Low Town: A Novel

by Daniel Polansky

  It came when he overextended trying for a thrust, and I lashed my club against his wrist. He let out an angry scream but didn’t drop his sword. This fucker was tough as pig iron, but his stoicism, while impressive, wasn’t sufficient to save his life. His hand crippled, he couldn’t maintain our pace and a half minute later he was down from a pair of fatal wounds.

  For a moment I thought we might even pull it off, until I heard the twang of a bowstring and watched Cilliers’s massive frame topple backward, a bolt feather deep in his breast. Now that it was too late, I spotted the assassin cresting the top of the ridge, reloading his crossbow, while his partner, a hulking Dren nearly Adolphus’s size, flanked him with a wicked-looking spiked hammer. Dropping my mace I took a running start and dove into the bowman, knocking the weapon from his grip and sending the two of us hurtling down the embankment. We struggled as we fell, but by the time we stopped rolling I was on top, and I drove the pommel of my trench blade against his skull, till his hold on me slackened and I was able to reverse my grip and pull the edge sharp across his throat.

  I caught my breath, then sprinted back up the hill. When I reached the summit, Saavedra was the only one of us still standing, and barely at that. The Dren giant had him on the outs, the Asher’s intricate style a poor match for the savagery of his opponent. Saavedra’s defenses did, however, provide sufficient distraction for me to close in and hamstring the ogre, nor did my comrade stutter when I provided him an opening, dispatching our remaining enemy with a quick thrust beneath his chin.

  The two of us stood staring at each other, then Saavedra slumped to the ground and I realized he had been tagged, a pool of blood seeping through his leather armor. Flinty bastard hadn’t shown it until the combat was over. “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “Bad,” he responded, with the same unreadable demeanor that had won him half the unit’s wages. I gingerly removed his armor. He winced but didn’t speak.

  Saavedra was right—it was bad. The spiked end of the war hammer had penetrated his intestines. He had a chance if I could get him back to camp. I settled him up against an incline and checked on the rest of my men.

  Dead—no surprises. That bolt had done for Cilliers, an inglorious end for such a valiant soldier. I wanted to bring his flamberge back to base, try and get it to his family somehow—he would have liked that, but it was heavy and I would already be half carrying Saavedra.

  Milligan’s head had been caved in while I was dealing with the enemy bowman. He was never more than average close in. I was glad at least that we had taken care of the bastard with the hammer. I had always liked the friendly little runt. I had always liked both of them, truth be told.

  Saavedra was praying in the dissonant tones of his foreign tongue, the most I had ever heard him speak. It was disquieting, and I wished he would stop but didn’t say anything, unwilling to begrudge a dying man the chance to get right with god.

  I crouched down beside the ridge and scanned the horizon. If another patrol showed, we were fucked. I thought about grabbing Milligan’s crossbow, but it was dark and I was never any good with those things. I wished I had some black powder. I wished that jewel would start working.

  Minutes passed. Saavedra continued his alien monologue. I started to wonder if a passing Dren unit hadn’t greased Carolinus and the sorcerer, leaving me waiting for a climax that wasn’t coming. Then from behind me I heard a sound for which I had no context, followed by a startled gasp from Saavedra. I turned on my heel.

  A wound was forming in the air above the gem, a hole through the universe that bled strange ichor around the edge. I had seen magic before, from the playful chicanery of the Crane to the platoon-killing firepower of a battle hex, but I had never seen anything like this. The rent let loose a high-pitched whistling, almost a cry, and against myself I peered into its depths. Things strange and terrible gazed back at me, vast membranes of eyes swirling in apoplectic frenzy, gaping maws gnashing endlessly in an infinite black void, orifices pulsating erotically, tendrils coiling and uncoiling in the eternal night. The obscene whine babbled to me in a half-intelligible tongue, promising hideous gifts and demanding still more terrible sacrifices.

