Cold Iron

by Miles Cameron

  Sasan had just killed another man, with the knife. The blood was black in the moonlight, and ran down the steps like water over a waterfall. There were still three living men on the steps with them.

  Sasan rolled his wrist, flourishing the curved sword he now had in his hand with expert dexterity.

  ‘You never forget,’ the Safian said distantly.

  The three bravos kept their distance.

  ‘Run away!’ Aranthur shouted at them.

  One of the downed men was gurgling.

  ‘Dark Sun!’ spat Sasan. ‘It’s a woman.’

  She tried to speak and coughed.

  The three men in the darkness were talking to each other in accented Liote mixed with Armean.

  ‘I hate hurting women,’ Sasan said.

  Maddie bent down and stabbed the wounded woman in the temple with an eating knife.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Aranthur said. ‘There could be more. This is quite a wolf pack for a few gold sequins.’

  Sasan looked at Aranthur. ‘They want you, brother. It’s not the money.’ He shrugged. ‘Or it started as money and now … They know your name. I can hear them.’

  Aranthur led the way down the steps. The two in front of him backed away, and he continued along the muddy upper reaches of the Green Canal. He didn’t look back. He watched the men in front.

  Then they ran.

  Aranthur was fairly sure where they were. On the wrong side of the City from his rooms, with the Academy south and west, and the Pinnacle equidistant to the east. The old temple towered above them, a blank wall of ancient stone rising like a mountain above the long steps.

  He looked back. The bodies lay above them on the steps. And now there were other shapes moving – men in cloaks.

  Sasan looked back. ‘I think we’d better run,’ he said.

  Aranthur nodded. The three of them ran along the canal, but Aranthur knew he’d end up in the spice market that way – another dangerous area. He certainly didn’t want the Pinnacle; that meant doubling back and leading them through the Precinct.

  He turned left into a cross street, and then across a narrow bridge over the Blue Canal. Behind them were armed men, swords like pale magiks in their hands, and then they were looking at armed people, men and women – dozens of them in what appeared to be a battle.

  Aranthur came to a stop in mid-bridge.

  ‘Who the fuck?’ Sasan panted. He was already blown, and he stood and heaved. Maddie was not tired. She looked back.

  ‘Sorry, boys,’ she said. ‘You do know how to show a girl a good time, but I don’t want to die with you.’

  She flashed Sasan a smile and kissed him on the lips. And then leapt off the bridge into the canal.

  Aranthur looked down to see her swimming powerfully, a lithe shape, pale in the darkness.

  The people fighting ahead of him were aristocrats. The men behind were growing less cautious.

  ‘Don’t kill anyone unless they attack you,’ he told Sasan.

  He dragged the other man across the bridge while wiping his sword clean with a scrap of linen from his purse. He threw the scrap in the canal as one line of swordsmen broke the other and men and women ran in every direction, including straight at him.

  He let the combatants go past – a glint of steel and frightened eyes in the darkness – and Sasan and Aranthur shrank against the stone balustrade of the bridge.

  ‘Come on,’ Aranthur shouted when the flood of panicked nobles was past.

  He led Sasan along the balustrade at the edge of the canal. It was a good neighbourhood here, and there was a body on the ground.

  ‘What in the Darkness?’ Aranthur spat.

  ‘You know what you’re doing, right?’ Sasan wheezed. But he grinned. ‘Hey, it’s hours since I thought of thuryx. You planned this to get me clean, right?’

  Both men grinned.

  There was a clack and clash of blade on blade, the swish and swash of a buckler blocking blows off to the right. Aranthur tried to go left, away from the fighting, and found that his guess was completely wrong. Instead of running clear, the two turned a corner under someone’s flowering orange tree and ran straight into the back of a chaotic melee. He drew his sword into a high garde, parried a blow that had very little intent to it, stepped in and threw the attacker to the ground, and then he and Sasan were in a stone arch, back to back with two other men and fighting for their lives. There were cuts, and more cuts, and a pair of thrusts that Aranthur was amazed he saw, much less parried. He was hit on the thigh and felt the warm wetness that meant blood. He seemed to be fighting automatically, his arm with a mind of its own. It was nothing like fencing – there was no subtlety here. He parried.

