Scar Night Page 0,17

or the way he trudged past with his jaw set and fists swinging at his sides like he wanted to punch someone. He might have, too, had they not been quick to avoid him.

He had meant to go straight back to the League, meant to go home and lose himself in a bottle, but somehow his boots led him on east of Merrygate, to the warrens of the weapon smiths.

To support all the forges and the heavy stone, there were more chains here than elsewhere in the Warrens, yet there seemed no sense to them, no way to see how they all connected. The smiths themselves had gone to work on these chains, adding to them, linking them, strengthening old iron with new, so Mr. Nettle found he had to duck and weave to get through. Huge staples, as big your arm, bound one chain to another, or were bolted to links where the welds had split. Great pins drove up through the cobbles or through walls, and in places there was nothing but iron underfoot. This resulted in a tangle of metal that the smallest breath of wind set quivering and singing—a song that might be heard for miles in the deep darkness below the streets.

Blacklung Lane was rightly named. Soot covered the brick in a foul fur. When you breathed you tasted coal and felt you could scrape it from your mouth, and when you spat you looked to check if it was black. Smithies packed the lane on both sides. Smoke from the forges boiled through pipes in the walls and then hung in a seething canopy between the buildings. Rusty wrought-iron signs hung over the doors, all swinging and creaking though there was no breeze. The sun had barely burned away the dawn mists, but already the place was bustling. A constant stream of porters shuffled past, carrying coal, wood, and heavy crates of raw or worked metal. The whole lane shook with their footsteps. With Scar Night looming, folks had woken early to make the best of the day, eager to get their work done before the coming sunset.

Iron rang. Steel clattered. Fires roared. Shovels scraped and men sweated. Hammers beat anvils, clang, clang, clang, and Mr. Nettle pushed on past the porters, through the chains, and ducked inside a low door on one side of the lane.

Two men with flame-reddened skin were stoking the furnace. A third leaned over an anvil, working the steel of a red-hot sword.

“What?” this man said without looking up.

“I’ve come to trade,” Mr. Nettle said.

The man gave him a quick glance without pausing in his work.

“What for what?”

Mr. Nettle told him.

The man snorted. “Next door,” he said.

Laughter followed Mr. Nettle out.

And so he went from door to door, from furnace to furnace, from scowl to scowl. The smiths’ laughter spread down the lane like a plague, and the calls, earnest as some were, were all the same: Next door, Next door . Of the many smiths on Blacklung Lane, none would offer more than fourpence for the cleaver and none would accept it as trade for what he needed. By the time he reached the end of the lane, the laughs, the calls, and the pounding of metal threatened to split his skull.

Blacklung Lane ended in a slump where it had come loose from the chains. It might slide into the abyss next week, or in a year, but then sometimes slipped lanes stayed this way for good, and people nearby just made do. Rubbish had gathered in festering piles where the rain had washed it down the slope. The last smithy of all hung in an impossible cradle of chain and girders, all meshed together like a great iron bonfire tied up with cable and rope. The door was skewed, half obscured by crates, so Mr. Nettle had to climb through with difficulty.

The smith had his anvil propped to one side on a stone slab to make it level, and worked away at it with a mighty hammer, pounding a spike of hot iron so hard it seemed like every strike would bring the whole lane toppling down. He was old for a smith, his muscles thin and knotted, his face creased with years of grime. By the light of the forge his skin looked flayed and roasted. When Mr. Nettle’s shadow fell over him, he looked up and said, “So it’s a hard bargain, then? No one comes here who will pay what the others ask of