Low Town lt-1

by Daniel Polansky

  I bowed deeply, almost to the ground, and left. Rearming myself from the bench outside, I scurried into the bar and took an empty table in the corner. Four Kirens slipped in from the back room, hard men, as distinct from the other patrons as a wolf is from a dog. They approached the table next to mine, and the workers seated there vacated their spot without comment. One of the four, a thickset man with an elaborate dragon tattoo spiraling across his face, looked over and nodded at me. I nodded back. Then I flagged down a serving boy and told him to send over some kisvas.

  After a few minutes the front door opened and Crowley walked in, backed by the three boys he’d introduced me to earlier. The bar fell silent and Crowley met the sea of heretic faces with a look of undisguised contempt. He saw me and whispered something to his men. They split off to the counter, and Crowley ambled toward my table.

  He stopped behind the chair opposite mine, flush with petty glee. The tavern had returned to something that resembled normality, if you weren’t paying much attention. Crowley wasn’t. “I thought maybe we’d lost you,” he said.

  “Just having a drink.” I kicked the seat toward him. “Take a load off. I know it’s been a little bit of a walk.”

  “We’re here though, aren’t we,” he responded, dropping his oversize frame onto the beat-up wooden stool.

  “It might be more of a contest now that I’m armed.”

  “If you thought anything of your chances, you wouldn’t have run.”

  “You always had trouble grasping the concept of a tactical retreat.”

  “Yeah, I’m an ogre and you’re a genius-but where’s all your smarts gonna get you? Dead in a ditch on a winter night.” His thick bulk shifted back into his chair. “Doesn’t sound so fucking bright to me.”

  “Not when you put it that way,” I agreed.

  “Course, if you were smart you wouldn’t be here. If you were smart, you’d be head of Special Ops by now. That’s why the Old Man hates you so much, you know-’cause you disappointed him.”

  “Daily I lament my failure to live up to his expectations.”

  “I tell you, he was shocked as hell when you did what you did. It was the only time I ever saw the bastard get hot.” He flashed his ugly grin, formed as a child when he first pulled the wing off a fly, perfected throughout the long years since by daily acts of cruelty. “What was her name again?”

  “Albertine.”

  “Right, Albertine,” he said. “Let me ask you, was she worth it? Because as far as I’m concerned, one piece of cunt’s the same as another.”

  I let that seep in through my pores, rubbed at it like a sore tooth, saving it up so I could pay it back.

  The serving boy came by for an order, but Crowley waved him away. “Why the hell did you pick here to hide? Fucking Kirens.” He looked about disgustedly. “They’re like insects.”

  “Ants,” I said. “They’re like ants.”

  He pointed one thick finger at me. “Every one of these motherfuckers that bows and calls you master would put his foot on your neck if you gave him half a chance.”

  “Either they’re playing at tyrants or cringing like slaves.”

  “Exactly! Not like us. No sense of pride, that’s the problem.”

  “Not like us,” I agreed. Behind Crowley, Ling Chi’s men were getting restless, understanding enough to be insulted.

  “And that monkey talk!” Crowley slapped his knee. “Speak Rigun, you slant-eyed bastards!”

  “It’s not that hard, once you get the hang of it. Here, we’ll practice.” I drained the last of my kisvas. “Shou zhe cao ni ma,” I said.

  “ Zou ze ca nee maa,” he repeated, then chuckled at his own awkwardness. “What does that mean?”

  The tattooed Kiren said something in his native tongue. I nodded at him. “It means, ‘End this motherfucker.’ ”

  I swear Crowley was so dumb it took him three or four seconds to put that together. Realization finally dawned on his face and he tried to stand, but I caught him flush against the face and he stumbled backward.

