Excerpt from Northern Steel - coming soon(ish)

(This is an excerpt from my work-in-progress novel Northern Steel, a prequel to The Many Shades of Midnight set one hundred years earlier in Qido.)

The workshop was the most impressive Tais had seen. Large, bright and possessed of an almost military neatness, it took up the entire corner of the block. The most impressive building on a street of impressive buildings—and this was the Trades, the artisan quarter. A reminder, if Tais needed one, of the status of Isyr craftsmen in the empire.

It was, however, immediately apparent that all was not well in this domain of the favoured. The street rang with the noises of the trade, but inside Hagan’s workshop, the forges and hammers were silent. A handful of journeymen and apprentices were clustered around a central worktable, but no one was doing anything. They looked lost, and Tais guessed that unexplained absences were not Hagan’s custom.

His appearance prompted a ripple of activity. A stocky, middle-aged man broke away from the huddle, wiping clean hands on his apron in what appeared to be a reflex gesture. He frowned as he looked Tais up and down, clearly trying to work out his social status. Trying to decide whether to treat him as a customer or a tradesman. A lesser tradesman.

Tais didn’t give him time to make up his mind. “Which one of you is Ainar Norr?

The man’s eyes narrowed at his tone. “That’s me. Who’s asking?”

Tais let his gaze wander around the workshop for a suitable pause before he brought his attention back to the man’s face. “Captain Evrard, Palace District. Is there somewhere we can talk in private?”

The effect was immediate. The Palace District was the most powerful of the Watch districts, and if Tais was not technically part of the Watch, he had just come from the palace.

Norr gestured towards a small office. “Of course, this way.”

They went inside and Norr closed the door on the curious stares of his colleagues. “How can I assist you, Captain?”

A crate of Isyrium bulbs rested on a worn desk. Tais picked one up, turning it over in this hand. “How do you do that thing, with the streetlights?”

Norr looked at him blankly. “I’m sorry?”

“That thing,” Tais repeated, waving the bulb at him. “You know—the turning off thing.”

“The turning off thing?” The words were cool, disdainful. “I assume you mean the light-sensitive bulbs?”

Tais tossed the bulb in the air and caught it. “Light sensitive, is it? How do you do it?”

Norr took the bulb from him, replacing it carefully in the crate with its fellows. “We are Isyr craftsmen, Captain. We don’t make bulbs.”

“So you don’t know?”

Norr took a breath, irritation replacing the wary respect. “What do you want, Captain? We are very busy.”

Tais glanced towards the door to the silent workshop. “You don’t look busy.”

A flicker of uncertainty crossed the man’s face. “We are waiting for someone.”

“Eirik Hagan?” Tais asked, watching Norr from the corner of his eye. “You’ll be waiting a long time. He’s dead.”

There was a long, taut silence. Tais abandoned his pretence and turned an assessing gaze on Norr. Shock was etched deep, cutting through the man’s self-assurance, stealing words. Shock, but not grief.

He was not popular, with his customers or his employees. But he is—was—brilliant. The kind of brilliant that comes along once in a generation. And that kind of skill in a man like that breeds enemies.

Norr cleared his throat. “How?”

Tais leaned against the desk, crossing his arms to relieve the ache in his right. “We’re still determining that.” He volunteered nothing else.

Norr looked away from him, back to the workshop. Vir’s notes said Norr was a master craftsman in his own right. Hagan’s shop had three, in addition to Hagan himself. Unlike other trades, Isyr craftsmen rarely left the shop they trained in, even after they attained mastery, such was the history and reputation of the established businesses.

Hagan’s was the biggest, the richest, and most famous of them all, in large part because of his immense talent. And Hagan was dead.

“What happens now?” he asked.

Norr focused on him, confused. “Excuse me?”

“To this place? Now Hagan’s dead. Who’s in charge?”

Norr looked around vaguely, still deep in shock. That much appeared to be genuine. “I don’t know.”

Tais straightened. “You don’t know?” He let his scepticism show. The future of such a wealthy business would surely not be left to chance.

“Eirik never formalised who would succeed him. He liked us to… that is, he was not ready to think about such things.”

