Low Town: A Novel

by Daniel Polansky

  The Old Man’s face returned to its friendly hollowness. Then he shook his head, saddened by the bad news he was about to relay. “Not enough. Not nearly enough. Perhaps it’s my fault—perhaps I’ve failed to sufficiently motivate you. Perhaps I should send someone down to that bar you own, pay your friends a nice visit.”

  I let that slide past without grabbing at it. “Not enough for a warrant maybe—but enough for the two of us to be sure.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’ll take care of it. Off the books.”

  He tut-tutted disapprovingly. “So much blood, so much fuss. What will it look like?”

  “You’re Special Operations—it’ll look like what you say it looks like. Don’t pretend you don’t relish the idea of taking out a noble, and an ally of the Crown Prince at that. I’m doing you a favor, and you know it.” I pushed across the desk, narrowing the air between us. “Unless you feel like waiting around for the Blade and his pet sorcerer to complete their ritual.”

  The Old Man’s eyes were blue as a summer evening. “Are you offering to return to the Crown’s service?”

  I knew he was baiting me but damn if I didn’t want to take it. “A singular proposition. Beaconfield and I have a discussion, and you wake up tomorrow with one less problem to deal with.”

  “And why are you so keen to take responsibility for the good duke’s demise?”

  “I bore easily—what do you care? It’ll get done.”

  He clasped his hands in front of his face, giving the impression of serious contemplation. After fifteen seconds of uncomfortable silence he spread his palms faceup and leaned back in his chair. “Accidents happen,” he said.

  I started to walk out, opening the door then turning back toward him. “There’ll be some cleanup required. It’ll be quick, but it’ll be noisy.”

  “As you said, we’re Special Operations.”

  “When I do you, it’ll be quiet as a chapel.”

  He let out an embarrassed chuckle, chagrined at my misbehavior. “Such a temper! You’ll never make it to my age if you don’t learn to enjoy life a little.”

  I didn’t respond, closing the door on the blank office and the evil man who lived there.

  Then it was back to the Earl, half jogging through the knee-high snow. The constant cold was wearing on me. I could remember a time when the sky was light and the clouds didn’t spew ice, but only dimly.

  I arrived to discover the bar had closed for the night—not that we’d see much business, the weather being what it was. The front room was deserted, Adolphus in the back looking after his wife. I didn’t have time to search for him. I wasn’t planning to move on the Blade till nightfall, but I’d need every minute of the interim to ready the setup.

  Up in my room I noticed a small envelope on my dresser. Across it Adolphus had scrawled a quick note—Grenwald’s messenger came while you were out. Under different circumstances this would have warranted a good laugh. To think for once in his useless fucking existence my old major actually came through for me, and it was too damn late to do any good. I ignored it and turned to more pressing duties.

  I removed the brown-wrapped parcel from the trunk beneath my bed, then sat at my table and began to unpack it. Two hours were lost in the haze of critical but menial tasks required to bring the equipment into readiness. I grabbed a couple of throwing knives and a thin stretch of wire before slipping a tin of faceblack into my pocket and heading downstairs.

  I was so fixed on my purpose that I nearly rebounded off Adolphus, who stood at the foot of the steps, rendered nearly invisible by the low light and his own uncanny stillness. Beneath his heavy overcoat a ragged suit of studded leather stretched taut against his chest, and he’d even dug up his old kettle helmet, the steel dented by five years of close calls. Apart from his dress he was also festooned with weapons, two short blades hanging at his side and a battle-ax strapped to his back.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” I asked, astounded.

  The savagery in his eyes left me with no doubt that my comrade was quite serious in his choice of attire. “You didn’t think you were going alone? This isn’t our first time over the top. I’ve got my eyes on your back, as always.”

  Was he drunk? I sniffed at his breath—apparently not. “I don’t have time for this. Watch Adeline, I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “Wren’s my son,” he said without affectation or aggrandizement. “I’ll not sit by the fire while his life is in danger.”

  The Oathkeeper spare us from such pointless nobility. “Your offer is appreciated but unnecessary.”

  I tried to squeeze by, but he put one hand against my collar and held me firm against the banister. “It wasn’t an offer.”

  The streaks of gray outnumbered the black in his once charcoal hair. His pockmarked face was heavy. Was I that old? Did I look that foolish, my collar pulled up like a hoodlum, steel bulging from my pockets, a middle-aged man playing at the adventures of youth?

  It didn’t do to think like that. Wren needed me—I could have a crisis of faith if I was still alive in six hours.

  I brushed off Adolphus’s hand and took a step back up the stairs, giving myself enough room to maneuver. “You’re fat—you were always big, but you’re fat now. You’re slow and you can’t sneak, and you don’t have it in you to kill a man anymore, not the way I’m going to do it. I’m not sure that you ever did. I’ve no time to flatter your vanity—every second you waste, the boy gets closer to death. Get the fuck out of my way.”

  For a moment I thought I had overplayed my hand and he would knock my head off my shoulders. But then he turned his face to the ground and all the energy seemed to slump out of him, like I’d put a hole in the bottom of a jug. He turned away from the staircase, his collection of cutlery jangling.

