Hammer’s Rest: Episode 3 — “The Empty Stool”
Frerin was sliding a loaf into the oven when Salt came through. Watch schedules still ran in him, waking him before the light changed and leaving him listening in the dark: the fountain in the courtyard, the particular silence of a city still sleeping, the absence of the ship’s creak he had lived inside most of his adult life. He had dressed and found the kitchen by smell.
A wave of baking-heat rolled across the room. Frerin didn’t look up.
A kettle sat over the low fire, ginger and mint cutting through the yeast rising off the counter. Frerin filled a mug without asking and set it in front of Salt.
“Root and Rise,” he said. “Elian’s blend. My brewing.” He set the kettle back over the fire. “Ginger goes in first or it sulks. The rest is timing.”
Ginger first, sharp enough to open the throat. Spearmint after, cool against it. Lemon verbena underneath both, faint until the last swallow, when it was the only thing left. Salt drank half the mug with his back against the counter.
“Thought you might be an early one.” Frerin nodded toward a peg on the wall where a clean apron hung. “There’s work.”
That was all. Salt put on the apron.
Tables to set, glasses to polish, fires to lay the way Frerin showed him and never explained. Wood stacked at an angle so it could catch and hold through lunch service, not collapse an hour in. The right movement, the right moment, passed hand to hand.
The first guests drifted in as the tables came right. A city guard off the night watch took the end of the bar and put her head down on her arms. Two dwarves argued about a horse one of them had already sold. Salt took what they wanted and carried it back to Frerin, then brought it out again, mugs of Root and Rise, plates from the kitchen, a cup refilled before it ran dry. He learned the round by carrying it.
They worked in near-silence.
Frerin slid a plate in front of Salt. Eggs, bacon, a heel of bread still hot from the oven. “Eat,” he said. “Kitchen’s ahead of itself for once.”
Salt ate standing. The eggs went soft against the bread, the bacon crisp, the crust crackling as he pulled it apart.
“Durnar mentioned you asked good questions last night.” Frerin wiped his hands on his apron.
Salt kept eating.
“He doesn’t always trust people who ask good questions.” Frerin went back to the counter.
Salt ate the rest of the bread.
Brondar came in mid-morning smelling of early air, his walk rolling and loose. He dropped onto a barstool, saw Salt behind the bar, and laughed before he had a word out.
“They put you to work fast.”
Salt set a cup in front of him. Brondar looked at it, then at Salt, and lifted it.
The talk picked up from the night before, lighter in the morning. Brondar knew Port Klim the way Salt knew sea routes, by what wasn’t on the charts. Which captains to deal straight and which to watch at the corners. How dock hierarchy ran, who deferred to whom and why, where unspoken ledgers were kept.
Salt filed all of it where he had once filed charts.
Then Brondar mentioned a trading company out of the eastern harbors, a captain named Duldav, who ran a tight operation.
Salt’s mouth pulled at the corner before he caught it.
“Cargo dispute,” he said. “Six years ago.”
Brondar set down his cup. “You’re the clerk.”
“I’m told I had a poor attitude.”
Brondar laughed loud enough that the man at the corner table looked up. “He still talks about it. Tells it like you cheated him. Swears you found a technicality no one else would’ve known to look for.” He shook his head. “Heard that story three times before I ever came to the docks. Never once thought I’d meet the man.”
“He signed the same contract I read.” Salt refilled Brondar’s cup.
Brondar was still grinning. “Still. The clerk. In Port Klim.”
They sat with that a moment. Brondar sat back and went on grinning at nothing in particular.
The room emptied down to two tables and the smell of the fires going grey. Salt had a crate of bottles half-shelved behind the bar when the door opened.
The dwarf who came through carried a quarterstaff over one shoulder and something small in his free hand. He crossed the room the way a man crosses his own kitchen.
Heavy in the shoulders and arms, the muscle sitting under a layer that had been there a while. Black and red angular symbols ran the length of both forearms, wrist to elbow. Russet beard, thick with beads and silver charms, the hair behind it dark auburn. He set the thing on the bar slowly. A fox, carved from pale wood, the size of Salt’s fist, and moving. Its tail switched back and forth in a slow, pleased arc, one paw lifting and dropping again.
