Low Town lt-1

by Daniel Polansky

  He smirked but didn’t say anything.

  “Well? What have you got for me?”

  “The butler says that the duke is indisposed, but that he wants you to come speak to him around ten.”

  “He said he wanted to speak to me personally?”

  Wren nodded.

  I had hoped I might get a chance to talk to the Blade, see if I couldn’t sniff something out, but had figured I’d at least have to con my way past his second. Why did Beaconfield want to talk to me? Was it simply idle curiosity, the lurid fascination of the well fed for those of us struggling through the seedy underbelly of the city we all inhabit? Somehow I doubted this was the first time that walking vice den had met a drug dealer.

  From behind the bar I grabbed a pen and parchment, then scratched a short note into the vellum: Don’t deal with the Blade or his people until you hear otherwise. Avoid anyone he sends for you. Will come round tomorrow, noon.

  I folded the paper lengthwise, then turned it and folded it lengthwise again. “Take this to Yancey’s house and leave it with his mother,” I said, handing the message to Wren. “He probably won’t be in, but tell her to make sure he gets it once he shows. After that you’re done for the night-do whatever Adolphus tells you.”

  Wren scampered off.

  “And don’t read the letter!” I yelled after him, probably unnecessarily.

  Adolphus’s voice was low amid the background chatter. “What’s the trouble?”

  “How much time you got?” I grabbed my coat. “If I’m not back tonight, tell Crispin to give a hard look at the Duke of Beaconfield, and especially any ex-military men in his employ.” Not waiting for a response I turned and headed out of the Earl, away from the boisterous crowd and into the quiet of the evening.

  My demeanor eased as I approached the back entrance to Beaconfield’s manor and saw Dunkan waving me down with a wide smile. “And here I was thinking I wouldn’t see you, what with your boy not sure when you’d make it out here and my shift almost over.”

  “Hello, Dunkan,” I said, taking his outstretched hand with an unfeigned grin. “Keeping warm?”

  He laughed good-naturedly, his face nearly as red as his hair. “Colder than the nipples on a hag, as my father used to say! Course, strictly between us as gentlemen, I’ve armed myself with a secret weapon against the onslaught of winter.” He took an unlabeled bottle from his waistcoat and shook it invitingly. “Don’t suppose I can interest you in a taste?”

  I knocked back a shot and my stomach filled with liquid fire.

  “Good stuff, ain’t it?” he asked.

  I nodded and took another. It was good, strong as the kick of a mule but with a sweet aftertaste.

  “Brewed over a peat fire-that’s the only way to do it. My cousin’s got a still in his backyard, sends me a monthly shipment. One day I’ll have enough saved to move back home and start a real brewery. That’s the plan, anyways. Course, I might change my mind and blow it all on loose women!”

  I laughed along with him. He was that kind of fellow. “If you go the first route, make sure to send me along a pony keg of your first batch.”

  “Will do. Enough jawing with the help-I’m sure you’ve got more important things to discuss. I signaled inside that you were here-Old Man Sawdust should be waiting for you. If I’m still on guard when you leave, give me a shout and we’ll share another drop.”

  “Looking forward to it,” I said and headed through the entrance.

  He was as good as his word, and before I could rap on the off-white door it had swung open and Tucket stared down at me, shriveled eyes over a pointed nose. “You’ve arrived,” he said.

  “It would seem that way.” The chill blew in and he was without hat or coat. I enjoyed watching him try to maintain his staid composure.

  “Will you enter?” he asked, his fastidious mannerisms tarnished somewhat by the chattering of his teeth.

  This courtesy extended, I ducked inside. He clapped his hands and a boy appeared to take my outerwear. As I tossed him my heavy wool coat I realized I’d forgotten to disarm before leaving the Earl. Tucket rested his gaze long enough on my weapon to let me know he had seen it but not so long as to make it an issue.

  Then he took a lantern from off the wall and shone the light down the hallway before us. “The master is in his study. I’ll take you to him.” As usual his speech was halfway between a command and a plea, incorporating the worst aspects of both.

