‘A lot of men have said that sort of thing to me before I made them dead. I wonder that it gave them much comfort.’
Credit where it’s due, the credible – though in this case, fictitious – threat of his demise didn’t rattle Brother Hume overly. One of the benefits of being certain about the afterlife, I suppose, is you aren’t horrified at the thought of reaching it. ‘I work for a man who is very much interested in meeting with you.’
‘And who would that man be?’
He pursed his lips but didn’t say anything. I waved my hand as if batting away a fly. ‘This is pointless – if you’ve got nothing to say, you can say nothing without me listening.’
‘Egmont,’ he said. ‘Director of Security Cerial Egmont.’
I hadn’t been paying much attention to the Steps, as I said, but still that was a name with which I was familiar. ‘And what would this meeting be about?’
‘That’s not for me to say.’
‘Cause you don’t know?’
You would think ignorance being the common state of mankind, fewer people would have trouble copping to it. ‘It’s not for me to say,’ Hume repeated. ‘Come in and meet with Director Egmont, he’ll make everything clear.’
‘Everything? That’s a tall order.’ It was clear Hume didn’t know anything more than what he’d said, and therefore pumping him any longer for information was pointless, if faintly enjoyable. ‘This has been a swell little interruption from the day to day, but I’m afraid I’m not interested in helping you.’
‘How can you say that, when you don’t know what it is we want you to do?’
‘Because it’s you asking me to do it. Your side isn’t mine. Rats don’t give no help to cats, and the cats offer their prey the same courtesy.’
‘They say politics make strange bedfellows.’
‘I sell drugs for a living, Brother Hume – I don’t lower myself to deal in politics.’
He was getting back to talking but I cut him off. ‘There’s no point in arguing with me anymore. My mind is set as a broken clock. So here’s what’s going to happen – I’m going to slip out of this alleyway, and you’re going to wait three minutes and do the same. My man on the roof is still watching you, and if he gets the sense you’re watching me, I’m afraid your superiors are going to have several things to be unhappy about. Dig?’
‘I understand,’ he said after a moment, though his eyes blazed rather furiously.
‘Good. Now after three minutes, you take your first right, then a left two more down, then straight on ahead till you hit the canal – I know, it’s not the way you came. The way you came isn’t the way you get back. That’s a crooked truth, but it’s one you run into more often than you’d think.’
He mulled that over for a while. ‘Can I have my purse?’
I fished it up off the ground and tossed it to him, noticing as I did that it was lighter than it should have been. Fucking Knocker – that kid was too damn smart for his own good.
Dull knife that Hume was, he had the thing halfway to his waistband before he bothered to check it. ‘I had eight argents in here,’ he said.
‘My fee for a consultation is a flat ochre – I assume you’re good for the rest?’
He belted his purse back on rather furiously, as if by strangling the leather he was getting some payback on me. ‘You might think about what it means to go against us.’
‘I get a deal on bolts. And on men who fire them.’
You can only push a person so far before they buck a little. That’s not true, some people you can push all day and they’ll come back begging for more, but Hume wasn’t one of these. He gave me the sneer he’d been waiting to offer since he’d seen me, the sneer of a man born on one side of the line for a man born on the other. ‘You can put on airs, but I know your big talk is nonsense. You’ve got a dive bar and a mutt boy who runs poison for you. You might act like the King himself, but it’s a bluff, and no good one at that.’
I hopped down from my spot on the crate, eased over towards him, turned my face nasty. ‘I hope for your sake that the people who make your decisions aren’t operating under that misimpression. Low Town is mine. Every broke-down whore shaking her ass on a midnight thoroughfare is keeping her eyes out for me, every lost youth leaps at the chance to do me a favor, every thug fingering his knife shivers when he hears my name, and makes sure to stay on the right side of it. The bricks in the street, the cracks in the walls, the smog and the smoke, the shit in the canal – I snap my fingers and an army rises up from the muck.’ I dropped the apple core at his feet and leaned into him. ‘There ain’t nothing here worth having – but by the Firstborn and every one of his siblings, there isn’t a man alive who’ll take it from me.’
