A Discourse in Steel Read Online Free PDF

Quiet.”
    They fell silent and tried to listen over the sounds of their own beating hearts and gasps. Sobs from the left.
    “There,” Nix said, and pulled Egil along behind him. He pointed with the light, its beam a faint, diffuse glow, and saw Drugal. The professor lay on the ground on his side, half submerged in the dark, spongy earth. Tendrils of it snaked up his arms and face like black veins, like roots. It was as if he were being slowly absorbed by the ground. He had his hands over his eyes and his body shook with sobs. He murmured something unintelligible.
    “Gods,” Nix said. He kneeled and put his hand on the professor’s shoulder. “Professor Drugal!”
    The presence grew closer, stronger, darker.
    “Nix!” Egil warned.
    “I know.” Nix shook Drugal. “Drugal!”
    Nix tried to roll the professor over but he was stuck. Nix tried harder, heard a wet ripping sound, and the professor screamed with agony. Nix put the crystal eye right up to the professor’s body and almost puked.
    The earth—or whatever it was—had merged with his flesh, the spongy, black substance growing into his skin and into his body. Nix pried one of the professor’s hands from his face. His eyes were gone, replaced by a nest of black, scaly tendrils that presumably snaked up into his brain. Much of his body must have been filled by the writhing appendages.
    Nix thought of himself and Egil going out that way and the idea nearly overwhelmed him, but he pushed it away.
    “Nix, it’s coming,” Egil said.
    “I can’t leave him like this,” Nix said.
    “So don’t,” Egil said meaningfully. “Don’t.”
    Nix took his point.
    “Sorry,” he said to his old professor. He stood and stabbed Drugal through the chest. The professor’s entire body spasmed, and black ichor rather than blood oozed from the wound. But at least the weeping stopped. Nix hoped he found peace.
    Nix looked back into the darkness where lurked a horror. He saw nothing, but he sensed it there, awesome and terrible and sinister.
    “Come on,” he said to Egil.
    Together, they hurried off but Nix quickly realized he had no idea where his magefire beacons were. He didn’t know in which direction they were heading. They could’ve been going in circles.
    “Nix,” Egil said, tension thick in his voice.
    “I know.”
    “We have to go.”
    “I know.”
    “Which way?” Egil said. “Which way?”
    “I don’t know! I can’t see the damned lights! I need to think!”
    The presence closed on them. Another warm breeze blew over them, the exhalation of reified terror. Nix fought down thoughts that bubbled from the dark parts of himself.
    “Then think on the run!” Egil said, and grabbed him and pulled him along. They staggered and stumbled along in the darkness, the lurker looming large in their thoughts.
    “I don’t see any lights!” Egil said.
    “We don’t need the lights,” Nix said, and stopped.
    “What?”
    “It feeds on sorrow, on self-loathing, regret. We’re going to give it the opposite.”
    “What? You’re not making sense.”
    “Yes I am. Turn around. Face it. And shove everything pleasing and happy back into its face.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “We’re going to make it spit us out, Egil.”
    “The fak?”
    “Do it.”
    As one, they stopped, turned around, and faced the emptiness, faced the fact that they’d done things and thought things that shamed them.
    The darkness was utter, a black curtain, and cold, and coming, and the something that lurked within it was terrible and old and hateful, the embodiment and sum of the regrets and spite and shame of who knew how many poor souls trapped within.
    Nix realized all that, realized the force of the creature he faced, held his ground, and smiled. He turned his thoughts mostly to Mamabird, but he thought too of friends he’d known and loved and with whom he’d laughed, he thought of Kiir’s smile, of Tesha’s well-intentioned anger, he thought of a stray dog he’d befriended in