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Nico had succeeded in backing him into a corner of the yard, and was coming at him with a swordstroke aimed right at his head. There was no escape for Fish—at least, no escape that his partner could see.
Fish ducked beneath the flying broomstick handle with lightning speed, rolled, and caught Nico across the shins with his own stick on the way up again. Nico fell to the ground, swearing loudly, as Fish straightened up, grinning and leaning the stick against his shoulder.
“You’ve been spending too much time practicing with Siegfried,” Fish told his partner smugly, one hand holding the stick, the other resting on his hips in a deliberately languid posture. “You’ve forgotten how a smaller opponent can trick you into spending your strength against him.”
Nico glared up at him. “It’s not fair,” he growled, panting. “How do you beat me every time?”
“You’re too easily distracted.”
“No, I’m not,” Nico insisted, and began to argue with him. Fish took the opportunity to catch his breath, feeling the cold Firstmonth air blowing through his thin shirt, drying the sweat he had worked up during the match. Nico did not know how close he had come to winning, and Fish would never admit to it.
Finally Nico stood up, and again they pursued each other around the circle of dirt that had once been their landlady’s garden. Mrs Cottbus was too old to garden now, and spent most of her time sleeping or knitting in the suite of rooms below theirs. Her rooms were situated just above the level of the whitewashed brick road that meandered crookedly through the city, with five steps leading down to it from her front door.
The bottom floor of the narrow three-level house lay mostly below the street, with another set of steps leading from a sunken back door down to the yard in which Nico and Fish were sparring. Mrs Cottbus let out this floor too, and it was occupied by a married couple who were almost as close about their affairs as were Nico and Fish. Both of them were good fighters, and often practiced with the two assassins, though Fish had no inkling of what either of them did for a living.
This was scarcely uncommon in Schooner Street, which was known to be the city’s most wretched hive of crime and villainy. It had originally been built as a slum quarter to house the poor, but with time, the very poor had gradually been pushed out beyond the city walls, and Schooner Street and its surrounds had become a haven for those who wished to avoid polite society as well as the city guardsmen. There was a large community of brothels here, and that in turn tended to attract a great many mercenaries and sailors for their leisure time. Over the years, it had become a convenient place to find what could not be found in the better policed areas close to the city centre.
Fish himself had a queer affection for the place. Despite being surrounded by criminals and other types of people down on their luck, he had never personally worried about being victimized. The city thieves were self-preserving enough to avoid hired swords and death-dealers. And as Nico often said, carrying out criminal acts in Schooner Street was akin to taking a squat on one’s own doorstep.
“Enough,” Nico finally begged, when they had been at it for almost an hour, and were both covered in sweat and dust. There was a communal well close to the garden, enclosed by wooden buildings that faced out to the streets on all four sides, and they headed there. Whilst Fish sank down to lean against the cold stones of the well, Nico drew a bucket of water and proceeded to splash his face and neck. Fish gazed up at him with eyes half-closed, wondering idly if Nico had any idea of his own attractiveness. They were both wearing the same kind of outfit: a loose white blouse that normally went under a waistcoat, plain workman’s trousers and dark brown, calf-length leather boots. But on Nico, with his stern blue eyes and powerful build, that simple outfit made him look like a maiden’s fantasy.
Fish was no maiden, but he had long since come to terms with the fact that he was not like other men. He could not remember a time when he had ever wanted to kiss a girl; only later, when the dark shadows of his tormented childhood had started to leave him, had he started to think about kissing boys instead.
Women seemed to sense that part of Fish somehow; they always ignored him whenever they went about drooling over Nico. The hardest part of being Nico’s partner was the stab of jealousy that would strike whenever Fish had to see him with a woman. But luckily, Nico’s liaisons were few, and never lasted long. One day, Fish would have to watch him walk away into a happy ending with the love of his life, but that day was not come yet, thank the gods. For today, he got to watch his golden Nico in the sunlight, got to laugh with him and touch his hand, got to ignore everything and everyone else in the world. Fish had always been a great believer in enjoying the moment, and he wanted nothing to ruin his moments with Nico.
