A Conversation in Blood by Paul S. Kemp
Rusk smiled and went off into an adjacent room, where Nix caught sight of a few gathered men, all of them olive-skinned foreigners in unusual dress.
“What’s he up to in there?” Nix asked Trelgin, just to irritate him.
Trelgin’s droopy face twisted with contempt. “Front door or sewers, slubbers?”
“Front door and we know the way,” Egil said, and walked past him.
“Suit yourself,” said Trelgin, who despite the words fell in behind them.
The interior door guards tensed at their approach, but Trelgin put them at ease.
“They’re leaving,” Trelgin said to them as Egil and Nix neared the front foyer.
The guards slid the series of bolts and bars that unlocked the door.
To Egil and Nix, Trelgin said, “I ain’t as worried about the two of you dying; you want to, you go ahead. But if you don’t, we’ll see you soon to collect on that debt.”
Nix didn’t turn around, but raised his hand in an obscene gesture as they walked through the door.
“Likewise to you,” Trelgin called after. “And good eve.”
Egil and Nix pulled up their cloak hoods and headed off briskly onto Mandin’s Way. Blocks of charcoal burned in the streetlamps and a few pedestrians and fishermen’s wagons dotted the streets. Guild spotters watched them from rooftops, grumbling.
“Something important going on in there,” Nix said. “You see those foreigners?”
“I did,” Egil said. “Rusk and Trelgin were on edge, too. Not our worry, though.”
“Not yet, anyway,” Nix said. “You know, seems like just yesterday I was walking the streets looking to head off your nightly drunk. No, wait. It literally was just yesterday.”
Egil harrumphed. “Should I interpret your mention of a point entirely sideways of our current situation to mean that you have no fakkin’ idea how to get into the Conclave?”
“Incorrect,” Nix said, holding up a finger. They cut down an alley, immersing themselves in the darkness. “I have an idea. But you might want to take your dice out and give them a few shakes, because it’s not a good idea.”
They stepped past a drunk snoring in a heap against the wall and continued through the alley until they reached the cobblestone paved way beyond. Again, a few pedestrians and carts moved along the street. Candlelight and voices and sometimes music carried out of the windows of inns and eateries and taphouses.
“I’m not sure I want you to tell me,” Egil said.
“But since you asked—” Nix began.
“I didn’t.”
“Since you asked,” Nix continued. “I’ll tell you: We’re going in the front door.”
They picked up their pace, avoiding the main thoroughfares, moving through alleys and side streets, all of which smelled of decay and urine and occasionally vomit. They moved quickly across Dur Follin.
“The front door, you say?” Egil asked. “Agreed that may warrant the dice. Elaborate.”
Nix grinned while looking up and down the street and into the sky for any sign of Kerfallen’s constructs. Seeing none, they crossed the thoroughfare and went down another alley, one that stank of dead fish. Probably a fishmonger had dumped his unsold spoiled catch there. A cat hissed at them from a pile of refuse.
Nix stomped his foot at the feline, then elaborated as Egil had asked. “The doors are closed at all times, to keep the students in and to keep everyone else out. Not that anyone would want to sneak into the Conclave.”
“No one smart, anyway,” Egil interjected.
“Right. Anyway, the wizards don’t trust the doors to human eyes or human weakness, so a pair of animated iron statues guards the doors.”
“Iron statues give me pause,” Egil said, running a hand over his head. “Why not go over the walls?”
Nix said, “Because the walls are warded with alarm spells. Learned that the hard way when I was enrolled there. Those get set off, most doors in the Conclave get magically locked, some hallways get fogged with a mist that confuses, more statues animate, and the Masters all get alerted. Things get tricky then.”
“We don’t want tricky,” Egil said.
“Aye,” Nix said. “We don’t want tricky.”
They hurried through the night-shrouded streets as fast as prudence allowed, eyeing every pedestrian with suspicion, but seeing no sign of Kerfallen’s constructs. Nix knew it was only a matter of time, though. He could not imagine Kerfallen giving up just because he’d lost them while they’d sheltered in the Vault.