  I followed him down the corridor, taking mental notes of the layout. There was nothing about the line of rooms we passed that suggested inside were cells built for children, or altars stained with their blood, but then in a house this size you could hide almost anything. Tucket noticed my attention, and to keep him from thinking too long on it I decided to needle him some.

  “Does the master often entertain drug peddlers in his private chambers?” I asked as we ascended the main staircase.

  “To whom the master grants an interview is no concern of yours.”

  “Well, it’s sort of my concern, as I’m about to be interviewed by him.”

  We reached the top and turned right, then continued a while longer in silence. I couldn’t help but think his maddeningly slow movements were less a factor of his age than a way to abrade me, for in truth he was only a few years past forty, though his tedious nature made him seem older. It was a petty retaliation but not entirely ineffective-by the time we had reached the Blade’s study I was as desperate to leave Tucket’s presence as he was mine.

  I held my breath through another interminable pause while he mustered the energy to rap on the door. From inside I heard the shuffle of footsteps, and the door swung open.

  Beaconfield had toned his appearance down since last I had seen him, which is to say he was no longer dressed like a whore. A dark coat covered his chest, and a sober if well-trimmed pair of pants made do for the lower half of his body. His face was clean of makeup or other affectation, and his throat and long fingers seemed almost naked without their earlier ornamentation. Indeed, the only aspect of his wardrobe unchanged from the party was the rapier that hung at his side. Was he wearing it for my benefit, I wondered, or did he regularly go armed within the walls of his home?

  “Thank you, Tucket. That will be all.”

  The butler shot me a snide look and cleared his throat obtrusively. “May I remind your grace that Sorcerer Brightfellow is expected?”

  Beaconfield nodded seriously. “Of course. Let me know when he arrives.”

  Tucket disappeared with the felicity of a natural servant. Beaconfield moved aside to allow me entry.

  The Blade’s study was surprisingly somber given what I had seen of his proclivities-no tapestries memorializing mad bacchanals, no bloody trophies from murdered enemies. Instead I saw a well-appointed parlor, luxurious but tasteful, the walls ringed with bookshelves holding ancient volumes, Kiren rugs covering the floor between them. Beaconfield stood behind an ebony table, the sort of ancient, massive thing that suggested the remainder of the structure was built to accommodate it. He eyed my weapon. “Expecting trouble?”

  “Your butler’s a heavy customer.”

  He had a decent laugh, robust and almost honest-not the forced nasal chuckle common to his class, closer to an expulsion of waste than an expression of levity. “Yes, indeed.” He noticed me looking over his decor and offered the grin which had won him half his nickname. “Not quite what you expected?”

  “It seems a bit out of character.”

  “One of the downsides of owning an ancestral estate-there’s nothing in this room that wasn’t here when I was born. See that one?” He pointed to a portrait on the wall of a man who loosely resembled Beaconfield. The protagonist was clad in full plate armor and standing atop an impressive pile of corpses, staring off into space with an expression meant to indicate the gravity of the situation-though what the hell he was doing contemplating the horizon while in the midst of a melee was beyond me.

  “Yeah.”

  “
What do you think of it?”

  “It’s a painting.”

  “Quite hideous, isn’t it? The old king gave it to my great-uncle, to commemorate his famous stand at…” He waved his hand apathetically. “Somewhere. It’s part of the package-I can’t so much as redecorate without betraying the blood.”

  “That’s not an issue I find myself plagued by.”

  “No, I suppose not,” he said. “Normally I’m good with faces, but I can’t mark yours. Too tall for a Tarasaihgn, too broad for an Asher. Your eyes say Rouender, but you’re too dark, near as dark as an Islander. Where do you come from?”

  “A womb.”

  He laughed again and motioned me into a chair. I set my weary body into it with a barely audible sigh. Beaconfield followed my lead, planting himself firmly into the high-backed throne behind his desk.

  “Long day?”

