I doubt very much it was the hardest blow Crowley had ever sustained, but certainly it was one of the least expected. One minute he was upright in his chair, smug as an eldest son. The next he was on the ground, picking bits of clay out of his hair.
Not that we’d ever been friends, but I imagine this was the moment where Crowley developed his particular dislike of me.
‘You stupid fucking dog you,’ I said, watching the trickle of blood inch down his scalp. ‘You worthless rag-picking monkey.’
Crowley was not the type to allow an injury to go unreturned, but the suddenness of my attack and the fact that I was technically his superior kept him quiet.
‘Do you have any idea how long I’ve been watching this cell? Nine months. Nine months of my time. Nine months coaxing them into the open, nine months inserting people into their operation. I was about to find out who they were reporting to.’ I followed up this revelation with a solid kick to his gut. ‘Once I flipped him we’d have had a real asset, a straight line back to Miradin.’
Miradin had been our nominal ally since before the Great War, though that didn’t stop their intelligence services from operating in our capital any more than it did ours theirs. The critical difference being the people that I had ferreting out information were professionals, hard men and women, sure, but worker bees. Not so the other end. Miradin was a strict theocracy, the Emperor holding the absolute reigns of secular and spiritual power, their Black House equivalent at once a civil and religious authority, arresting pickpockets and holding auto de fe’s. One imagined that the larger part of their population held as much truck with the priests as necessary to avoid being burned at the stake, but those involved in the secret service were true fanatics. The Emperor was Śakra’s direct representative, every order he gave a command from the Firstborn. Death in his service was the greatest glory imaginable, a bolthole to paradise everlasting. It meant I’d had to be especially cautious when I’d picked up on this cell, moving slowly, never allowing my presence to be noticed. It also meant that Crowley’s impetuousness was likely to result in the death of everyone in the building.
‘I didn’t …’ he began, stuttering, still on the ground but starting to pick himself up. ‘No one told me.’
‘No one told you because you didn’t need to know, and you didn’t need to know because you don’t fucking matter. Let me break it down for you, so there’s never another mistake – knowing things is my job. Your job is to kill people that I point at.’ He was most of the way to his feet, but I hooked him by the ankles and sent him sprawling back to the earth. ‘I swear to the Scarred One, Crowley, you forget again and I’m gonna pull you apart with my fucking teeth.’
Back then, before ten hard years of crime and breath, I didn’t find myself getting angry so easy, always tried to make sure I kept my temper hanging on its hook. But right at that moment I wanted to beat that ape-looking bastard into the ground, shut him down permanent. He was a nice substitute for my real problem, which was that I didn’t see a way out of this without a lot of random folk dead. Images of my heel on Crowley’s throat, one short jerk – the Old Man would give me his disapproving look, but that would be as far as it would go. The Old Man didn’t shed a lot of tears.
I blinked away thoughts of easy murder, walked back over to the table and pulled on my gloves. There was a shuttered window looking at the Miradin hideout. I undid the latch and peeked through.
‘What do you figure?’ Crispin asked. He’d remained silent while I’d worked over Crowley.
I sucked my teeth and glanced over the tenement building across the street. ‘In this weather they’ve only got one play. If it was summer they might ask for passage out – we wouldn’t give it to them, but at least we could string them along for a while.’
‘You think about going to the Mirad ambassador?’
‘Even if he knew about them, he’d never admit it – an unfortunate crew of miscreants, of no concern to the Emperor or to the great nation of Miradin.’
‘Hostages?’
‘They’ve got them. Probably corralled the rest of the building’s unfortunates into the basement somewhere.’
‘And the black powder?’
I wasn’t sure about that one – the man I’d had inside hadn’t ever said anything about it, but he might not have known, or he might have been saving it to sell me special. A keg of black powder was hard to get, no one in the underworld would have been foolish enough to provide it, and even the army made a vague point to see that they didn’t fall off the back of any wagons. But they might have smuggled it in from their homeland, a last-ditch defense in case of this exact situation. And if they did have it, it meant they could level the whole building and half the block. ‘We have to assume so.’
‘What’s the plan?’
The plan, the plan. The plan had been to get someone in there that they trusted, have him follow the chain up. They had to have a man this side of the channel, a merchant or ambassador backing their play, the brains of the operation, who would book passage on the first ship back to the old country once he heard about this fiasco. I snapped my head back into the present. ‘Negotiation isn’t an option – what they want can’t be provided this side of the afterlife. We go in hard, and fast, and we don’t leave anybody alive.’
‘And if they’ve got black powder?’
‘Then we better get to them before they get to it.’
‘The plan sounds distinctly similar to Crowley’s.’
‘Don’t think that doesn’t gall me. But we aren’t exactly full up on options.’
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Crowley interrupted from the floor, blood streaming down his nose.
‘I wouldn’t trust you to take out the fucking trash,’ I said, but not angrily; I’d put my rage aside. He was yesterday’s problem, and tomorrow’s. Just then I was focused entirely on today’s.
‘We’ll need an edge, if this has a shot in hell of working.’
‘Couldn’t hurt.’