In other words, he had enjoyed letting the other masters jostle for favour. Abrasive, suspicious, controlling. Tais suspected Norr could add several other less polite words to that list. “There must be a process, surely?” he pressed. “Who is the next most senior here?”

Norr met his eyes with a flicker of unease. “I am, but I didn’t…”

“Didn’t what?”

Silence.

“What about Hagan’s widow?” Tais asked, changing the subject before Norr could clam up. “What does she get?”

“Ineta?” There was genuine warmth in Norr’s voice, which was interesting. “She is entitled to a pension, of course, but she has no say in what happens next. Where there is no appointed successor, the guild will make the choice. It is, ah, unusual, but it has happened before.”

It had, Tais knew. He had read Vir’s notes. All of them. Ten years ago, give or take, the master of one of the other major houses had died suddenly not long after taking over. When the guild appointed the new master, the more senior of the two had left and set up on her own, not far from here. Before that, she had been an apprentice in this very workshop. A career path so unusual that Vir had considered it worthy of mention.

Norr asked, “Ineta. Does she know?”

Tais cocked his head, studying the man. “When did you last see Hagan?”

Norr blinked, surprised. “What? Yesterday. In the evening. We closed the shop together. Why?”

“Where was he going when you left him?”

“To see a client.” The words grated, annoyance winning out over fear. “Why are you asking?”

Tais took a bulb from the crate, tossing it in the air and catching it left-handed. “Because the emperor would like to know what happened. Which client?”

Norr blanched. “Eirik. Was he… Did someone…?”

Tais laid the bulb down. “He was robbed and killed last night, his body dumped in the canal.” There was no point concealing that titbit. The rumour would be all over the city within hours.

“Yholis have mercy!” Norr sat. He looked stunned, fearful. As well he might. “Who would do that?”

“That is what I am endeavouring to find out. Did you notice anything unusual in his behaviour?”

Norr gave his head an abstracted shake. “No, nothing. He was his usual self.”

Tais sighed. This was going to be difficult. “Nothing at all? What was he working on? Any special commissions?”

“Any special…? No, I don’t think so.” Then Norr paused, his eyes flicking towards the desk. “Actually, there is something.”

He regained his feet, only a little shaky, and crossed to the desk. From a drawer he lifted a long, leather-wrapped bundle. “It’s not a new commission, but it’s certainly special.”

As Tais watched curiously, Norr unrolled the leather cloth with something close to reverence. When he saw what was inside, Tais couldn’t blame him.

He was no stranger to Iysr. In Qido, a city that had built its vast wealth on the most precious of metals, Isyr was everywhere. Even so, there was something hypnotic about the pair of blades that Norr slid free from their plain sheaths and laid on Hagan’s work bench. A sword and its matching parrying dagger. Their design was simple and beautiful, the slender blade of the longer weapon tapering to a lethal point that could skewer a man clean through. Unadorned, they were as far from plain as anything Tais had ever seen. Everything from the elegant, clever hilts to the clean sweep of the blades was as close to perfection as human hands could craft.

“Beautiful, no?” Norr said, with a knowing smile. “Go on.”

Tais needed no second invitation, reaching out to run his fingers down the cool, smooth metal. “Is it true,” he asked, “that Isyr steel never loses its edge?”

“Never dulls, never blunts. Never nicks,” Norr confirmed with all the pride of a new father. “You could take this sword into a hundred fights and it would look as perfect as the day it was made.”

There was longing as well as pride in Norr’s voice. Isyr did that to you, Tais had heard, its intense allure part of what made it so precious. As his hand closed around the silver-blue hilt, he could believe it. For an instant, there was nothing he would not give to possess these weapons. The sword’s hilt fitted his hand as though it had been made for him. The injury to his right arm had damaged more than just the muscles. His fingers went numb at odd times, his hand drooping at the wrist when he was tired, and he could no longer reliably use a weapon. Even after five years, he had not gained the same skill with his left. But this sword—even in his left hand, he felt whole.

Tais raised his arm, holding the slender blade out, so perfectly balanced it was almost weightless.

“What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Tais sliced the blade through a series of forms, marvelling in its effortless movement “It’s a work of art.”