  The bar erupted into violence. The men who first moved on Crowley were in Ling Chi’s employ, but it wasn’t long till the crowd got in on the action, happy to provide the arrogant round eyes in their midst a permanent comeuppance. Crowley’s boys went quick. The bartender, whose value I generally rated closer to lichen than mammal, pulled a cleaver from beneath the counter and took the head off a well-built Vaalan with a dispassion suggesting this was not the first time he’d decapitated a patron. The scarred Mirad managed to draw his knife before being swallowed, screaming as the press of men beat him senseless to the ground with whatever makeshift weapons they could find.

  After that, I decided it was best to pull toward the back-we didn’t want the heretics getting confused on whom they were supposed to be killing, and anyway the cuff I’d given Crowley had torn at the wound I’d gotten the night earlier. My ex-colleague put up what resistance he could, rocking one of Ling Chi’s henchmen with a left hook before the tattooed Kiren sapped him to the ground. I stepped in then, waving off the heretic before he could draw a razor across Crowley’s throat. I wanted him alive. His friends I didn’t so much care about.

  The Kiren were unprofessional and overzealous, but they were thorough. After five minutes there was nothing to reveal that three white men had just been murdered, the corpses removed to be disposed of in one of the myriad ways Ling Chi had devised to eliminate evidence of his frequent executions. Crowley lay on the ground, two of Ling Chi’s men taking turns booting him when he squirmed. I nodded toward a side door, and they dragged him outside by his arms.

  There was a break in the storm, and the evening light reflected bright off the snow. Crowley’s knees left a line in the fresh powder, the trail inset with red leaking down from his scalp. We stopped in a cul-de-sac behind the bar, the henchmen holding my old nemesis firmly, their support the only thing keeping him from collapsing. I pulled out my tobacco pouch and rolled a tab, waiting for him to come to.

  It was no small joy watching him awake to my ugly mug square against his own. “Back with us?”

  He cursed something fierce and inventive.

  I pulled a throwing knife from my shoulder holster and held it lightly in my left hand. One of the Kiren said something to his counterpart too rapidly for me to catch. “Crowley, look at me.”

  I laid the knife to his throat. To his credit, he neither flinched nor pissed himself. “I could do you right now, Crowley, and the heretics would make your body disappear, and there wouldn’t be a single person in the Thirteen Lands who’d care.” His skin twitched against the cold metal.

  I let the weapon fall to my side. “But I’m not going to fade you-I’m gonna let you walk. And I want you to remember, from now until the day I decide to kill you, this act of kindness. I am your benefactor, agent-and every sunny afternoon, every fuck and full stomach, you owe to me.” He blinked twice, confused. I smiled broadly. “But just in case you get forgetful.” My dagger opened a wound from the bottom of his forehead down through his cheek, and he screamed and went limp.

  I watched him bleed for a moment, then nodded at the tattooed Kiren. He and the other exchanged quizzical looks-apparently there was no tradition of last-minute reprieves among the heretics. I nodded again and they released Crowley, who slumped to the ground, motionless except for the hemorrhaging.

  The Kirens walked back inside the bar, laughing at the absurd customs of this alien country. As for me, I ducked down the alley and headed back to the Earl. It was too late to follow up with Cadamost-I’d have to hope this side errand wouldn’t end up costing me more than it had been worth. Still, walking home I had to struggle to keep a smile off my lips at the thought of the permanent one I’d given Crowley.

  I woke up early, and sneaked out of the bar. The address Guiscard had given me was deep in Kirentown, the part of the city where you could walk five blocks without seeing anyone who wasn’t a faithful subject of the Celestial Emperor. Of course, three days into the
storm of the century you could walk five blocks without seeing anyone period. By the time I arrived beneath the sign of the Gray Lantern my boots were soaked straight through, and I found myself wondering whether the Old Man might give me an extension on account of the weather.

  Inside was a comically small store, maybe eight feet from the front door to the back. The shelves were stocked with a disparate variety of general goods-pots and pans, needles and spools of thread, consistent only in the layer of accumulated dust. Very little effort was being put forth to maintain the facade that this was a functioning enterprise, but then I supposed so far into Kiren territory the hoax didn’t show up much and were easy to bribe when they did. A pinched-face heretic sat on a stool and stared at me with an expression that made me want to teach him the basics of customer relations with my fists. He nodded curtly and I slid past him, happy to have gotten through so easily but disturbed that I was apparently indistinguishable from a common junkie.