Fish had occasionally wondered whether he would be able to cure his infatuation with his partner by finding another man, and doing all the things he had never done before. After all, Schooner Street had no shortage of prostitutes, boy or girl or whatever else one might desire. But word of this sort of thing would inevitably make its way back to Nico; someone always talked, no matter how discreet he might try to be. And then Nico would know, and Fish had no idea how he might react. At best, he might simply accept it, but it would still change their rapport, set obstacles between them that could never be bridged. At worst...
“Hey there, you two!” called a woman’s voice, and Fish surfaced from his daydreams. Striding towards them was Gudrunn, the woman who leased the ground floor of their building along with her husband, Siegfried. She was dressed as she usually was; rather than wear a skirt like most Sven women, she had leather breeches underneath a kind of extended jerkin, calf-length and divided by four slits.
“Did Fish beat you?” she asked Nico, reaching the well and grinning at them. By her mode of talking, one could easily tell that she was Arvenian, and having some difficulties with the common speech of the twin lands of Svanfeld and Vailana. Historically, the Arvenians had come out of the north as pirates, circling the continent looking for adventure and rapine. Nowadays, most of them were honest tradesmen and merchants, making their way in the world like anyone else.
Fish stood up, shielding his eyes from the sun as it flashed from behind a cloud. “I always beat him, my lady,” he said airily.
Gudrunn laughed loudly, as she always did when Fish called her “my lady.” “When are we two going to spar again, little Fish? A better challenge I would be, than this clumsy fellow.”
Nico was far more skilled than she was, and they all knew it, but played along. “Knock on our window whenever you please,” Fish said.
“It may not be for a time yet,” Gudrunn sighed. “Busy, I am. Well, the reason I am here—Eric Skimmer sends you both a message. He wants you at his inn, the usual time tomorrow. You understand this, yes?”
Fish groaned loudly, and Nico gave a chuckle. The “usual time” was at daybreak, so that they could discuss business before the inn’s opening hours. Nico had no problem rising at such an unholy hour, and it was one of the few things he could tease Fish effectively about.
“We understand,” Nico told Gudrunn. “We’ll be there.”
She smiled. “Well—I must be going back. Only moments could I spare.”
When she had gone, Fish turned to Nico. “They paid us yesterday,” he said, in a low voice. “Why would they need to see us again?”
Nico shrugged. “Maybe it’s a new patron. We can always turn them down. We have enough money for that.”
“I suppose so.”
“However, we should be presentable.” Nico stretched languidly, flexing his shoulder muscles. “You know what that means.”
“Bathhouse,” Fish sighed. “Not the one down Coley Lane, please.” Ülhard’s public bathhouses ranged from luxurious to downright disreputable; the Coley Lane establishment was cleaner than most of the ones which doubled as brothels, and you could actually get a proper bath there without necessarily engaging any of the girls to share it with you. Since Coley Lane was but a few minutes’ walk from their building, he and Nico had often gone there for that purpose alone.
But it was not the place to relax after having a dusty and wearying day, nor a good place to try and have a serious conversation with his partner. Nico seemed to fit right in there, flirting mercilessly with the girls even though he never so much as laid a hand on them, but Fish was made of different stuff, and was never so painfully aware of it as when the girls tried to flirt with him instead.
“Alright, we’ll try a different one.” Nico was grinning broadly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were scared of Madam Essie’s girls,” he teased.
Fish did not reply, only hoping that the red-hot blush he could feel working its way up his neck and face wouldn’t show under the darkness of his skin.
“Worried they’re going to steal your virtue?”
“Shut up,” Fish growled.
––––––––
The first sign of morning was, as usual, Nico waking up and rolling out of bed, yawning noisily.
Fish refused to believe that it was time to wake. Pulling his pillow half over his head, he squirmed into a ball, and resolutely closed his eyes.
Nico padded across the wooden floor and opened the squeaky window shutters. That alone would have woken Fish, if he hadn’t been awake already. The room remained almost as dark as it had been before; the day was overcast. Nico snorted, and Fish heard him make his way towards the tiny washroom—an alcove, really, with a basin and chamberpot—floorboards creaking under his tread.
