A Discourse in Steel Read Free Page A

into one end. A boom of thunder rattled the Warrens.
    “No more rain,” Nix said to the sky.
    “Let’s get on with this,” Egil said.
    “Aye.”
    Egil followed Nix to the mouth of one of the intersection’s alleys.
    “Use those tallow sticks and scribe a line down the sides of the buildings on either side of the alley mouth,” Nix said. “Like this.”
    He dragged the tallow stick vertically down the corner of the building, starting at about the height of a door. It left a thick black line caked on the wood.
    “Just lines? They need to be straight or…?”
    “Just lines. They don’t need to be perfect, just continuous from about door height to the ground. And make them thick. We need them to burn for a while. We’ll need sigils, too, but that’s what the scribing wand’s for.”
    “Wait, we’re going to burn the lines?”
    “Aye.”
    “You’ll burn down the Warrens, Nix.”
    “It’s all right.” He held up the matchsticks. “They don’t burn with normal flames. They’ll consume only the lines. Couldn’t burn wood if I wanted them to.”
    Egil looked at the matchsticks, the lines, back to Nix. “And you think this will summon it? Blackalley?”
    “We’ll see,” Nix said.
    They moved from alley to alley, lining the sides of the alley mouths with borders of corpse fat and pitch. Nix followed up with the scribing wand. He spoke a word in the Language of Creation to activate its power, and felt it grow warm in his hand. He stood in the center of the first alley, aimed it at the wet earth, and spoke another word of power.
    A tongue of green flame formed in the wand’s carved mouth. With it, Nix wrote glowing green sigils that hovered in the air, the magical script stretching across the alley mouth between the tallow lines he and Egil had drawn. He scribed one set of summoning sigils across the alley at the top of the lines, and one set at the bottom, just off the ground. When he was done, the lines and the sigils formed a rectangle, a doorway. He stepped back and regarded his handiwork.
    “None too bad, I’d say.”
    Egil grunted.
    “You still stuck on regrets and death?” Nix asked his friend, trying to make light of it, but Egil made no answer.
    Nix checked the sky. He could no longer see Kulven’s light through the clouds, but Minnear put a faint, viridian blotch on the clouds. Had to be getting close to third hour.
    “We fire the lines now?” Egil asked.
    “Not yet,” Nix said, putting the wand and remaining shafts of tallow back into his satchel. “Now we wait.”
    “For what?”
    “For Ool’s clock to ring three bells.
Then
we light them.”
    “Three bells,” Egil said absently. “Walk not the streets but fear the Hells.”
    “Aye,” Nix said. He held his blade in one hand, the matchsticks and smooth oval of the shining eye in the other. He handed a few of the matchsticks to Egil.
    After a moment Egil cleared his throat and asked, “How do you know he died in regret?”
    Nix was focused on the hour and at first didn’t take Egil’s meaning. “Who?”
    Egil held up the stub of the tallow stick. “The man whose fat is in this. How do you know he died in regret?”
    “Hells, Egil,” Nix said. “Who doesn’t die in regret?”
    “Truth,” Egil said softly. “Some more than others, I suppose.”
    Nix could imagine the line of Egil’s thoughts—his wife and daughter and their deaths—but he said nothing. Speaking of it only picked at the scab of his friend’s pain, so he just stood beside him in silence.
    The summoning sigils cast an eerie light on the intersection. Time seemed to slow. Nix pushed his wet hair off his brow and moved to the nearest of the alley mouths.
    “When the clock sounds, we light them. The smoke should help draw it, as should the sigils.” He thought back on the night he’d seen Blackalley, thought of the sudden, inexplicable sorrow he’d felt, thought of the way the mournful teamster had wept. “I think it’s attracted in some way to