Sully mumbled something that I couldn’t quite make out.
‘What?’
‘Uriel Carabajal.’
I didn’t say anything. Then I said, ‘Fuck me.’
‘Yeah,’ Sully agreed.
‘You got in bed with the Asher?’
‘It was a sweetheart deal,’ he said, though he was more lamenting than celebrating it. ‘They wanted someone to distribute this new drug they’ve got cooked up. Someone unaffiliated – not one of their own. The money was good. And they’re Unredeemed, it’s not like they wear the outfit.’
‘He tell you where he got his hands on this stuff?’
‘What do you think?’
I wouldn’t have told Sully the name of my barber. I didn’t suppose Uriel felt any differently.
‘They aren’t so bad,’ Sully said, mostly to himself. ‘The Asher are just the same as anyone else.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They aren’t at all.’
Sully put a hand up to his head.
‘You ever hear that story about Uriel and his brother, about why they left the fold?’ I asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘No way to prove it, of course – not like the Asher are going to go swearing out a complaint with the hoax.’
‘No.’
‘But having met him, I kind of think it’s true. You think it’s true?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sort of person who would do that to his own people, folk he grown with, folk whose blood he shares – don’t bear pondering, kind of thing he’d do to some stranger who betrayed his trust.’
‘No.’
‘I’m saying, things would go bad, he ever finds out we had this conversation. Not for me – nothing bad ever happens to me, I lead a charmed life. But for you, Sully. I imagine things would get very ugly for you indeed, if Uriel ever found out that you’d let a few harsh words pry his name out of your mouth.’
To judge by the look on Sully’s face, forlorn and near to weeping, this thought had already occurred to him.
‘Well,’ I said, standing, ‘I’ll do my best keep you out of it.’
It took him a while to hear what I said. ‘What?’
‘I won’t mention you to Uriel,’ I said, ‘when I go to see him tomorrow.’
‘Why the hell would you be talking to Uriel?’
‘What did you think this was all about? You roll on Uriel, he rolls on whomever he rolls on. It’s the way of the world. But don’t worry about it – I’m looking out for you. I’m gonna make sure you come out of this OK.’
I waited to see if he’d thank me, but he didn’t. Poor breeding, that’s all that was. Kids today, and so forth.
I buttoned up my coat. ‘You’ll remember, Sully, that I did you this favor? When I come back and see you, next week or in six months or in five years, you’ll remember how I helped you out this time – and you’ll be happy to make good on your debt.’
By that point, Sully would have sold away his firstborn if it meant getting me out of the bar. ‘I won’t forget.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ I said. ‘At the end of the day, all a man is is his word. Don’t you think?’
I didn’t wait around for an answer. But then, I was pretty sure where Sully stood on questions of personal loyalty.
6
The weather had turned from early to late autumn by the time I made it outside. The wind was blowing – a month earlier it would have been a breeze, but by now you’d have to go ahead and admit it was the wind. There had been some sunlight a few hours earlier but there wasn’t any now, the sky was gray and so was the mood. I pulled up the collar of my coat and headed east.
Yancey had never moved out of his mother’s house, and I guess now he never would. A solid thing, brick walls and a bright red door, the kind they didn’t seem to build anymore. Everything these days is cookie-cutter mansions or slum tenements, shacks with tarpaulin for a roof. It was in a decent neighborhood too, there weren’t many of those near Low Town. A good spot to grow up, as good as any to die. Better than most.
I knocked on the door. It was a long time before it opened.
Once upon a time, Mrs Dukes had a certain genial affection for me – misplaced but appreciated. Later this had turned into a rather exaggerated contempt, though I suppose from her perspective it was well earned. I wasn’t sure what she felt for me at this point. Not a lot, I supposed. What was left of her was consumed by her son.
She’d been a handsome woman well into middle age, with an infectious smile and lively eyes. That had been burned out of her with Yancey’s illness, and now she just looked tired. She wouldn’t long outlast him – you didn’t want to think it but you couldn’t help yourself.
‘Hello, Mrs Dukes.’
‘He’s upstairs,’ she said, with no great excess of kindness. She started to warn me not to make trouble for him, but she didn’t finish. Things could not, after all, get much worse.
He was lying in bed when I came up. He was always in bed these days.
I’d met the Rhymer some fifteen years back, long enough ago that it was a struggle to recall the specifics. When I used to enforce the law he’d let me in on the gossip, what everyone knew that Black House didn’t. When I started breaking it for a living he’d been of even more help, dropping my name at the parties and nightspots he frequented, letting anyone looking for a pleasant escape know I was the man to act as tour guide. He’d been a musician and a poet, still was I suppose, though his body was no longer capable of focusing his inborn talent. For a while it had looked like he could do no wrong, that his ascent would be continuous and uninterrupted. At his peak, there wasn’t a drawing room or garden of the empire’s elite that wasn’t graced with the presence of Yancey the Rhymer.
