Low Town lt-1

by Daniel Polansky

  I stood in front of the house of my oldest friend and lit a cigarette, the wind having died down enough to allow me my petty pleasures. There were very good reasons why I hadn’t visited my mentor in five years, and I blew tobacco smoke in the chilly air and piled one atop another till they loomed over the whim that had carried me this far. I could still call an end to this idiocy, return to the Earl, light some dreamvine, and sleep until tomorrow. The mental impression of soft sheets and colored smoke faded as I stepped through the first archway, my feet threading their way forward against my better instincts, instincts I seemed to be ignoring a lot lately.

  I negotiated my way through the maze, half-forgotten memories guiding me right or left. My cigarette went out but I didn’t have the energy to relight it, and I stuffed the butt into my coat pocket rather than dirty the Crane’s patio.

  One last turn and I was facing the entrance, an outline of a door in the sheer wall, absent knocker or other obvious means of ingress. Perched on an indentation above it was a gargoyle, white stone like the maze, its maw locked in something closer to a smirk than a grimace. Seconds passed. I was glad no one was around to witness my cowardice. Finally I decided that I hadn’t traversed the maze for nothing, and rapped twice on the frame.

  “Greetings, young one.” The voice the Crane had created for his watchman was incongruous with its purpose, lighter and friendlier than one would expect from the creature’s composition. Its concrete eyes looked me up and down slowly. “Perhaps not so young these days. The Master has been alerted, and will receive you in the loft. I have standing orders to allow you entry should you ever arrive.”

  The crack in the facade widened, stone sliding against stone. Above it the gargoyle’s face contorted smugly, no small feat for a creature composed of mineral. “Although I didn’t think I’d ever need to follow them.”

  Not for the first time I wondered what in the name of the Firstborn had possessed the Crane to imbue his creation with a sense of sarcasm, there being no great shortage of it among the human race. I stepped into the foyer without responding.

  It was small, little more than a platform for the long circular stairway that led skyward. I began the climb to the upper floors, my path illuminated by evenly spaced wall sconces leaking a clear white light. Halfway up I stopped to catch my breath. This had been a lot easier as a child, sprinting up the curving stone with the abandon of someone who was not a hardened tobacco addict. After a rest I continued my ascent, fighting the urge to retreat with every step.

  A spacious living room took up most of the top floor of the Aerie. The furniture was neat and functional, making up in clean aesthetic what it lacked in opulence. Two large chairs sat before a narrow fireplace built into the dividing wall that separated this area from the Master’s private quarters. The decor had remained unaltered since I had first glimpsed the interior, and unbidden memories came to mind of winter afternoons by the fire and of a childhood best forgotten.

  I watched him, silhouetted against the great glass window looking southeast over the harbor. From that height the stink and hustle of Low Town evaporates, giving way to the endless ocean in the distance. He turned slowly and placed his withered hands over mine. I was conscious of my desire to look away. “It’s been too long,” he said.

  The years showed. The Crane has always been wizened, his body too thin to support his height, scraggly tufts of white hair sprouting from his head and bony chin. But also he’d always possessed an improbable energy which seemed to make a lie of his age. I could detect little trace of it any longer. His skin was stretched thin as paper, and there was a jaundiced tinge to his eyes. At least his costume remained unchanged, an unadorned robe, rich blue like everything else in his citadel.

  “My greetings to you, Magister,” I began. “I appreciate you seeing me without an appointment.”

  “Magister? Is that how you greet the man who rubbed unguent on your scraped knees and made you boiled chocolate to ward off the cold?”

  It was clear he wasn’t going to make this easy. “I thought it inappropriate to presume on past intimacies.”

  His expression soured, and he pulled his arms firm across each other. “I understand your reticence to return-even as a child you had more pride than half the royal court. But don’t suggest that I turned my back on you, or ever would. Even after you left the Crown’s service and… took up your new vocation.”

