Free A Discourse in Steel by Paul S. Kemp Page A

them.
    “He’s down,” Rusk said. “But you already knew that.”
    Channis smiled and approached him. Scars lined his face, a script of past battles, and he wore his long hair pulled back in a horse’s knot. For a moment Rusk flashed on the idea of clicking Channis, driving a blade into his chest, testing just how tough was his hide, but put the idea out of his mind. Clicking a Committeeman—much less the Upright Man—had to be done without witnesses and with a great deal of discretion. Suspicion of clicking a Committeeman was one thing. Evidence of doing so was something else again, and got one sent to the tunnels below the guildhouse for a visit with Zren the Blade and his many pointy metal objects.
    “Did he suffer?” Channis asked.
    “One shot and down. He gurgled some.”
    “That’s a job done well, Rusky. And now let’s have a little talk.”
    He gestured Rusk over to one of the chairs that sat before the window. Rusk walked with him, but did not sit. Neither did Channis.
    “So there are two men, and only two, who are in on this, yeah? And they’re both standing in this room.”
    Rusk flashed on the faytor, the words she’d shouted, but he said only, “Yeah.”
    “So if there was ever a loose tongue about this here, well, then the person without the loose tongue would know it was the other of the two was yapping, yeah?”
    “I don’t yap, Channis. And even if I did…”
    “Even if you did,” Channis said, his voice like a blade over a whetstone. “I’d deny everything and there’s no evidence and you’d go visit with Zren for…discipline.”
    “Right.”
    “Right, then.” Channis put one of his huge hands on Rusk’s shoulder, squeezed, then turned and walked away. “That’s clear as good glass, then. We can help each other, you and me. I’ll be calling the Committee together later, then we’ll have chapel down below, say thanks to Aster, throw a few prays. I’m just waiting for Trelgin to show. He shoulda sprouted a seventh blade by now. He’s not going to be happy how this goes for him.”
    Rusk winced. “About that…”
    Channis turned to face him, his right eye half closed due to scarring, and so stuck in a perpetual glare.
    “There was a problem,” Rusk said, and shifted on his feet. “Well, two. Though one is not so much a problem as a surprise.”
    Channis took a couple steps toward him, stopped, and stared. “Keep on.”
    “The faytor in the tent—”
    Another step toward him and the other eye joined the first in the glare. “She saw you?”
    Rusk shook his head. “No, no. But she…went down when he went down.”
    “You clicked her, too? So?”
    “No, I didn’t. She just went down, grabbing at her head, shouting things.” He looked meaningfully at Channis.
    Channis’s voice was a low rumble. “What kind of things?”
    Rusk swallowed. “Things she shouldn’t know. Guild things. Things only the Upright Man—the old Upright Man—should have known. It was like it poured out of his head and into hers.”
    Channis stared at him a long, uncomfortable while. “Why didn’t you click her?”
    “I couldn’t. It happened fast and by the time I made sense of her words, the Bazaar slubbers were coming.”
    “So maybe she knows guild business but she didn’t see you?”
    “She definitely didn’t see me. I had some of our streeters follow her out of the Bazaar. She was unconscious, taken in a wagon with the other faytor. They went to a joint called the Slick Tunnel. Live there, I think.”
    Channis visibly relaxed and Rusk let himself breathe. “That don’t sound like a problem. That sounds like a nuisance. What’s the surprise?”
    “What?”
    “You said you had a problem and a surprise. The problem we discussed. The surprise?”
    Rusk could think of no good way to say what he needed to say, so he just said it. “I’m, uh, not Sixth Blade.”
    Channis’s eyebrows rose in surprise, at least as far as the scars allowed. “No?”
    Rusk held up his hand,