He had never used this type of sword. It was better suited to single combat than the brutality of the battlefield. A nobleman’s blade, too delicate for his brand of killing, or so he’d always thought. He preferred a sturdier cut-and-thrust weapon. But holding that perfect blade, he was quite sure it would do whatever was required of it. In the hands of a skilled, agile swordsman, this would be a devastating weapon indeed.

Norr held out his hand and Tais reluctantly relinquished the blade.

“Hagan made these?” he asked as Norr replaced the sword beside its matching dagger.

Norr shook his head. “These were made more than a hundred years ago by Stevan Baard for the great-grandfather of their current owner. He thinks they are too plain for today’s fashions and commissioned Eirik to embellish them.”

The disgust in Norr’s voice was palpable, the words curdling on his tongue. Tais had seen the elaborate swept hilts and engraved blades worn by those in the Silks who had never used a sword in true combat in their lives. The thought of altering the beauty of these weapons to look like that—it was unthinkable, abhorrent.

Then the name registered and he sucked in a disbelieving breath. “Stevan Baard? Stevan the Smith? These are the Ado blades?”

Norr nodded and Tais resisted the urge to punch something. “Who knows these are here?” Because the Ado blades represented not just a fortune in Isyr, they were also among the most famous weapons made by Stevan Baard, the first Isyr craftsman and the most renowned master of his art who had ever lived. More than that, the blades themselves had a history of scandal that stretched back almost to the day they were made. The names of the men they had killed—and who had killed with them—filled a whole page in one of Vir’s meticulous record books.

Norr gave a small shrug. “Eirik told me about the commission when he received it, but everyone in the shop knew the blades were here. This is a school as well as a business, Captain,” he pointed out at Tais’s evident surprise. “These are the foremost examples of our craft. Eirik showed them to all the apprentices, and you can be sure they told their friends and families. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole quarter knows.”

“Wonderful.” If the whole quarter knew, make that the entire city. The most valuable items of Isyr in the whole of Qido—the whole of Ellasia—were wrapped in a couple of layers of scrap leather in the drawer of an old man’s desk, and everyone in the city knew it. “How long have they been here?”

Again, Norr shrugged. He seemed amused. “Four months? Six? Eirik, he… he couldn’t bring himself to do the work. Every time he got them out… Well, let’s just say, he wasn’t pleasant company until he put them away again. He hadn’t looked at them for weeks until yesterday, otherwise I would not have thought of them.”

That was interesting. “And their owner…?”

“Otto Kranz.’”

“Right, him. He wasn’t getting impatient?”

“Oh yes. He’s furious. We had a man here last week about it. You could hear their argument from the shop floor.”

“A man?” Tais asked. “Who was he?”

Norr frowned. “I don’t know his name. He’s been here before. He may have been the man who delivered the blades. I’m sorry. This is a busy shop and the Ado blades were Eirik’s commission.”

That did not ring true. They might have been Hagan’s commission, but Tais doubted very much that Norr hadn’t paid close attention to everything connected to them. He was the most senior master after Hagan himself, and these blades were as much his problem as they had been Hagan’s. Their very presence here changed everything.

He thought about where Hagan’s body had been found, halfway between the craft quarter and the merchants’ district. “The client he went to see last night. Was it Kranz?” The man managed one of the biggest Isyrium mining operations in Qido. His company was always nipping at the heels of the army’s territorial expansion, misery following wherever they went as they funnelled wealth and resources back to Qido and its emperor. And to Kranz. Especially to Kranz. Tais disliked him on principle, even without his unpleasant reputation.

Norr’s face creased into a frown. He nodded.

Of course it was.

“I need to know the name of everyone who knew where these were kept,” he told Hagan, bundling the blades back inside the leather cloth. Kranz had a lot of enemies. “And a copy of Hagan’s client list. In fact,” he added, “all your client lists.”

He tucked the blades under his arm before Norr could stop him.

There was something close to panic in the craftsman’s eyes. “What are you doing? You can’t take them.”

“I can,” Tais assured him. “Hagan may have been killed for these. You want to keep them here?”

“But who would do that, Captain?” Norr asked, his face a picture of confusion and dismay. “They’ve been here for months and we’ve never had any trouble. We have the protection of the emperor.”

So do I, Tais thought bitterly, and that never stopped anyone trying to kill me.