  As abruptly as it began the noise ended, and a black goo leeched through the rift. It dripped from the entrance into reality, bringing with it a smell so foul I had to choke back vomit, a rot deeper than conception and older than stone. Gradually the slime coalesced, shadowy black robes forming around a bone-white outline. Saavedra made a sound somewhere between a shriek and a sigh and I knew he was dead. I caught a glimpse of the thing’s face, broken-glass eyes above rows and rows of sharp teeth.

  Then it was gone, floating east toward the Dren line. It moved without visible signs of effort, as if propelled by a force external to its body. The stench remained.

  My mind scrambled to regain footing amid the formerly rigid laws of existence. It was touch and go. The knowledge that more Dren patrols lingered in the area—and the suspicion that their sympathy for my mental state as I stood over the corpses of their comrades was likely to be limited—ultimately proved sufficient inducement to get me moving.

  A half second of inspection confirmed that Saavedra was no longer living. He was a grim cur, but he had died like a man, and in the end I had no complaint of his conduct or character. The Ashers believe death in battle is their only path to redemption—on that account his forbidding deity had been well served.

  There wasn’t time for lamentation; there rarely is. Nine men lay dead, and there would be a tenth to add to the tally if I stayed around much longer. I hooked my trench blade through my belt and headed back to check on the sorcerer.

  Adelweid stood at the top of the small dune, his hands planted firmly across his hips, proud as a game bird and twice as pretty. “Did you see it? You must have—you were so near the epicenter. You have been allowed a glimpse into the realms that lie beyond ours, seen the tissue-thin walls between this world and the next separate before your very eyes. Do you realize how lucky you are?”

  Slumped against a small gray boulder was Carolinus. A pair of Dren soldiers were sprawled a few feet in front of him, joining their enemy in repose. “What happened to him?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t receive much of an answer.

  Adelweid’s reverie broke momentarily. “Who—oh, my guardian. He’s dead.” The sorcerer turned flush toward me now, excitement in his voice, the closest to human I’d yet seen him. “But his sacrifice was not in vain! My mission was successful, and across this shattered plain I can feel my comrades were as well! You are doubly blessed, Lieutenant, for you are privileged to stand watch at the collapse of the Dren Commonwealth!”

  When I didn’t say anything, he turned back in the general direction of his creations, watching as the occasional burst of lightning illuminated the landscape. In the distance I could see waves of the things move steadily eastward. Adelweid was right—from far out there was something ethereal and even somehow beautiful about the things. But the memory of that horrible stench, and the sound Saavedra made as his heart went out, were still fresh, and I didn’t share Adelweid’s conceit that what I had seen was anything less than an abomination before the Oathkeeper and all the Daevas.

  Then the screams started—a chorus of them erupting from across the Dren line. In combat the sounds of death are mixed with those of battle, the shrieks of the wounded merging with the clash of steel and the eruption of cannon fire. But the final sounds of the Dren were undiluted by any other noise, and a thousand times more terrible for that fact. Adelweid’s smile widened.

  I knelt down beside Carolinus. He had done his duty, then bled out while the sorcerer performed horrors in the darkness nearby. His trench blade lay broken at his side and his eyes were open. I closed them and took his damaged weapon in my hand. “Once you’ve summoned these things your job is finished?”

  Adelweid was still staring east, at the terrible devastation his creature and its brethren were spreading, something between lust and pride on his face. “Once
called, the creatures will complete their missions and then fade back to their world.” He was so engrossed in the carnage that he paid no attention as I took up a spot beside him, and scarcely more when I put Carolinus’s shattered weapon through his exquisitely tailored coat. His scream was subsumed in the sounds echoing off the Dren lines. I withdrew the blade and tossed it aside. Adelweid’s corpse rolled awkwardly down the hill.

  I figured somebody was owed for Saavedra and the rest, and if I couldn’t get any higher up the chain, Adelweid would do. And I figured the world would be better off without him.

