The Hammer and the Blade

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 whole 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 meals 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."

"They will if I ask, Mama."

"I know how you ask, Nixxy."

Nix smiled to hide his concern. He tried to imagine Dur Follin without her, tried to imagine his life without her, and failed. He would've offered to move her out of the Warrens, but he knew she wouldn't abide it. She regarded the Warrens as her home and its urchins as her children. She'd die in her shack and leave only when they carried her out. He dreaded that day.

After they'd eaten and the conversation had slowed, he broached the real subject of his visit. "I have some coin for you, Mama."

She cleared his bowl. "Oh, Nix, I don't need-"

"It's just a bit."

He took a coinpurse from his cloak and dumped fifty commons and ten terns on the table. He'd included no gold because he knew she couldn't spend a royal. Merely holding gold in the Warrens could put her at risk.

Her hand went to her mouth. "Oh my, Nix! It's too much. I couldn't hope to spend it all."

He smiled but held his tongue. She always marveled at a pittance as if it were a fortune. He couldn't buy a decent blade for what he'd put on the table. But he knew she'd never take more, not all at once. He had to provide for her in dribs and drabs.

She looked up from the coin and regarded him across the table, eyes shrewd.

"How'd you come by all this coin, young man? You didn't hurt someone for it, did you? I taught you better'n that."

He felt his cheeks warm. "You did, Mama. And I earned it fair. Egil and I have had a bit of luck of late."

He and Mamabird had an unspoken agreement that he never told her about his tomb robbing explicitly and she never asked in detail.

"You two." She shook her head, chuckling, chins and breasts bouncing. "Good boys, you are."

Ool's clock sounded the hour: nine deep, discordant notes. He reached for her hand as he stood.

"So soon?" she asked.

"I know." He kissed the back of her hand. "I'm sorry, but I'll return as soon as I can."

She sighed, nodded, came around the table and embraced him. She had tears in her eyes. He had tears in his. He fell into her, memorizing her smell, the feel of her arms around him.

"Oh, I need you to keep something for me," he said, and took the rolled piece of vellum from an inner pocket. "This is a deed to some property Egil and I bought."

Mama took it, a question in her eyes. "A deed? What property?"

He nodded. "Just keep it safe for us, will you? If ever I'm… away for a long time, that deed is yours. Understand?"

"I wouldn't know what to do with such a thing. I'll just hold it 'til you come back."

She tucked it into a pocket in her apron.

"Thank you, Mama," he said.

She smiled and walked him toward the door. "You be good, Nixxy. And don't worry about your old Mamabird. I'll be fine."

Her words devolved into a fit of wet coughing that made him wince.

"I know you will," he said, and wished he believed it.

"Send my love to Egil."

"I will."

He exited her shack, the only home he'd ever had. The moment he closed the door, he donned the mask — Nix the Quick, Nix the Lucky, a man fast with a word, faster still with a blade. He drew his falchion and pushed his past down deep.

He had to hurry. Egil would be waiting and Egil hated to be left waiting.

He picked his way back through the avenues and alleys until he reached the Poor Wall, the ancient line of crumbling stone that delimited the border of the Warrens, a binding cross that separated the Warrens' poverty and hopelessness from the rest of Dur Follin. Four lax watchmen in orange tabards manned the Slum Gate. In the torchlight, Nix saw that crossbows hung from their backs, blades and truncheons from their belts. He knew that Slum Gate duty was considered a punishment post among watchmen.

Seeing Nix approach, one of them nudged another and the second stepped forward. He was unshaven, his helm removed and his hair disheveled. "Name and business."

Nix sheathed his blade. "Nix Fall of Dur Follin, and my business is none of yours."

"Nix Fall?" The guard squinted at Nix, looked back at his fellows, back at Nix. "Nix the Quick?"

One of the other guards pushed off the wall and walked closer, attitude in his stride. "Don't you belong in there with the rest of the rubbish?"

He was tall, maybe twenty winters, barely old enough to grow a beard. He stood beside his comrade.

The insult deflected off of Nix's distraction, summoning only modest ire. "More than you know. Better class of people living in there than I see standing before me. Now, go fak yourself and both of you get out of my way."

He knew he shouldn't cross the watch, but he was irritable, and growing moreso by the moment.

"You know what…" the tall watchman began, his hand moving for his truncheon.

The watch sergeant, a towering, fat man Nix knew by appearance from a run-in with the watch years earlier, leaned out of the guard shack to one side of the gate.

"Let him pass," he said.

The men in front of Nix glared but didn't move.

"I said let him pass," the sergeant repeated.

Reluctantly, the guards stood aside. One of them spit at Nix's feet. Nix took care to bump that one as he passed. He nodded his thanks at the sergeant.

"We should arrest that prick," the tall guard hissed to the sergeant.

"Your job ain't to pick fights, boy," the sergeant said. "It's to uphold the law of the Lord Mayor and the Merchants' Council. 'Sides, I probably saved you an unpleasant meeting with sharp steel just then."

Nix left the guards behind and stepped through the gate into Dur Follin proper. The change was almost immediate and entirely palpable. Street torches blazed at regular intervals, well tended by the city's linkboys. Carriages and wagons moved along the muddy, cobbled streets. Pedestrians walked here and there. Candlelight poured from shop windows, laughter and shouts from taverns and inns.

The first time Nix had left the Warrens, he'd felt like he'd dug himself out of a dark hole and emerged into the light. He wondered if Mamabird had ever seen the light. He suspected not. It saddened him.

He was maudlin, moreso than usual after seeing Mama, and it kept him from playing his part as well as normal. Maybe it was the rain. He consciously pushed the sentimentality aside, and with each step he fell more and more back into his normal persona. By the time he found Egil where they'd agreed, at the corner of Teamsters Avenue and Narrow Way, under the towering shadow of the Archbridge, he felt more himself.

The priest stood with his back to him, hands in his cloak pockets, staring at the huge span of the bridge. Torches and candles and even a few magic crystals lit the shrines along the length of the bridge, illuminating a swirl of colors, languages, songs, and chants. A gong rang from somewhere, the tinkle of bells.

Ebenor's tattooed eye watched Nix approach. Nix put a hand on Egil's shoulder by way of greeting. The priest whirled and had him by the wrist in a blink, the grip painful enough to make Nix wince. Seeing Nix, Egil released him.

"Apologies," Egil said absently.

"None needed," Nix said, rubbing his wrist. "I should've announced myself." He nodded at the shrines on the bridge. "Thinking of switching faiths, are you?"

Egil ignored the jibe. "Is it done?"

"It's done. I left the deed with Mama. Dram license is filed with the guild. We're good."

"So you say." Egil flipped up the hood of his cloak as rain started to fall in heavy drops. "How is Mamabird?"

"Well as can be, I suppose. She asked about you. I told her you remained as surly as ever."

Egil smiled. "Handsome as ever, too, I trust?"

"Alas, I never lie to Mamabird."

Egil chuckled. "So let's go see this thing we bought. Gettin' on to the dark part of night. The ruffians ought to be filling the place by now."

"Indeed. Two more will go unnoticed."