Hammer’s Rest: Episode 2 — “Steam and Sanctuary”
The door held a moment before it gave, swollen shut from disuse, the air behind it old and closed-in. Under the dust, steam and minerals, faint but there, the bathhouse already working its way in.
Durnar stopped two steps in, head tipping back, and blew a long breath at the ceiling. “Disaster,” he said. “Complete disaster.” He drew a finger across the table and held it up. “Months.”
“I’ve slept in worse.”
“You won’t sleep in this.” He turned back toward the tavern. “Come. Linens, cleaning supplies. I’ll show you where everything is.”
They passed through the tavern and into the bathhouse. A storage alcove sat on the far side of the deck, above the garden and the hot spring pools. The space was narrow enough that reaching for a shelf meant leaning past each other. Durnar moved around him as though it were twice the size. Salt was less practiced. Each time Salt reached past, Durnar’s heat met his forearm first. The lantern caught the red of his beard. His jaw shifted as he read the shelves. Durnar’s tunic left his arms bare to the shoulder, the hair on his forearms damp with steam, the thick muscle rolling under bronze skin each time he lifted a stack of linen down.
Salt tucked his elbows in. Years of physical work, dense in the shoulders, soft through the middle, past caring how it looked. Here, he did.
“Grab that bucket. We can fill it in the tavern on the way back,” Durnar said without looking at him.
Back at the apartment, Salt took the corners first, working outwards, the way he’d once gone over a hull, joint by joint, nothing left unchecked. Durnar hauled the mattress outside to beat the dust from it, calling through the window that Salt could take the shelves if the floor could wait.
They made up the bed from opposite sides. Durnar’s hand found the small of Salt’s back to steer him aside. Salt’s shoulders pulled in before he registered the touch. Durnar’s expression didn’t change. He moved on.
Salt set the globe on the windowsill, where the last light would reach it, and hung the knife’s belt from a peg by the door, within reach of the bed. His own order.
Clean now, the apartment, late afternoon light lying across the floor between them. Nowhere obvious to go next.
“Much better. Now you have a proper place for the night.”
“You and Frerin didn’t have to do this.”
“You’re helping us out too. The bathhouse is quieter before the evening rush,” Durnar said. “Come see it.”
Salt caught the globe up off the windowsill on his way out, dropped the chain over his head, and followed.
Salt had been in communal baths before. Ship baths were rough wooden affairs smelling of saltwater and lye. A public house in Neptun he had stumbled into once, half-frozen, and the water there had come near to a miracle.
Durnar stopped at the deck railing above the garden. The last light was going out of the sky, and the crystals set among the plants had come alight, brighter as the dark came on. Steam stood over the water in the cooling air. Below, the pools were filling, men coming down from the tavern in twos and threes, towels over their shoulders or left behind at the changing rooms. They took the stairs down.
At the bottom Durnar nodded him toward the largest pool. “Hold your hand over the water.”
Salt did. The heat rose against his palm in a dense column, deeper than any galley stove. His ribs opened around the next breath, the first full one since Neptun.
“The communal pool. Full mineral. The water moves through limestone a long way before it comes up here.” Durnar set two fingers on a stone ledge just under the surface. “Sit here if your back wants it. Low enough to rest without swimming.” Salt’s eyes went to the ledge and stayed there before he brought them up.
The garden had its own business going on around them, and Salt read it slow, then all at once. An old dwarf lay back against the pool’s rim with both arms spread along the stone, the grey pelt of his chest running down into the water, his gaze travelling over each new arrival on the steps. A half-elf climbed out of the far pool as Salt looked, water sheeting down a long back and the slack weight of his cock, the points of his ears showing through wet dark hair, taking his time about the towel. Two more stood close in the shallows, a lean elf at another man’s back, a word going low against a pointed ear, a hand resting easy on a hip. By the far wall, where the ferns grew tall and the crystal light gave out, a shape moved that was two shapes, and a sound came from there that climbed and broke off. No one turned a head.
The check-in wanted Durnar, a guest and a lost room key, and he went up the stairs. He left Salt the deck, the pools, and the reading of which men wanted a hand and which wanted the dark.