He wasn’t quite quivering, but let’s just say if you’d been looking at us then, you wouldn’t have said he was the taller man. I went back to smiling, brushed a bit of dust off his shoulder. ‘And since this is my fiefdom, I can assure you – it’s your first right, then a left two more down, then a straight shot back to the river. You do that and you’ll be back in the Old City in a half hour.’
I tipped a finger off the brow of my head and walked out from the alley. After a short ways I took quick shelter in one of the many abandoned buildings that girded the warrens, rolled a cigarette and waited to see what the Step would do.
Just shy of three minutes Hume walked briskly out of the mouth of the alley we’d been occupying, swiveled his head back and forth, as if trying to make up his mind about something. Then he cut back the way he’d come. With his unerring sense of direction, it would be three hours before he found his way back to a main road. I’d spend a fair portion of that trying to figure out what in the name of the Firstborn the Steps wanted, and why they’d detailed an incompetent to try and get it.
8
Low Town’s borders are ill-defined, the squalor and waste stretching out further every year. But there’s a change in the air after you cross Lisben’s Square, spirited anarchy giving way to dull urbanity, blank neighborhoods of hard-working nobodies, eight hours a day for fifty years, earning them their six-square feet. I didn’t know many people there. There weren’t many worth knowing.
The pedestrians are pale-faced Tarasaighn, bony children and women that look older than they are. But after a slow mile you start to get pepper with your salt, olive-skinned and clad all in black, unfriendly eyes making an effort not to look at you. Another twenty minutes and it’s all pepper, as if after passing Whey Street you’d been transported to a foreign country. Another twenty minutes and you come to the hive itself, stone walls twice the height of a man, a single wooden gate guarded by a scowling tough with a blade at his side.
Rigus is the capital and the largest city in the Empire, maybe the largest in the Thirteen Lands. I was born here, grew up here, made a life and will die here, and I’ve seen all of it – from the mansions up in Kor’s Heights to the wyrm houses where the Kiren smoke away their souls.
But I’ve never been in the Enclave – no one has, not no one who wasn’t born Asher. There’s an Enclave in every metropolis in the Thirteen Lands, a walled-off ghetto behind which the Pure Folk are free to obey the dictates of their harsh, single god. They’ve got their own schools, hospitals and courts. They eat their own food and spit their own curses in their own foreign tongue. During the war they’d even had their own units, silent ranks of black-clad men with long, curved swords, clear eyed and looking to die. An entire world crammed into a few square blocks, the apotheosis of a culture sprung from the millennial exile of a damned people.
But all that shit’s academic. Everything there is to know about the Asher can be summed up in four short syllables – don’t fuck with them. The central tenet of their faith is that a violent death is the only means of squaring accounts with the almighty. No percentage in troubling a man that’s looking to die and been trained long to do it.
It was a sentiment I’d have been happy to go on upholding, if events hadn’t overtaken me. Not shoc
kingly, the stark creed of the nameless Asher god fails to find favor with every one of his children. Each generation sees a slow trickle of apostates, forswearing the doctrine of their fathers and joining the rest of us in sin. The Unredeemed, they’re called, these Asher who left the fold – and the faithful would cross a street to avoid them, cross it crawling over broken glass. Some of these outcasts take up a trade or go to sea, but most decide that they hadn’t given up one set of commandments so they could strictly adhere to another. This last year had seen a steady expansion by these Unredeemed Asher, pushing out from the Enclave west towards Low Town and south against the docks.
The underworld is a delicate ecosystem, and the sudden rise of a new power had threatened to wreck that fragile equilibrium that keeps people from getting murdered in their beds. In particular, the growth of the Unredeemed threatened the interests of the Gitts family, a clan of backwoods savages claiming a swathe of territory running from the eastern docks out past the city walls and into the Glandon suburbs. Squatters’ rights, sure enough, but it would be no simple thing to evict them. Throughout Low Town, an interested party could make book on when violence between the two groups would pop off. As of yet, no one had collected – but it wouldn’t be very long.