Ool’s clock was chiming a small hour when they reached their destination—a vast public expanse of grass and trees and scrub and benches known formally as Erilton’s Park, after the lord mayor who’d established it long ago, but which everyone simply called the Sward.
The Sward covered several acres within the city’s walls and at its far southern end butted against the walls of the Conclave. By day the Sward would be filled with people taking their ease, by night with people satisfying their vices, but in the very small hours, as now, there was no one save a few sleeping drunks or homeless.
Egil and Nix hurried along the walking paths, past the central bronze statue of Lord Mayor Erilton, and toward the low, gently sloped hill on which stood the Conclave, perched like a buzzard over the body of the city.
Popular wisdom said the land on which the Conclave sat had been ceded to the school by an unnamed lord mayor generations earlier, but like Ool’s clock, like the Archbridge, the Conclave seemed to have always been there, a thing apart. Nix sometimes thought the whole history of Dur Follin was built on rumor and tales and little else.
They stopped and sheltered in a copse of trees on the Sward, a bow shot from the Conclave. The wind rustled the leaves. Nix scratched at the stubble on his cheeks.
Smooth walls of basalt, perhaps twice as tall as Egil, formed a polygon around the grounds. When Minnear, the green Moon of Mages, rode full in the sky, its light suffused the walls, so that they looked like a deep, green pool lit from below. Small crowds sometimes gathered on the Sward to watch the otherworldly show. When Nix had first come to the Conclave, he’d marveled the first time he’d seen the walls light up.
But the glowing walls were the only architectural marvel of the Conclave, which otherwise gave an impression more of a jail or barracks than a college. And Nix supposed it was as much jail as anything. Students with an affinity for magic came from all of the Seven Cities of the Meander, and some from farther away than that, and all of them spent their days locked inside, immersed in study, classroom instruction, and practicum. They were seldom allowed to leave the grounds, and then only under the eyes of a Master.
Nix had found the classroom instruction mostly tedious and the rules unbearable, but the practicum he’d loved. He’d been born with a sense for magic that his fellow students had envied. He had no idea where it came from—his unknown father, he supposed—but Mamabird had noticed it somehow and arranged to have him plucked from the Warrens in his teens and sent to the Conclave. He’d lasted only a year before getting expelled.
“Can’t see why you’d quit that place,” Egil said sarcastically. “It’s quite inviting.”
“It’s a fakking jail,” Nix said. “And I was expelled.”
“So you say, but never why.”
“So I say,” Nix agreed. “And the why is my own.”
A wide, tiered walkway of polished stones led up out of the Sward to the elaborately carved stone façade and oversize double doors that allowed entry onto the Conclave’s grounds. Two towering statues of iron, half again as tall as Egil, stood to either side of the large, metal doors. Each looked like a helmed warrior of old, complete with breastplate and a spear. Nix had seen them animate once, when a panicked horse had ventured across the Sward and come too near the gates. Responding to the commands that guided them, the statues had animated and skewered the poor animal in their ruthless, mechanical fashion.
Egil reached into his pouch, presumably for his dice, but must have thought better o
“The gates will be warded with an alarm spell,” Nix said, and reached into his satchel. “I’ll handle that.”
Egil stared at him, waiting, then, “There are two giant statues there. Did you notice those?”
“You’ve found your wit, I see. And yes, I did notice them. But they won’t notice us.” He unwrapped the golden plates and lifted the cloaking shroud from his satchel.
Egil waited, eyebrows raised. Nix let him hang on the silence for a moment before he went on.
“Human guards can be bribed, incapacitated, or killed. Bound spirits are angry at being bound and can be bargained with or dismissed. The Masters take no chances with such things.” Nix looked out on the statues, still and dark in the night. “The statues are dumb, deliberately so. Magic animates them and nothing more. The Masters gave them no discretion. If they see something approach and that something isn’t invited or expected or doesn’t know the pass phrase, they kill it. But because they are what they are, they don’t see like we see. Their sight is itself nothing more than a spell.” He held the shroud up before him. “Behind this, they won’t see us at all.”
