Low Town: A Novel
Page 6
The fire had died to its embers, and the room was cold. On the ground next to the furnace lay a wad of unused bedding. There was no trace of the boy.
I walked out the front door of the Earl and leaned against a wall, rolling a tab and shivering. Morning was still a few minutes off, and in the twilight the city was the color of smoke. My hacking cough, spurred on by the autumn chill, echoed loudly through the abandoned streets. I lit a cigarette to ease it. In the distance a cock announced the dawn.
When I found the motherfucker who did for that girl, I’d make what happened to Harelip look like the caress of a newfound lover. By everything holy, he’d be a slow time dying.
Eight hours and six ochres later and I was no closer to my goal. I’d been to every operation making or using a heavy solvent from Broad to Light Street without so much as a bite. A few coppers were usually enough to get me information—if that didn’t work I’d flash a paper that said I was a member of the guard and ask less affably. It was easy enough getting answers—it’s always easy to find answers that don’t lead anywhere.
Wren had caught up with me shortly after I’d set out from the Earl, not offering an explanation for his disappearance, not saying anything at all, just falling in line behind me. He was getting restless, presumably not anticipating that working for me would prove to be so boring. I wasn’t enjoying our business any more than he was. The longer the search continued, the more absurd it seemed to have trusted the outcome of the investigation to my olfactory sense, and I was starting to remember that one of the virtues of my adopted trade was that people came looking for me and not the other way around. But the memory of a dead girl and my innate obstinacy drove me onward, hoping against the better dictates of reason that I’d get a lucky break.
At a worn counter sat an equally worn grandmother, her gray face not changing a fraction of an inch throughout the entire interview. No, none of her workers had been absent the last three days. There are only two of them, they are both women, and they work six days a week between sunup and midnight. On the merits, it was not a story sufficiently interesting to warrant the coppers I gave her.
I stepped out of the tiny shop and into the afternoon light, thinking it was time to call it off, head back to the Earl to regroup, when the wind changed direction and brought with it a familiar scent. A smile stretched the corners of my mouth. Wren saw it and cocked his head curiously. “What is it?” he asked, but I ignored him and set myself against the breeze.
Two blocks farther on and the acrid scent had grown stronger. A few more steps and it was almost overpowering, and a few steps past that I realized why. In front of us stood a massive glue factory, a stone gatehouse leading to a wide work yard where a small army of Kirens submerged bone and marrow in boiling vats. I was close. I opened the door and headed inside, Wren a half step behind me.
A quick flash of my fake papers and the manager was the very picture of amicable obsequiousness. I spoke in worse Kiren than I was capable of. “Workers, all here last three day? Any no?” I put an argent on the table and his eyes lit up. “Important info, big price.” A half second for his conscience to justify selling out a member of his race to a foreigner, and the coin disappeared and he pointed discreetly to a man in the work yard.
He was bigger than me, bigger than almost any Kiren I’d ever seen, the heretics tending toward short and wiry. He carried a huge sack of powder toward one of the tanks in the courtyard, and there was a dull, plodding quality to his movements. The right side of his face bore some light bruising, the kind that could have been made by a young girl trying frantically to defend herself against a man bent on her despoliation. Of course it could have been made by any of a thousand other things.
But it hadn’t been.
And I felt that old thrill buzzing up from my groin, filtering through my chest and into my extremities. This was the one—dead eyes only vaguely reminiscent of his fellows, the set of his face betraying his crimes even at this distance. A peculiar grin crept across my face, one I hadn’t worn since before I had been stripped of the Crown’s authority. I breathed deep of the poisoned air and bit back a chuckle.
“Boy, go back to the Earl. You’re done for the night.”
Having spent so much time on the pursuit, Wren understandably wanted to be in on the payoff. “I’ll stay.”