  “You mean after I was stripped of my rank and started selling drugs on the street?”

  He sighed. I could remember him making that same sound when I came to him with a bruised eye from fighting, or he realized I’d stolen whatever new toy I was playing with. “I spent years trying to break you of that habit.”

  “What habit?”

  “This way you have of taking everything as an insult. It’s a sign of low breeding.”

  “I am lowbred.”

  “You could work harder to hide it.” He smiled and I found myself doing the same. “Regardless, you have returned, and as grateful as I am to see you, I can’t help but wonder to what I owe the reappearance of my prodigal son? Unless you reappeared at my doorstep after five years solely to inquire of my health?”

  When I was a child, the Crane had been my benefactor and protector, doing me what kindnesses the fiercest urchin in Low Town would accept. As an agent, I had often turned to him, both for advice and for the assistance his prodigious skill could offer. Yet for all my practice this newest round of supplication choked me on its way out. “I need your help.”

  His face tensed up, a fair reaction to a plea for aid from a man he hadn’t spoken to in half a decade, particularly one on the wrong side of the law. “And what services do you require?”

  “I found Little Tara,” I said, “and I need to know if you’d picked up anything on her from your channels. If there’s a divination you think might be helpful, I’d ask you to do that as well, and without alerting Black House or the appropriate ministry.”

  I suppose he had assumed I was there for money or for something illicit. The discovery that I was not evoked the return of his natural demeanor, amiable and slightly mischievous. “It seems I was confused about the full range of your new duties.”

  “I’m not sure I take your meaning,” I said, though of course I did.

  “Let me be clearer, then. How exactly does finding the murderer of a child fit into your current purview?”

  “How does aiding a criminal fall into the purview of a First Sorcerer of the Realm?”

  “Hah! First Sorcerer!” He coughed into his hand, a wet and unpleasant sound. “I haven’t been to court since the Queen’s Jubilee. I don’t even know where my robes are.”

  “The ones trimmed with gold thread and worth half the docks?”

  “Damnable things itched my throat.” The Crane’s laughter was forced, and after it was over the afternoon light fell on an old and tired man. “I’m sorry, my friend, but I’m not sure there’s anything I can offer. Yesterday evening, when I heard of the offense, I ran a message to a contact in the Bureau of Magical Affairs. They said they put a scryer on it but came up with nothing. If they couldn’t pick up anything, I don’t imagine I would have any more luck.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked. “Was the scrying blocked?”

  “It would take an artist of exceptional ability to completely cover any trace of his presence. There aren’t two dozen practitioners in all Rigus capable of such intricate work, and I don’t imagine any of them would resort to so vile an undertaking.”

  “Power is no guarantee of decency, more often the opposite-but I’ll grant you a mage of such ability would have easier means of satisfying his desires should they incline in that direction.” I could feel the old muscles working again, stretching off their torpor after years of neglect. It had been a long time since I’d investigated anything. “Apart from magic, what else would work against your scrying?”

  He took a decanter of vile-looking green liquid from above the mantel, then poured it into the
tumbler that sat next to it. “Medicine, for my throat,” he explained, before downing the fluid in one quick gulp. “If her body had been cleaned very thoroughly or sanitized with some kind of chemical. If the clothing she was wearing had only been in contact with her a short time, that might do it as well. It’s not my specialty-I’m not really certain.”

  The odor I had smelled on the girl’s body could have been a cleaning agent. It could have been a dozen other things as well, but this gave me something to go on.

  “That’s a start at least.” Having gathered the nerve to return I found myself reluctant to leave. Part of me wanted to sit down in his soft blue chair and let it envelop me, to share a cup of tea with my old mentor and speak of days past. “I appreciate your help. And I appreciate you receiving me. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  “I hope you find the person who did this, and I hope this isn’t the last time you visit. I’ve missed you, and the trouble you track to my door-like a stray cat with a dead pigeon.”