Fish sighed and turned over onto his back, stretching out, aware that Nico’s side of the bed was still warm and smelled of fresh sweat and soap and him. They slept on the same straw mattress, held off the floor by a low wooden frame and a few bricks. It was Nico who had originally suggested this arrangement, and he had never given any sign that it was out of the ordinary for two men to do so. Fish supposed that was the farm boy in him; he’d heard that it was not unusual for entire families to share a single bed out in the country, or even in the houses of city labourers.
This was probably also the reason, thought Fish, sighing into his pillow, why Nico could wake up at any given time of day and be no worse the wear for it. The timing of dawn was wildly different in winter and summer, and he could see how a lad growing up in a remote farming community might learn to adapt his sleeping needs to the season.
Fish had never learned this knack. Not in his father’s house, not as a wandering urchin, not even during his stint in the Townsguard of Zarath.
Nico returned from the washroom, and gave Fish’s prone body a shake. “Time to wake up, sleepy-face.”
Fish groaned in response and burrowed further into the pillow, trying to shut him out. There was constant noise now, as Nico was moving around the room, taking clothes from drawers and laying them on the chair in the corner. It was enough to almost make Fish wish that he had remained in his father’s house, where he had had a private suite of rooms all to himself.
Almost.
“Are you going to get up, or not?” After another shake woke no more response from Fish, Nico padded away again. There were several small clinking sounds that Fish could not quite make out. Nico padded back, and something splashed on Fish’s ear. Shrugging it off, he kept his eyes stubbornly closed. It was only when the cold water reached his neck that he suddenly sat bolt upright.
“What is wrong with you?” Fish demanded, trying to dry off his face with the bedclothes and only succeeding in making himself more uncomfortable. Nico had set the water jug down and was chuckling to himself as he laced up his boots.
The drifting thoughts of his unhappy childhood were driven away, and reluctantly Fish got out of bed to prepare himself for the day ahead.
Nico was already fully dressed by the time Fish came out of the washroom, every fold of his outfit immaculately brushed into place, his hair combed down and his beard neatly trimmed. He wore a sleeveless waistcoat of blue linen a few shades darker than his eyes, and he was even wearing cufflinks, brass to match the buttons of the jerkin. He took no notice as Fish stripped to the skin and wandered around looking for his own clothes, which he found on the chair. Nico had picked out everything for him, down to his linen drawers.
Begrudgingly, Fish had to admit that Nico chose well: the charcoal-coloured woollen waistcoat added gravitas to his youthful face, and the bright gold-plated buttons drew attention away from the circles under his eyes. Fish regarded himself in the polished copper mirror. There was not much they could do about his wayward curls...
Nico approached, carrying two pieces of bread drizzled with honey. Setting them on the table, he picked up a comb and his nail-scissors.
“What are you going to do with that?” Fish was half nervous.
“It needs a trim,” Nico insisted, the scissors hovering over his partner’s head.
“All right,” Fish grumbled. “But don’t cut too much off!” he added anxiously, as the scissors moved in.
“Eat your breakfast,” Nico retorted. “You have a bit of stubble here,” he added, as Fish did as he was told and picked up the bread.
“I don’t think there’s any time for me to shave.”
“I’d keep it. It makes you look less of a boy.”
“Well, you’re only about two years older than me; if I’m a boy, so are you.”
“Three years, unless you’ve decided to change your identity again.” Nico spoke lightly, but there was something heavier behind his words, and suddenly Fish wished he could speak openly to his partner. In a way it might be easier, to share the burdens of the past with someone else...
Nico combed out what was left of Fish’s curls, and handed him the last piece of his outfit, a black linen cravat. Fish had no more time to dwell upon his half-formed longings. Donning short jackets as well as their winter cloaks, the two young men climbed down from their loft and set off into the overcast streets.
It was a cold, brooding day, and the smell of the sea was strong in the wisps of mist that clung to the muddy streets. Fish could even hear the sea in the distance, grumbling restively as if it was just as moody about early mornings as what he was.