  “Look after Adeline,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.” That was far from certain, but there was no point in saying so. I slipped out into the night.

  I crouched by a bush twenty yards out from the back gate of Beaconfield’s mansion. I’d darkened my skin with faceblack, and the wire hanging from my hands shimmered in the moonlight. I was trying to think up a way that Dunkan didn’t have to die. So far nothing was coming.

  I couldn’t knock him out. That doesn’t work the way people think it does—one quick sock in the noggin and your mark wakes up an hour later with a dull headache. Half the time he moves and you don’t hit him right, and you’re left standing there like a fool. If you do knock him out, he’ll probably be back up in time to cause trouble; and if he stays down, it usually means his brains are scrambled and he’s going to spend the rest of his life shitting himself, and for my money that’s no great improvement on being dead.

  And it was going to be a close thing, even if it went straight, this would be as close a thing as I’d ever done.

  And I’d made a promise to Adeline.

  The night was getting on and every minute that passed was another for Beaconfield to decide the best way out of this was to feed Wren to Brightfellow’s abomination. The ordnance in my satchel gave me a fighting chance, but not if someone saw me while I was setting up. I cursed the quirk of fate that had mandated the smiling watchman’s presence here, instead of by a fire sipping his whiskey—but there was nothing for it.

  I closed my eyes briefly.

  Then I was up, a stone flung against the outer wall drawing the unsuspecting sentry, ten yards, five yards and I was behind him and the loop pulled tight.

  The garrote is quiet but slow, and Dunkan took a long time to die. First he grabbed at the wire, fingers scratching savagely at his swollen throat. After a while his arms dropped to his side and he ceased struggling. I held on till his skin turned purple, and he kicked his legs in one final spasm. Then I lowered him to the ground, behind the wall where no one could see him.

  I’m sorry, Dunkan. I wish it had gone another way.

  I closed the lantern above the open gate. The guards would notice the absence of li
ght soon—I hoped the murder of my friend had bought me enough time.

  I crept about the perimeter, securing what I needed for the thing to work out. No one noticed—security was lax. Beaconfield might just be dumb enough not to realize I was coming. I hoped so at least.

  After everything was set I returned to the back door and picked the lock, not as expertly as the doctor perhaps but without any trouble. I started counting off the seconds in my head once I was inside, my back to the walls, stopping at every sound. The defenses were strangely delinquent, no patrols, not even anyone posted at the stairwell.

  When I opened the door to the Blade’s study he was standing in front of the broad windows behind his desk, drinking and watching the falling snow. He whirled his head around with defined celerity. There was a moment of purest shock when he recognized me. Then a smile spread across his face, and he downed the rest of his liquor and set the glass on the table. “This is the second time you’ve come uninvited into my study.”

  I closed the door behind me. “Just the first. I sent a man around yesterday.”

  “Is that how friends behave? Taking advantage of hospitality to steal intimate correspondence?”

  “We aren’t friends.”

  He looked a little hurt. “No, I suppose we’re not—but that’s just circumstance, really. I think if things had worked out differently, you would have found me a very reasonable man. Affable, even.”

  Two and a half minutes. “I don’t think so. You blue bloods are a little too bent for my tastes. At heart I’m a simple creature.”

  “Yes, forthright and candid—that’s exactly how I would describe you.”

  We were each waiting to see if the other would drop this pretense of amiability. Inside my skull the clock ticked away—three minutes.

  The Blade lounged against his desk. “I have to admit, I’m surprised at how you’ve decided to play this.”

  “This is a bit direct for my tastes, but then I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  “The Old Man sent you, then? It shocks me the loyalty that madman instills. It won’t be his life taken on your suicide mission.”

  “Not loyalty—I practically had to twist his arm.” A flicker of surprise crossed his face. “And what makes you so certain I’m the one who won’t be walking out of here?”

  He burst out laughing. “No one’s calling you an incompetent, but—let’s not exaggerate your prowess.”

  Three and a half minutes. “You tell that to the men you sent to kill me?”

  His eyes filmed over, a rare show of regret. “That was Brightfellow’s idea—he wanted me to go after you from the beginning, and once Mairi let us know you were sniffing around … I had hoped we might be able to scare you or buy you off. I suppose you were more frightened of the Old Man than me.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said. “Where is the practitioner, anyway?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. I haven’t seen him since the party. I suppose he scampered off. Not many have the stomach for the endgame.”

  “Not many do,” I agreed, figuring him for a liar, figuring the sorcerer was holed up in the basement with his hands around Wren’s throat.

  Beaconfield trailed his hand to the hilt of his sword. “We’re not so dissimilar as you pretend. We’re both warriors, children birthed in the screams of men and the flow of blood. There can be no dishonesty between us, no prevarication in the perfection of the thrust or the candor of the riposte. And so I speak to you as a brother. The men you killed, my friends—they were not the palest shadows of myself. No one is. There has never been anyone as good as me, not in the long ages leading back to when the first man struck the second with a rock. I am the perfect engine of death, the apex predator, an artist in the oldest and noblest of man’s activities.”

  “You rehearse that in front of a mirror?”