Frerin looked at it. His hands stopped on the towel.
“Breki.”
“I know.” The dwarf dropped onto a stool and the new cushion gave under him. Elbows on the bar. “It’s good. You can say so.”
The fox trotted across the bar top, stopped in front of Salt’s hand, and sniffed at his knuckles. Salt stopped with his hand where it was. Breki grinned.
“That’s his way of deciding. He’ll either approve of you or he won’t. Not much to be done about it either way.”
The fox pressed its carved nose against Salt’s hand once, then turned and walked back toward Frerin’s end of the bar, tail high.
“Breki Stanulf.” He put a hand across the bar. Solid handshake.
“Lyndon Blackwood. Most call me Salt.”
“Salt.” Breki said it back once. “Winter batch, if Frerin’s got it drawn.”
Salt drew it. Breki took the top off the mug and set it down. “Dark. Not badly. Dark like it means it.” He looked down the bar. “Frerin. The cushions. Whose idea.”
“Mine,” Frerin said.
“They’re good. I’m telling you they’re good.” He shifted on the stool twice to prove it. “Four years I sat on a plank.”
Salt polished a glass and let him run.
“Job near the harbor last week. Me and Cormac. Warehouse.” His voice came down half a step. “Complicated. Satisfying.” He drank and left it there.
Frerin went to see to the fires. Breki’s voice dropped low and private.
“So how’s it sitting,” he said. “Being here.”
Salt took a moment with it. “Stranger than I expected. And better.”
Breki nodded. He glanced at the fox, gone quiet beside Frerin’s hand, its carved head turned to the room. “Took me three visits before I stopped waiting for the catch. There’s no catch.”
The door opened again. A wedge of street air came in with it, cold and river-smelling, and the lamp above the lintel swung once.
Breki didn’t turn around. But his shoulder line dropped half an inch, hand settling on his mug and staying.
The man moved quiet for his size, every step set down with care. Tall, dark-haired, he took the room in once and lingered on none of it. He gave Frerin a nod, held Salt’s eyes a moment, then stopped. Short beard, trimmed close, his coat open at the collar and hard-used.
Salt took his measure and went back to the crate.
He took a seat two down from Breki.
Frerin made the introduction from the far end of the bar. Cormac Stone. A nod passed between them before either spoke.
“You favor your right leg,” Cormac said. “Old or new?”
“Old enough.” Salt held his gaze. “Yours?”
“Nothing that shows.”
What he watched instead was Breki.
Breki kept talking. He had a bead in his beard between finger and thumb and he worked it slow while he talked, and he had not once looked at the man two seats down.
The stool between them stayed empty.
Cormac said something low about the warehouse. Breki answered him in half the words he had used on anything else all afternoon.
Cormac thanked Frerin for something, said he had somewhere to be before dark, and left.
Breki watched the door a moment after it closed. Then he lifted his mug. “Good man.” Nothing in his face moved. “Best ranger in the city.” He drank. “Another?”
Salt filled the mug. Breki drank it down like it was the first one.
Salt put the last of the glasses up too fast, twice setting one down hard enough to ring. When Frerin let him go he went looking for Durnar and heavier work. Durnar led him back through the bathhouse garden, past the ferns and the steam curling off the near pools, to a stack of crates against the far wall. Three men had the near hot spring, an elf with his hair pinned up off his neck and two dwarves gone pink to the collarbone. One of the dwarves lifted a hand to him, grey through the chest hair and in no hurry about it, and Salt’s ankle knew the grip before he placed the face.
Cleaning and moving supply crates, rehanging a curtain rail that had pulled loose at one end. None of it required thought. It required his full weight, and he gave it.
They talked more freely than the night before. Durnar asked about the Gryphon’s Claw, what crewing a ship that size was like. Salt could answer. The Gryphon’s Claw, a three-masted carrack, old-built and heavy, a ship that didn’t move so much as proceed. He talked about the rigging, the weight, the sequence you ran when weather came in fast. The sound of a full crew going to stations. The crow’s nest in the early morning with a clear sky, the closest thing to solitude at sea.
Durnar listened. The air around him went damp enough that Salt’s sleeves clung. Partway through he looked over. “You miss it.”
