A Discourse in Steel (32 page)

“And if we come back for that,” Nix said, tapping the hilt of his blade, “there's no amount of fear or regret or mindmagic shite that will save you from us. I'll make those pointy-eared fakkers you fought before seem like gentlemen.”

Odrhaal's eyes narrowed a bit but he said nothing.

Nix and Egil took one last look at Rose and Mere, turned, and headed back to the boat, back to Dur Follin.

Egil rowed
them upriver at almost a leisurely pace. Nix sat in the back of the boat, staring at the mountainous back of the priest as he worked the oars. They spoke little. Each lived in his own head for much of the journey.

“Could be none of that happened,” Nix said. “You know that, right?”

“Aye,” Egil said.

“Everything we think we know, Odrhaal could have put there, just as we think he did with the guildsmen.” Nix searched his memory for their names: Rusk and Trelgin.

“Why bother?” Egil said.

“Can't say,” Nix said. “Could be a reason, though. We just wouldn't know it because whatever it is was replaced with what we're meant to think.”

“I think you should stop,” Egil said over his shoulder. “It happened. Hurts too much to not have happened.”

“Fair point,” Nix said.

The river rolled past. Nix had the question on his tongue for a long time before he could finally bring himself to ask it.

“Assuming everything that happened, happened…Did you do it?”

Egil's back muscles tensed. He pulled up the oars for a moment and looked out on the waters of the Meander. For a while Nix didn't think he'd answer, but finally the priest spoke.

“Most religions are about expiating transgressions, giving the faithful a way to live with their faults, to forgive themselves for those faults. You know what I mean?”

“I suppose.”

“But if you could just”—Egil made a cutting gesture with his hand, and his voice cracked—“cut your failings out, be made to forget they ever happened, then you'd remake yourself as a better you. Wouldn't you do that if you could, Nix?”

Nix, with his many and sundry faults and regrets, hesitated only a moment. “No. And I mean that. No.”

“You've never been a religious man, Nix.”

“No, but I'm around one sometimes.”

Egil said nothing, so Nix continued: “I think that if you cut it out then you're not remaking a better you. You cut it out, then you're not you at all. A priest I know once taught me that over ales.”

Egil's body shook with a short chuckle or maybe a shudder. “Maybe you're more religious than you realize.”

“Maybe,” Nix said. He stared at the back of his friend's head. “You didn't answer my question. Did you do it?”

Egil inhaled deeply and shook his head. “I didn't do it. I came close, but I couldn't leave them again. Hulda and Asa. I can't leave them ever again.”

Nix closed his eyes, thanked gods he didn't believe in, and reached up to put a hand on his friend's shoulder. He left it there for a time, then left Egil to himself.

The priest took up the oars again and rowed them back upriver to Dur Follin, their city, their home. Nix pretended not to notice when Egil wept.

“You row,”
Rusk ordered Trelgin.

The droopy-faced Seventh Blade did not even grumble. He pushed them off, took a seat on the rower's bench, and started back toward the Meander. They'd had to leave the bodies of Varn, Mors, and the others in the swamp, though Rusk had collected the symbols of Aster each wore. They'd throw a pray to the God of Stealth in the name of their fallen guildsmen. The witches had been vicious, had turned Varn and Mors against their fellows, the same way they'd forced Egil and Nix to attack the guildhouse.

Rusk still didn't understand why the witches had arranged an attack on the guild. He supposed the red-haired witch had been hurt somehow when Rusk had murdered the old Upright Man in her tent. So she and her sister had enspelled Egil and Nix to take their vengeance, and things had escalated from there.

Rusk eyed the tat on his hand, the new eighth blade it had grown.

“Bitter taste to let Egil and Nix live over this, Eighth Blade,” Trelgin said. “They killed a lot of good guildsmen.”

“They did, but they were as enspelled by both those witches as were Varn and Mors. And they're going to pay compensation to make good. They'll be grateful we treated them square and that'll be useful to us someday.”

“As you say, Eighth Blade,” Trelgin said, sucking drool, and Rusk liked the way the title sounded on another's lips. When they cleared the swamp and broke out into the Meander proper, Trelgin spoke over his shoulder, his diction sloppy with palsy.

“My loyalties are always to the guild and whoever wears the eighth blade. I know we had some words on this deal, but I hope you can respect that.”

Rusk didn't bother to respond, instead letting Trelgin stew.

After a time he smiled and said, “Seventh Blade's a shite job, Trelgin. Get used to it.”

For Jen, Roarke, Riordan, Lady D, and Sloane

My thanks to Mr. Leiber, for
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser,
and to Mr. Howard, for the Cimmerian.