But nothing lasts forever – not success, not life. Four years back, Yancey had roughed up a noble after one of his sets. No doubt the blue blood had deserved it, but go ahead and try telling that to the hoax. He’d gotten off light, apart from being tuned up like a lute string. Six months inside, not so terrible in the scheme of things, but it had changed him. He’d fallen out of favor amongst his old patrons, had to stoop to playing dive bars and busking for coin. Then he’d started to get sick, real sick, for days and weeks on end. I’d see him out one night and then he’d be gone for half a month, holed up while his body ate away at itself. Whatever was killing him had been growing for years – but I think it was prison that let it take root, prison and the shame of falling from such heights.
Back when Yancey was Yancey he was constantly in motion, his body echoing the rhythm pulsing through his skull. He swiveled his shoulders when he walked, bounced his head when he talked and drummed his fingers when he laughed, which he did often. He was a small fellow but he took up twice the space of a normal man.
So it was the stillness that I noticed more than anything else, the long moment it took him to look up from the spot on the wall he’d been aimlessly staring at, the longer moment it took for him to react to my presence. I dropped in to see him whenever I could stomach it, which was less than I should have. You could read every minute I’d been gone in the loose folds of his face, and his jaundiced eyes.
Still, he did the best he could, offering a smile that still carried some flicker of the man he’d been. ‘So you stopped by?’
‘I was in the neighborhood.’
‘You bring me a present?’
‘You need to ask?’ From inside my coat I took out a ball of dreamvine, wrapped in brown paper and tied tight with thread.
I tossed it on over and he brought it up to his nose, savoring the smell. ‘Where’d you get this?’
‘Dread Mackenzie himself.’ It was widely believed that Mackenzie had the best vine in the city. A boutique business, far too expensive to warrant farming out through my dealers. What I bought from Dread I kept for my own personal use. It wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it.
‘Coming through strong for me?’
‘I wouldn’t drop by with anything less.’
The Rhymer took that as his due, then swung his legs off the bed. ‘Help me up,’ he said.
‘Where we going?’
‘The roof – Mom would kill me if I smoked in the house.’
This was not a good idea. The weather was bad, and Yancey was in no shape to be spending twenty minutes outside without a coat. But his eyes were firm, though bloodshot, and I knew there wasn’t any point arguing. And I knew it wouldn’t make any kind of difference anyway, not in the long run.
I helped him up, trying not to grimace at the wasted shell he’d become. In his prime, Yancey had been a solid block of muscle. After getting out of prison he’d started to swell up some, a curious precursor to the wasting process he was now undergoing, his body bloating unpleasantly before failing all together. He leaned on me as we walked out of his room and up the stairs, leaned on me and hated doing so. But his legs were spindly things that seemed barely able to support his torso, for all that he’d withered down to half what he’d once weighed.
Yancey’s house was built over the Beggar’s Ramparts, a deep ravine that cut down towards the docks. I’d passed many an afternoon looking out over it, listening to Yancey practicing new material or just burning through vine and time. There were two chairs left on the deck built over the top of his house, relics of a summer that seemed long distant. I settled him into one. On the other was a thick wool blanket. I covered his shoulders with it, then joined him in repose.
He undid the wrapping on the dreamvine, and got to rolling. After a moment he had a twist as wide as my middle finger and twice as long. ‘Not so bad,’ he said.
‘Not at all.’
‘I can still do that, at least.’ He let his hand sink back to his lap. ‘When a man can’t roll his own joint – that’s when a man knows it’s time to put razor to wrist.’
I didn’t say anything. Under the circumstances, Yancey was entitled to a little self-pity. Śakra knew I indulged deeper than he did, and for less cause. The breeze picked up. It would rain tonight.
He managed to light the thing against the wind. The first puff rumbled through him, he started coughing, had to hold on to the rest of his chair. If he died up here in the cold, his mother would throw me off the balcony, and I wouldn’t do anything to stop her. But he straightened up, even managed a decent smile. ‘Good shit,’ he said. ‘What’s the news?’
The Rhymer had always been a font of gossip, the repository of all Low Town’s secrets and sins. It was one of the many things his illness had taken from him, I think he craved information more than he did the drugs I brought. ‘Things roll along. You remember Zaga, giant Islander, used to be part of the Bruised Fruit Mob, back when there was one?’
Yancey scowled. ‘Sure.’
‘He dead.’
‘Yeah?’ Yancey brightened up a bit.
‘Found him bobbing in the bay yesterday morning. People who seen it say the corpse was … mistreated.’
‘Who done him?’
‘Let’s just say there are a lot of dry eyes in Low Town. One of the Tarasaighn mobs, maybe; they’ve been going back and forth over the west docks.’
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.’
Yancey passed the joint over and I took a puff. Dread’s reputation wasn’t no lie – this was as good as it got. You could tell from the sweet taste on your tongue, and you could tell from the color of the smoke, royal purple and star orange. And you could tell from the way it swelled up in your chest, made your head full of light and empty of trouble.
‘What else?’ Yancey asked.
I could feel Reinhardt’s tin in my pocket, nor was my mind far from the events that had preceded me finding it. But there was no point in tracking that mess to the Rhymer, and anyway I’d come over here as an excuse to not think about it. ‘The Sons of Śakra don’t show any signs of disappearing. There’s half an army of them handing out tracts down by the docks, trying to convince men been on a ship for six months they’d prefer a church pew to the arms of a whore.’
