Low Town: A Novel

by Daniel Polansky

  Wilkes was good, very good, and not just in the archaic and formalized style of the duel. He had killed men before, maybe in the war, maybe in one of these little tête-à-têtes the rich engage in rather than do any honest work, but he was no stranger to the spilling of blood. I wondered if I could take him and thought maybe, if I got a little lucky or if my style surprised him.

  Regardless, he was absolutely outclassed, embarrassingly so. Watching the Blade play with him I wondered what in the name of Maletus could have convinced this poor bastard to draw steel with Beaconfield, what absurd point of honor could have necessitated so foolish a gesture.

  In the midst of the melee the Blade’s eyes flashed up and locked on mine, a flourish that would have seen anyone else dead. Sensing an opening, Wilkes threw everything into his attack, surging forward, the tip of his weapon searching for flesh. The Blade deflected his opponent’s blows, parrying each thrust and cut by some preternatural instinct.

  Then one eyelid winked shut and Beaconfield struck, a flash so quick that I couldn’t follow it, and Wilkes had a hole in his chest, one he stared at awkwardly before dropping his weapon and sinking to the ground.

  I will admit I wondered, in an off moment here and there since I’d met him, the extent to which the Smiling Blade’s reputation rested on rumor and hearsay. I wouldn’t waste any more time. It’s an important thing to know your limitations, not to be blinded by pride or optimism as to what you’re capable of. I’d never be pretty. I’d never outwrestle Adolphus or beat a drum better than Yancey. I’d never get comeback on the Old Man, never be the kind of rich that lets you start your life over, never find a way out of Low Town.

  And I would never, ever, be able to take Beaconfield in a fair fight. To draw a weapon against that man was suicide, as sure as swallowing widow’s milk.

  Wilkes had gotten what he’d asked for I supposed—it doesn’t do to go around antagonizing someone with “blade” in their nickname. Still, the small crowd seemed unenthusiastic about the outcome. Beaconfield’s coup de grâce had been bad form. It’s one thing for a combatant to die of sepsis from a gut wound, and another to be laid out deliberately with a killing stroke. There was a code of conduct about these things—first blood usually isn’t last as well. The Blade’s men offered the appropriate obeisance, of course, ruffled cuffs clapping against one another, but the rest of the gathering was in no great hurry to laud the victor. A medic rushed onto the field, followed closely by Wilkes’s second, but they couldn’t have had much hope, and if they did it was soon dashed. I could tell that wound was mortal at fifty paces.

  The Blade had returned to his perch on the wooden bench, surrounded by his entourage of courtiers, fawning over themselves in congratulations at his ritualized slaughter. His shirt was unbuttoned below his neck and snowflakes were gathering in his dark hair. Apart from a lively flush there was little enough to show he’d been in an athletic contest of any kind—the bastard hadn’t even broken a sweat. He was laughing at something I couldn’t quite make out as I approached.

  I greeted him with a bow. “May I say it was a pleasure to see your grace demonstrate his skills in the service of such a noble endeavor.”

  He sneered slightly, and I was struck by how different he was in front of his lackeys. “I’m glad you had the opportunity to witness it. When you didn’t respond to my invitation, I wasn’t certain you’d be coming.”

  “I remain your grace’s servant, in this as in all things.”

  The sycophants took that as the obsequiousness due their leader, but the duke knew me well enough to appreciate the sarcasm. He rose and brushed off the parasites surrounding him. “Walk with me.”

  I did as he directed, falling in beside him on one of the narrow stone paths that radiated from the fountain. The white sky shed light but no heat through the bare branches of the trees. The snow was coming down harder now and would only get worse. Beaconfield kept quiet until we were out of earshot of the rest of the assemblage, then pulled up in front of me. “I’ve considered our last discussion.”

  “It flatters me to know I have a place in your graces’s thoughts.”

  “Your words disturbed me.”

  “Oh?”

  “And more so your actions against me in the interim.”