  I opened my satchel and set two items on the table. The first was a pint of amber goo in an unmarked jar, the second a bundle of intertwined brown roots. “Be careful with that honey, it’s uncut. Don’t take more than a lip-full unless you feel like getting real intimate with the bottom of your chamber pot.”

  “Excellent. I’m hosting a Midwinter ball next week. It wouldn’t do to be without party favors for my guests.” He picked up the dried stems and inspected them casually. “How’s the root? I never tried it.”

  “A good excuse to stare at your boots for three or four hours.”

  “Sounds riveting.”

  A chuckle slipped out before I could grab it.

  He set the ouroboros root back on the table and looked me over. He was trying to work the nerve up to ask me something, but I cut in before he had the chance. “So Brightfellow’s up next? You line up your unsavory interviews so you can burn the upholstery afterward?”

  “Is that how you’d describe yourself? Unsavory?”

  “That’s how I’d describe Brightfellow.”

  “I wouldn’t introduce him to the Queen. But he’s useful, and clever. Damn clever.”

  “How’d you meet the man? I don’t imagine the two of you run in the same circles.”

  Beaconfield leaned back in his chair and thought this over, his hand resting affectionately on the pommel of his weapon. I got the impression this wasn’t meant to be intimidating, that the duke was simply the sort of person who liked to stroke his chosen instrument of murder. “Do you believe in fate, Warden?”

  “I doubt the Daevas have any hand in the mess we’ve made of their creation.”

  “Normally I’m inclined to agree with you. But in the case of Brightfellow that seems the best way to describe it. I’ve had some… bad runs lately. He’s going to help turn my luck around.”

  “I knew a priest once who liked to say that the Oathkeeper prefers to work through imperfect vessels.” I suspected it had been the Frater’s favorite aphorism because he couldn’t go an hour without a half vial of breath, but that was neither here nor there. “And has the sorcerer made good on his promises?”

  “Not yet. But I’m confident in the eventual success of our enterprise.”

  Did this enterprise include the murder of two children and opening a door to the abyss? I wouldn’t put it past either of them, but then suspicion isn’t the same as certainty, let alone evidence. I’d pushed the duke as far as he’d go, so I went quiet. He’d called me here for a reason; if I waited long enough, I figured he’d get to it.

  “It wouldn’t surprise you to hear that I made inquiries into your past, into your conduct and character, before deciding to do business with you.”

  “My life’s an open book.” With the pages torn out, but someone with the Blade’s draw wouldn’t have had trouble getting the outline. “And I’m not that easily surprised.”

  “They say you’re a modest criminal presence, not attached to any of the bigger players. They say you’re reliable, quiet.”

  “Do they?”

  “They say something else too-they say you used to play on the other side of the fence, that you wore the gray before taking up your current occupation.”

  “They’ll say I was a babe in swaddling clothes if you go back far enough.”

  “Yes, I suppose they would, wouldn’t they? What incited it? Your fall from grace?”

  “Things happen.”

  “True, exactly as you say. Things happen.” His eyes traced patterns on the wall behind me, and the fire crackled in the corner. His face took on a wistful quality that tends to augur monologue, and, sure enough, the pregnant pause gave birth to soliloquy.

  “It’s strange, the paths a man finds himself on. In the storybooks everyone’s granted some critical moment, when the road forks and your options are laid out clear in front of you: heroism or villainy. But it’s not like that, is it? Decisions follow decisions, each minor in and of itself, made in the heat of the moment or on the dregs of instinct. Then one day you look up and realize that you’re stuck, that every muttered answer is a bar in the cage you’ve built, and the momentum of each choice moves you forward as inexorably as the will of the Firstborn.”

  “Eloquent, but untrue. I made a decision, once. If the consequences were worse than I had anticipated… that’s because it was a bad decision.”

  “But that’s my point, you see. How can you know which choices matter and which choices don’t? There are decisions I have made that I regret, that were-that were not who I am. There are decisions I would unmake, were it possible to do so.”

