A Drink Before We Die: A Low Town Short

by Polansky, Daniel

The reduction of the Seven Brothers to five took place a few days later, swift movement by any standards. A squad of Consortium heavies stealthed into the Brothers’ main hideout, did there what could be expected of them. Only two of the brothers had been in attendance, but they'd put up a decent fight, done for twice their number. Hadn't done them any good, of course—the Consortium had enough killers on their payroll to go two for one all month and come away smiling. This act of savagery was taken across the length of the city— that part of the city that thought about these sorts of things, at least—as more evidence of the Consortium's rise, and of my own decline. It was taken by the rest of the Brothers as an opportunity to drink and weep uncontrollably. Personally I only enjoy one of those activities, but events necessitated my dropping by and paying respects.

  The funeral had been private, and earlier that morning, and by midafternoon, of the five brothers still extant only three remained capable of speech. I'm generally not fond of backyard moonshine, in so far as I value my eyesight, but it was all that was on offer, and it seemed ill-advised to do anything that might upset the equilibrium of the drunken half-giants that had just put two of their siblings into the ground.

  One glass of the poison was enough to leave a fire in my stomach and my mind strangely light. A half barrel of it had not been enough to drown the Brothers' sorrow, nor their rage. “Danie and Christiaan were friends.” I had spent the walk over repeating their names in my head so I didn't get confused. “The least I can do is come by and offer my support.”

  The Seven Brothers—I'll keep with the original nomenclature, if its all the same to you—were Island Valaan, born on some little speck of rock in the North Sea. Ten years back they'd decided that violence and banditry in the Imperial capital was preferable to farming or fishing or sheep-rutting or whatever sort of business it was that people did in their place of birth. They ran a little slice of Offbend and they hired themselves out as muscle for anyone who could pay their price. They were somewhat less awful than some of their competitors, but then again, this was not a high bar.

  The eldest brother—I was thinking of him then as the eldest but he might have just been the loudest—responded with a long oration, bloody-minded, theatrical and peppered thoroughly with profanity. I can't remember the specifics—something about revenge and family, you can probably figure out the tune on your own.

  “I'm not any happier about the Ballafleur Consortium's expansion than you are,” I said, “but they outnumbered you even before the....recent unpleasantness.”

  Essentially without introduction one of the brothers that I had taken to be unconscious from drink, or perhaps dead from drink, leaped up from his chair suddenly, pulled a knife out from his belt and began to shake it vigorously. “Enough talk!” he slurred. “Blood calls for blood.” He brought the blade down against his chest, a shallow wound but it certainly added something to the melodrama. “Every moment we wait is a blot on our name! The Ballefleur Consortium dies tonight!”

  I left my eyes unrolled. You will find, if you stay with me a while, that I am not a fellow who sees the point in announcing his intentions. That was something I learned during the five years I'd spent as an Agent of the Crown. A man is no less dead for being ignorant of who made him so. “Just going to walk up to Cosgrave's, kick in the door and start making corpses? Let your momma attend another one of these tomorrow? That really what you want?”

  “What I want is justice!” the brother yelled, though in fact what he wanted was revenge. People often have trouble with this distinction. “And what about you, Warden? The Consortium has been banging at your door for a month now without getting an answer. Ever since I got to Rigus all I've ever heard was to keep my hands out of Low Town, what a savage the Warden is, that his mind is a labyrinth and everything you do he's already planned for. Now you're over here telling us to bend knee!” Red ran through his coat—I guess that wound wasn't as shallow as I'd thought—and he was waving his knife about in a fashion I found less than amicable. “You don't have the stones to handle this, you'd best make way for those of us who do.”

  I don't really get angry much. I don't really get anything much, to be honest. But all the same there are certain things you can't let a person say, not in the business I'm in, not if you want to be in it much longer. Lèse-majesté and all that. The youngest brother was just blowing steam, drunk and despairing and fearful, but he needed to be set down a notch.

