A Discourse in Steel (17 page)

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.”

“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 life 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.