed toadstools, a fungus of improvised homes for the urchins and other desperate residents who mined the Heap for the ore of food scraps and lost valuables. Now and again someone, usually a child, threw a stone at a gull in hopes of bringing one down to fill a stewpot, but Nix knew well the fruitlessness of the attempt. He'd managed to bring down only three in all the years he'd spent there, and he'd been a better shot than most. The birds were canny and quick.

  Watching the urchins prowl the garbage, his mind drifted to his childhood. He recalled the glee he'd felt once when he'd found a piece of salted meat in a moldy sack, the excitement he'd felt when he'd discovered a finely-made lockpick – his first – in the sliding heel of an old boot. He remembered how, by sunset each day, he was always covered in stink, dirt, bird shite, and sweat, but how it would always seem worth it if the effort had landed something in his belly.

  Whenever he returned to the Warrens, he made a point to see the Heap, a pilgrimage to remind himself of his former life, a reminder of who he was and would always be. He should've died many times over while living in the Warrens, but somehow the gods had overlooked him, or decided to spare him for some reason. He figured he was living on borrowed time, a divine promissory note as it were, so he lived as if he had nothing to lose.

  Hence, tomb robbing.

  A trio of adolescents, two girls and a boy, all too thin, dashed across the street before him, either running after something or running away from something. Rags covered them, and only the boy had shoes, mismatched. They vanished down a side alley as fast as they had appeared, ghosts of the Warrens.

  He felt for them, felt for everyone who lived hungry and cold, and did what he could. Every few paces he let a silver tern or a copper common leak from a hole in his trouser pocket. If he just gave coin away, he'd have a crowd around him and maybe a riot, or some tough would have a run at him, so instead he just left dozens of terns and commons in his wake for the lucky or diligent to find. He thought of them as seeds, an attempt to grow hope from desperate soil.

  Having made obeisance to his childhood at the temple of the Heap, he turned and headed for Mamabird's home, a few dilapidated blocks away. He could have walked there with his eyes closed, so well did he know the route. He dropped more coins in the road as he went.

  He smiled when he saw Mamabird's house: a single-story mud-brick building with a sagging roof of wood and straw. Lean-tos were built against two sides of it, and a fire burned in a large pit near one of them. Cats, of course, seemed everywhere. Mama collected cats the way a noblewoman collected jewelry, and Nix had once seen her beat a man who'd tried to catch one for stew. Two tabbies perched on the roof of her house, a long-haired black lay near the fire pit, and a fourth orange tabby stalked something in the weeds near the fire pit. Mama kept a small vegetable garden in the small dirt plot she'd fenced off behind the house, and everyone respected its boundaries. Mamabird's house was treated by the residents of the Warrens the way other people treated temples elsewhere in the city – sacred ground.

  A tentative rain started, just enough to lend humidity to the stink. Another rumble of thunder threatened a heavier downpour. The cats slunk out of sight.

  Nix hustled up to the house, stood on the makeshift porch of scavenged timber, stared at the worn door a few long beats. Standing there, he transformed, reverted back to the person he'd been in boyhood, frightened, alone, desperate. He'd found a life behind that door, security, hope. And, in the end, he'd also found the man he later became and whatever conscience he carried.

  He sheathed his blade, adjusted his cloak, his hair, shed the mask he wore when facing the world, and knocked his knock. The floor creaked as Mamabird came to the door. He could hear her murmuring to herself.

  "It can't be, can it? Nixxy, is that you?"

  "It's me, Mamabird."

  She pulled open the door so hard she almost jerked it from its rusty hinges. The smell of her onion stew – he never thought overlong about what else might be in it – wafted out, redolent with memories.

  When she saw him, her pale, fat face wrinkled up in a toothless smile that reached all the way to her rheumy eyes. He could not help but answer with a face-splitting smile of his own.

  He tried to take her in at a glance but she always seemed too large. He perceived her only in pieces, never in whole: the tight bun of her gray hair, the perpetually stained apron, her three chins, the immensity of her girth, the hairy mole on her right cheek, the puckered, flabby arms, the tattered dress large enough to serve as a tent.

  She squealed with delight and hugged him hard enough to take his breath, enfolding him in her rolls of fat, her sour smell, her love. He returned the hug in full, losing himself for a moment. Mamabird was the sweetest person he'd ever met in this life, and sweeter than any he expected to meet in the next. He knew holy men without half her rectitude. He felt relaxed for the first time since entering the Warrens.

  "My favorite chick returned to the nest!" she said.

  "I always come back, Mamabird."

  "But it's been so long," she said, and hugged him harder.

  "Mamabird," he said into her apron, "I can't breathe."

  She laughed, released the hug, and held him out at arm's length.

  "Let Mama look at you."

  She examined him the way she might a market chicken. Frowning at the sharp steel he carried, she turned him all the way around and tsked.

  "You're not eating enough. Look how thin. You've got no backside. Come sit and eat. I've just made some stew."

  "It smells delicious," he said, and meant it.

  As always, she kept her damp two-room shack with its warped wood-plank floor as tidy as life in the Warrens allowed. Rain pattered softly on the roof. Blankets lay on the floor near the tiny hearth, all of them tattered but clean.

  "Caring for some of the urchins, I see. Where are they?"

  She tsked again. "They're not urchins, my love. They're children. As were you. And they're out doing what they do. They'll be along."

  Her furniture, reclaimed from the Heap or made for her inexpertly by grateful beneficiaries of her grace, looked worn but reasonably sturdy – a few sitting chairs, a round eating table with mismatched chairs, a cabinet, the doors long removed, that held her two pots and few dishes.

  "I don't have a lot of time, Mama. Egil is waiting for me back in the city."

  "Time enough to eat, though," she said. Not a question.

  "Of course, Mama."

  She ladled her stew into a wooden bowl. "And how is Egil? Shame about his wife and child. Such a sad man, he is."

  "Aye," Nix said somberly.

  "Come, sit."

  They sat at the eating table: not the same one at which Nix had taken so many me
als as a child, true, but Mama's presence and her stew made it feel the same. He might as well have been ten winters old. He sipped the stew, its smell and taste full of good memories, and they talked for the better part of an hour about small things. Mamabird coughed often and he noticed her rale, noticed, too, the additional wrinkles that time had added to her countenance.

  "I'll send a priestess of Orella to see to you about the cough," he said.

  She waved off his help. "Now, Nix, you know Mama's had the same cough for ten years. Ain't no need for a priestess. Besides–" She chuckled and the chuckle gave way to a coughing fit. She never stopped smiling throughout. "No white-robed priestess of the healing goddess will come in here. You know that."