Scar Night

7


Mr. Nettle’s Luck

With Smith’s bill of sale clutched in his fist, and Smith’s trolley creaking before him, Mr. Nettle sought the gaffer on Berth Seventeen. Tradeships rumbled over a forest of docking spines and tarred chains where armies of men worked with hammers and hooks and aether flames to keep the whole thing hale. More men unloaded goods from docked ships: metal ores and coal from Hollowhill, wood from Shale, food, livestock, and soil from the Coyle Plantations, and wine from the High Valleys; salt, textiles, worked gold, silver, and bronze from the desert settlements. Tremors ran through the girders and stones underfoot. The air smelled of fuel and iron.

The incoming ships were from the depots at Sandport and Clune, heavy with the collected wealth of the river towns, but the outgoing ships were swift and light. They carried little but tax demands and the occasional crate of armour or bolts for the outpost garrisons.

Mr. Nettle remembered the days before the great ships ploughed the skies. Everything had come to Deepgate by caravan, and many of those caravans had never reached the city. At the height of the Heshette war there had been difficult years when the heathens choked the supply lines. He was just a boy back then, but he remembered the food queues, the hunger, and the bloodshed. In those times, Iril had taken many souls.

Great ragged holes pocked the shipyards, some of them big enough to let the airships manoeuvre down to moorings where stitchers and Gluemen could clamber over them and work their repairs. All of the holes he passed by were empty now, full of nothing but darkness and chains, and a queer metal wind sighed up from the abyss. But he knew there were men down there, in harnesses on ropes, strengthening the old iron with new. Mr. Nettle could hear their faraway shouts and laughs, the pounding of their hammers. He wondered how men managed to face those chains each day, and if their wives could bear to look at them when they left home in the morning.

He found the gaffer bawling out a group of dockhands gathered beside an overloaded cart. The weight of coal sacks it carried had tipped the cart back on its wheels, leaving the harnessed donkey suspended a few feet above the ground. The donkey chewed its teeth and merely looked bored.

“Laggards, you think this is a joke?” The gaffer smacked his billet against his palm. “You want my stick on the back of your heads?”

“Not our fault,” one of the dockhands protested. “Donkey’s lost weight since yesterday.”

“Aye, and you will too, when I cut your wage for this folly.”

Smiles faded from the dockhands’ faces. They set to work unloading the cart.

“Pig iron,” Mr. Nettle said, “for Smith.” He thrust the bill at the gaffer, who ignored it.

“Tomorrow,” the gaffer growled, then, to his men, “Take them from the top first, you dolts, you want to spill the lot?”

“No,” Mr. Nettle said.“Now.”

The gaffer gave him a square look. He seemed about to say something, then to change his mind. Maybe he noticed the way Mr. Nettle’s shoulders had tensed. He sighed and grabbed the bill. “Over there. Warehouse eleven, like it says here. Pallet three hundred two.”

After Mr. Nettle had got the bill checked by the warehouse boss, he found the crates where he’d been told, and heaved the first onto his trolley. Wooden axle squeaking, he set off back to Blacklung Lane.

He worked hard for Smith all afternoon. His ribs protested with every step, and at times the pain was worse than from the beating, but he just kept moving, planting one foot in front of the other and trying to clear his mind of everything but the cobbles ahead and the grumble of the trolley wheels. Each box seemed to weigh more than the last, and there appeared to be no end to them. He could have sworn someone was loading up the pallet even as he emptied it. At this rate, he’d be lucky to finish the job by the time it got dark. Lucky? He scowled. What was luck? Bad luck was just what happened day to day. Bad luck was an icy morning, or finding nothing in the nets for a week, or getting ill when you had to work. Bad luck was just life. And good luck? It was nothing but a pause in the bad. That was when you didn’t get ill, and therefore could keep dragging the nets every day. That was when you found something you could sell, and you could eat. But maybe his luck was changing. Smith was a good man. He didn’t want to think about it, though. The more he thought about it, the more he felt he was tempting fate. Good luck, real good luck, didn’t come to people like Smith and Nettle.

By the fourth afternoon bell he had delivered half the iron. His ribs were aching, and his muscles beginning to fold. The sun beat down mercilessly and sapped his strength. Sweat soaked into his mourning robes. He slumped to the ground by a common pipe under the Merrygate watchtower, there slaked his thirst and sloshed water over his face. Some folks looked at him strangely, and some even stared outright, but most ignored him like he was a beggar.

Only three bolts. What were the chances? If he missed with the first, the angel was sure to finish him before he could load the second, poisoned or no. One bolt would have to do it. But which one would he use? The soultaker was the most fitting—a soul for a soul. Though it would cost the most to replace, since diseased bolts were rare. Smith had never said anything about him paying for the bolts, but he figured he owed the man that at least—assuming he made it through the night. Mr. Nettle rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. What if the angel killed him? The crossbow would be left on the streets for anyone to find, and Smith would never see it again. That was a poor trade for a day’s work. He shunned the thought.