The Kiren was looking back at me now, and I spoke without taking my eyes off him. “This ain’t an equal partnership, you’re my lackey. If I tell you to swallow a hot coal, you’ll sprint to the nearest fire, and if I tell you to head out, you’ll disappear. Now … disappear.”
Wren held his ground for a moment before turning away. I wondered if he’d head back to the bar or fade off into the streets to repay my insult. I figured the latter but wasn’t much concerned either way.
The Kiren was trying to decipher the origins of my interest. Now his crimes were running through his memory unbidden, his mind trying to convince his nerves that my attentions were innocent, that they had to be, that there was no way I could know.
I put another argent down on the table and said to the owner in pidgin, “I wasn’t here.” The manager bowed slavishly and the argent went into the folds of his robe, a vacant grin plastered across his face. I returned it but my gaze never left the target. A few seconds’ pause to work his nerves, then I turned and walked out of the building.
This sort of operation would better be done with three more people, one to watch each exit and an extra just to be safe, but I wasn’t worried. It seemed unlikely my man would run the risk of quitting work early. I could picture him inside the dusty pen trying to convince himself his fears were unwarranted, that I was just some ignorant guai lo, and after all he had been diligent, careful with the body, had even gone so far as to clean it with the acid he had stolen from work. No one had seen. He would finish out his shift.
I sat on a barrel in an alley across from the main entrance and waited for the shadows to lengthen. Back when I was an agent I had once crouched outside a whorehouse for eighteen hours dressed as a beggar until my quarry stumbled out and I had the chance to smack him in the head with a crutch. But that was when I was in fighting trim—patience is a skill that withers quickly when not used. I resisted the urge to roll a cigarette.
An hour passed, then another.
I was grateful when the bell above the door clanged, announcing the workday’s end, and the Kiren filtered rapidly out of the mill. I pushed my aching body up from its perch and took up a spot in the back of the crowd. My target towered over his fellows, an advantage in shadowing him that I didn’t need but would take. The horde headed south, filtering into a dilapidated drinking house marked by Kiren characters unfamiliar to me. I sat outside and rolled a tab. A few minutes trailed away with the smoke. I stubbed out the butt and headed inside.
The bar was the kind common to heretics, wide and dimly lit, filled with rows of long wood tables. A surly, inattentive staff brought bowls of bitter green kisvas to anyone with the money to pay. I took a chair against a back wall, conscious of being the only non-Kiren in the place but not letting it nettle me. A server with a face that had been hit with an oak branch walked by, and I ordered a draft of what passes for liquor among the foreign born. It came with surprising speed, and I sipped it while searching the room.
He sat alone, unsurprisingly. His kind of depravity tends to mark a man, and in my experience people can practically smell it. The other workers wouldn’t describe it that way, of course. They would say he was odd, or quiet, or that he had rotting teeth and didn’t shower—but what they meant was there was something wrong with him, something you could feel if not name. The really dangerous ones learn to hide it, to camouflage their madness amid the sea of banal immorality surrounding them. But this one wasn’t smart enough for that, and so he sat alone on the long bench, a solitary figure among the clumps of laughing workmen.
He pretended not to notice my attention but downed his kisvas with a speed that belied his ease. Frankly, I was impressed with
his composure—I was surprised he even had the presence of mind to follow through with his normal after-work routine. I checked my bag for the straight razor I kept attached to the canvas. It wouldn’t be much use as a weapon, but it would come in handy for what I planned after. I gave him a wave. He blanched and his eyes flickered away from mine.
It was time to step this up a notch. I drained the remnants of my kisvas, grimacing at the sour aftertaste, and moved from the back table to join my prey. As he realized what I was doing, his mouth shriveled up and he stared down into his drink. The men around him glared up at me anxiously, dislike of their compatriot contending against the instinctive antagonism of similarly colored folk toward an intruder of a different one. I disarmed them with a wide smile, half laughing, feigning drunkenness. “Kisvas hao chi! Kisvas good!” I bellowed, and rubbed my stomach.