Salt took an empty basket along the water, gathering cups. The work gave his hands something while his eye learned the place.
A dwarf in the second pool had been watching him since the stairs.
Salt caught it on the turn, the way he had learned to catch a change in the water off the bow. Broad and barrel-chested, the beard on him dark and dripping, the hair climbing thick up his shoulders and matting his chest above the waterline. Heavy through the arms, heavier through the belly, both forearms folded along the rim. The mineral water sat clear, and through it the dark fur of his gut ran down to the heavy hang of his cock against one thigh. His eyes came up Salt’s body from boot to belt to chest and met Salt’s own without sliding off.
Salt held it, then took the cups to the next bench. When he came back the dwarf was still on him. This time Salt let the look sit a breath before he broke it. The dwarf shifted along the pool wall, an arm’s reach nearer the steps, and set his forearms on the stone. A space stood empty beside him where he had been, the water moving in it. He raised his chin a fraction toward it.
Heat gathered low in Salt, sudden and certain, his trousers no friend to him now. He set the basket down.
He crossed to the pool and crouched at the lip, close enough to see the dwarf’s eyes were pale in the dark of his face. “Cup?” Salt said. His voice came lower than he meant it.
“When you’re done with them.” A palm came out of the water and settled over Salt’s boot, then his ankle, wet heat soaking through the leather. Nothing past that.
Salt left it. The dwarf’s thumb worked once along the bone of the ankle, and the pull of it ran straight up the inside of Salt’s leg.
“First night,” Salt said.
“I gathered.” One corner of his mouth lifted. His hand stayed. “The offer keeps.” He tilted his head toward the back of the garden, where the planting closed over the dark. “For when it’s not.”
Durnar’s voice carried down from the deck, his name and a stack of linen wanting a second pair of arms.
The dwarf drew his hand back into the water and let him go, eyes staying on him a moment, banked.
Salt picked the basket up and climbed to the deck. Evening light lay gold over the pools, steam rising into it as the air cooled, and along the walls the tile figures held the last of the day. His fingers found the globe at his chest.
He stood in it longer than he meant to.
A man came from the storage alcove with an armful of clean towels and nearly walked into him. Pointed ears past a fall of green hair, coming loose near his jaw. Warm brown eyes, olive skin. He rocked back a half step and got the stack level again.
“Oh, sorry. You must be Salt. Frerin told me you were joining us.” He hitched the towels against his chest. “Elian. Next door.”
“Word travels fast on a ship this size,” he said. “You work here?”
“I tend the garden. The herbs, mostly. Some plants respond better to specific handling.” He tilted his head toward the wall. “And I made those.”
Salt looked. Figures in steam and pale light: human, dwarf, elf, gnome, set into the stone wherever the climbing plants gave room. A half-orc man in the water up to his shoulders, eyes closed and head back, his broad hands resting palm-up on the stone. An older dwarven man at the pool’s lip, scarred forearms across his knees, feet in the water, eyes open on the middle distance. An elf with knees pulled to his chest, half-submerged, pointed ear-tips just above the waterline. A gnome in the communal pool, white beard fanned out on the water, bald crown bright above it.
At the far wall, a human man, broad and bearded, his eyes on the rising steam. Salt had seen that same set of shoulders on men three days out from port once they’d finally let themselves believe the worst of the crossing was behind them.
“What do they represent?” Salt asked.
Elian didn’t look away from the wall. “What I see when nobody’s watching for once.”
Salt studied the bearded man. The set of the shoulders. “Did you put yourself into any of them?”
Elian laughed. “Once. Frerin dared me.” Moving again, towels balanced. “I’m not telling you which one.”
By full dark, the tavern had emptied itself into the bathhouse. Durnar set him to towels, to locking up guests’ belongings, to reading which men wanted help and which wanted to be left alone.
His rounds took him back past the mosaics, and both times his eyes went to the bearded man on the far wall, large and unbothered.
The pools filled. The changing rooms smelled of mineral water and cedar oil, and carried the low talk of men at rest. Salt restocked the hooks, found someone’s mislaid sandals and put them back where they belonged, held the door from the tavern to the deck for two men arguing cheerfully about a dock-side card game.
