Free A Discourse in Steel by Paul S. Kemp

expense.”
    “Aye,” he said, still smiling.
    Mere opened the door to Rose’s room for her.
    “See to your sister, Mere,” Nix said. “We’ll be downstairs if you need anything. Maybe the saint can do something.”
    Mere looked doubtful but nodded, and she and Tesha disappeared behind the door.
    “We need to talk,” Nix said to Egil.
    “Aye,” the priest said.
    “Downstairs.”
    “Yeah.”
    Nix called down the hallway, “We’re opening back up. Everybody out of your rooms. Come drink and eat and copulate, preferably as separate activities.”
    “Copulate,” Egil said. “Nice.”
    Nix gave a little bow. “Come on! Out, out!”
    As the doors started to open down the hallway, the two friends headed downstairs to the bar, where Gadd already had foaming tankards waiting for them.
    “You’re my kind of priest,” Egil said to the tapkeep.
    Gadd smiled, showing his sharpened fangs.
    “Rose all right?” Gadd asked.
    “Not sure,” Nix said. “We hope so.”
    Gadd nodded. After sticking his pipe between his teeth, the easterner turned away to give Egil and Nix privacy, tending to his tankards and cups and plates the way a priest tended relics.
    “It’s this jumble bit that bothers,” Egil said, taking a long pull on his ale. “This is good, Gadd,” he said. “Very good.”
    Gadd glanced over his shoulder, nodded.
    “My thoughts ran the same way,” Nix said. “But how would they even know about that? The assassin probably shot, saw it sink, and bolted. To him, Rose and Mere are just common buskers. He’d have no reason to suspect anything else.”
    “Truth,” Egil acceded, then, “But if they did.” He left the thought unfinished, then said, “Guild slubbers.”
    “Aye, that.”
    “You ever really think of joining?” Egil asked.
    Nix guffawed. “The only priests I want to associate with are bald, tattooed, and stubborn, yeah?”
    “Stubborn?”
    “A mule looks on you with envy, Egil. Stubborn.”
    “Fair enough,” the priest acknowledged.
    “Besides,” Nix added, “those guild slubbers aren’t square in the head for the most part.”
    “That’s truth.”
    They drank in silence for a time while the Tunnel refilled behind them.
    “New Upright Man and shifts in the Committee,” Nix said. “Should make things interesting for a while.”
    “We’ll see,” Egil said.
    —
    Rusk passed five bodyguards, hard-eyed and bristling with steel, on his way to see Channis. Rusk found the new Upright Man in a well-appointed waiting room in the southwest wing of the guildhouse, along with two more bodyguards. Rusk didn’t even know their names, but their eyes never left his hands. Channis must have prepared for his rise for a long time. Rusk reminded himself never to underestimate Channis. He also cursed his lot as Seventh Blade.
    “Lot of muscle,” Rusk said.
    “Prudence pays,” Channis said.
    A throat wound from years earlier had made the Upright Man’s voice as coarse as gravel. Channis was said to have more scars than even the most holy of Millenor’s self-mortifying priests. Rusk had heard many fellow guildsmen say over the years that Channis could not be killed. Too mean. Too thick a hide.
    “Like coming to see a king in his court,” Rusk said, irritated at himself for the nervous twinge in his voice.
    “Is it?” Channis said, and Rusk heard a smile in his tone.
    The new Upright Man stood before a window that overlooked the guarded grounds that abutted the slow, murky waters of the Meander. The sun fell behind the Archbridge and the huge structure painted a shadow across the guildhouse and the river. Channis, tall and blocky even in his fitted cloak, admired the tat on the back of his hand the way Rusk might admire a woman’s thigh. A short, wide blade hung from Channis’s hip. A few daggers hung from his belt, too, like the bastard children of the short sword.
    Channis turned and dismissed the bodyguards in the room with a wave of his hand. They closed the doors behind