  I returned his smile and made a move for the exit, but his voice stopped me, suddenly stern. “Celia wants to see you before you leave.” I tried not to flinch at her name but suspect I failed. “She’s in the conservatory. You still remember the way.” It was not a question.

  “How is she?”

  “She’s up to be commissioned to First Rank in a few weeks. It’s quite an honor.”

  Sorcerer First Rank was the highest grade a practitioner could receive, held by perhaps twenty artists in the realm, all of whom had performed noble services in the interests of the country-or had done the right favors for the right people. The Crane was entirely correct: it was quite an honor, especially at Celia’s age. It was also not at all what I had been asking. “And how is she?”

  The Crane’s eyes fluttered away and I had the only answer I needed. “Fine,” he said. “She’s… fine.”

  I made my way back down the steps, stopping in front of a clouded glass door a level beneath the summit. I resisted the temptation to reach into my coat for a sniff of breath. Better to do this quick, and sober.

  The conservatory was beautiful, like everything in the Aerie. Cultivated plants from across the Thirteen Lands thrived in its sultry environs, flowering in a spectrum of colors that complemented the blue stone of the walls. Bright violet strands of queen’s fingers jutted out against vines of orange drake’s skin; fierce blossoms of Daeva’s posies cast their scent throughout the room; and stranger things still thrived in the damp hothouse heat.

  She heard me come in but didn’t stop what she was doing, tending a small fern in the corner with a decanter of filigreed silver. A blue dress pulled tight across the bottom of her back and stopped just below the thigh, though as she stood straight it eased its way down to her knee. She turned to meet me and I caught a first glimpse of her face, familiar despite the time apart, soft brown hair above dark almond eyes. Hugging the curves of her honey-colored neck was a cheap necklace, a lacquered wooden medallion with a strand of twine running through it, Kiren characters emblazoned on the front.

  “You’re returned.” It wasn’t clear from her tone how she felt about it. “Let me look at you.” She brought her hands up near my face, as if to caress or slap me. Either would have been appropriate. “You’ve aged,” she said finally, opting for the former, running her fingers over my calloused hide.

  “They say time does that,” though whereas the years had withered my features and scored my face, for her the effects had been nothing but positive.

  “That’s what they say.” As she smiled I saw something of the girl she had been in the open and friendly way she looked at me, in the speed with which she forgave my absence, in the light she radiated instinctively and without deliberation. “I visited the Earl every day for a month after you left Black House. Adolphus said you were out. He kept saying it. After a while I stopped coming.”

  I didn’t respond, neither to amend her belief as to how I’d left the Crown’s service or to explain my absence.

  “You leave us for five years, disappear completely without a message, without a word.” She didn’t seem angry, or sad even, the wound no longer tender but still visible. “And now you can’t even offer an explanation?”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “They were bad ones.”

  “They might have been. I make a lot of bad decisions.”

  “I won’t argue that.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it was enough. “It’s very good to see you,” she said, laboring over each word as if she wanted to say more.

  I stared at my boots. They didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. “I hear you’re to be commissioned Sorcerer First Rank. Congratulations.”

  “It is an honor I’m not sure that I deserve. Certainly the Master’s word went far in smoothing my ascension.”

  “This means you get free rein to destroy any stray bit of architecture you find objectionable and turn misbehaving servants into rodents?”

  Her face assumed the strained pose I’d often see her adopt as a child when she didn’t get a joke. “I have trained myself to follow in the footsteps of the Master, and thus studied the specialties he has perfected-alchemy, spells of warding and healing. The Master never saw fit to learn the patterns by which a practitioner does evil to his fellows, and I would not think to pursue avenues he has determined to ignore. It requires a certain kind of person even to practice the darker shades of the Art. Neither of us is capable of it.”

  Anyone is capable of anything, I thought, but didn’t say it.