  “And what alterations to my behavior would satisfy your grace?”

  “Cut the shit—I don’t find it amusing,” he said, coming on strong, swaggering like a cock now that he had a homicide under his belt. “Stop your investigation. Tell your superiors whatever they need to hear to get them off my back—I’ll make it worth your while. I have influence throughout the court, and I have money.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  His face, bright red from his earlier exercise, blanched white, and he answered awkwardly, less practiced with his tongue than his weapon. “I’ve got other ways to settle my debts.”

  “You waste a lot of vowels,” I said, “for a man holding trumps.”

  He smiled a little, and I was reminded that there was something about him that didn’t quite fit in the archetype he sometimes chose to embody. “I responded in haste.” He swallowed hard, humility an unfamiliar taste in his mouth. “I’ve made some poor decisions, but I won’t let Black House use them to destroy me. It hasn’t gone too far—it’s not too late for forgiveness.”

  I thought about Tara’s fractured body, and Crispin lying in the Low Town muck, and I disagreed. “I told you last time, Beaconfield—there’s no such thing.”

  “That makes me unhappy,” he said, drawing himself up imperiously. “And you’ve had ample evidence of what happens to those who earn my displeasure.”

  As if I had forgotten the part of the morning where he’d murdered a man for my benefit. “You’re aptly named—but I won’t dress up for it, nor set a convenient time to be slaughtered. I didn’t make my reputation stabbing noblemen on shaped grass. I made it in the dark, in the streets, without a crew of courtiers clapping their support or a rule book to let me know procedure.” I bared my teeth in a bitter smile, happy to dispense with the dissimulation, happy to finally lay my simmering hatred of this monstrous fop on the table. “You come at me, you best start thinking crooked—and you best put your affairs in order.” I turned on my heel, not wanting to give him the chance for a last word.

  He took it anyway. “Greet Wilkes when you see him!”

  You’ll meet him first, you son of a bitch, I thought, heading east back to the city. You’ll meet him first.

  I was hustling through Alledtown when I caught the flicker of Wren’s hideous woolen coat as he ducked behind an apple cart. I wondered if he’d been waiting for me outside the gardens, but dismissed it as unlikely. He must have been shadowing me since I’d left the Earl, all the way from Low Town, through the greenery, and now back into the city. That wasn’t an easy thing to do—I might have said impossible, if you’d asked me prior to him doing it.

  After I was done swallowing my surprise I just got angry, real fucking pissed, the thought of that fool child dogging my footsteps, with Crowley, Beaconfield, and Śakra only knew who else doing their concerted best to end my existence near enough to send me apoplectic.

  I hooked down a side street, following it around the back exit of a dive bar. Then I faded behind some packing crates and put my back to the stone, pulling the lapels of my coat up over the bottom half of my face and letting the shadows cover the rest.

  Wren must have figured me oblivious by that point, and he stalked around the turn with less care than he should have. Before he thought to check the alcove I’d jacked him up, pinning his arms against his head and lifting him above the ground.

  He cursed a blue streak and flailed madly, fighting to gain some leverage, but he was still just a pup. I gave him a good shake and tightened my grip until he started to go limp. Then I dropped him ass first into the mud.

  He scrambled to his feet, apple-sized fists guarding his face, fire in his eyes. I’d have to tell Adolphus that his afternoons spent teachin
g the boy boxing hadn’t gone to waste.

  “This is how you make yourself useful? Ignoring my orders anytime it suits you?”

  “I’m tired of being your fucking errand boy!” he screamed. “All I do is tend bar and run messages! So I came after you—what’s the harm?”

  “The harm?” I feinted to his gut, then sent the heel of my off hand against his brow. He stumbled backward, trying to keep his balance. “Yesterday some dangerous men made a credible effort to kill me. What if they’d come back and noticed you following me? You think you’re too young to have a man open up your insides?”

  “I’ve made it this long,” he said, all pride and steel.