‘One of us will have to buff up, break through a side window. Give the rest a chance to come in through the main entrance.’
‘I had a similar line of thinking.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Crispin said.
‘It’s my operation – my responsibility, my fault for letting things get as far as they did.’
‘Now’s not really the time for self-pity.’
‘There’s always time for self-pity.’
‘Like you said, it’s your operation – you’ll need to lead the rest of them through the front, need to be there for clean-up if something goes off.’
He was right. It made more sense for someone else to take point. ‘You buffed yourself since the Academy?’
‘No,’ he said. Crispin wouldn’t tell a lie, even when a lie would have been more convenient, more comforting. It was one of the things I liked about him, and, also, very much detested. ‘Have you?’
‘Twice.’
‘Those are two more reasons it should be me.’
I spent a moment trying to find a chink in Crispin’s thinking, but there wasn’t much time, and it was pretty sound. ‘All right,’ I said, liking no part of it.
‘You and the rest of the squad post up near the entrance. I’ll be a minute or two – when you start hearing screams, come in full force.’
‘Don’t worry about us – you just take care of yourself.’
He nodded and skulked off.
I called him back for one last word. ‘Crispin – be careful. It feels good, real good, better than anything. Don’t burn yourself out.’
‘I’m not exactly a hedonist.’
‘That’s what worries me – you’re unused to succumbing to temptation.’
He gave a nervous smile and disappeared through the door and out into the snow.
The Crown’s Eye can do all sorts of extraordinary things. It can compel obedience, breaking a strong man’s will into splinters. It can overcome wards and basic runes, rendering magical protection void. And final
ly, perhaps most impressively, it can supercharge the body, make it capable of feats of speed and strength far beyond that which the human organism was normally capable.
It took months to learn how to do any of that, part of what they drilled into you as a cadet, the instructors rough men, quick to repay failure with abuse. Once you learned you never forgot it, it was too much fun to forget. The best drug you could imagine, better than anything else I’d ever tried, and I’d tried them all. A shot of pixie’s breath might make you feel like a god, but the Eye … well, the Eye turned you into one.
Like any drug of course, there was a price, one commensurate with the benefits. The Eye was meant to replicate the workings of a practitioner, allow us a tiny fraction of their power. But we weren’t practitioners, didn’t have their strength to draw on, whatever pool of energy was theirs by birthright. Anything one did with the Eye was fueled by your lifeblood, by the breath in your lungs and the strength of your body. Every second Crispin spent buffed was an hour off his life, a day, maybe a week, there was no way to know exactly. It was why we didn’t do it for fun, didn’t do it just to cross the street or impress strangers. Didn’t do it during the course of a normal operation, even when violence was called for. All but the most callous of agents had some appreciation for what they spent when they used the Eye.
I’d brought three men besides Crispin, serious hitters, near on useless for any actual investigative work but exactly the sort of ogres you wanted carrying your play in a situation like this. I drew my sword with one hand, the mid-sized weapon we all wore, longer than a trench blade, prettier and more versatile. ‘Agent Crispin is going to buff up and go through the back – once he’s made his presence known, we follow in double quick. They’ve definitely got hostages, and at this point we have to assume a stash of black powder as well, probably in the basement. When we get inside, I’ll go downstairs, the three of you head up to take care of any stragglers. Remember – most of them are just in the wrong place at the wrong time – you leave off of anybody not carrying steel.’
They all nodded, though I wouldn’t have given my pension for the lives of any unlucky civilian in there with the fair skin and dark hair common to the Mirad. They drew their weapons to match me. That was as much preparation as we were able to make.
‘Keep your heads up,’ I said, my last word of pep talk. ‘I’ll see you on the other side.’
There was a scream from the building, and I nodded at the foremost of my soldiers. He put his foot in the door and followed in after it. He came stumbling back almost as quickly, a bolt in his stomach and a dazed look in his eyes. I thought he was probably not going to live but there wasn’t anything to do about it, not until we had the rest of the building clear. I sprinted over his body, praying to Meletus that there weren’t two men guarding the doorway. He chose to grant my prayer – the Scarred One has always been kind to me. There’s just the one fanatic, working to reload his weapon. Foolish – a bolt-thrower takes a competent man thirty seconds to rewind, and he was far from that – fingers trembling, eyes on me instead of his machine. I flicked the point of my sword through the hollow of his throat and kept on moving. It was a quicker death than he deserved, but it would have to do.
There were two men in the next room, pale and wet-eyed, each holding a curved scimitar, impractical given the size of the interior. They ought to have waited for me to come to them, but they didn’t, excited by the prospect of dying nobly. That was the one upside of dealing with fanatics, as opposed to professionals, who tend to have a strong attachment to their own existence, and to take what measures they can to prolong it. The first one followed a feint I made at his chest, and found himself unprepared for the boot I put into his shin. It was supposed to be his knee, but I’m far from perfect, and it ended up against his shin. It worked though, slowed him down long enough for my back-up to take care of him. I bulled past him and into the second one, sending both of us to the ground.