  Sasan was breathing like a bellows, but he used the hook of his hard-won Eastern sword to cut a man behind his knee and the man screamed and fell. The fight made no sense; the man whose back was a warm presence behind Aranthur was a total stranger, and the two men whose swords he was parrying were equally strange and not in House colours he even knew.

  Aranthur crossed his nearer opponent, and, as the man raised his hands, kicked him hard in the crotch. The man fell with a choked sound and Aranthur cut, hard, and a-purpose, into his other opponent’s sword from off line. He carried it to the ground, stepped in, and slammed his pommel into the man’s head. He was trying not to kill.

  The man dropped.

  Aranthur turned, but Sasan was already safe, breathing like a racehorse after a race, and he whirled just as the man behind him parried and stepped back.

  Aranthur stepped in beside him and the man’s opponent turned and ran.

  ‘Damme,’ said his ally. ‘Thought you was my brother, what?’

  The man was wearing a domino, a half mask, with a White badge pinned to it over complex House colours – red and blue. They shone clearly in the torchlight of the gate.

  The man laughed with relief. ‘Whoever you are, I owe you.’

  Aranthur bowed. ‘Your servant, syr.’

  ‘Damme,’ said the stranger. ‘Like a storybook, what?’ He had the accent of privilege and money. ‘What House?’

  Aranthur shook his head. ‘Student,’ he said. ‘Timos.’

  ‘Klinos,’ said the stranger. ‘Always at your service, syr.’ The man, apparently of House Klinos, one of the oldest and poorest, got a shoulder under a wounded companion. ‘For the Whites, what?’

  Sasan laughed.

  ‘Black or White?’ the man asked.

  ‘What is this all about?’ Aranthur asked.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ the other man said. ‘Someone slept with someone else’s wife and there was blood. To be honest, I’m not even sure what side my sword is supposed to back, but I’m sure it’s all for honour.’ He laughed bitterly.

  ‘I’m neither Black nor White,’ Aranthur said. ‘And I’m certainly not a Lion.’

  ‘Maybe we should form our own faction, then,’ the man said with a bitter smile.

  Aranthur shook his head. ‘It’s all insane,’ he said.

  He was thinking about the House war and the student protest and the calls for the resignation of the Master of Arts. It was as if the whole world had gone mad.

  His new friend hoisted his relative and led him back through the arch and across the bridge.

  The men who had been following Aranthur were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Dark Sun,’ Sasan wheezed. He was laughing. ‘Damme,’ he said, mimicking the accent. ‘I might just stay sober, just to see what the fuck you get up to. That was fun.’

  Aranthur put an arm around the addict and started him toward the Precinct, and home.

  ‘Fun?’

  Sasan panted for a while.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can we go back? I want the girl.’

  Aranthur might have laughed, but he was working too hard. He got Sasan around a second riot and began climbing towards the Precinct.

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘I haven’t wanted a woman in a year. Oh, by the Twelve.’ But he began to walk on his ow
n. ‘I’m wiped out,’ the Easterner said. ‘Sunlight, brother, I don’t even like the smell of my sweat.’

  Aranthur paused to think and saw a man in a leather jerkin. The torches on the outside of a private home shone on the greasy garment, and Aranthur knew him from the gambler’s tavern.

  He thought of Drako’s words. Two places, well apart, different backgrounds. He wished, very hard, for Drako to appear like a troop of cavalry.

  ‘They’re still following us,’ he said to Sasan.

  He pulled the Safian into an alley as narrow as a man’s shoulders, between a tall private house and a glover’s shop. It was full of decaying hides, rejects from the glover, and it smelled worse than a jakes.

  ‘Then I’m going to die here,’ the Safian muttered. He still had the curved sword in his hand. ‘Smells bad.’

  ‘Where’d the sword come from? Aranthur asked, considering his options.

  They were below the Founder’s Square and from the sounds, the square was full of late-night protestors, or perhaps just revellers. The seriousness of his situation was settling in, but the action had freed something in his head, too. He realised that he had been running for his room as if that would protect him – that he really was half-expecting Drako to appear.

