The Blade Itself

He plodded on, through wide courtyards and neat gardens, past gurgling fountains and proud statues, down clean lanes and broad avenues. He wandered up and down narrow stairways, across bridges over streams, over roads, over other bridges. He saw guards in a dozen different splendid liveries, guarding a hundred different gates and walls and doors, every one eyeing him with the same deep suspicion. The sun climbed in the sky, the tall white buildings slid by until Logen was footsore and half lost, his neck aching from looking always upwards.

The only constant was the monstrous tower which loomed high, high over everything else, making the greatest of the great buildings seem mean. It was always there, glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, peering over the tops of the roofs in the distance. Logen’s footsteps dragged him slowly closer and closer to it, until he came to a neglected corner of the citadel in its very shadow.

He found an old bench beside a ragged lawn near a great crumbling building, coated with moss and ivy, its steep roofs sagging in the middles and missing tiles. He slumped down, puffing out his cheeks, and frowned up at that enormous shape beyond the walls, cut out dark against the blue, a man made mountain of dry, stark, dead stones. No plants clung to that looming mass, not even a clump of moss in the cracks between the great blocks. The House of the Maker, Bayaz had called it. It looked like no house that Logen had ever seen. There were no roofs above, no doors or windows in those naked walls. A cluster of mighty, sharp-edged tiers of rock. What need could there ever be to build a thing so big? Who was this Maker anyway? Was this all he made? A great big, useless house?

“You mind if I sit?” There was a woman looking down at Logen, more what he would have called a woman than those strange, ghostly things in the park. A pretty woman in a white dress, face framed by dark hair.

“Do I mind? No. It’s a funny thing, but no one else wants to sit with me.”

She dropped down at the far end of the bench, resting her chin on her hands, her elbows on her knees, gazing up without interest at the looming tower. “Perhaps they’re afraid of you.”

Logen watched a man hurry past with a sheaf of papers under his arm, staring at him with wide eyes. “I’m starting to think the same thing.”

“You do look a little dangerous.”

“Hideous is the word you’re looking for.”

“I usually find the words I’m looking for, and I say dangerous.”

“Well, looks can lie.”

She lifted an eyebrow, looking him slowly up and down. “You must be a man of peace then.”

“Huh… not entirely.” They looked at each other sidelong. She didn’t seem afraid, or scornful, or even interested. “Why aren’t you scared?”

“I’m from Angland, I know your people. Besides,” and she let her head drop onto the back of the bench, “no one else will talk to me. I’m desperate.”

Logen stared at the stump of his middle finger, waggled it back and forth as far as it would go. “You’d have to be. I’m Logen.”

“Good for you. I’m nobody.”

“Everybody’s somebody.”

“Not me. I’m nothing. I’m invisible.”

Logen frowned at her, turned sideways to him, lounging back on the bench in the sun, her long smooth neck stretched out, chest rising and falling gently. “I see you.”

She rolled her head to look at him. “You… are a gentleman.”

Logen snorted with laughter. He’d been called a lot of things in his time, but never that. The young woman didn’t join him in his amusement. “I don’t belong here,” she muttered to herself.

“Neither one of us.”

“No. But this is my home.” She got up from the bench. “Goodbye, Logen.”

“Fare you well, nobody.” He watched her turn and walk slowly away, shaking his head. Bayaz had been right. The place was strange, but the people were stranger still.

Logen woke with a painful start, blinked and stared wildly about him. Dark. Not quite entirely dark, of course, there was still the ever-present glow of the city. He thought he’d heard something, but there was nothing now. It was hot. Hot and close and strangling, even with the sticky draught from the open window. He groaned, threw the damp blankets down around his waist, rubbed the sweat from his chest and wiped it on the wall behind him. The light nagged at his eyelids. And that was not the worst of his problems. Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say that he needs to piss.

Unfortunately, you couldn’t just piss in a pot in this place. They had a special thing, like a flat wooden shelf with a hole in it, in a little room. He’d peered down into that hole when they first arrived, wondering what it could be for. It seemed like a long way down, and it smelled bad. Malacus had explained it to him. A pointless and barbaric invention. You had to sit there, on the hard wood, an unpleasant draught blowing round your fruits. But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.