Skepticism furrowed Egil’s brow. “We’re going to walk up to those two metal men hiding behind a piece of enchanted cloth?”
Nix grinned and nodded. “Aye.”
Egil looked from Nix to the statues, then back again. He eyed the thin fabric of the shroud, measuring with his eyes whether he thought it large enough to shield them both from the eyes of the statues.
Nix waited for it.
“Fakkin’ gewgaws,” Egil said.
There it was.
“You ready?” he asked the priest.
“No other way in?” Egil said.
Nix scratched the stubble of his cheeks. “There were always rumors of secret tunnels that led out, exiting at various places around the city. But I never saw them. So this is the only way.”
Egil put a hand on the haft of each hammer. “We’ll barely be able to fit the two of us under that, when it comes to it.”
“And whose fault is that for being bizarrely large?”
“Bah.”
Nix smiled, the banter his and Egil’s usual method of dealing with tense situations. “We have to move fast. The statues will be linked to a Master, a different one every other month. Even the Grandmaster takes a turn.”
“Shite, man. You’re telling me this Master will know when the statues animate?”
Nix nodded. “If they animate. The point of the exercise is to keep them just as still as they are now. But if they happen to animate and we’re fast, it won’t matter. Everyone in the Conclave knows they do so if animals get too close, or a drunk wanders near, or sometimes without any reason at all. Hells, street urchins sometimes run at them in the day to animate them, then dart away. Like a game of dares. The Master, who’ll be sleeping anyway, will at first assume it’s nothing and won’t come right away. So if we get through the gates and they deactivate before the Master comes, he’ll assume something inadvertent triggered them.”
“Hold on,” Egil said. “They’ll deactivate after we’ve activated them?”
“Right. Remember that they’re dumb. They stay animated only so long as they see or hear a threat. That said, if we take too long and leave them animated for a while, the Master will show up. And then…”
“And then,” Egil said. He sniffed, rolled his head on the stump of his neck. “Wizard shite.”
“Aye. Ready?”
Egil eyed the shroud, inhaled deeply. “Aye.”
“Stay close now,” Nix said.
Nix held the shroud up before them, arms held high and spread wide, as though holding up laundry to dry. They eased out of the copse of trees and moved toward the gates. Nix felt ridiculous sheltering behind a piece of enchanted cloth as though it were a shield wall. The sheer fabric allowed him to see through it and he kept his eyes on the statues’ eyes, trying to gauge the angle of their line of sight. He stopped well before he thought that angle would allow them to see behind the shroud. Egil bumped into him and whispered a curse.
The head on one of the statues turned in their direction, the metal creaking with the motion.
They both remained still and said nothing. Long moments passed and the statue did not move again.
“Why stop?” the priest whispered.
Nix tucked his chin into his shoulder and whispered back, “We need to lift the shroud over us as we hunch. The angle of their sight changes as we get closer. They’ll be looking down on us, so I can’t just hold it before us. They’ll see. We need it over us. And nothing can stick out or they’ll see it, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Ready?”
“No, but as we’re standing in the road hiding behind a sheet,” Egil said, “I guess we should continue.”
“Do not make me laugh, priest. Hunch over, I’ll lift and hand the end back to you. Draw it back until it covers us. Slowly. I don’t want to lose the other end. We want to be like a turtle.”
Moving deliberately, Nix lifted the shroud high and back, and Egil took it. The priest started to draw it back. Nix hunched, took the bottom of the shroud in his hands, and lowered himself onto all fours, holding his end tight against the paving stones. Behind him, Egil did the same, though he had to have been reaching back and just bent at the waist. Soon they were bunched together under the shroud.
“We never tell anyone about this, yeah?” Nix whispered.
“You’re not to make me laugh, either,” Egil said. “But agreed. No one hears of this.”