  Against the back wall an iron fence had been erected, long stalks of wyrm hanging from the top of the cage, ready to be cut up and sold as needed. Inside, a young Kiren girl sat ready to trade a few hours of oblivion for whatever coin one could muster. She watched me open-mouthed. I wasn’t sure if she was high or just stupid. The rest of the room was occupied by all manner of tables and booths, acquired without the slavish desire for uniformity or cleanliness that tends to plague legitimate businesses. Wafting over everything was the unmistakable melange of the drug itself, noxious and enticing, like baked goods and burnt flesh.

  It was early, and the weather discouraged casual errands, but just the same there were a dozen victims strewn about the place, puffing on their pipes or sunk back into oblivion. All but one was a heretic, though, so it was easy enough to find my man. He was huddled in a back booth, his head lying awkwardly on the table in front of him, and he didn’t react to my approach.

  “Afonso Cadamost?”

  He answered without lifting his skull off the counter. “Fuck off.”

  I set an argent on the wood beside him.

  The clink of silver brought his face up, and I wished him still prone. The tawny color of his race had been altered to a sickly gray, and his skin hung loose and heavy. Decayed teeth are the most common mark of a wyrm addict, but even expecting that, the black-green rot of his smile was unsettling. More unsettling were his eyes, ascetic, stygian things, angry dark dots in a muddled off-white saucer.

  I dropped myself into the chair across from him, careful not to think about whose ass had rested there before my own. “I’d like to know some things,” I said.

  He put the argent to his teeth, and I worried the weakened ivories might break against the metal. When they didn’t he shrugged and dropped the coin into his pocket. “Yeah?”

  “I hear you were part of Operation Ingress.”

  Fear is the last thing an addict loses-apparently Afonso still had enough on the ball for my reference to worry him. “What do you know about it?” He licked his lips, trailing saliva across the chain of sores that disfigured the lower half of his face.

  I thought about lying but decided against it-he wouldn’t remember this conversation in twenty minutes, and no one would listen to such an obvious degenerate even if he did. “My unit was outside Donknacht before the armistice. I provided protection for a counterpart of yours.” Not very well, I might have added, but he didn’t need to know that. “Sorcerer Adelweid.”

  “Adelweid,” he repeated slowly, like he was having trouble placing it.

  “The two of you were classmates at the academy.”

  “I know who he was,” Cadamost snapped back. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

  A junkie, obviously. Cadamost took a hit from his pipe to calm himself, doing little to alter my opinion.

  “I remember Adelweid,” he began again. “He was the start of it, you know, the start of everything. He found a journal one day in the archives… the Crown had tons of that shit, papers they’d confiscated over the years but never bothered to look at. It was nearly ruined from age and written in a strange hand, but what was left…” His eyes darted about like a coursed hare. “You say you were there at the end?”

  “Lieutenant in the Capital Infantry. We were the first into Donknacht, although you boys had softened them up pretty good by the time we got there.”

  “Yeah, I suppose we had. You… saw one?”

  “I saw one.” It wasn’t hard to figure out what he was referring to.

  “Where do you think it came from?”

  “Another world? I don’t know-metaphysics was never my strong suit.”

  “Not another world, not a world at all. The absence between all of them. In the nothing between the universes, in the space where light doesn’t reach-that’s where she came from.”

  “She?” I asked.

  “She,” he confirmed. “She was dancing in the darkness when I called her, waltzing endlessly in the center of forever. Waiting for a suitor.”

  I clenched tight on my revulsion. “How did you summon her?”

  His breath reeked of carrion, fetid and unnatural. “She wasn’t some common whore to come at your beck and call! She was a lady, prim and proper, like one of those sweet-looking cunts you see out by the palace! She didn’t just spread her legs for me ’cause I crooked my finger! I had to court her!”

