Douglas Hulick - Sworn in Steel

I nodded. Dirty Waters sat on a narrow strip of shore between Ildrecca’s city wall and the Corsian Passage. It had one main thoroughfare-called either Eel Way or the Slithers, depending on who you talked to-that paralleled the city wall. Down in the Lower Harbor, it was wide enough for three wagons; here in the Waters, it was a good day when two carts could pass each other and only rub wheel hubs. People, barrels, ramshackle huts, and garbage clogged most of the road, leaving a meandering path intersected by the occasional side street or alley. The back ways were even worse.

The entire place was a warren of hidey-holes and roosting kens, but it wasn’t a warren I knew well. Running would be better than hiding, if we could manage it.

“We’ll need to stick to the Slithers if we want to get out of here,” I said as I began to move away from the quay.

“I don’t suppose you have any friends around here, do you?” said Fowler as she fell in beside me.

“No,” I said, looking up the street. Had that shadow been in that doorway before? “But that’s not the important question.”

“It isn’t?” said Fowler.

“No.”

“Then what is?”

The shadow, I decided, was definitely new, as were the four that had just slipped around the corner on the opposite side of the street. All were coming our way. Fast.

“The important question,” I said, drawing my rapier and my fighting dagger, “is how far is it to the end of Soggy Petyr’s territory? Because unless the answer is ‘pretty damn close,’ we’re going to have a long, hard fight ahead of us.”

I took the corner fast-so fast that I slipped in the small pile of fish entrails someone had dumped inside the entrance to the alley. I managed to catch myself against a crate in the process and keep running. The maneuver gained me a palmful of splinters, but it was a hell of a lot better than the alternative being offered by the pair of Petyr’s Cutters running a block behind me.

I dodged past barrels and around fallen timbers, unsure whether to be grateful for the detritus or not. It could hide me and foil my trail, but it was also slowing me down. If I lost much more ground to my pursuers, all the switchbacks and trash in the world wouldn’t keep them off my blinders.

I burst out of the alley and into what passed for a piazza in Dirty Waters-basically an irregular open space set off by a laundry on one side and a tavern on the other. Weak light spilled out of the tavern, illuminating a collection of ramshackle tables and benches, all set on an uneven patio made up of stray boards laid out on the ground. Men sat at the tables. Two of them looked up as I staggered past, my eyes already burning from the faint light. Neither man moved to interfere.

Small blessings.

I was most of the way across the piazza, heading for a gap in the buildings on the far side, when I heard a shout of triumph behind me.

Petyr’s boys. Had to be.

I redoubled my efforts, pushing tired limbs and battered muscles as best I could. Between the trip up from Barrab and the ambush on the quay, there wasn’t much left to draw on; but given the alternative was to turn and fight and-most likely-lose, I headed into the alley and prayed I wouldn’t stumble over some fresh hazard.

If I could only find a handy bolt-hole, or a Rabbit Run, or maybe a Thieves’ Ladder to. .

There. I came around a turn to find a gift from the Angels themselves: a tall, sloping pile of garbage directly ahead of me. If I could get enough purchase to run up it and leap to the overhanging gutter beyond, I might be able to. .

Pain flared along my back as I picked up my pace, reminding me I was doing good to be moving at all. I’d been striped across the back on the quay, just before we’d been forced to rabbit: now a line of fire extended from below my shoulder blade, down across my ribs, to my hip. While I still wasn’t sure if it was a cut or one hell of a bruise-my hand had come back red when I’d reached around to check the wound, but there’d been no way to tell whether the blood was mine or someone else’s-I did know I would have ended up in two pieces if it hadn’t been for Degan’s sword lying across my spine.

One piece or two, though, there was no way I was going to be making that leap.

I skirted the garbage pile, tripped over a decaying mound of fur that might have once been a dog or a cat, and fell. My knee landed on something hard and I let out a gasp. Then I was up and running again, but not for long. Thirty paces on, the alley ended in the back of a building.

I looked around. Dawn, I expect, was pushing itself toward the horizon somewhere to the east, but here in the slums of Dirty Waters, deep under the shadow of the city walls, it was still dark enough for my night vision to function.

I studied the alley in the red and gold highlights of my sight and felt my heart sink. The wooden wall before me looked weathered and worn, but that didn’t mean it would give way easy. I could still be trying to kick a hole in it when my pursuers arrived. The buildings to either side were brick, tall and without doors. There was a single window high up to my right, but it was boarded over.

The sounds of voices and stumbling feet-and more ominously, of bared steel scraping up against stone-came to me from back along my path. They were getting closer.

I took a step toward the garbage. Maybe if I could bury myself in it quickly enough, I could. .

No, wait. Even better.

To call the gap in the wall near the garbage pile an alcove would have been generous. At best, it was a space where two buildings failed to meet, just behind the stinking pile and well in the shadows of the buildings that formed it. That I had initially missed seeing the gap spoke well of its potential; that I had missed it with my night vision was even better. If I couldn’t see it, it would be nearly invisible to the normally sighted Cutters on my tail.

I hoped.

I stepped over to the alcove, drew the long knife from my boot, and slipped into the small space as best I could. It was a tight fit, especially with Degan’s sword strapped to my back, but I wasn’t in a position to complain.

I heard smaller things shifting and scuttling away as I invaded the gap. Something hard poked me in the side, while something soft ran up my shin before deciding to jump off at the knee. My right leg and part of my hip were left sticking out into the alley.

I settled in and listened and wondered how Fowler and Scratch were faring. Whether they were even alive.

It had been an ugly fight, even by Kin standards. Scratch had dropped two of Petyr’s men at the outset, and Fowler another, but the odds never shifted in our favor. By the time I’d driven one of the Cutters into the harbor, more of Petyr’s people had begun to arrive. Steel and strategy quickly gave way to fists and fury, with elbows and teeth and worse coming into play in a vicious blur. When I finally managed to look up from the man who’d tried to lay my back open-I ended up pushing his eye into his head, along with four inches of my rapier’s cross guard-it was to see Fowler riding the back of another Cutter, her legs wrapped around his waist as she plunged her dagger down and into his chest. Even as I watched, another woman began to move to flank her, while a dozen yards away Scratch, his left side a study in blood, swung his sword like a scythe as he tried to fend off the three coves who were driving him backward toward a stack of barrels.

There were too many Cutters: too many on the quay, and too many more on their way. Soggy Petyr owned this corner of Dirty Waters, and he was clearly willing to empty it out to take me down. If we wanted to survive, we needed to fade.

And seeing as how they’d been sent after me in the first place. .