I’ve met plenty of men better than me with a sword, faster hands and better footwork. But up in close, flesh against flesh, when you can feel the other man’s breath on you, when his blood sprays up into your hair and your mouth and your eyes – well, daevas forgive me, that’s where I always excelled. I fish-hooked the Mirad with three fingers on my left hand and he started to scream, the sound mutilated by what I was doing to his mouth. I had a knife in my sleeve – I always had a knife in my sleeve back then – and I managed to get it into my hand and saw it across his windpipe.
I brought myself quickly to my feet, grabbed my sword and chanced a look behind. The Mirad was on his last legs, courtesy of the agent following me, bleeding heavily from wounds on his hands and stomach. I didn’t bother to give any help – the thought of a keg of black powder somewhere in the basement was imprinted into my head.
They’d prepared the next room for their last stand, a makeshift barricade and the forces to man it. There were three of them, big, vicious fellows, blades out. They had the dream of death in their eyes, like the Asher I’d seen in the war, religious mania raised to the pitch of madness. I had a dagger in one hand and my sword in the other, and I knew they wouldn’t be enough. I raised them both anyway – best to go out swinging. Best not to go out, but if you got to, best to go out swinging.
All of a sudden, the backmost one didn’t have a head.
At least that was how it looked from my perspective. In one instant, he stood upright, a scimitar in his hands, ready to see me dead and himself just as happily. Then the crux of his corpus was flying through the air, a trail of blood following behind it.
A sudden swirl of movement and the second and third were dead at the same instant. Logic told me that this was false, of course, that there must have been some interlude between the two men collapsing onto the ground, but my eyes were unable to detect it.
I didn’t take the time to marvel at the miracle I’d seen – there was an open door behind the corpses leading downstairs, and I sprinted through it, well behind the blur that I assumed was Crispin. He must have been fading out of it, slipping back down into humanity. There were two doors at the bottom of the steps and he took one and I took the other.
It was cramped, dark. There were some things on the floor, bundles I didn’t have time to pay attention to – my focus was squarely on the dark-haired man with the curved knife, and with the young girl squealing beneath its edge. His back was turned and I could see him struggling to finish his work, watch the muscles and his shoulder strain against resistance. Either he hadn’t heard me or he was too fixed on the slaughter to pay attention, but either way he made no move to defend himself, nor even to turn and face me. My first stroke severed the tendons in his shoulder, and with my second I took off the top of his scalp, careful to make sure I didn’t do damage to the innocent he was holding.
The child saw all of it, watched me savage a man and enjoy it. I imagined it would be a fixture of her future nightmares, though in truth she was lucky she’d be having any.
‘All clear,’ Crispin said from behind me, mumbling the words out in between heavy breaths. ‘They had the fuse going, do you believe that? Those sick sons of bitches. If I’d have been a few seconds later we’d be meeting She Who Waits Behind All Things, us and half the block.’ His hair had gone gray, I realized suddenly, just the tips but they’d been black ten minutes before. Were those lines around his eyes new, I wondered? I wasn’t sure – who takes the time to inspect everyone you meet, every time you meet them?
Whatever he’d given he was smiling, though this last dripped off his face as I turned away from the door. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
I didn’t answer. I wished he hadn’t followed me in there, after what he’d sacrificed today he deserved better news than I had to offer. The bundles on the floor were bodies, four of them, three children and a fat mother. The fanatic had already begun his business by the time I’d intervened. The youth I’d saved was cowering in the opposite corner, surrounded by the corpses of what I presumed were h
er family. She began to scream, then. I imagined she would go on a long time.
29
Touissant’s had not changed. Same mess, same stench of cat piss. Same stupid selection of weapons on the walls, same horny tabbies chasing each other through them. I had to wait the same length of time for Craddock to show up, and when he did I wished he hadn’t. For once his back-up remained unchanged as well, the pretty young thing whose name I didn’t know and didn’t care to learn sneering at me as I came into the back room.
Touissant was as grossly vast as ever, though this time he wasn’t holding a cat. On his lap was a silver tea service, barely larger than his wide pelvis and thick, cordlike thighs. He sipped from a cup that seemed built for a doll in his hands, and a selection of brightly colored macaroons sat half eaten next to the pot.
I grabbed the seat in front of him. Craddock angled himself a few feet away, but off to my right, in the blurred region of my vision. I could hear pretty boy take up a spot behind me.
‘Warden,’ Touissant opened in his grating sing song, my nom de guerre four extended syllables by the time he was done with it. ‘To what do we’, pause to shove a cookie into his mouth, and lick one oversized digit clean of crumbs, ‘owe the pleasure.’
‘Tardiness.’
He laughed that awful little laugh of his, his moon face beaming down on all of us. Craddock laughed as well, the stump of his tongue wagging at me. Pretty boy was too pretty to laugh, though I thought I could feel him smirk.
‘I’d expected some sort of word from you by now, Touissant. A crack operator like yourself, four days and nothing?’
‘I told you it might be a while before I found anything out. It’s not a light matter that you’ve deputized me to look in on.’
‘Indeed – it’s a very serious matter, Touissant. Immensely serious. Critical, even.’
‘Then it’s a good thing you gave it to someone so capable.’
She Who Waits (Low Town 3) Page 24