  ‘I took it from the first bastard who jumped us,’ Sasan panted. ‘Didn’t think to take the scabbard.’

  ‘More fool you. They were Easterners.’

  ‘What does that even mean? Easterner? You know, to us, the Zhouians are Easterners?’ Sasan breathed in and out, heavily. ‘There are quite a few of them,’ he panted. ‘Four? Six?’

  Aranthur made some decisions. ‘I’m going to cast a working on you,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel better. Fresh. Fast. Strong.’

  ‘You are full of surprises,’ Sasan said. ‘It sounds like thuryx.’

  Aranthur had no focus, no talisman, and he was standing in a stinking alley with men hunting him. Luckily he’d had some practice casting in difficult conditions.

  He dropped into his concentration routine. He found his crystal wind, and sang to it softly, in Safiri. He pictured the calligraphy, imagined the pen, dipping into the wind of power and writing on reality in beautiful, sweeping strokes of fire.

  He released his creation: the climax of sex; the moment the sword slid free of a parry and punched into flesh; the moment the dice show the number the gambler chose.

  It was, of course, his Safian spell, and it worked.

  Sasan’s eye almost burned with potency.

  ‘I am the fucking Sun!’ shouted Sasan. ‘Oh, gods, that’s a rush.’

  The addict charged out into the darkened street, the very last thing Aranthur had anticipated. He followed.

  The Safian met the first two pursuers at a dead run. His curved blade cut, was parried, and Sasan’s next step carried him past his first opponent even as his sword hand rotated and rose. The curved point rolled in and around his opponent’s straight blade and pecked him in the neck. The bravo fell, clutching the side of his throat and Sasan cut back, through the other pursuer’s guard and over his hilt. The man dropped his sword and fell to one knee, where Aranthur knocked him flat with a knee to the head.

  Leather Jerkin raised a puffer that gleamed malevolently in the darkness, but he miscalculated Sasan’s speed. The Easterner slammed into him, knocked him flat, and cut the fourth man in the side before he could draw his weapon.

  Sasan shrieked and kicked Leather Jerkin in the head, so that his long puffer skittered across the cobbles. Aranthur pounced on it. It was loaded, but the hammer wasn’t cocked.

  Aranthur had to guard against a cut. Another assailant had a big sword, a long, two-handed blade, and he cut hard, overhead, whirled it up and cut again, fast. Aranthur tried to make the cover that Master Sparthos taught for this very situation, but the man’s blows were so hard he couldn’t drop them off his own blade to retaliate. He backed, tripped over the man he’d kneed in the head, and fell.

  Long Sword leapt forward, sword rising. Sasan flew in under the blade, close as a lover, and there was the loud crack of a bone breaking. Then a heavy crunch as a shoulder dislocated, and then the long sword clattered in the street. The man bellowed in pain.

  Aranthur lay almost still; he’d hit his head on the cobbles and nothing was working.

  Sasan stood over him, his shamshir dripping blood.

  ‘Coryn’s angels,’ he said, in rapid Safiri. ‘I am like a god of war.’

  ‘We have to follow them,’ Aranthur whispered.

  Long Sword roared again and Sasan casually kicked him in the head. The kick was too fast to follow, and the man’s neck snapped and he dropped, dead. His Lion badge showed on the back of his cap.

  Sasan giggled. ‘Oops,’ he said.

  Aranthur muttered.

  ‘Who?’ Sasan asked.

  ‘The footpads,’ Aranthur said. ‘We need to follow them.’

  Sasan had a dark eldritch glow about him. ‘Whatever you like, master of Dark Arts. If I’d known you could make me feel like this … I can conquer the world.’

  He gave Aranthur a hand up. Then the two of them went off down the side street, following the running men, leaving the corpses in the street.

  The two running men didn’t stop until they had run almost to the Lonika gate, all the way along the waterfront. Aranthur had a stitch in his side; Sasan ran as if he could run all night.

  ‘I can run them down,’ Sasan said.

  ‘No. I want to see where they go.’