  “Remember who you're fucking talking to,” I snapped, standing up and starting towards him, and I guess I must have played it well enough because he backed down just as soon as I was on my feet, even though he had a full head of height on me and was carrying a knife. “Everything they say about me is true twice over, and staying out of my neighborhood is the reason your mother only has to weep for two of you.” I shot a slow look around at the rest of the family, letting the lesson sink in. “And of course I have a plan. I always have a plan.”

  4

  I never learned why Armadal decided to hire men to kill me instead of sending his own people. I assume it was in hopes of obfuscating his involvement, and fair enough—he was far from the only man in Rigus willing to lose a few ochres to attend my funeral. But still he'd have been better off making sure of the matter, even if that meant leading the charge himself. You will find there is very little point in almost killing a man.

  Most of my drinking I do at the Earl, with Adolphus and the regulars around to make noise if anyone arrives worth looking at. But it gets tiring staring at the same four walls, and anyway I'm king of Low Town, not just the Earl, and it's necessary to remind folk of that every now and again. Anyway, a few days after the funeral I found myself at a joint near the docks called the Bastard's Teeth, which had an ugly name and weak beer but in which you could find a good game of cards going pretty much any time of day or night. I'd been winning modestly for the better part of three hours, suppose word of my presence had spread.

  Probably they figured I'd been drinking heavy, which was true but only half the story; I'd been drinking heavy and huffing a vial of pixie's breath, and between them I was angry-drunk and twitchy as all hell. I'd have noticed them even if the first one, a fat-but-also-big Valaan with a hatchet hanging from his belt, hadn't eyeballed me when he walked into the bar. Do you believe that? A professional, calls himself a professional at least, and he plays himself out before he walks two steps.

  “You in or you out?” Albus asked me. Albus was a little runt who had some interests in Offbend, made the money he was giving away to me by dealing choke and breath. He was not a hard man, but he spent a lot of time with hard men and I guess he occasionally got confused. The game was starting to wear on him, between greed and humiliation and liquor and general stupidity he was beginning to believe he might take back with the knife at his belt what he had lost with his quivering-lip tell.

  “Rushing off somewhere?” I'd always made a point of sitting with my back to a wall, but since I'd become the man to kill in Low Town I'd also made a point of leaving myself an out at most of the places I frequented. The Bastard's Teeth, for instance, had a sort of kitchen a very short walk from where I was, and from there to the back exit was about twenty seconds. Not exactly the impression you want to leave on the neighborhood rowdies, but better a live coward than a dead—well, you couldn't really say a dead hero, but you get the idea.

  The Islander who walked in then was carrying a small armory, a ball and chain, a long sword strapped to his fucking back, if you can believe that. Following immediately behind him, immediately, I am not exaggerating, came a thick-shouldered, tattooed Kiren weighed down with a cutting sword and some other iron.

  “Are you in or out?” Albus repeated.

  The foolishness! The incompetence! The sheer fucking gall of it! To walk in one after another, like a troupe of pikemen! Why not blow a horn? Why not carry a banner?

  “I'm in,” I said.

  Albus's upper lip trembled, and he dealt us both a card. I made sure to keep my eyes on hi
s hands, because Albus wasn't above cheating to try and get the pot. There probably wasn't very much that Albus wasn't above; murdering his mother for a clipped copper, maybe, though I wouldn't have sworn to the Firstborn on that point. Anyway, I checked.

  Albus looked at his hand, looked at me, looked back at his hand. Mostly I just looked at the trio of killers at the bar, though in a way that didn't make it clear that this was what I was doing. “I'll raise,” Albus said.

  I spilled another half ochre on the table, distantly observed Albus flinch. One of the drunks at the bar burped loudly. The Vaalan started towards me with purpose. The last up card was an eight.

  The circumstances for knife throwing were less than favorable, but I went ahead and tried anyway, part because I'd been so lucky with the cards but mostly because I wasn't overly concerned for the safety of the drunkards and scumbags in the Bastard's Teeth that evening. The Vaalan went for his hatchet as soon as I started moving, and he was fast, credit where due, he got the thing most of the way out from his belt before my blade entered his sternum.