  “Watch your tone.”

  “I’ve known your kind my whole life, punk boys who get a length of steel in their hand and decide it makes them men. You think you’re special ’cause your hand is a touch faster? I pass a dozen of you on my way to breakfast every morning—only difference between them and you is the cost of your coat.”

  “Why are you keeping up your end of the conversation, if I’m of such little interest?”

  “Why indeed.” That had to have been five minutes already. Śakra’s swinging cock, what the hell was taking so long? If Beaconfield wasn’t such a desperate megalomaniac, I’d be dead. I had no illusions on that score. “Why did you do it?” I asked. “I understand the events—I’m just trying to get some perspective.”

  “What’s there to say? I needed money, they had it, or I thought they did. I never burned with the desire to betray the country, but then, like you said—things happen.”

  I was counting the seconds desperately now. “I don’t care about your pathetic attempts at espionage. How did you get involved with Brightfellow—when did you start with the children?”

  He looked at me with an expression of curious astonishment, and to my dawning horror I realized it wasn’t feigned. “What children?”

  The floor below us erupted, kicking me backward into a wall.

  I suspect the history of mass combat has never seen a more incompetent logistic corps than the one I suffered through during the war. For five years we struggled to make do without the most basic supplies—spare bandages, cob nails, faceblack. Two days in Donknacht and the flow of goods wouldn’t stop. Saddles for dead horses, armor no one had any idea how to put on, crates of wool socks, as if the war had multiplied our supply of limbs rather than diminishing them. When I mustered out I had enough small goods to start a general store, and one other item less commonly found stocking the shelves of local merchants—twenty-five pounds of black powder and the explosive components required to detonate it.

  Part of it I had used while still wearing the gray. Part of it had gone to make my name after I left the Crown’s service. The remainder I was using to introduce the Smiling Blade to the joys of modern warfare.

  The blast flung the two of us to opposite ends of the room, but I was expecting it and managed to get up first. I pulled a dagger from my boot and moved on Beaconfield with what speed I could muster. He was slumped in the corner, groggy but conscious. That wasn’t good—I’d hoped the discharge would put him out long enough for me to make sure he wasn’t a threat. I reversed my grip on the knife and leaped at him. His eyes fluttered, but he reacted with extraordinary speed, shifting out of the way of my blow and wrapping his fingers around my weapon hand.

  He was stronger than I thought, and though I had assumed otherwise, he was a fighter. Not just skilled with his sword—that I knew of course—but a fighter, the kind of man who attacks when wounded, who doesn’t back down from pain or shock. He had grit, though you couldn’t tell it from his dress. I guess that deserves to be remembered, though it doesn’t cancel out much else. I tried for a rabbit punch to his throat, but he blocked it with his usual astonishing agility.

  I don’t know how it would have ended if we’d fought straight—but then I’m not that big on fair play. The second bomb went off, directly beneath us this time, and then I was looking up at the ceiling and there was a glare in my eyes so bright it seemed to stun as well as blind me. In time the light began to fade but not the terrible ringing in my ears. I put my hands against them—no blood, but that didn’t mean anything. In the war I’d seen men go deaf who hadn’t shown any sign of injury. I screamed out loud, my throat raw but the sound itself lost.

  Pull it together, pull it together. The ringing will stop or it won’t—if you lie here, you’ll be dead either way. I stood up, knowing I’d be useless in a fight, hoping to Maletus the Blade had gotten it worse than me.

  He had. The floor of the study had blown out, leaving gaping holes in the wood and sending shrapnel everywhere. A jagged splinter the size of a man’s arm had lodged itself in Beaconfield’s stomach. He lay with his back arched over a fallen support beam, blood draining from his mo
uth. I stumbled toward him, my equilibrium utterly scrambled.

  “Where is Wren?” I asked. “The boy, where is he?”

  The Blade had enough in him for one final smile, and he played it for everything he could, mouthing his words slowly enough that I could make them out despite the clamor in my ears. “You’re a better killer than you are a detective.”

  I couldn’t argue with that one.

  This shot of energy expended, Beaconfield slumped down on the spear embedded through his torso. After a few seconds he was gone. I closed his eyes and pulled myself to my feet.

  No man expends his last breath on a lie. Beaconfield had let forth the secret out of spite, a final blow thrown before meeting She Who Waits Behind All Things. He didn’t have Wren. I’d screwed something up—I’d screwed something up terribly, but I couldn’t tell where.

  Time was passing, and it seemed likely someone had noticed the detonation of the Duke of Beaconfield’s mansion. I headed downstairs, knowing if I ran into trouble I was good as dead.

  The back wing of the house seemed to have collapsed in on itself, tons of wood and brick burying the back hallway. In the main parlor the once beautiful carpets were destroyed by soot, shards of glass from the broken chandeliers coating everything. One of the explosions had set off a fire in the kitchen, and the blaze was rapidly moving to cover the rest of the house.

  The Blade’s butler lay prostrate beside the door, his head cocked in a fashion no contortionist could have matched. Death seemed an inequitable punishment for his arrogance and general unpleasantness, but then few enough of us get what we deserve. I stepped over him and into the snow.