Their suspicions assuaged, they returned my grin, happy to see a white man play the jester. They chattered back and forth, too rapidly for me to decipher.
My target didn’t share their amusement or fall for my ploy. I didn’t want him to. I dropped myself onto a spot on the bench across from him and repeated my mantra. “Kisvas hao chi!” I continued, broadening my smile to the point of imbecility. “Nu ren [young girl] hao chi ma?” I asked. Desperation sweated through his sallow skin. I spoke louder. “Kisvas hao chi! Nu ren hao hao chi!”
The giant Kiren stood abruptly, sliding through a narrow opening in the long row of tables. I rose and blocked his path, getting in close enough to smell the sour stink of his unwashed body, close enough that he could hear me drop the drunkard act and condemn him in my awkward but decipherable Kiren. “I know what you did to the girl. You’ll be dead within the hour.”
He shoved his paw against my chest and I tumbled onto the table. The crowd laughed and I joined them, chortling uproariously, enjoying my theatrics, enjoying the entire enterprise. I remained supine, listening to the ridicule of the heretics, watching him run off through the broad windows that flanked the door. Once he was out of sight, I slid myself off the table and moved quickly out the back exit, stumbling through a dirty kitchen and muttering something about the evils of drink. I pushed my way outside and started at a dead sprint, hoping to cut him off where the side street met the main thoroughfare.
I made it to the intersection and slumped against the alley wall casually, like I’d been there all day. The Kiren rounded the corner with his head turned over his shoulder, and when he saw me, his skin went so white he could have passed for a Rouender. I bit my tongue to keep from laughing, his fear potent as a stiff drink. Śakra’s cock, I had missed this—there are pleasures the life of a criminal cannot provide.
I bowed as he went past me, then peeled myself off the stone. He was almost broken now, guilt and terror overpowering him. Unsure whether to walk or run, he adopted a method of locomotion that was at once lacking in speed and subtlety. I followed at an even pace, gliding past the occasional pedestrian but not making an effort to catch up.
After a few blocks he twisted down an alley and I had him. He had taken one of those curious thoroughfares common to Kirentown that terminate within the center of the block, and provide no egress save backtracking to the entrance. A smile crept across my face. With days to plan, and all the resources of the Crown at my disposal, I couldn’t have run it any better. I slowed my pace and thought about how I would take him.
He was big, as tall as Adolphus though nowhere as broad. But like a lot of big men, I bet he never really learned to fight, to anticipate an opponent’s reaction, to recognize a weakness and seize on it, which parts of a man’s body hold firm and which parts the Creator botched in forming. Still, his lack of technique wouldn’t matter if he got those monstrous hands near my throat. I’d need to put him down fast. He had favored his right leg—I’d work with that.
When I turned the last corner the Kiren was looking around frantically for a means of escape. Like most folk with his inclinations he was terrified of danger, despite his size only inclined to enter combat when all other options had been exhausted. He swiveled back toward me and I could see his fingerhold on sanity slipping. Beads of spittle pitched from his lips as he shouted something vicious and beat one thick fist against his chest. I felt a sense of certainty wash over me, the bloom of warmth that came whenever I bowed to the inevitability of coming violence. There was no retreat now for either of us. I set my guard in front of my face and came toward him, circling left to throw off his balance.
Suddenly from behind me came a fierce chill accompanied by the stench of feces and decomposing flesh. My stones shriveled up into my body and I lurched sideways, covering my nose with my arm as I took shelter against the worn brick wall.
It was eight or maybe nine feet tall, although determining its exact height was difficult because it didn’t walk but hovered a few feet from the ground. Its shape was a blasphemous imitation of a biped, though sufficiently altered to make confusion with a member of the human race impossible. Lolling, obscene arms stretched down past the length of its body, each tipped by a pair of fanlike hands wider than my head. It was tough to make out more than that, as most of its body was covered by something that looked like a thick black cloak, but upon closer examination seemed more a strange carapace. I caught glimpses of the frame beneath the casing, hard and white as bone.