  The crowd screamed and scattered to wherever it was they could scatter, and I came around the table just as fast as I could make myself. The Kiren was caught in the throng of people trying to leave, but the Islander managed to get his hands on his chain, swung it in a fashion which would have spelled trouble for me if I'd allowed it to continue. So I didn't, coming in hard and fast with my trench blade. He held a hand up to try and stop it, which maybe wasn't the cleverest thing anyone ever did, though then again there weren't a lot of good options available to him at that moment. Anyway, I sheared my way through his fingers—actually it was about an inch further in than his fingers, not quite to the palm, I'm not sure what that part of the hand is called, or if it has a proper name—but I cut through it and then into his chest, and unlike his Vaalan confederate who was somehow still alive and standing, the Islander collapsed and died quickly.

  Unfortunately in dying he carried my weapon to the ground with him. That happens sometimes, when you kill a guy. Upside, seeing the two men he'd been in partnership with die like chickens in a farmyard had done something to unman the Kiren. You will find that also happens, when you kill a guy.

  There was a tankard of ale on one of the tables and I grabbed it and threw it into his eyes and then jumped on him, and we went to the ground together, and he screamed and I screamed, but his was fear and mine was—I'm not sure exactly, excitement or cruelty or rage? Regardless. He gave me a pretty good shot in the eyes and I gave him three in response, and mine were harder and he wasn't so skilled at getting hit as I am—I have a real gift for masochism, if you hadn't yet figured—and he pretty much stopped fighting then.

  I didn't, however. That isn't the way these things work. I hit him until his face was no longer recognizable as such, eyes shuttered, nose running down his chin, mouth like a burned out shack.

  I stood. I cleaned and retrieved my weapons. There is something that a living man feels when there are dead men around him, and I felt that. Then I went back to the table, pulled my chair upright and sat down on it.

  “I fold,” Albus said, dropping his cards and looking the other way. “I fucking fold.”

  “If only all the world had your wisdom,” I said, scooping up the pot.

  5

  “Let me start off by making it clear I got no hard feelings.”

  It was a week or so after I'd left three corpses bleeding into the floor of the Bastard's Teeth—which, so far as most of the rest of the city was concerned, was likely to be my last gasp of resistance against the Consortium. Armadal continued to strengthen his grip on my territory, I barely had a false friend left in Low Town. The wise money had me dead inside of a three weeks, you could make book on it at half the bars on the docks. I understood there was even a bonus if you picked the right day.

  “I'm not quite sure I follow,” Melrose Cosgrave said. It was the first time we'd met, though I had known his uncle, who had been small and cruel and who had made his living importing women from the distant provinces of his homeland and renting them to men. His nephew seemed cut from much the same cloth, pint-sized and boy-faced, eyes nasty as a gangrenous wound.

  “About you setting your hooks into Low Town,” I explained.

  Cosgrave smiled wider and looked over at the two guards he had stationed behind me. I'd been searched before coming into the meeting, thoroughly searched, but he was still playing me like I wasn't. “If there's been any confusion about where our boundaries begin and yours end, I'm sure—”

  “Like I said, you can cut all that. Etiquette has its uses, but there's no reason to make a fetish of it.”

  “Then why are you here, exactly?” he said, the smile dripping off his face like wax off a votary. It hadn't been much of a smile to begin with, and Cosgrave seemed well rid of it.

  “I'm here to do you a favor.”

  Cosgrave laughed. The guards laughed. I laughed also, out of camaraderie. “Thanks,” Cosgrave said finally.

  “Don't mention it.”

  “And what exactly is the nature of this kindness?”

  “I thought I'd go ahead and make sure you don't die at the hands of your closest subordinate.”

  “Armadal's a close friend,” Cosgrave said, but he didn't tell me to stop talking.

  “He seems like a real friendly sort, that Armadal,” I said. “Just sweet as molasses pie, when he came in to see me two months ago.”

  “Anything Armadal's done, he's done at my orders.”

  “I know—and like I said, I don't have any hard feelings. I can even see why you made the play. Armadal isn't happy about your ascension, but he's got too many years in the organization to cut him right out. So you figure, why not point him at Low Town? Worst case scenario, I take care of him and you're out a rival. Best case scenario, you've expanded the franchise, the Consortium gets to plant their flag on virgin soil. Am I right so far?”

