Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town 2)

by Polansky, Daniel

  ‘You registered with the Crown, Mazzie? They take a tax off your . . .’ I waved my hand at the squalor, ‘. . . enterprise?’

  ‘The Crown? I’ve lived under three of them, child – two back in Miradin, and the last twenty-five years under your Queen Bess,’ she said, ticking royalty off on her broad fingers. ‘Ain’t none of them done nothing for Mazzie.’

  ‘It seems neither of us are staunch monarchists, then.’

  She scratched aimlessly at her chin. ‘Never taken on no white child. No boy child neither.’

  ‘I’ll leave him in the sun awhile. Nothing to be done about the cock.’

  ‘No light thing, taking on an apprentice.’

  I pulled a purse from my pocket and dropped it onto the table, startling a fly enjoying an early afternoon repast. ‘That even the scales?’

  She stared at it evenly, as if to read gold through the leather. ‘More to it than ochres and argents. You certain you know what you’re asking?’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  She weighed over the request like I’d asked for possession of her eldest son. Then she shrugged with something bordering on annoyance and started speaking. ‘Take ten thousand babies, put them in a cage.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that.’

  ‘Watch them for ten years, maybe twelve. Watch them until the one half starts to bleed, and the other half starts to look at the first. One of those children, maybe one of those children, they’ll start doing things the rest of them can’t.’

  ‘What do you do with the rejects?’

  Mazzie was good at ignoring me. ‘You take that child, you show her how to focus what she has. Teach her what you were taught, maybe give her books from people that learned something and wrote it down before they died. But it ain’t like being a cobbler, first come the leather, then you hammer in the nails.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s a reason they call it the Art – you got to have the feel, you understand?’

  ‘I’m following along.’

  ‘Everybody who does it, they’ve got a different way of doing it, depends on how their mind runs. Some folk like to build things, force a working onto a blade or a jewel or a clock. Some folk can listen to things that no one else hears but are always right about what they say. Some folk force the world into things that it isn’t, coils of fire streaming from their fingers, cool the air till it’s thick as ice. Some folk get caught looking up into the night when the moon’s still fresh, wonder what’s looking back at them.’

  The conversation had turned a bit dark, in my estimation, though you wouldn’t have known it from Mazzie’s grin. ‘They the ones that end up being trouble. They stop looking at you when they speak, have trouble remembering the two of you is human, and the things they’ve been looking at ain’t. Back in Miradin we used to put the ones that forgot beneath a wall of stone, weigh it down till there wasn’t nothing left. Here they burn them.’ She shrugged. ‘Not their fault, really – they just doing what comes natural. Everybody’s got a knack.’

  ‘What’s your knack, Mazzie?’

  She smiled but didn’t answer. ‘Point being, the road is crooked. Some of the paths end in a coffin. Some of the paths end in worse places. You’d best be sure of what you’re asking from me, before you go ahead and ask it.’

  ‘That was a nice speech,’ I said. ‘But you left something out of it.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That one child in the ten thousand, that girl who can do things the others can’t – if you don’t teach her to control what she has she’ll burn her brain into mush, be left staring at the walls. I’m well aware of the dangers posed by the Art. If I had my way I’d reach inside the boy and strip the spark right from his soul, leave him just the same as the rest of us. Barring that, the least I can do is make sure he doesn’t go mad before his fifteenth name day.’

  ‘Seems like maybe you know more about this than you let on.’

  I could have told her that the man who’d all but raised me had been the greatest practitioner in the Empire, and the girl I’d grown up beside had become perhaps the most evil. ‘I’ve picked up a piece here and there.’

  ‘How old is your boy?’

  ‘Thirteen? Fourteen, maybe.’

  ‘Awfully old to just be starting.’

  ‘Then we ought not waste time.’

  She never seemed to blink. I’m sure she did, sometimes, but try as I might I couldn’t catch her. ‘I’d need to give him a look first.’