  I slipped back to our lines and reported a successful mission, albeit one with a high casualty rate. The major was not concerned with our losses, neither my men nor the sorcerer. It was a big night, the eve before the final charge that would break the back of the Dren Republic, and there was much to prepare. At dawn I formed my platoon up as part of an all-out attack, the kind that should have taken us ten thousand men to pull off. But their defense was piecemeal, whole sectors of the enemy trenches containing nothing but dead men, bodies contorted horribly, the source of their demise uncertain in the full light of morning. The remaining Dren were too scattered and disheartened to muster much resistance.

  That afternoon General Bors accepted the capitulation of the capital city, and the next day he received the unconditional surrender of Wilhelm van Agt, last and greatest Steadholder of the United Dren Commonwealth.

  It ain’t the way they tell it on Remembrance Day, and I don’t imagine it’ll ever make the storybooks, but I was there and that was the way the war ended. I got a medal for it—the whole company did for being the first men into Donknacht, beaten gold with a pikeman standing over a Dren eagle. I sold it for a top-shelf bottle of rye and a night with a Nestriann whore. I still think I got the better end of the deal.

  When I finished relaying those parts of the story appropriate for public consumption, the Crane poured himself a glass of his noxious medicine and sipped from it slowly, shivering. I’d never seen the Crane frightened. It did not bode well for my immediate future. “You’re sure Adelweid’s monster was the same thing that killed the Kiren?”

  “It left a vivid impression.”

  “A creature from the outer emptiness, let loose on the streets of Low Town.” He threw the rest of the drink down his throat, then wiped at his lips with a bony arm. “By the Oathkeeper.”

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  “I’ve heard legends. It is said that Atrum Noctal, the false monk of Narcassi, could peer into the nothingness between the worlds, and that the things he saw there would answer when he called. Sixty years ago, my master, Roan the Grim, led the sorcerers of the realm against the Order of the Squared Circle, whose violations of the High Laws were so egregious that all records of their activities were destroyed. But as for direct experience”—he shrugged his narrow shoulders—“I have none. The study of the Art is a twisting path, and one with many branches. Before the creation of the Academy for the Furtherance of the Magical Arts, practitioners learned what their masters had to teach them and studied where their inclinations and talents led. Roan would have no truck with the dark, and though I left his service I have stayed true to his precepts.”

  He smiled then, his first since I’d entered. By the Oathkeeper, he was going fast. “For me the Art was never a path to power, or a way to delve into the secrets hidden where nothing living dwells.” His hands began to shimmer with a soft blue light, the glow gradually forming into a scintillating ball that swooped around his arms. He had performed this trick often for me and Celia when we were children, sending the sphere dashing under tables and over chairs, always just out of our reach. “My gifts were for healing and for protection, to shelter the weak and provide respite for the weary. I never wished to be capable of anything else.”

  Two sharp knocks rang out on the outer door and Celia entered. The illusions diminished, then disappeared. The Crane turned his eyes quickly toward her. “Celia, my dear—look who’s returned!” There was a strange note in his voice.

  Celia crossed the floor, her pale green dress swaying slightly with her movements. I leaned in and she kissed my cheek, her hands trailing against my face. Coiled around her index finger was a silver ring with a fat sapphire, the symbol of her ascension to Sorcerer First Rank.

  “What a pleasant surprise. The Master suspected that we wouldn’t see you again, that your last visit was a fluke. But I knew better.”

  “Yes, you were right, my dear! Right completely!” His grin was taut across his aged features. “And now we are all together again, as we used to be.” He spread his hands, one resting lightly on each of us. “As we were meant to be.”

  I was grateful when Celia broke away, allowing me to shrug off the Master’s grip. There was a slight arc to her mouth that looked like a smile. “Much as I would love to think this call is purely social, I can’t help but wonder about the hushed conversation the two of you were having before I entered the room.”

  I shot a look toward the Crane, hoping to keep the content of our discussion secret, but he either missed my signal or ignored it. “Our friend wants to know more about the creature that attacked him. He says he saw one in the war. I think he has notions of becoming another Guy the Pure, hunting down the enemies of Śakra with a sword of holy flame!” His forced laughter sputtered into a choking cough.