  Aranthur was playing a guessing game, running on side streets. At the first canal, he led Sasan north, up the spine towards the western wall of the Precinct, and then across the canal by the upper bridge to come down on their opponents from the north. The two fleeing men were in sight as they crossed the southern bridge and again at an intersection. Sasan moved like lightning and Aranthur moved from shadow to shadow. But at the Lonika Gate, Aranthur lost them; there was a crowd of aristocrats and some soldiers who were clearly disarming them. The two bravos had vanished.

  Aranthur stood bent over, panting with frustration.

  Sasan smiled. ‘Will I pay for all this tomorrow?’

  ‘I expect so,’ Aranthur said.

  ‘Best enjoy it, then. Like thuryx. I’ll see if I can run them down.’

  He set off at a sprint; faster than a racehorse, up a side street.

  Aranthur went straight across the square, alone. He moved through parked military wagons, avoiding the line of soldiers. It was clear the House fighting had spread to the gate, and that this noble house had tried to block the soldiers from moving the wagons. Then Aranthur was on the opposite side, moving along the broad avenue that ran up the spine under the Aqueduct. He was reasonably sure of his notion that the men were Easterners and lived in the camp on the Pinnacle. It struck him that this was stupid; on the other hand, he’d just escaped death at least three times, and he felt invincible.

  But he could not see anything, nor hear anything, to suggest that he was right. With every step he took up the spine, he worried that he was leaving Sasan to his own. So, after listening to the temples ring the hour, he turned back west and retraced his steps. He was coming down the long ramp under the aqueduct bridge when he heard men coming, and ducked behind a buttress.

  ‘Bastard has the luck of the Gambler,’ came a disembodied voice.

  ‘Goddess has a thousand hands to chastise,’ said the other. ‘Be civil and modest, Juwad.’

  ‘What the hells was that thing? It was like a spectre.’ He sounded young, and shaken. ‘We have lost half an army tonight.’

  ‘It was a man,’ said the other. ‘Only a man, but the Servant will not be pleased. We were not told …’ He shook his head.

  Aranthur let them go by. They were quite close – perhaps two arm’s lengths. But there was not enough light to see them by.

  ‘Will the Servant punish us?’ asked Juwad.

  The older voice was soothing. ‘The Servant only punishes disobedience and heresy, Juwad. We have lost
blood in honest war. I do not think we can be faulted.’

  Aranthur thought that the soothing voice was trying to reassure itself.

  ‘Yet the thief lives.’ Juwad sounded truly regretful.

  ‘Not for many breaths. The Disciple’s reach is long, I promise you. And the Master’s reach is longer still.’

  Aranthur moved as cautiously as he could behind them. They were under the Aqueduct now, surrounded on both sides by hundreds of rude shacks and small clapboard houses, some quite permanent, most terrible in their simplicity. The smell of human waste was overwhelming; the alleys and streets were almost empty.

  ‘Why does the Master not send the Bone Plague to eat him?’ Juwad asked. ‘By the saints, my hand hurts.’

  ‘Keep your pain inside,’ the older voice said. ‘We are the strong. We do not whimper.’

  ‘Yes, syr,’ Juwad said, as they passed along the long line of sutlers and temporary taverns, all closed and shuttered.

  Aranthur had never been under the Aqueduct at this hour. Far from dangerous, it seemed more like a graveyard or an abandoned theatre. He had little cover, though, and he began to fall back, giving them distance, heart beating with excitement.

  The two men surprised him by turning north, towards the sea and the spice market. They began to descend from the Aqueduct and the poor neighbourhoods, and they took a winding street like a spiral staircase that wound through a semicircle while going down from almost the Pinnacle to virtually the seaside. Aranthur had never been in the area, but the long crescent was perfect for following them. He could walk carefully and watch his quarry. For their part, they never looked back and both men seemed to feel secure – far more worried about the Servant than about the possibility of pursuit.

  ‘But the soldiers were suspicious!’ Juwad hissed.

  ‘They are suspicious of all Easterners,’ the older man said. ‘As we want them to be. The worse they treat the Armeans, the readier the Armeans will be to our will. How often have I told you this?’

  The two men turned into an alley, and Aranthur had to stop. He was under the eaves of a roof, and he realised that there was a fire ladder to an upper balcony.