Paul Kemp: The Hammer and the Blade

Here and there fire pits dug in the narrow streets burned dried dung, the smoke dark and reeking. Thin, ill-dressed people crowded like shadows around the flames, people worn down by time and the world until they looked as crumbled and dilapidated as the buildings in which they would later squat. The odor of open latrines and the stink of the Deadmire, whose waters lay just beyond the walls, polluted the air.

Ool's clock tolled eight deep notes, signifying the passage of another desperate hour for the residents of the Warrens. Nix could see the great clock in the distance, its spire a dark line silhouetted by the thin silver crescent of Kulven, Mad Ool's device looming over the filth like a doom.

The sky cleared its throat with a low, prolonged rumble of thunder. Rain was coming; it would turn the Warrens into a morass, an extension of the Deadmire.

Nix prowled the alleys and narrow roads, tense, all eyes and ears. He held his bared blade in his fist. The ubiquitous and canny rats squeaked indignantly at his approach, slunk into dens and dark hidey-holes. Urchins eyed him sidelong as they melted into shadows and alleys. The rotted body of a dead dog lay in the street, its ribs like jail bars.

The men and women of the Warrens regarded him with hooded eyes and wary glances, but kept their distance. He felt their eyes on him, whores, pimps, addicts, would-be street thugs, and the merely unfortunate, all of them evaluating him as either potential prey or possible savior. His blade and hard expression, however, pronounced him neither. He had no business with them, and only someone very stupid or more desperate than usual would dare a run at him.

He'd worn the same look once, a hard, brittle veneer of hostility that coated the terror and desperation beneath. His mind flashed back on deeds he'd rather have forgotten. Guilt dredged the depths of his past and in his mind's eye he saw the wan, sunken-eyed face of the thin old man he'd killed with a rusty piece of sharp metal. They'd fought over a chunk of bread Nix had found in a rubbish drop, the whole of it more mold than grain. Nix had killed many men since, but he regretted that one still, and probably always would. They'd both just been hungry, and Nix had been too young to stain his hands with blood and carry it well. He still saw the old man in dreams sometimes, eyes wide and fearful, mouth moving as he chewed on his last breath.

He rounded a nameless corner onto another nameless street, waving off a haggard prostitute in a tattered dress who looked like she might approach him. Two blocks ahead he saw the lesion of the Heap, a mountain of rubbish rising in a huge lumpy arc over the uneven, sagging roofs of nearby buildings. The Heap served as final resting place for most of Dur Follin's daily trash (and many of its murdered, as Nix had learned later), and each dawn and dusk brought a steady stream of rubbish men and their carts through the Warrens. The mountain grew every year, accreting waste and stink the way the Warrens accreted the hopeless. Nix figured that one day the Warrens would be nothing more than the Heap.

Though after dark, hundreds of river gulls still dotted the Heap's surface, wheeling in the air over and around it, their calls from dawn to midnight as much a timekeeper for the Warrens as Mad Ool's clock spire. Their shite painted large swaths of the Heap white.

Shacks, makeshift tents, and lean-tos clung to the base of the Heap like malformed toadstools, a fungus of improvised homes for the urchins and other desperate residents who mined the Heap for the ore of food scraps and lost valuables. Now and again someone, usually a child, threw a stone at a gull in hopes of bringing one down to fill a stewpot, but Nix knew well the fruitlessness of the attempt. He'd managed to bring down only three in all the years he'd spent there, and he'd been a better shot than most. The birds were canny and quick.

Watching the urchins prowl the garbage, his mind drifted to his childhood. He recalled the glee he'd felt once when he'd found a piece of salted meat in a moldy sack, the excitement he'd felt when he'd discovered a finely-made lockpick — his first — in the sliding heel of an old boot. He remembered how, by sunset each day, he was always covered in stink, dirt, bird shite, and sweat, but how it would always seem worth it if the effort had landed something in his belly.

Whenever he returned to the Warrens, he made a point to see the Heap, a pilgrimage to remind himself of his former life, a reminder of who he was and would always be. He should've died many times over while living in the Warrens, but somehow the gods had overlooked him, or decided to spare him for some reason. He figured he was living on borrowed time, a divine promissory note as it were, so he lived as if he had nothing to lose.

Hence, tomb robbing.

A trio of adolescents, two girls and a boy, all too thin, dashed across the street before him, either running after something or running away from something. Rags covered them, and only the boy had shoes, mismatched. They vanished down a side alley as fast as they had appeared, ghosts of the Warrens.

He felt for them, felt for everyone who lived hungry and cold, and did what he could. Every few paces he let a silver tern or a copper common leak from a hole in his trouser pocket. If he just gave coin away, he'd have a crowd around him and maybe a riot, or some tough would have a run at him, so instead he just left dozens of terns and commons in his wake for the lucky or diligent to find. He thought of them as seeds, an attempt to grow hope from desperate soil.

Having made obeisance to his childhood at the temple of the Heap, he turned and headed for Mamabird's home, a few dilapidated blocks away. He could have walked there with his eyes closed, so well did he know the route. He dropped more coins in the road as he went.

He smiled when he saw Mamabird's house: a single-story mud-brick building with a sagging roof of wood and straw. Lean-tos were built against two sides of it, and a fire burned in a large pit near one of them. Cats, of course, seemed everywhere. Mama collected cats the way a noblewoman collected jewelry, and Nix had once seen her beat a man who'd tried to catch one for stew. Two tabbies perched on the roof of her house, a long-haired black lay near the fire pit, and a fourth orange tabby stalked something in the weeds near the fire pit. Mama kept a small vegetable garden in the small dirt plot she'd fenced off behind the house, and everyone respected its boundaries. Mamabird's house was treated by the residents of the Warrens the way other people treated temples elsewhere in the city — sacred ground.

A tentative rain started, just enough to lend humidity to the stink. Another rumble of thunder threatened a heavier downpour. The cats slunk out of sight.

Nix hustled up to the house, stood on the makeshift porch of scavenged timber, stared at the worn door a few long beats. Standing there, he transformed, reverted back to the person he'd been in boyhood, frightened, alone, desperate. He'd found a life behind that door, security, hope. And, in the end, he'd also found the man he later became and whatever conscience he carried.

He sheathed his blade, adjusted his cloak, his hair, shed the mask he wore when facing the world, and knocked his knock. The floor creaked as Mamabird came to the door. He could hear her murmuring to herself.

"It can't be, can it? Nixxy, is that you?"

"It's me, Mamabird."

She pulled open the door so hard she almost jerked it from its rusty hinges. The smell of her onion stew — he never thought overlong about what else might be in it — wafted out, redolent with memories.

When she saw him, her pale, fat face wrinkled up in a toothless smile that reached all the way to her rheumy eyes. He could not help but answer with a face-splitting smile of his own.