Slowly, awkwardly, taking care to stay completely covered by the shroud, they crawled forward toward the statues and the doors. Nix braced for the grating, metal-on-metal screech of the statues that would indicate that he and Egil had been seen, but they closed the distance and the statues remained still.
Soon they were directly between the statues, the only thing protecting them a sheer piece of enchanted cloth. The doors, huge metal slabs, were directly ahead. The statues loomed like titans on either side. Nix eyed their feet—cast as though wearing sandals—through the shroud. He could have reached out and touched their spears, the butts pressed to the ground.
Neither he nor Egil said anything as they silently crawled toward the doors. Working under the shroud, Nix held his palms near them—not touching them for fear of triggering the wards—and felt for the enchantment. He had a tool in his satchel that would enable him to bypass them but—
Metal grated on metal, the sound like the movement of a huge, rusty hinge. He turned to whisper to Egil to remain silent and perfectly still but before he could, the priest exclaimed as he was jerked out from under the shroud. Nix barely kept the fabric over himself.
“Fak!” Egil said. “My boot must’ve poked out! Don’t say anything, Nix! They’re dumb, as you said. Fak!”
It took everything Nix had not to throw the shroud off and attempt to help his friend.
A clamor sounded, the deep ring of Egil’s hammer striking one of the metal men. Nix heard a thud and whump, and imagined Egil being dropped to the ground by the statue. A different sound followed, like a weapon being sheathed—the spear of one of the statues sinking into something, but Nix could not tell if it was flesh or soil.
He had his answer when Egil’s hammer rang off one of the creatures again.
“I can’t hurt them!” the priest said, through the screech and grate of the statues’ movements. “Get the doors open, Nix, then I’ll get back—”
A huge thud sounded and Egil cursed.
“Fakkin’ thing tried to stomp me!”
Egil’s hammer sounded again, gonging futilely against a statue.
Nix knew what Egil intended. He’d keep the statues occupied while Nix got the doors open, then hurriedly get out of sight or under the shroud.
Another ring of Egil’s hammer. Another curse and grunt.
“Hurry the fak up!”
“Get back under,” Nix hissed, looking back. His voice drew the attentio
“Get the fakking things open!” the priest shouted. “A wizard will be coming!”
Nix turned and put his palms back near the door, trying to move as little as possible. Behind him the movement of the statues sounded like the turning of great, rusty gears. Now and again he heard the shuffle of Egil’s feet between the grates and creaks of the statue’s movement, heard the priest’s breathing and whispered curses, heard a sudden, sharp creak, and felt the ground tremble slightly, probably as the statue drove its spear down at Egil and hopefully hit only earth. Nix flashed on the horse he’d seen the statues impale years before.
“Egil?”
“Work!”
Egil’s hammer rang off the metal of the statue, the chime an echo of Ool’s clock.
Nix closed his eyes and forced himself to concentrate. The magic of the door’s ward caused the hairs on his forearms to rise. He let the nature of the ward sink into his skin, made sure he had a good feel for it, then took from his satchel a thin silver rod tipped with a tiny turquoise. He tuned the wand by putting it between his palms and spinning it rapidly, as if he were using a stick to start a fire, transferring the feel of the ward from his palms to the wand. The residuum of the ward still left in Nix’s skin sank into the rod and the turquoise started to glow. When it did, Nix gently touched it to the door.
A snap sounded, like a twig breaking, and the turquoise flashed brightly and turned black. Nix held still as one of the statues, apparently having heard the sound, turned and stepped near him, its sandaled foot on the corner of the enchanted shroud. Egil still labored behind him, but Nix had to remain still until the statue turned back to the priest.
In moments it did, taking its foot off the shroud as it turned, and Nix held hands to the door. No tingle. The ward was gone. He turned the large lever in the center of the doors, felt the vibration as the mechanism released.
Behind him, he heard a statue turn toward him, drawn by the turn of the gate mechanism. Nix pushed the doors open and crawled through. He turned around, still shielded by the shroud, and saw one of statues staring at the open doors, the other stabbing and stomping at Egil.