There were no cobbles in Schooner Street, and none of the distinctive white marble buildings that Ülhard, the White City, was known for. The only true marble buildings in the city, Nico had told him once, were the royal palace, which overlooked the city from an outcrop of rock from which sprang the famous Trollen waterfall, part of the central square, including the town hall and the temple, and the old city wall—where it had not been patched. Repair work on the wall was done with white sandstone, and the fancier suburbs were made of it too; further away from the centre, the houses were built of whitewashed brick. And the buildings in Schooner Street were made of wood, and only painted white, when indeed they were painted at all.
Eric Skimmer’s inn, the Black Ass, was not far. Situated on a corner convenient for sailors and other wanderers to find, its painted sign had no words, only a picture of a donkey done in black. At this time of day, the front door was locked; Nico and Fish picked their way around the back, through the stables, where Eric’s brother gave them a toothless grin as he mixed a bucket of gruel for his horses.
“Master Klavbert! Master Fish! It’s good to see you back.”
“Stonetooth, good morning,” Nico acknowledged him as he stepped through the door. “Is your brother awake?”
“He’s never been one for early mornings,” Stonetooth rumbled, “but he did promise to be out at the counter by the time you arrived. Careful of his crossbow, mind you.”
“Your brother is a maniac, Stonetooth,” Fish said to him. Uric Skimmer only chuckled. They were peas in a pod, the Skimmer brothers; Stonetooth had been so nicknamed, the story ran, when his teeth had been knocked out by a barroom tough armed with a loose brick from the city wall. Stonetooth still had the brick somewhere, it was rumoured, along with the skull of the man who had wielded it.
Stonetooth’s burly brother was fast asleep in an armchair behind the bar counter. An army-duty crossbow, loaded and locked to fire, rested in front of him. Keeping well out of its line of fire, Nico approached and banged loudly on the counter with his fist.
The crossbow was up, levelled at Nico’s forehead, and set apologetically down again in a movement so fluid even Fish could admire it. Eric Skimmer grinned, showing a set of fine white teeth, the like of which his brother had once sported.
“Welcome back to my establishment,” he said expansively. “You two’ve gotten popular, I must say. We haven’t even had a chance to sit and talk over an ale since—how long has it been? Must be three weeks or more! The ale has missed you especially, Master Fish.” At Nico’s stone-eyed look of impatience, Eric Skimmer turned sober again. “The usual room. And mind that there’s no trouble.”
Nico nodded, and Fish touched one of his hidden daggers.
“I’ll be back to reacquaint myself with your ale, Innkeeper,” Fish promised as they went upstairs. “Don’t count me out yet!”
Fish carefully straightened out his jerkin as Nico thumped on the door of the “usual room,” where most of their business dealings took place. The door creaked open, and Fish espied the pockmarked countenance of Hans Wyrm, their usual point of contact, behind it.
“Welcome back, Nico,” Hans said greasily, giving Fish a nasty glare which he returned with interest. He had disliked Hans from the first time they’d met, when he’d pointed out that half the coins he was offering to Nico for a tricky little job in the harbour were just slightly roughened around the edges.
Hans sidled back behind the desk in the middle of the room, and the second man stood up. Both assassins stared in surprise. The man was masked; it was one of the ugly ones often seen at cheap Guild masquerades, done up with the face of what seemed to be a gargoyle, or perhaps an inexpertly painted monkey. He was dressed in a tight-fitting red jacket with white woollen gloves, and Fish could even see pin marks on the fabric at his chest, where a Guild pin might have been removed just moments ago.
“Please, sit down,” the man said. His learned, formal accent jarred with his surroundings, and the company he was currently keeping. His whole manner simply screamed “rich merchant,” and he seemed quite aware of that, and not making any attempt to hide it.
Nico and Fish took the two stools offered to them, and the man sat down again himself.
“No doubt you have misgivings,” he began. The assassins said nothing.
“Although I cannot allow you to identify me,” the man said, “I can tell you that I am the person who hired you two weeks ago, through Master Wyrm here”—Fish saw Hans practically preen at being referred to as “Master,”—“to take care of our... little problem.”
“Have we displeased you in any way?” Nico asked neutrally.