  “He’s extraordinary. I don’t think we ever quite realized it as children. To be given the honor of learning at his feet…” She held her tiny hands to her chest and shook her head. “Do you understand what his spell of warding means to this city? To this country? How many died from the plague? How many would have died if his safeguards didn’t still protect us to this day? Before his working, they needed to run the crematorium twenty-four hours a day in the summer just to keep up-and that was when the plague was at its ebb. When the Red Fever hit, there wasn’t even anyone left to dispose of the bodies.”

  A memory crept to my mind, a child of six or seven walking gingerly over the corpses of his neighbors, careful not to step on their outstretched limbs, screaming for help that would never come. “I know what his working means.”

  “You don’t know. I don’t think anyone does, really. We don’t have any idea of the numbers killed in Low Town, among the Islanders and the dockworkers. With sanitation like it was, it could have been a third, half, even higher. He’s the reason we won the war. Without him, there wouldn’t have been enough men alive to fight.” Her eyes trailed reverentially upward. “We can never repay him for what he did. Never.”

  When I didn’t respond, she blushed a little, suddenly self-conscious. “But you’ve got me started again.” Her loose smile revealed a thin cobweb of lines stretching across her skin, lines that contrasted sorely with my memories of her as a youth, images I knew to be defunct but couldn’t discount. “I’m sure you didn’t return to us to hear my tired bromides to the Master.”

  “Not specifically.”

  Too late I realized my half answer allowed her to conjure her own explanation for my arrival. “Is this a forced interrogation? Am I to tie you down and tease it out of you?”

  I hadn’t planned on telling her-but then I hadn’t planned on running into Celia at all. And it was better to let her know my real motive, rather than stoke whatever fantasies she had been clinging to. “You heard about Little Tara?”

  She blanched, and her sultry grin dripped away. “We aren’t so far removed from the city as you seem to think.”

  “I found her body yesterday,” I said, “and I stopped by to see if the Master knew anything about it.”

  Celia gnawed at her bottom lip-the tic, at least, one thing that had held over from our time as children. “I’ll light a candle that Prachetas might bring comfort to her family, and one to Lizben, that the girl’s soul will find
her way home. But frankly I’m not sure what business it is of yours. Let the Crown handle it.”

  “Why Celia-that sounds like something I would say.”

  She blushed again, faintly ashamed.

  I took a few steps toward a towering plant in full bloom, stripped from some distant corner of the globe. Its odor was cloying and heavy. “You’re happy here, following in his footsteps?”

  “I’ll never have his skill, nor be capable of his mastery of the Art. But it is an honor to be the Crane’s heir. I study day and night to be worthy of the privilege.”

  “You aim to replace him?”

  “Not replace of course, no one could ever replace the Master. But he won’t be here forever. Someone will need to ensure his work continues. The Master understands that, it’s part of why I’m being raised in rank.” She lifted her chin, confident bordering on imperious. “When the time comes I’ll be ready to safeguard the people of Low Town.”

  “Alone in the tower? Seems like a lonely pursuit. The Crane was past middle age when he retired here.”

  “Sacrifice is part of the responsibility.”

  “What happened to your clerkship at the Bureau of Magical Affairs?” I asked, recalling the position she had occupied the last time we had spoken. “You seemed to be enjoying it.”

  “I realized I had ambitions beyond spending the rest of my life shuffling papers across a desk and arguing with functionaries and bureaucrats.” Her eyes iced over, unhappy contrast to the sweetness she had heretofore offered me. “It’s an aim you would be more familiar with, had you bothered to speak to me in the last five years.”

  Hard to argue that one. I turned back toward the greenery. The anger leaked out of Celia, and after a moment she was her jovial self. “Enough of this-we’ve years and years to catch up on! What are you doing with yourself these days? How is Adolphus?”

  There was no good to be found in prolonging this, not for either of us. “It’s been good seeing you. It’s a comfort to know you’re still looking after the Master.” And that he’s still looking after you.