  By the Lost One, he was worse than the heretics. What was he admitting to? The children were dead-there was no do-over coming on that. Or was I reading subtlety where none existed? Was Beaconfield the sort of patrician who likes to reminisce with us low folk about the difficult and forlorn nature of human existence? “One way or the other, we pay what we owe.”

  “Then there is no hope for any of us?”

  “None.”

  “You’re a cold man.”

  “It’s a cold world. I’ve adjusted to the temperature.”

  His jaw tightened. “Quite right, quite right. We play our hands out to the end.”

  Beaconfield began radiating something that might have been threatening or might have been just general aristocratic disdain-it was tough to tell. I was relieved when a knock signaled the end of our meeting.

  We both rose and moved toward the exit. The Blade opened the door, and Tucket muttered a few words to his master before disappearing.

  “Thank you for your services,” Beaconfield began. “It occurs to me I may need to make use of them in the future, perhaps before Midwinter. You’re still at the Staggering Earl, then, with your comrade from the war and his wife?” he asked, the threat obvious and unanticipated.

  “A man’s home is his castle.”

  He smiled. “Indeed.”

  It had been a long day, as long a day as I could remember, and as I headed back the way I’d come part of me hoped that I’d be able to make the exit without running into the duke’s next appointment. But the rest figured that he was worth taking another run at, and this latter portion was gratified when I reached the top of the steps and saw Brightfellow seated on a bench below, looking every bit as prepossessing as he had during our first meeting. He pushed himself up to his feet and broke into a broad grin, and so numerous were Beaconfield’s parlor steps that I got to spend a good fifteen seconds staring at it as I descended.

  I hadn’t expected Brightfellow to have transformed himself into a respectable member of the human race in the day since we’d seen each other, and he’d been kind enough not to refute my assumption. If he wasn’t wearing the same soiled black suit as when we’d met, he was in a close enough cousin to make my confusion reasonable.

  But there was something about the man that struck me, something that I’d noticed earlier but hadn’t been able to square with the rest of him. A lot of men affect hardness, fortifying themselves with dreams of their potential menace like it was sack wine. It was something of a local pastime in Low Town, rent boys and bumblefuc
ks leaning against crumbling brick walls, convincing one another that they were deadlier than an untreated wound, that their reputation kept passersby on the far side of the street. After a while they become part of the scenery. There are some things a man can’t fake, and lethality is one of them-a lapdog might learn to howl, even bare its teeth on occasion, but that don’t make it a wolf.

  The real ones don’t put on airs. You can feel what they are in the bottom of your stomach. Brightfellow was a killer. Not like the Kiren who’d taken Tara, not a maniac-just a murderer, an everyday sort of fellow who’d put a few members of his species in the ground and not felt any particular way about it. I set that thought squarely in my mind as I went to meet him-that the buffoonish exterior was only part of who he was, and maybe not a big part either, a sliver he’d ballooned up to cover the rest.

  I pulled out my tobacco pouch, rolling up the cigarette I’d wanted to light from the moment I’d stepped inside the Blade’s mansion, figuring the smoke might do something to cover up Brightfellow’s unwashed meat. He held his cap in hand, and his uneven teeth formed a false smile.

  “Well, if it ain’t the funny man himself. How you doing, funny man?”

  “Tell me something, Brightfellow-do you make a point of eating liver before you see me, or is it such a regular part of your schedule as to make the coincidence unavoidable?”

  He laughed nastily, grinding his yellowed ivories against one another. “Caught my name, did you, funny man? Nice to see I’ve gained a little renown-sometimes I think all my hard work goes unappreciated.”

  “And what exactly is it you do?”

  “What do you think I do?”

  “I figure that most of the people around here are employed to clean off whatever shit the duke finds himself stepping in. And since you smell distinctly of a latrine, I figured you for being in that same general line.”

  Brightfellow barked out another ugly chuckle. That laugh was a real weapon-it let him slip blows and keep coming. “I have the honor of being the Duke of Beaconfield’s court mage, and I strive daily to be worthy of it,” he said, doing a pretty good impression of the butler, though with enough of his toothy smile to make clear it wasn’t more than that.