“Oh, no!—quite the opposite, in fact. You see, your unfortunate victim was only a beginning... a kind of—trial run, shall we say? We had never hired an assassin before, after all, and some of us were doubtful... but the two of you have proven that you can be trusted to follow orders, and even to deal with challenging situations.”
Fish raised his eyebrows at that, and Nico cleared his throat. “Like handling the guards quietly, and not leaving a bloody mess and the entire neighbourhood in an uproar?”
“Something like that,” the Guildsman agreed. “Now, the reason why we needed to get Guildsman Erdmann out of the way—”
“Oh, I’d figured that out,” Nico interrupted. “There’s a war going on in your ranks, the ranks of all the Guilds. You don’t like slavery.”
Nico paused. The Guildsman leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “Go on.”
“Slavery may be illegal in Svanfeld,” Nico continued, “but the laws are almost never enforced. The King doesn’t care if the trade Guilds are undermined, just as he doesn’t care if you—how shall we say?—take it upon yourselves to thin out your ranks.” Nico looked as if he was enjoying himself; the Guildsman showed no expression behind his mask, but had drawn himself up in a pose of surprise. “If slave labour proliferates, the Guilds will only suffer, but that doesn’t stay the greed of some of you lot.” Nico folded his arms. “I know for a fact that some senior Guildsman was accepting bribes from slave caravans to help them smuggle people past the towns in the northern foothills of Svanlyn. I grew up there. I remember.” He scowled. “It was only a matter of time before someone was called to task for it.”
Nico hardly ever spoke about his own past. Fish knew that his partner had been a fosterling, raised by the Sven monks in a small town somewhere on this side of the mountains, and that was about all. Fish had glanced at a map before and made an educated guess as to which monastery it had likely been, but Nico had never appreciated any kind of prying, and Fish had never wanted to discomfit him. He was surprised, now, to hear Nico mention something so personal.
The Guildsman responded: “Yes! And now you see the extent of our problem.” He took a rolled-up map from his belt and spread it out over the desk. Fish suppressed the urge to whistle under his breath; it was the most detailed map of the Svanlyn mountains he had ever seen. The great range that separated the lands of Svanfeld and Vailana was generally shown on maps as a giant no-go area, not worth annotating in any detail.
“The slavers strike in remote villages,” the Guildsman said, “and they bring their captives to Ülhard.” He tapped the city on the map, where it sat curled up beside a wide bay on the western coast. “Those that they cannot sell here, they put on ships—but they do not take them far.” His finger travelled southwards, along the coast. “Our operatives have witnessed those same ships coming ashore near the town of Von Dharen, which is right below the highest part of the mountains. The slaves were then taken up into the wilds, where our operatives could not follow.”
Nico contemplated the map. “There is only one mountain pass which the slavers can use to pass into Vailana, or even into the lower parts of Svanlyn,” he said.
“A pass which is watched over day and night by the King’s guardsmen,” the Guildsman said soberly. “Unless the slavers have found a way to bribe each and every single one of them, they cannot use the Beerstana Pass. They must have found some way around it.”
Nico snorted. “I have seen those mountains. One does not simply ‘find a way’ around the Peak of Beerstana. Not unless he is part wildcat. And the slavers are travelling with frightened, exhausted people who will do their best to escape if they can. There is foul play involved in this somehow.” He sat back, folding his arms. “What precisely is it you want us to do here?”
“Follow the slavers into the mountains,” the Guildsman said promptly. “Find out where they are hiding. Destroy them, and do it in such a way that others will see—will know.”
“As brilliant as we are, myself and my associate,” Nico said, tapping the edge of the desk, “we are only two men. What if your slavers have banded together, and now form a small army?”
“If that occurs, come back, and devise a strategy for our private army to move in and destroy their stronghold.”
“Why not send this private army of yours in the first place?”
“As you said, Master Klavbert,” the guildsman replied, “the mountains in that area are impassable if you do not know how to conquer them. Before we hired you, we had heard tell of how once you pursued a similar group of wrongdoers into the Storm Cliffs, to cut them down one by one.”