‘Two of them woke me up banging on the door the other day, asked Mama if she had a few minutes to talk about the end of days.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said the end of days would be coming for them sooner than they expected, if they visited a second time.’
It would have been funnier if I didn’t know that Ma Dukes had it in her to murder a pair of men and hide their bodies. ‘There are always folk that look around and decide what they see isn’t enough. Start searching for something to believe in, aren’t altogether partial on what it is.’
‘Flies on a wound,’ Yancey said. ‘They won’t be what kills you, but they’re a sure sign of rot.’
The wind snapped at us, carried the particolored smoke out into the firmament near as soon as we breathed it.
‘So that’s Low Town,’ Yancey said.
I nodded.
‘And how are you?’
I shrugged. Things were not great, but then again I was not rapping on the last door. ‘I’m old,’ I said, feeling it.
‘You’ve been saying that for years.’
‘It’s only gotten truer.’
‘How’s business?’
Business was a steady moneymaker in the degradation of fools, taking resources off men too stupid to use them properly, out of the hands of their womenfolk, the stomachs of their children. It hadn’t bothered me as much, back when I was on the breath. Part of that had been because nothing particularly bothers you after a good whiff, but part of it had been that I could at least pretend I wasn’t selling anything I wasn’t already doing. That had been a lie, of course, but a tolerable one. You could claim prohibition as the chief ill, and it was – if the Crown had any sense they’d slap a tax on it and sell it in shops, stoke their coffers and choke the life out of the criminal organizations that flourish off its sale. But even if they did, it wouldn’t make the trade smell any sweeter. At the end of the day I was helping people kill themselves, and there’s no dignity in that.
‘Booming,’ I said, with sad accuracy.
‘You feeling that way, maybe it’s time you started looking for an out.’
We all of us only have the one out, and Yancey was well on his way to taking it. ‘Thing about being a small-time criminal, there’s not much in the way of retirement.’
‘You ain’t so small time.’
‘I don’t have an organization – there won’t be anyone following behind me, kicking up a percentage.’
‘How about the boy?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
He hocked and spat some of what was killing him over the side. ‘So step off.’
‘To where?’
‘Not here. Isn’t that the point?’
‘Just leave everything?’
‘What you got keeping you here? A shithole bar, a network of pushers and lowlifes. The junkies will find another person to buy breath from, I can promise you.’
‘The bar’s not so bad.’
‘I don’t have the time to flatter anyone,’ he said, and looking at him I was forced to agree. ‘Stick around, you won’t live to enjoy your dotage.’
‘I’ve stumbled through so far.’
‘You used to be hungrier.’
After that we didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat there and let smoke blow away. It started to rain, light but getting harder, and I helped Yancey up out of his spot and into the house. By the time I’d gotten him back downstairs he was ready to pass out on my shoulder. I eased him into his bed, pulled the covers up around his neck, blew out the weak light coming from the lantern on his night table.
‘You’re all right,’ he said to me as I was leaving. His eyes were little slits in his head, and his voice was weak. ‘You’re all right.’
There weren’t but a handful of people who would say that to me and mean it. I didn’t like the thought that there would soon be one less of them.
7
So back when I was a kid I spent a few months workin
g as a spotter for a Valaan named Martinus the Bull. That wasn’t really his name, but it was what he told you to call him, and Martinus was not the kind of guy with whom you argued nomenclature, making up for a limited wit with biceps the size of ripe melons. Anyway, we had this little scam where I’d hang around some of the more lucrative dice games, wait around for a player to walk off deep in the black, then shadow them back through the city and mark him out for Martinus and his boys to thump. It was a dangerous gig – the sort of person who pulls out of a dice game heavy in the purse is often the same sort of person capable of defending it, and as a general matter of policy the people running these little gambling dens dislike it when their best customers are robbed, and have concrete and unsavory ways of making manifest this displeasure. And all the money I made for Martinus, I didn’t see much of it, and most of that I ended up gambling away, cause how long really can you watch a group of men throw the bones and not want to give them a toss yourself? I bowed out of the whole thing about six weeks before one of the less forgiving tycoons had some thugs find Martinus in an alleyway and cut a half-circle into his throat. If I could have held onto such a fine sense of timing, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble over the years.
Anyway, I found myself thinking about old Martinus the next morning, while running a few vials over to a whorehouse in Brennock, when I turned around and caught a guy tailing me.
He wasn’t the worst shadow I’d ever shaken, but he was far from the best either. He had the basics down – kept himself at a reasonable distance, made sure his eyes weren’t near me when I turned around. But his costume wasn’t quite right, he was too well dressed to be a laborer and too clean to be a criminal. He might have passed for an artisan or maybe a counter at one of the merchant houses, except for the long sword swinging at his side. This in itself was something of a giveaway, weapons of that length being uncommon in Low Town, outside the price range of most of the rabble, and rightly seen as an encumbrance in stealth and movement. Some of the Bravos carried them, quick-handed fools trying to make names as duelists, but no bully-boy in the city would be caught dead in such bland garb, or be awake before late afternoon.
She Who Waits (Low Town 3) Page 5