“Parts of it,” he said, after a moment. “Not the parts that ended it.”
Durnar nodded. He didn’t press.
Last crate moved, Salt’s arms held the pleasant ache of used muscle. His hands had set to the shape of the crate and he worked them open. Durnar kept his eyes on the crates. Salt caught them come to his leg once and go away again, and come back twice to his forearms, where the sleeves were rolled past the elbow.
Salt picked up the empty crate and stacked it. His breath came slow and even, the pull of the work still in him.
Durnar sent him to carry the last of it through to the far store. The path ran along the pools, the ferns tall and dark, the crystals in the walls not yet lit.
The plants thinned before the far pool and left nothing between him and the two men in it. A dwarf and a lean human, close in against the ledge. The human had the dwarf backed into the stone, a hand fisted in the beard, and they were kissing like they had somewhere to be and had decided not to go. The dwarf’s laugh broke against the human’s mouth, and then went out of him altogether.
Salt should have kept walking. He set the crate down instead. Their shoulders and beards stood above the waterline, the water breaking where they pressed together. Whatever went on below it showed only in the dwarf’s head going back and his breath coming apart. The human’s mouth found his throat.
The heat came up in him and stayed there. His trousers pulled tight across the front. He shifted, pressed the heel of his hand against himself once before he thought better of it, and still didn’t look away.
“Something got you excited?”
Durnar, at his shoulder. Salt hadn’t heard him come back. Durnar’s eyes went from the far pool to the front of Salt’s trousers and stayed there, a grin working up into his beard.
“They put on a good show,” Salt said.
“They usually do.” The heat off Durnar had its own weight this close. He made no move to step back, and none to pretend he was looking anywhere but where he was looking. “House rule. You’re allowed to enjoy it.” The grin widened. “Looks like you took it to heart.”
Salt held his ground, the ache of the work and the ache of the watching both still in him. “Hard not to.”
Durnar laughed, low, and clapped Salt once on the shoulder, the broad hand staying a breath past the clap. “Good,” he said. “That’s the idea.”
The afternoon went into evening and the evening into service. The fires burned down and got fed again, the lamps came up on their own as the light failed, and the room filled with the noise of men who had finished work. Salt carried plates and mugs and learned three more names.
The last four stayed past everyone else, still arguing about the horse.
They took it out the door with them. Frerin shot the bolt behind them and told Salt to leave the glasses.
He didn’t leave the glasses. He put them up, banked the fire, wiped the boards down, and came out onto the porch.
The courtyard had gone quiet enough to hear both fountains. Someone had barred the front gate while he was inside. The lanterns on either side of it were still burning, the way they had been since the light went, laying their gold out across the packed earth.
He came down the steps and crossed to his own door, and sat in the chair he kept beside it with the driftwood.
Pale and smooth on one side, rough on the other where the sea had worn the outer layer away. He hadn’t remembered packing it. Couldn’t have said why he had kept it.
He opened his knife and found the grain.
Durnar had called it a house rule. You’re allowed to enjoy it.
Salt turned the wood, following the line, taking off little pieces at a time.
He wondered what the others were. Nobody had handed him a list. But Frerin had put a mug in front of him before he asked for one and a plate in front of him before he said he was hungry, and had not once asked what brought him to Port Klim. That was a rule of some kind. Breki had told him there was no catch, and Breki had taken three visits to stop waiting for one.
The fox had sniffed his knuckles and decided. Nobody had asked the fox to explain itself either.
He got a curve out of the wood that hadn’t been there before, and stopped to look at it.
The empty stool. Breki’s voice dropping, and the door swinging shut behind Cormac, and the beads gone still in his beard.
Salt worked at the grain a while longer.
The two men in the far pool came back to him last, the steam and the water breaking where they pressed together, and the heat came with them and settled where it had settled all afternoon. The only thing anyone had said to him about it afterward was that he was allowed.
After a while he stopped carving and looked out.
Something moved at the edge of his vision, barely anything. A shift of shadow past the reach of the lantern light, there and gone. He held his head where it was and let the corner of his eye do the work.
Whatever it was, it watched him back.
The gate was barred. It had not come in that way.
Salt watched the dark until nothing moved in it at all. Then he folded the knife, put the driftwood under his arm, and went inside.