Copper smugglers, Fish thought, but he held his peace; only Nico spoke when they were negotiating a contract, and he spoke for both of them. Copper smugglers who thought they could double-cross the man they worked for. Now that I think on it, probably a Guild member who was smuggling his own product in order to create an artificial shortage. He shook his head to himself. Ah, does the corruption never end?
“I’m not sure,” Nico was saying. “We have never dabbled in politics before.”
There was a deep silence, in which Fish could hear the Guildsman shifting in his seat. “Sir,” he finally began, speaking in a low voice, “a matter of politics this may be, but it has become something all too personal for us. Some of us have family in the areas targeted by these slavers, and our pockets are bled dry hiring mercenaries to protect them. We depend on the villagers of Svanfeld to provide the raw materials for our trades. When this labour chain is disrupted, we suffer again. Some of us in the Guilds feel ourselves obliged to protect the villages, to treat them as our people. I do not want to live in a land run by slave traders. I am a craftsman, and I wish my workers to be free as I am, perhaps even with the opportunity to one day sit where I am now.”
He fell silent. Fish rubbed his nose and glanced over at Nico, but his partner was intent upon the Guildsman. Nico replied, speaking slowly: “I am inclined to agree with you. There seem to be many compelling reasons to accept this contract. Fish?” He turned in his chair. Fish only nodded, as he knew Nico expected him to. His partner was not truly asking for his opinion, but giving him a signal. The Guildsman stirred expectantly in his seat.
“However,” Nico continued, “a task such as this cannot be accepted too readily. My associate and I need to construct a strategy first. If we feel that it is too difficult for us to handle, we will have to turn you down.”
“We will wait a few days,” the figure under the mask agreed.
“And what of our reimbursement? What are you offering us?”
“You will never need to work again,” the masked man said grandly. “We have agreed to deed you a country estate outside the walls of Ülhard if you succeed.”
Fish nearly gasped; tightly controlling his facial expression, he took in a sharp breath. They’re willing to make us landowners? Desperate, they must be.
Somehow, Nico had managed to not register any expression at all. “That is... very generous,” he said, hesitating, “but I have no wish to be permanently tied to the Guilds. I would have to refuse unless an equivalent cash offer could be made.”
The Guildsman turned towards Fish, for the first time. “And you? You would refuse too?”
“Nico speaks for both of us,” Fish said woodenly, secretly hoping that his partner was thinking clearly.
“Very well.” The Guildsman shrugged. “We shall sell the piece of land in question and pay you the proceeds of the sale.”
“The proceeds, plus ten percent,” Nico said.
“Done.” The Guildsman did not hesitate in the slightest.
“You will find a buyer before we leave,” Nico continued, “and pay us a quarter of the amount upfront.”
“Very well.”
“And we will need expense money.” Nico ticked off items on his fingers. “Horses, if you want us to arrive there with any sort of speed. Mules or packhorses. Gear for navigating the wilds. Winter clothes and provisions, because the snow will lie on the mountains till Thirdmonth, if we’re unlucky. High-energy rations for the horses.”
The Guildsman nodded behind his mask, and detached a leather bag from his belt, setting it before Nico. “Will this be sufficient?” he asked.
Fish came forward, picked up the bag and peered inside. Glinting golden coins caught the light, and Hans’s squinty eyes gazed greedily from the corner he was lurking in. Fish estimated the volume of the bag, calculating quickly how many coins were likely to be in it. Finding a satisfactory total, he nodded to Nico. “That should cover it.”
“Keep the gold,” the Guildsman said from behind his mask. “Whether you accept the contract or not, let it be a token of... trust. In our friendship.”
Fish hesitated, glancing towards his partner. Nico gave a slight nod, and Fish attached the bag to his own belt and returned to his chair.
“In that case,” the Guildsman said, “we will meet again in three days to hear your decision.”
Nico looked preoccupied. “We’d best take our leave,” he said to Fish. He glanced around the room. “Until then.”