  My composure cracked, and my rage spilled out in a torrent. I battered aside his guard and threw him up against the alley wall, forcing my forearm into his sternum. “You survived this long because you’re garbage, lower than a fucking rat, not worth the effort to down. Raise your head above the gutter and see how quick they come after you, knives sharpened for the pink of your throat!”

  I realized I’d shouted these last words an inch from his face, and that my lesson was likely to do the boy permanent injury if I didn’t cut it short. I let my elbow off his chest and he dropped to the ground, and this time he stayed there.

  “You gotta be smarter than you are—do you understand? There are lines of smart Low Town boys lying in unmarked graves. You’ve gotta be smarter than that, smart all the time, smart every minute of the day. If you were the son of a cotton merchant it wouldn’t matter, you could afford your youth. But you aren’t, you’re ghetto trash, and don’t ever forget it—because Śakra knows they won’t.”

  He was still angry but he was listening. I rubbed sleet out of my hair, water melting against my brow and running down my cheeks. Then I extended a hand and helped him back to his feet.

  “What did you see?” I asked, surprised at how quickly my temper had cooled, surprised that it had run so warm a moment earlier.

  He seemed as willing as I was to return to the calm back-and-forth we’d perfected. “I saw one noble kill another, and I saw you walk off with him. That was the Blade, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He suggested it was unlikely I would die in my sleep.”

  Wren sneered at that, still convinced I was invincible. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him folk queue to put me down, and if he doesn’t step up he might find himself late to the party.” Wren smiled, and despite what I’d said earlier, I was glad I left him his illusions, maybe even a little proud that he thought so well of me. “Where does Adolphus think you are?”

  “I told him you sent me round to Yancey’s, that you wanted to get something else on Beaconfield.”

  “Try not to lie to them.”

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  The snowfall was getting worse. I was starting to shiver. “If I let you trail along for a while, you promise to head back to the Earl when I tell you?”

  “I promise.”

  “And is your word any good?”

  He narrowed his eyes, then gave a quick up and down with his chin.

  “All right then.” I set off down the alley, and after a moment he caught up with me.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I need to see the scryer.”

  “Why?”

  “Now would be the part of the morning where you walk next to me in silence.”

  We reached the Box thirty minutes later, and when I told the boy to wait outside he nodded and stretched against the wall. Happily the Islander who let me in last time was manning the door, and despite his age he was sharp enough to recognize me, and decent enough to let me in unaccompanied.

  Marieke was bent double at her desk when I entered, raking over a weathered, leather tome with an intensity that would have frightened a syndicate heavy. I slammed the door shut and she whirled her head around, preparing to excoriate whatever poor bastard was foolish enough to intrude upon her work. When she saw it was me, she breathed out slowly, a little bit of her seemingly inexhaustible anger draining away with it.

  “You’re back,” she said, careful to make sure she didn’t sound happy about it. “Guiscard stopped by earlier. I figured you would have come with him.”

  “We had a falling out. I needed my freedom, and he’s a one-man sort of gal.”

  “Do you think that was funny?”

  “Give me a few minutes and we can try again.” On the slab in the center of the room a shroud covered a body about the size of a child. Beneath it Avraham lay in permanent repose, soon to be set beneath the ground. For him there would be no grand funeral, no public outpouring of grief, and the weather being what it was, I doubted the High Priest would manage the trip from his chapel to the plot of land near the sea where the Islanders buried their people. Low Town had enjoyed the autumnal pathos, a moment of communal mourning amid the vibrant foliage, but with the mercury falling no one was in any great hurry to leave his house just to pay sympathy to the family of a little black boy. And anyway, at the rate children were disappearing from Low Town the whole thing had lost its novelty.

  “I assume you didn’t have any more luck reading this one than you did his predecessor?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve tried every trick in the book, worked through every ritual, meditated over every scrap of evidence, but—”

  “Nothing,” I finished, and for once she didn’t seem to mind being interrupted.