  “You aren't wrong.”

  “But you didn't account for how much he hates you. I'll tell you something, Cosgrave, the voice of experience speaking through my mouth—don't never underestimate hate. Avarice, lust, ambition, can't none of them hold a candle to sheer rancor.”

  “I'll make a note of it.”

  “And a man like Armadal, he's always hungry. You think Low Town is going to be enough to satiate him?” I shook my head. “All you've done is given him a base of operations to use against you.”

  “He's been kicking up his fee honest enough.”

  “Cause he's still got me to worry about, because he hasn't stabilized things yet. You think that's going to last forever?”

  “What are you saying, exactly?”

  “What's Armadal? A hundred fifty a month?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I can give you two hundred flat out—and that's two hundred from someone you know won't ever end up being a rival. You make yourself some coin and you eliminate a threat, and if that's not two birds and a stone, then I've never murdered an avian.”

  Cosgrave looked at his hands for a while, and then at his guards. I looked upwards, towards the Firstborn and his angels.

  6

  The agreement had been to meet at a warehouse near the docks at eight in the evening, me and Armadal and one other man a piece. I'd hand-written the message a few days after my meeting with Cosgrave, the script even, the words polite. Armadal took it as an offered throat, and had brought along six thugs equipped for battle, hatchets and knives and crossbows, one of them even dressed in the boiled leather armor we'd worn during the war, which I thought was overkill but fair enough. I did not like Armadal, I did not particularly respect Armadal, I sure as hell did not trust Armadal, but credit where due he understood the foremost rule of our business: a downed man exists to be kicked.

  I was sitting at a small table, and I'd been waiting a while. “Why, Armadal,” I said, sparking a match and bringing it to a cigarette liberally laced with dreamvine. “This hardly seems in keeping with our agreem
ent.”

  “You know, Warden,” Armadal said, smirking as his men shook themselves out around me, “I admit, I'm a little disappointed.”

  “Oh?”

  “Everything they say about you, I'd never have imagined you'd roll so easy. Two months I've been stripping you of your territory, eating off your table, every day expecting some riposte.”

  “That's what makes this part so much fun,” I said, smiling as Cosgrave and his squad of men slipped out from the darkness behind me.

  To his credit, this reversal of circumstances did not unman Armadal, quite the opposite. Though his boss had brought ten in to deal with his six, he neither quivered nor begged. And you have to respect that in a man, in any man, if he can stare at She Who Waits Behind All Things without flinching. “What is this supposed to mean?” Armadal said.

  “I told you to expand our interests towards the docks,” Cosgrave said, “not settle Low Town as your own personal fiefdom.”

  “I been kicking up your end.”

  “You'll bite the hand that feeds you before long.”

  “Warden been telling you that?”

  Cosgrave laughed. “I don't need him to tell me you're a treacherous little snake who never knew his place.”

  “You're a spoon-fed fuckwit,” Armadal spat. “And my place is where you're sitting.”

  My job really isn't so difficult. Convincing violent people to do violent things? Like getting a cobbler to resole a shoe.

  Armadal was swift on the draw, his little fencing sword out with your first blink, and with your second he had tossed himself at Cosgrave—there was real hate there, this wasn't just business. Cosgrave's bodyguard intercepted Armadal's attack, which was an impressive bit of loyalty for a hired blade, though not one for which he'd ever be rewarded. Armadal skewered him through what looked like the spleen, though I couldn't tell for sure. Regardless, he didn't seem to enjoy it, even fell to the ground and wept a little bit.

  Things continued apace. I smoked away the rest of my joint, watching the grim arithmetic by which eighteen thugs became fourteen became ten became four. It was your standard melee, evil men in a darkened room sticking metal into each other, as ugly and brutal and pointless an activity as might be imagined. I did not actually see Armadal go down, my attention must have been elsewhere. At one point he was in a corner defending himself rambunctiously from a pair of Cosgrave's stouts, and then he wasn't, and the world continued on much the same as it had before. You will find that is generally the way of it.