––––––––
They left the Black Ass under an anxious silence. Nico suggested that they make their way to a coffee-shop they frequented in one of the more respectable boroughs nearby, and said nothing further during the time it took them to get there. Even when they were finally seated, sharing a small pot of coffee between them, he did not say anything about the situation. Fish hesitantly brought it up, and he changed the subject, eyes roving across the shop towards a table in the corner.
Following Nico’s gaze, Fish saw a young man in a bluish overcoat, reading a newspaper. Or at least, he had a newspaper in front of him, but his eyes were glazed over, fixed to a single point. An empty cup sat on the table before him, yet when the serving-girl came to fetch it, he waved her away.
Fish looked back at his partner, who raised his eyebrows and said nothing. Fish put his hands on the table.
“Nic,” he said brightly, “I have an idea. I want to go to—to the place where we became partners. Just for a walk. What do you say?”
Nico put his empty mug down, and Fish could tell he was holding back a smile. “Good idea,” he said, a touch louder than he usually would have.
There was a dusty man in a dented hat lurking by the nearest lamp-post when they left the coffee-shop, smoking just a little too slowly to have been a workman on his break. There was another at the end of the street, sharp eyes peeking out from under a floppy hat as he lounged on a public bench.
So much for trusting in us, Fish thought. Gods, how many of them do they have?
Fish felt the strain of keeping up the appearance of unawareness all the way to the city wall. It felt as though there were following eyes in every doorway, footsteps tracking him down every alley. It took him back to memories of another life—the years before he had met Nico, the time when he had still been a frightened child running from the horrors of his past.
They passed through a foot gate on the southern edge of Ülhard, and followed a rocky footpath over the low-growing seagrass down to the beach. No-one could follow them down there without attracting due suspicion. By the time they went striding along the sand, leaving boot-prints behind where the tide was coming in, Fish felt relaxed enough to speak.
“So they’re having us followed.”
“Seems like it.” Nico had taken one of his silver-edged daggers out, and was absent-mindedly passing it from hand to hand.
There was a moment’s silence, filled with the rumble of the waves and the sound of their boots squelching in the wet sand. The wind whipped at Fish’s curls and set the edge of his cloak snapping where it pulled loose from his body. The sea came up behind them and disintegrated their footprints neatly, threatening to suck the solid ground out from under them.
“So, are we going to take the job?” Fish asked. Nico seemed to be in a strange mood, even now. He was still toying with the dagger.
“I don’t see that we have much of a choice,” he said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“Fish, I know you had a gut feeling. Tell me, what do you think about our Guildsman?”
Fish furrowed his brow in thought. “Well... I don’t think that he was lying to us,” he said after a while. “When he said that this was a matter of more than business to him, I believed him. But...” He fought to find the right words as Nico waited. “He may not have been lying, but perhaps he didn’t tell us everything,” he finally said. “He negotiated our price too easily. And why give us this bag of gold to keep? Why does he have his own men following us?”
“Your questions are mine,” Nico said, stopping for a moment above the reach of the tide. A flat plain dotted with piebald sheep led up to a cliff by the edge of the sea, almost half a mile from where they stood. The waves crashed against the side of the distant cliff, and Fish knew that the turbulent surf concealed a reef of cruel rocks.
“I have a theory,” Nico continued. Fish looked questioningly at him. “Why did this Guildsman offer to give us land—Guild land!—so easily? Because he thinks that we will never return to claim it.”
“Why would he send us on a suicide mission?” Fish asked.
“Why not send regular mercenary soldiers on a mission like this? Why would they need a pair of assassins?”
Fish paused. “Because... because they have already sent mercenaries, and they failed.”
A silence fell between the two of them. A ray of sunlight broke out from behind the clouds, turning the beach sands gold for a brief moment before retreating. There was an odd glitter in Nico’s storm-blue eyes, and he was fidgeting with the dagger again.
“So what do we do?” Fish asked softly.
“We don’t have a lot of choices.” Nico looked unhappily at Fish, his eyes reflecting the greenish hue of the restless sea. “If we refuse, they will probably kill us. Doubtless they know all of our movements across the city by now.”
“But if we agree, we will walk ass-first into a situation that hire-mercs couldn’t handle.”