  “You come up with anything solid on your end?”

  “No.”

  “You keep talking like this and I’m never gonna get a word in edgewise.”

  “Yeah.” Thus far our conversation had been within a stone’s throw of pleasant—I could almost fool myself into thinking the scryer had taken a shine to me.

  “Does the Bureau of Magical Affairs know about the talisman you’ve got sewn into your shoulder?” she asked.

  “Of course. I make a point of telling the government every time I do something illegal.”

  The beginnings of a smile worked themselves through Marieke’s growl, but she snapped its neck before it could mature. “Who put it there?”

  “I can’t remember. I’m high a lot.”

  She set her hands against the desk behind her and arched her spine backward, a startlingly uninhibited display given her almost pathological self-consciousness, the rough equivalent in a normally functioning human of dropping her drawers and taking a shit on the floor. “Fine, don’t tell me.”

  That was my preference anyway. “If I slipped off this covering and checked the boy for spots,” I asked, “would I find any?”

  She gave a conspiratorial glance around, unnecessary, given that we were in an enclosed room, but understandable all the same. “Yes,” she said. “You would.”

  It was what I expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. The Blade had done another child, taken him from beneath my nose, hidden him somewhere in the catacombs beneath his mansion, drained his life, and left him facedown in the river. And as if somehow these blasphemies were insufficient, he’d infected the boy with the plague, weakened the wards that protected the city from its return—all because he couldn’t stand the thought of honest labor or forgoing a few exotic debaucheries.

  “If you took off the sheet and saw the rash,” she responded, “would you have any idea why it was there?”

  “I’m looking,” I said, though my effort would mean little enough if the city again found itself awash in Red Fever.

  Her eyes, normally as bright as the unclouded sky, fogged up. Uncertainty was a guise Marieke wore infrequently, and with more than her usual discomfort. “Right now, you’re the only one who knows. I don’t trust Black House, and I didn’t want to start a panic. But if another there’s another …”

  “I understand,” I said. After a moment I asked the obvious question. “Why tell me?”

  “I flashed something off you the first time we met, who you ar
e and where you’re going. Something that told me I ought to let you in on it.”

  That would explain the fit. That would explain, for that matter, why someone so congenitally incapable of kindness would even take the time to speak with me.

  “Don’t you want to know what I saw?” she asked. “Everyone always wants to know what’s ahead of them.”

  “People are fools. You don’t need a prophet to tell the future. Look at yesterday, then look at today. Tomorrow is likely to be the same, and the day after.”

  It was time to leave. Wren was outside in the cold, and I had a ways left to go before I’d earn my day’s rest. I took a long look at Avraham. He’d be the last, I told myself, one way or another.

  Marieke interrupted my thoughts. “Did you survive it, the first time?”

  “It killed me,” I said. “Can’t you tell?”

  She blushed a little, and rushed forward. “I meant did you …”

  “I know what you meant,” I said. “And yeah, I survived it.”

  “What was it like?”

  People asked me that sometimes, if they knew I’d been in Low Town during the worst of it. “Tell me about the plague,” like it was some piece of neighborhood gossip or the outcome of a prizefight. And what could you tell them, and what did they want to hear?

  Tell them about the first days, when it didn’t look to be any worse than every other summer—one or two from a block, the old and the very young. How the sick marks on the houses began to grow, to spawn and multiply till there was scarcely a shack or tenement that didn’t have an X scrawled on its front door. About the government men who came to burn them, that sometimes they weren’t so careful to make sure everyone inside was dead or to contain the flames.

  Tell them about the second night after they put Momma and Papa on the wagons, when the neighbors ransacked our house, just walked in, not happy about it but not ashamed either, leaving with the few argents my father had managed to save, giving me a blow to the face when I tried to stop them. The same neighbors we borrowed sugar from and sang hymns with at Midwinter. And who could blame them, really, because nothing anyone did mattered anymore.