Headquarters was a few blocks from the ghetto, two stories in gray slate, indistinguishable from every other building on the street. I might have missed it myself if it weren’t for the heavies – squat men standing motionless, dour by the standards of a sullen race. I’d only been there once before but they must have remembered me because I got waved in without comment.
The interior had the look of a place that was meant to be left quickly, and thought of little thereafter. A wooden table took up most of the room, two men sitting on the far side of it.
Uriel was clean-looking and pretty, the sort of person to whom you’d extend credit. He wasn’t tall but he had the broad stature common to his people, the kind that let you know there was more there than you could see. He wore a snow white suit and his smile wasn’t half a shade darker. His hands were red, but you couldn’t see it looking at him.
Qoheleth was taller and broader than his brother, though I didn’t imagine fiercer. He had dull, flat eyes and a head like the business end of a bludgeon. The Unredeemed had a thing about garish clothing, presumably a reaction against spending their youths in sackcloth. Uriel was pulling it off, but his brother looked like a circus performer, each item of clothing at cross purposes with another, a polka-dot tie clashing with a checkered shirt, bright orange pants and a too-tight mauve hat. While not the person I’d choose to double-check my arithmetic, credit where due he was supposed to be very good at his job – which was sticking metal into wriggling things. Uriel was even better at his, which was telling Qoheleth what needed sticking.
‘Warden, what a pleasure,’ Uriel began. He made as if to get out of his seat, but then didn’t.
Qoheleth grunted something I decided to take for a greeting. He had a strong dislike for me, as he had for that segment of the world to which he was not directly related.
‘Can I offer you anything?’ Uriel asked. ‘Coffee? Liquor? Something stronger?’
Uriel didn’t take anything but tea – but he liked to have it all on offer when you came in, liked it more if you took him up on it, a reminder of your moral weakness. Not that I needed one.
‘I’m solid.’
‘As a rock.’
‘What kind?’
Uriel crinkled the brow above his nose. It was a pleasant affectation. I imagine he practiced it in the mirror before going to bed. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Lots of different kinds of rocks. Shale, for instance, you can pull right apart.’
‘I hadn’t taken you for such an expert on the subject.’
‘There are depths to me, my young friend, heretofore unhinted.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
We smiled at each other for a while.
‘How’s business?’ I asked.
‘We scrape by.’
‘Barely breaking even?’
‘Something like that.’
Qoheleth snickered.
‘I would think the fever must be adding something to your bottom line.’
Qoheleth looked for a moment like he might choke on his tongue. But Uriel didn’t so much as blink. He gave me a fingertip clap that lasted a long few seconds. ‘How’d you figure it out?’
‘I have my sources. Where are you getting it?’
‘I’ve mine as well.’
That was as much as I’d expected. Getting to Uriel had been easy. Getting past him would be less so.
‘As impressed as I am with your acumen,’ Uriel continued, ‘I’m not clear where your interests lie in the matter. We’ve been … careful to make sure that our new enterprise doesn’t infringe on your own prerogatives.’
‘Frankly, I’m hurt that you didn’t think of including me in this exciting opportunity. But that’s not what I’m here for.’
‘Do continue.’
‘You’ve done a solid job of keeping things a secret as long as you have. But you can’t stay under cover forever. Won’t be long before people start wondering where this new drug is coming from, and who’s making money off of it. I don’t imagine they’ll have much more trouble finding the answer than I did.’
‘Our obfuscation is only a short-term strategy – testing the waters, as it were. Soon we’ll be ready to give the thing an official roll-out. When that happens, we’ll make sure the bigger boys get their cut.’
‘You’ve been growing pretty quickly as it is. I don’t imagine everyone will be happy to hear of your new-found success. The Gitts may well have feelings about this new narcotic – where you’re peddling it, in particular.’