Mr. Nettle rose stiffly and tilted back the trolley, resting it on his stomach. Pain shot through his ribs, but he did his best to ignore it. He had a full afternoon’s work ahead.

Even before he got back to Blacklung Lane, he knew something was wrong. As Mr. Nettle wove through the narrow, winding lanes towards the weapon smiths’ warrens, a sense of dread began to fill him. At first he shrugged it aside, thinking it a shadow of his grief, but when he drew nearer the feeling grew until, not knowing why, he found himself hurrying. He was still a street away when he realized what was wrong. The ringing and hammering of metal had stopped. Blacklung Lane was silent. Mr. Nettle ran the last few yards, the crate rattling on his trolley.

Crowds blocked the entrance to the lane itself. The smiths were all outdoors, away from their forges, their coal-streaked, muscled torsos jostling as they tried to push past one another to see what was happening. Smoke billowed from somewhere at the end of the lane and someone cried, “Get back, get back, it’s going to go.”

Mr. Nettle abandoned the trolley and tried to push his way through. The crowd threw him angry looks, shoved him this way and that, but he squeezed among them and managed to force his way forward. Big as these smiths were, Mr. Nettle was bigger. The smell of burning rope hung thick in the air.

“Get back, I say! Back, you fools.”

Up ahead, people were coughing; others were shouting. There was a whoomph, then the groan of stressed metal. Embers twisted upwards through the smoke, and suddenly the crowd surged backwards, carrying Mr. Nettle with it. Men fought to get past him. Someone punched him, another kneed him hard in the stomach and he almost dropped. He grabbed the man’s hair and dragged him down, sending him sprawling beneath the feet of others. And all at once there was space in front of him. And flames.

Blacklung Lane terminated abruptly: where once there had been a slump of cobbles, chains, and soot-blackened walls, there was now a gaping hole rimmed with burning rubble. The far end of the lane had fallen through into the abyss, taking half the adjoining smithies and much of the surrounding neighbourhood with it. A circle of cross-chains hung down into the rift like a basket with the bottom fallen out. The collapse had ripped open a dozen houses. Walls had crumbled away, leaving girders jutting from the stonework and private rooms open to Mr. Nettle’s gaze, their furniture undisturbed but now inches from the open abyss.

Smith and his workshop were gone.

Mr. Nettle took a step back as more cobbles dropped away before him. He pressed himself into the crowd. Coals from the furnaces had set fire to the torn nets below and, even as he watched, those flames grew higher and a cloud of smoke rolled over him.

“Back!” he roared, and pushed hard into the throng. Men stumbled and fell, but those behind him were still struggling, trying to free themselves from others, while at the back still more onlookers were pushing forward.

The crowd swelled alarmingly, and for a dreadful moment Mr. Nettle felt himself being shoved toward the abyss. He tripped, grabbed something—a man’s ear—and pulled himself upright. The man yelled, fell back—if he went over the edge, Mr. Nettle didn’t see. Others were now tugging at his robes from all sides, pulling him, pushing him. He kicked them away. He elbowed someone else in the face, knocked him to the ground.

Another whoomph, and a loud cracking noise. Behind him, more loose stone rumbled into the abyss.

There was no way out through the crowd. He had to go up, over them. Mr. Nettle wrestled with the men nearest to him, forcing them down. Shouts and screams came from everywhere. He climbed over backs and faces and arms and legs, pushing, punching. He kicked out, grabbed hair or skin, and clawed his way forward. For a heartbeat he was carried above the crowd, and then he sank among them, among their legs and boots. Something hit him in the face; he tried to rise, but there were men on top of him, flattening him, suffocating him.

He heard the snap and hiss of parting cables. Suddenly he was covered in blood; his hands and arms were red, wet. He didn’t know if it was his own blood or not. A boot kicked him in the teeth; then it stood on his head. Crushing weight bore down on his aching back.

The scrounger yelled, strained against the man’s weight, and wrenched himself up onto his elbows. Another push and he got his feet under him. He heaved upwards: men fell on either side and Mr. Nettle stood. Thicker smoke now engulfed him. He closed his eyes, struck out with his hands, and pushed and pushed and punched and punched his way into the mass of people. His fists connected dozens of times.

A deep rumble erupted from somewhere behind. More men began to scream.

Eyes shut, lungs full of smoke, Mr. Nettle battered his way further through the crowd.

And suddenly he burst free.

All around, the smiths were dragging fallen comrades from the panicking throng. Others were rushing to the scene with buckets of water, but hampered by the tangled mass of people, they could do nothing but drop these nearby and run to fetch more.

Mr. Nettle paused there, gasping for breath. His robe was now torn to tatters and covered in blood, too much blood to have come from the blows he’d delivered. The snapping cables, he realized, had torn right through the crowd. He checked his own limbs, counted his fingers. He felt dazed, bruised, but still in one piece.

He’d been lucky, he thought miserably.