The Hammer and the Blade

A Discourse in Steel

Star Wars: Crosscurrent

Star Wars: Riptide

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived

Star Wars: Lords of the Sith

The Halls of Stormweather

Shadow's Witness

Twilight Falling

Dawn of Night

Midnight's Mask

Shadowbred

Shadowstorm

Shadowrealm

Ephemera

Realms of Shadow

Realms of Dragons

Realms of War

Sails and Sorcery

Horrors Beyond II

Worlds of Their Own

Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales

P
AUL
S
.
K
EMP
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the Egil and Nix novels (
The Hammer and the Blade, A Discourse in Steel,
and the upcoming
A Conversation in Blood
),
Star Wars: Crosscurrent, Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived,
and
Star Wars: Riptide,
as well as nine Forgotten Realms fantasy novels and many short stories. He lives and works in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with his wife, children, and a couple of cats.

paulskemp.com

Facebook.com/​paulskemp

@paulskemp

By Paul S. Kemp

Published by Del Rey

Nix bounded backward but the creature's thick appendage caught him squarely, audibly cracked his ribs, and drove him backward into the hard stone of the wall. The edges of his broken bones ground against each other, coarse, gritty, agonizing. Nix tried to wall off a shriek of pain behind gritted teeth, but it slipped past and the force of the scream misted the air before him in spit and blood.

“Nix!” Egil shouted, the priest's body blocked from Nix's view by the huge, misshapen bulk of the creature.

Nix's legs failed him and he slid down the wall to the floor, gasping, wincing against the pain.

The creature roiled toward him, one thunderous step, another, and Nix knew he was going to die. Pain blurred his vision, shrank his field of view down to a tunnel in which he saw only the creature, the impossible creature, as it advanced on him. Egil came into view behind it, the priest on all fours, bleeding, beaten, his forehead wrinkled by pain.

“Over here, creature!” Egil said, working up to an attempt at standing. “Over here, you fakking thing!”

The creature stopped, its bulk rippling, flowing under the filthy cloak it wore, and turned to face Egil with whatever passed for its head.

“Get up,” Nix said to Egil, though the priest could not have heard him. “Get up.”

And Egil did. Blood leaked from a cut on the top of his head, the smear of it painting the eye of Ebenor in crimson, but Egil rose, gripping one of his hammers in his right hand. The veins in his right arm stood out like ropes. His left arm hung limp at his side, probably dislocated. The look in his hooded eyes promised an answer in violence, and so too did his tone.

“I said: Over here.”

The creature tensed and roared, the sound coming from a dozen mouths, a cacophony of rage and frustration that somehow reminded Nix of crashing surf, an elemental sound, the sound of something inexorable, unstoppable.

“Maybe we'll do this again sometime, creature,” Egil said, raising his hammer. “Or maybe we won't. But either way, you don't clear today without some pain.”

The creature took a step toward him. Nix tried to shift his weight and rise, but he could not move, could barely breathe. He felt as though a boulder were on his chest and knew what it meant: blood was filling his lungs.

Nix saw Egil's tracheal lump work as he swallowed some hard truth. The priest looked to his right and said, “Do it now, Jyme. Do it if you can.”

“How?” Jyme asked from somewhere out of Nix's pain-constricted view, though Nix knew that Jyme stood at the place that was no place, that was every place, that was the only place.

Nix put his hands on the cold floor, tried to shift his weight, and the pain brought another scream. He faded, nearly lost consciousness, but held on. He shook his head, raised a hand feebly in Jyme's direction.

“Don't,” he said, but his shattered chest could make it little more than a strangled whisper that ended in a bloody, painful bubbling. “Don't, Jyme. This is who we are.”

From outside Nix's field of view, Jyme screamed, “I don't think I remember the fakkin' words, Egil!”

“You don't need to know them,” Egil said, and eased himself to his right, into the space between Jyme and the creature. “Nix already activated them. Just read the damned stanzas.”

“No,” Nix murmured, though he was drifting and the word came out a half moan. “We don't know what will happen.”

Maybe Egil heard him, or just knew what he meant, for the priest glanced at him, nodded, then turned his heavy-browed gaze away and squared up to the creature.

Nix's eyes were heavy, closing. He heard Egil roar, and, bleary-eyed, watched the priest charge the monstrous creature.

Jyme stood
behind the barrier, directly on the spot, and watched the irate creature fling Egil's corpse against the wall of the cavern. The priest's body hit the stone with a dull thud, left a smear of blood of the wall, and flopped grotesquely to the floor.

Jyme had to work to slow his breathing. Sweat saturated his jerkin and tunic. His legs felt as though they'd give out at any moment. He didn't know if he should do it.

No, he knew he should do it. But he didn't know what would happen and it terrified him.

The magic of the place-that-was-no-place stood his hairs on end, caused his skin to tingle. Fear added to the sensation.

Egil was dead and Nix was either dead or nearly so.

They'd fakked it up, the three of them. Fakked it all up.

“Shite, shite, shite.”

The hulking creature—Jyme still didn't know what to call it, though he could guess what it really was—turned on the barrel-thick trunks of its legs and faced him. Its hood had fallen away, revealing the misshapen horror of its head, the congealed mien of four or five faces. Jyme winced at the sight of it.

The creature's breathing came in rapid, wet gasps. The eyes in the lumpy egg of its head moved about seemingly at random, though one pair managed to stay focused on Jyme. The mouths opened, strings of spit stretched between the cracked lips, and they spoke together, but not quite in unison.

“Give us what I want I will we will do it you don't know how to do it I must we must do it!”

Jyme lowered his chin, dug deep to find the courage, and eyed the horror. “Fak you, creature. We go again.”

All the eyes widened, looked at him, focused, and it lumbered toward him, its movement more like the roll of a landslide than ambulation.

Jyme forced spit down his dry throat and recited the stanzas as the creature began to scream.

“No it must not no we I must no stop stop stop!”