I hadn’t ever thought I would see one again—another plea to Śakra unanswered.
Its face was a contorted parody of my own, a husk wrapped tightly across ossein, eyes rabid and cruel. I felt a terrible pain in my chest and collapsed to the ground, the agony coursing through me so terrible that my long history of injury seemed as nothing before it. A scream died stillborn on my lips. For an awful moment I thought of everyone I would betray, every humiliation I would endure and evil I would perpetrate to ease the torment. Then the thing turned its head away from me and floated onward, and the torture ended as abruptly as it had begun. I remained on the ground, my strength utterly spent.
It stopped a few paces before the giant. The lower hinge of its jaw seemed to dislocate, stretching down a half foot to reveal an open and amaranthine void. “The child was not to be mistreated.” Its voice was shattered porcelain and bruises on a woman. “As she suffered, so now shall you.” The Kiren looked on with terror undiluted by conscious thought. With a speed that belied its earlier deliberateness the thing struck, locking a clawed hand around the man’s throat. Without apparent effort it lifted his body off the ground and held him there, motionless.
Between the half decade I had served in the trenches, and my long hours spent breaking criminals in the prisons beneath Black House, I had grown confident that there was no utterance of pain with which I was not familiar—but I had never heard anything to compare to the Kiren’s screams. He let loose a noise that spread into the depths of my skull like rusted screws, and I pressed my hands to my head so hard I thought I might burst my eardrums. Gore poured forth from his nostrils, less a nosebleed than an open wound in his sinuses, and he whipped his head back and forth, struggling against the grip of the abortion. So furious were the Kiren’s attempts to free himself that he crippled his hand raw against the unyielding substance of his foe, his fingers snapping as he clawed at the rough black covering. Some internal pressure erupted and his right eye burst in its socket, and his screams redoubled against the inside of my head.
Then they stopped, the muted sputtering and the fat swelling in his throat indicating he had bitten straight through the root of his tongue and was now struggling unsuccessfully to swallow it.
For all the many evils that stained my memory, I had no analog for this horror.
Finally the thing shook what was left of the body, like a terrier with a rat. There was a sharp crack and the corpse dropped to the ground, a tattered mass of ripped orifices and torn flesh. Its errand finished, the abomination twisted like a leaf on the wind and glided beyond my field of vision, the aftermath of the pain so intense I lacked the strength even to follow with my eyes.
What with all the excitement I figured that was a good time to pass out, so I never learned who called the guard or when they brought the small cadre of agents surrounding me when I awoke. I suppose the brutal murder of a child rapist by a demonic force managed to break through even the aversion to governmental authority ingrained in the heretics.
Of course I wasn’t thinking about any of that as I was roughly shaken from my repose, my attention taken up with more immediate issues. The first of these was the unfriendly mug of a former colleague from Black House. The second was his fist balled up in front of my face.
And then my jaw hurt and the men in ice gray were shrieking questions at me, any memory of our shared past buried beneath the violent inclinations universal to law enforcement officials across the Thirteen Lands, or at least every one I’ve visited. Happily, my position against the wall and the exaggerated number of participants—I’ve hit enough men in shackles to know that more than three people is just showing off—rendered their enthusiasm less effective than it might have been. Still, it was no great addition to an evening already marked by unpleasantness.
Crispin managed to pull my attackers off long enough to drag me to my feet and lean me up against the morgue cart. The Kiren’s shattered carcass lay over the dray, conspicuously uncovered. Despite the blood draining from my mouth, the madness of the evening had left me manic and strangely jubilant. “Hey, partner! Miss me?”
Crispin was not amused. For a moment I thought he was going to indulge the darker shades of his character upon my bruised face, but he kept his rage under control like a good little soldier. “What in the name of the Oathkeeper happened here?”