‘The pie’s big enough for all of us.’
‘Depends how hungry you are.’
‘I’m a man of … modest appetites,’ Uriel said, grinning ravenously.
‘Self-restraint is a virtue.’
‘I’ve heard that.’
Having swelled up like a boil during this last exchange, Qoheleth took this moment to burst. ‘Fuck the Gitts – they don’t mean a damn thing to me. And while we’re on the subject, fuck you – what business is it of yours where we peddle our merchandise? Glandon ain’t your territory. Keep to Low Town, and leave the rest of Rigus to those of us man enough to take it.’
‘Now, now,’ Uriel clucked, but that was as far as he went. His feelings were more or less in line with his brother’s, though it wasn’t his style to air them. That was why Qoheleth sat in on these back and forths. It offered Uriel the opportunity to seem reasonable, while making clear where the hard line lay.
‘It’s no great shakes, getting old,’ I said. ‘Your knees creak and your hair goes gray. You need to piss all the time, and you can feel your muscle turn to fat. But one minor compensation is that you get to bore your juniors with unwanted advice.’
‘Respect for one’s elders is a central tenet of the Asher faith,’ Uriel said.
Small comfort, given his apostasy. ‘Then take a moment and hear one – the Gitts don’t look like much to you, I suppose. A bunch of illiterate hill folk, pumping low-grade junk into neighborhoods no one cares about. You ain’t wrong – but what they are, they’ve been for a long damn time. Every so often some sharp young fellow gets it into his mind that the Gitts need changing, gets it into his mind that he’s the one to change them.’
‘And?’
‘We’re having this conversation, aren’t we? That would suggest that the Gitts disagree. Might even suggest that sharp young fellows, assuming they’re the first and not just the second, ought to look for wiser places to expand.’
Uriel stroked the dimple in his chin. He had a talent for making it seem like he was listening to what you were saying. ‘Let me set your mind at ease – we’ve got no interest in making trouble, only money. We’re still working out distribution for our new product. It’s possible some of our … intermediaries have been less than
diligent in respecting the Gitts’ territory. If that’s the case, I’ll make sure to put a stop to it. None of our people will be selling fever in Glandon – I imagine that should prove satisfactory, even with a party as … temperamental as the Gitts.’
‘That’s all I wanted to hear.’
‘And now you’ve heard it.’
I recognized a dismissal when it came down to me. ‘Before I split – I don’t suppose I could get a taste of your new concoction?’
Uriel’s perpetual smile widened slightly. He nodded, and Qoheleth disappeared rather grudgingly into the back room.
‘Only be a minute,’ Uriel said.
‘I can’t think of a more pleasant way to spend it.’
‘What you make of this new guy they put in as High Chancellor?’ Uriel asked, small talk one of the many aspects of human behavior he was capable of mimicking.
‘Thrilled to my armpits. I figure he’ll have the whole thing wrapped up in six months or so.’
‘The whole thing?’
‘Crime, poverty, disease – all in the past. We’re staring into a golden age, Uriel. Soon all men will be brothers, and the sun won’t never set.’
Qoheleth slipped back into the room and set a wooden box onto the table before dropping himself back into his chair. Uriel picked it up and held it out towards me. ‘On the house. In appreciation for your coming over to talk with us, and in hopes that it’s only the beginning of a lucrative relationship.’
‘Very kind, but I like to pay for what I own. Gratitude sours quick as young love – mutual self-interest is the basis of all cooperation.’
‘Mutual self-interest,’ Uriel repeated. ‘I like that. If you insist, five ochres is the going rate.’
I paid the man, shoved the box into my satchel and stood. ‘Always a pleasure seeing you boys. This goes down well with my customers, we might have to talk about a more permanent arrangement.’
This time Uriel made the grand effort of joining me on his feet. Qoheleth, predictably, remained seated. ‘It would be an honor to do business with such a venerable and accomplished man of business.’
She Who Waits (Low Town 3) Page 7