Nico nodded. “Yea, but remember—they can’t track us in the wilds. They admitted as much.”
“We can disappear,” Fish said, realization dawning. He snorted. “You know, I bet they’re not even going to sell that land,” he said sourly. “Likely they’ll just come up with a sum that should keep us happy, and have no intention of paying us the rest.” He spat into the sea. “Gods, why did we even get involved with the Guilds in the first place?”
“It’s my fault,” Nico said unhappily. “Fish—”
The way Nico said his name made Fish immediately turn towards him. “Yes?”
Impulsively, Nico hurled the silver-edged dagger he was holding at the sea, as if he could arrest the motion of the tide by throwing things at it. “That’s it,” he announced, half laughing, his eyes glittering icy-crystalline in another brief flash of sunlight. “I’m never killing anybody again.”
Fish was quiet until the rising sea frothed up the beach and began to suck the sand away from under the dagger, hauling it in. Then he strode towards the blade, picked it up, and handed it back to Nico.
“Didn’t you once tell me you got these from a friend?”
Nico snorted, but he took the dagger anyway. “We got them from a mercenary down on his luck,” he said. “He was willing to practically give four of these away. Two matched sets.” He turned away. Fish was used to Nico clamming up about his past, however, and waited until the mood passed.
“You meant that, didn’t you?” he asked as soon as it was safe, when Nico sank down upon a sandbar and sullenly started turning the dagger round and around in his hand. The tide continued to come in, and Nico watched it heave and ebb for a while before he started speaking.
“I’ve been thinking lately,” he said quietly. “I’ve been thinking about—about how I would never have chosen this life for myself, if it hadn’t been a matter of survival. I’m getting older now.” He lifted his eyes to Fish’s. “I feel as if I’m standing in that sand.” He pointed at the wave line. “As if the footing is constantly being sucked out from under me. One day soon, I’ll lose my footing, and then I’ll drown.” He ran his fingers along the silvered blade of the dagger. “Fish, there’s something that I—that I’ve never told you.”
Nico stopped suddenly, interrupting himself, and put the dagger away, looking down at his hands. “No, scratch that: there are things I’ll never tell you. If I stay here...” He trailed off into silence.
Fish was stunned. This was by far the most intimate speech that Nico had ever given him, and it deserved to be validated with a fitting response. But he could not ignore the repercussions of what his partner appeared to be saying.
“You don’t want to return here,” he stated, as gently as he could manage. “You want to leave this city behind. You want a fresh start.”
“We’ve been partners for this past year,” Nico said softly. “And we’ve worked out better than any other pair in the city, but I can’t expect you to share the rest of my life based on a—a—”
“A promise?” Fish whispered.
Nico hesitated. “I don’t understand.”
“We’re almost at the place where we came ashore that day,” Fish said. “Remember? At the foot of the cliff.”
“I remember,” Nico said hesitantly.
“I was injured. I’d gotten us both into a pretty bad fight with those pirates, and we hardly knew each other. I’d managed to convince you that I was the Baron Vonnegüth’s son, remember?”
Despite his mood, Nico chuckled.
“I told you to leave me there,” Fish said. “I admitted I lied—I’m nobody’s son, least of all someone so illustrious. But you didn’t care. You said you were going to patch me up again, and you took my hand”—Fish reached for Nico’s right hand with his own, and clasped it—“and asked me to partner up with you.” Fish turned to look into his partner’s eyes, and squeezed the hand he was holding. “My answer has not changed since that day. What would I do in this miserable city without you?”
A slow smile replaced the grimness of Nico’s countenance, as he followed Fish’s gaze out over the beach towards the cliff. Fish pretended not to see as his partner smudged away a tear with his hand. Standing up, Nico drew him into a one-armed hug. The tide was still rising; water lapped at their boots, then withdrew again.
“Come on,” Nico said at last. “We’ll deal with these bastards, but we’ll do it on our terms.”
Fish turned with him, half hoping for a second hug, but Nico was already on his way home, impatient as usual, the collar of his jacket turned up against the wind. Fish sighed and cast one last look towards the cliff as he walked after his partner, clasping his cloak tightly around himself.