A dwarven man with a silver beard asked where the communal pool ran hottest. Salt didn’t know, so he found Elian. Garden dirt still on his hands, a stack of linen under one arm. Elian answered without looking up, already reaching for the next load.
The man made his way to the pool and lowered himself in by slow degrees, chin lifting as the water took his weight.
Mid-rush, Salt carried an empty jug of ale back through the tavern. A man ahead of him, making for the bar. Dock shift still on him. Thick through the chest and shoulders, green-tinged skin and short tusks, rope-worked hands. He crossed the floor without a glance at the room, nodded to Frerin, and took a stool.
Salt set the jug down.
“New?”
“Staying in the apartment by the gate.”
Frerin poured without asking and leaned on the counter. “Salt’s with us now.” He nodded between them. “Brondar Ironfist. Been a regular here for many years.” He took the empty jug to refill it.
“Salt.”
Brondar let the silence sit before he spoke. “What did you sail?”
Salt looked at him.
“You’ve got the bearing,” Brondar said, wrapping both hands around his glass. “Dock men get it too.”
“The Seafarer’s Glory.”
“Deep-water carrack. Feldport-built.” Brondar turned the glass a quarter turn. “I unloaded one of her sisters last spring on the western run.”
“Then you know the hold ladders.”
“I know the bruises.” The laugh came up from low in his chest. “Whoever laid those out never carried a crate in his life.”
“You work the Dantan coast?”
“Some years. There’s a harbormaster down there who counts every cargo three times.”
“And trusts none of the counts.”
“That’s the man.” Brondar’s grin showed a flash of tusk. “Still at it. Meaner now, they say.”
They kept on. The stretch of the Wilds that went quiet two summers back and stayed that way. The storm year the western passage closed for three weeks and held every ship at Port Klim. Brondar had worked the docks through all of it, Salt the water.
They didn’t land on a moment they had shared. The timing was off by years either way.
Brondar drained his glass and stood. “The Glory still running?”
“She was when I walked off her.”
“They mostly are.” He left with a nod to Frerin. The stool remained empty behind him.
He refilled two glasses near the end of the bar and made a slow circuit of the pools. In the communal pool, a black-bearded man stood to wring the water from his hair, arms up, crystal light on his back and the heavy line of his waist.
Salt’s hand went to his temple and pressed the headband flat. Still there, still holding. He lowered it before Durnar could see.
The rush ebbed. The pools thinned to a last few bathers.
He crossed the deck with an empty basket. The quiet had come down over the garden and the pools, steam still rising off the water below, and he stopped where he was.
The lanterns along the deck had brightened as the sky darkened, amber and gold, turning the steam to gauze. Below, the water moved in slow currents from no obvious source. Minerals and green things, eucalyptus and something faintly sweet Salt couldn’t name. Outside the walls the city went on, hushed to cart wheels, bell chimes, voices trailing home.
A footfall on the deck behind him. Durnar took the railing a foot away. He looked down at the garden.
“How did you know how to make it?” Salt asked.
“I didn’t. The springs told me where the heat wanted to go. Frerin worked the surrounding stone. My father did the rest.”
They stood in silence. Below, the last bathers drifted toward the tavern and the changing rooms. The fig tree at the far end had gone dark. Durnar pointed it out, mentioned the year he had planted it, and said it had nearly died the second winter. He had sat with it. Talked to it a little. Brought it indoors that year and put it by the kitchen fire. Salt listened and left the quiet alone.
When Durnar turned back inside, his hand closed over Salt’s shoulder. It stayed there, the heat of his palm through the fabric, working into the muscle beneath. Salt didn’t move. Durnar’s thumb pressed once, lightly, then his hand dropped, and he was gone through the door. Salt’s shoulder kept it.
Salt stood alone on the deck, the first stars out above the garden. He stayed, counting them as they arrived. Five.
Three years since the Gryphon’s Claw, and he had learned to keep the next departure within reach. A ship short of crew, a captain making good time, a reason that made more sense than staying.
Below him the stream ran between the pools, the same few notes it had been making since before he came out here and would go on making after he went in, water finding the one way down it had always found.
He rolled the globe between two fingers once.
The night could have held him a little longer.
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