  He took a hit, then coughed into my face. “What does that mean, you had to court her?”

  “What are you, some kind of faggot, down on your knees at the bathhouse, sucking cock through a hole in the wall! Ain’t you never had a woman? You speak soft words to her, you tell her she’s beautiful. When the time is right, you give her something special-a token of your love.”

  “What kind of token?”

  “That’s the catch, isn’t it? She didn’t see like we saw-one human was the same as another. She needed something of mine to remind her, something special, something that had some of me in it.”

  “What was it?”

  “A bracelet-my mother gave it to me when I left Miradin.” This seemed an unwelcome memory, and he offered no further explanation. “I cast it into the void and when it came back to me it hummed with her song, hummed with it, morning through night. It’s what bound us together. She was beautiful and devoted-her love for me was as endless as the black sea she swam in. But she was a jealous mistress and quick to anger. The token connected us.” He smiled grimly. “Without it, she would have been very, very displeased.”

  At the time I had thought Adelweid’s refusal to part with his jewelry was sheer vanity. That might also explain Brightfellow’s penchant for jewelry, though bad taste would do the same. “These… things,” I said, “you can summon them, but they can’t stay here?”

  “She was too perfect, undiluted by the dross of our reality. It took the strength of my love for her to cross over.”

  That jibed with what Adelweid had told me about his creature dissipating after completing its task. “There was another student in the academy with you-Brightfellow, Johnathan Brightfellow.”

  Cadamost ground a dirty fingernail against the cracked skin of his scalp. “Yeah, I remember him. He was a few years older than the rest of us, came from some petty province up north.”

  “What else you remember?”

  “He had a temper. There was this little piece he used to follow-someone said something about her once and he lost it, cracked the boy’s head against a wall before anyone could think to do a working.” Cadamost strained to shake his mind out of its debasement, the simple act of recollection a marathon sprint. “He didn’t have much in the way of talent, maybe because he started learning so late-but he was sharp, sharper than you’d think, sharper than he let on.”

  “And he was part of Operation Ingress.”

  “Yeah, he was part of it. Most of us were, anyone with any sense and skill-you could tell what it would lead to, everything it promised. To see what came out when you cracked open the cage, to get a look at the bottom, way dow
n at the bottom, the nothing that makes up everything. It wasn’t about the war-we let them think it, but it wasn’t about that at all. They were gods, and they wanted to look at us, talk to us and touch us, love us.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked, though I already knew.

  “The others were cowards. They didn’t understand; they wouldn’t let themselves understand. I knew what she wanted, knew what she wanted and wanted to give it to her. For that they feared me, and they took her away.” He stroked his wrist and gazed out past the walls, as if his obsession might reveal itself in the distance. “I can feel it out there, somewhere. They have it and they keep it from me!” He coughed this out, along with something that looked very much like blood.

  “And the rest of the practitioners? They still have their tokens?”

  “I was singled out for my genius. The rest of them were allowed to keep theirs, I suppose. Or at least they still had them when I was stripped of my rank.” His eyes squinted to slits in his rotting face. “Why? What’s all this about anyway?”

  “Thanks for your help,” I said, laying another argent on the table.

  The sight of more silver was enough to make him forget his concerns. “You’re a good man, to help a fellow veteran. There’s a spot in Chinvat for you, no doubt about that!” He laughed and reached for the bowl.

  “Go careful on the next round,” I told him as I buttoned up my coat. “I’d rather mine wasn’t the coin that killed you.” Though on the way out I realized I didn’t care much either way.

  I picked Wren up and spent the rest of the morning at a tailor I used to frequent, getting my outfit ready for Brightfellow’s party. The snow was not letting up. I had lived in Rigus for thirty of my thirty-five years, only leaving it to wage war on the Dren, and in all that time I’d never seen anything like this. The streets were deserted, the hum of city life dulled to an almost pastoral quiet, the season’s festivities canceled.