Nightsworn | The Whispering Wall #2

Fourteen: Bisa

Patrolling with Nika was a very different experience to patrolling with Yddris; for one, Nika liked to talk, and didn't fill the air with smoke that made Jordan's knees weak as they walked.

"You'll like the light season," he was saying. They patrolled the leisure quarter, Bisa, which lay adjacent to the merchants' quarter. The Night Fire had been set in its main plaza when the Hallow Festival had taken place, but aside from that Jordan had seen very little of it. It was a different place in the quiet times, the large stretches of cobbles glittering in the cold and the windows dark in many of the buildings. "It's very beautiful here when it's light and the demons aren't nearly as much of a menace."

Jordan hadn't seen anything in Nictaven he would have called particularly beautiful, perhaps with the exception of a temple – or a girl - but he kept his mouth shut.

"Yddris will take you to the Guildtown, of course, but you'll be back to see some of the Light Fayre."

Jordan glanced at him sidelong. "Are you not coming?"

"Yddris needs me to stand in for him up at the castle," Nika said, sounding faintly regretful. Then his voice brightened again. "But I've been back far more often than he has, so it's only fair. And he'll certainly find it harder not to spend more time training with you if he's got nowhere to vanish off to."

"There is that." Jordan sighed. Yddris's timetable was far from the biggest obstacle to his training, but he could hardly say so.

"You'll like it there," Nika said, after a pause. "I know I keep saying it, but it really does start to feel like home after you've been in service for a while."

Jordan could tell Nika was trying to make him feel better, but a sour mood had settled on him since the previous night that he hadn't been able to shake. As they left the plaza and walked down a narrow side-street lined with curtained windows and signs that Nika refused to translate for him, he tried to think of how he might break the news to Grace without her binding him hand and foot and hiding him in a cupboard.

"Well met, gentlemen," a voice called from a nearby doorway. Before Jordan could look properly, Nika had a firm hand on his shoulder and was leading him away. Ren growled, picking up on Jordan's surprise. Men and women lounged in front of the few buildings that were open, calling them over for business and making bawdy comments. Finally cottoning on to what Harkenn meant when he had banned 'disreputable' businesses from the plaza, Jordan kept his head down and walked without stopping, face blazing.

"Sorry, Thorne," Nika said, as they turned off into a much quieter road. "It's a bit of a shortcut but I forgot how...intense it can be."

"S'alright," Jordan muttered, trying to scrub the image of the naked man whose eye he'd met by accident from his mind. "Bit early for that kind of business, isn't it?"

"Is it?" Nika asked mildly. "There's little difference at this time of year."

Jordan supposed he had a point.

They passed gambling dens and more pleasure houses, walked through drifting clouds of blackweed and knots of people gathered on the few rune-marked roads. It was empty of demons, aside from the occasional darting glimpse of a thrall disappearing down an alley or into a broken cellar window.

"It's quiet," Jordan said. Nika seemed just as comfortable with silence as conversation, but his was a hard silence to read and made Jordan slightly nervous. Yddris's silences were surly and brooding; Nika's were simply blank, and it was impossible to guess what he thought or how he felt. "Got Listeners and a Death last night."

"The merchants' quarter has more waste piles to dig through, more residents," Nika said, as if coming back from a long way away. "And despite it always being dark, they still favour the night hours."