  Celia took the empty cup from his hands and refilled it from the green decanter before handing it back. “I would have thought you’d have had enough of playing hero. Few indeed survive an encounter with the void, and those who do are seldom anxious to repeat the experience.”

  “I’ve survived a few things in my time. Firstborn willing, I’ll survive a few more.”

  “Your bravery is inspiring. We’ll make sure to commission an epic poem when your body lies mangled in a coffin.”

  “See if you can’t have it set to music. I’ve always felt I merited an ode.”

  I thought that would at least get a chuckle, but Celia was having none of it and the Crane seemed not to be listening. “It might not be up to me,” I said. “Another girl has disappeared.”

  This broke the Crane out of his repose, and his anemic eyes darted across my face before resting against Celia’s. “I hadn’t heard. I had thought that …” He stuttered his way into silence, then drank the remainder of his tumbler. Whatever was in that concoction, he’d be sleeping it off tomorrow.

  Celia put one hand on the Master’s back and escorted him into a chair. He flinched at her touch but allowed himself to be led, sinking down into the leather and staring off into space. She bent and patted his head, her wooden necklace hanging over the low cut of her dress, tightening against her skin as she stood erect. “That is ill news, but I don’t understand what it has to do with you.”

  “The Crown knows I was there for the last one. It’s only a matter of time before they come calling, and if I don’t have something to give them … it might go badly.”

  “But you have no skill with the Art! They have to understand that. You used to be an agent! They’ll have to listen to you!”

  “I didn’t retire from the Crown’s service with an honorable discharge—I was stripped of my rank. They’ll be happy to have something to pin on me just to wrap up a loose end.” What a strange conception the upper classes have of law enforcement. “These aren’t kind men.”

  When next Celia spoke it was with a firm self-seriousness. “All right, then. If you’re in it, we’re in it. What’s the next step?”

  “We?”

  “Much as it suits your vanity to play the lone wolf, you aren’t in fact the only one concerned with what happens to Low Town. And difficult as it may be to believe, time has passed inside the Aerie as well as out of it.” She held her hand up to the light, drawing attention to her ring. “Given the nature of your investigation, perhaps it isn’t altogether illogical to rely on the assistance of a First Mage of the Realm.”

  “Perhaps it isn’t,” I conced
ed.

  She pursed her lips in thought. I tried not to notice their ripeness. “Wait here. I have something that can help you.”

  I watched her leave, then turned to the Crane. “Your charge assumes her new responsibilities ably.”

  He answered without looking up. “She’s not the girl she was.”

  I was set to continue, but as I caught his face in the dying light, so frail that it seemed it might well fade into dust, I thought better of it and waited quietly until Celia returned.

  “Take off your shirt,” she told me.

  “I’m well aware of my overpowering allure, but I hardly think this is the time to succumb to it.” She rolled her eyes and made a hurrying gesture with her hand, and I tossed my coat on a nearby chair and pulled my tunic over my head. The room had a draft. I hoped Celia’s purpose wouldn’t be a waste of my time.

  She reached into a pocket of her dress and drew forth a sapphire, perfect blue and about the size of my thumbnail. “I have ensorcelled this—if it feels warm, or if it causes you pain, it means you are in the presence of dark magic, either the practitioner himself or a close associate.” She pressed the stone against my breast, just below the shoulder. I felt a burning sensation, and when she withdrew her digit the jewel was fixed to my body.

  I gave a quick yelp and rubbed the skin around the gem. “Why didn’t you warn me you were going to do that?”

  “I thought you’d take it better as a surprise.”

  “That was foolish,” I said.

  “I’ve just given you a powerful gift, one that might well save your life, and you complain over the bee sting required to implant it?”

  “You’re right. Thanks.” I felt like I ought to have said something more, but gratitude is an emotion I’m rarely called upon to display, and the reversal of our traditional positions left me unsteady. “Thanks,” I said again lamely.