  ‘I didn’t take this for a correspondence school.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Wren.’

  ‘Tell Wren to come see me in four days’ time. Tell him to wear this on his arm,’ she said, pulling out a feathered charm from somewhere on her person and sliding it over. ‘And folk won’t bother him.’

  ‘You got so much pull around here, Mazzie?’

  She stretched back her lips. You might have called it a smile, if you were being careless. ‘Enough.’

  I put the charm into my satchel. ‘I’ll tell him.’

  It was miserable in that fucking hut, our smoke and the fumes from her stove thickening the air. Still, I was seated, and so tired from the summer and the walk that I lingered despite the obvious conclusion of our conversation.

  She looked at me cross-eyed over her cup of muddy tea. ‘Death hangs around you thick as flies on shit.’

  By the Lost One, it never fails – you can’t spend five minutes with one of these two-copper soothsayers without getting an earful of dark augury and grim forewarning. ‘I thought you said you don’t give out samples. Sounds like you’ve been rolling the bones for me.’

  ‘Don’t need the bones to see what you are. Your victims swirl around you and scream in your ear, cursing at you day and night.’

  ‘Funny – with all that noise I sleep like a baby.’

  She smiled like she’d won a bet. ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I take a lot of uppers.’ I tapped the purse on the table. ‘You’ll get another one of these every month. You teach him the basics – how to focus his mind, a few simple charms, not to bake his brain by drawing in too much. And leave out all the nonsense you do for the look-sees. He comes home chanting gibberish or trying to sacrifice any of our chickens and his mother will have my hide.’

  She didn’t say anything to that, not for a little while, just stared at me. Then she shoved the coin back over in my direction. ‘I haven’t promised you anything,’ she said. ‘You come back and see me after I’ve talked to the boy. I’ll give you my decision then.’

  I pocketed the money pouch and stood. ‘I’m counting the hours.’

  There were ways back to the Earl that didn’t require me to swing past the Queen’s Palace. I should have taken one. I wasn’t planning on a visit – as far as I was concerned I was done with the Montgomerys. I’d told her father that. I’d been telling myself the same.

  I could see the crowd about a block away, a small knot of people, growing fast. A handful of hoax had a loose cordon bottling up the mouth of the alley. At some point they’d figure out whose child they had lying under a sheet, and once they did the ice would be down here double-time, but it hadn’t happened yet. The ranking officer was a fiend for the dice, in my pocket on top of what I spread around to his bosses, and I gave him a nod and he let me through without saying anything.

  There was no reason to look. I knew what was under there, had known since I’d seen the herd, known since I’d left her room the night before. I looked anyway.

  You think, being strangled, how bad could that be? Hold your breath for a while, the lights go dim. But it’s not like that at all. Calloused hands around the soft of your neck, the beaming eyes of a man willing you to death, trying to scream and failing. The white rings around Rhaine’s sky blues were punctured, blossoms of blood leaking in. A thick patch of her scarlet hair had been torn out, either in the struggle or afterward, as a trophy. Her nose was broken back into her face. Her throat was discolored, green and black.
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  I threw the sheet over her and moved to stand, but the heat, I say the heat, set me back on one knee. The guards turned away, embarrassed at my weakness and not wanting to cause offense. They knew who buttered their bread. I pulled myself back to my feet, managing to make it out of sight before reaching for the vial of breath I had in my satchel. I was very proud of my restraint.

  18

  There is a corner of every man’s soul that would prefer him dead. That whispers poison in his ear in the still hours of the evening, puts spurs to his side when he stands atop a ledge. For the weak and the misbegotten, the suggestion alone proves sufficient, and the unfortunate runs himself a hot bath and adds his life-blood to it, or drinks a few pints of backyard whiskey and goes swimming in the canal. But most of us are too stubborn or cowardly to make a clean go of it, and this bit that hates us has to start thinking sly. Have another drink, it says, and maybe one more on top. Polish it off with a hit of breath, and ain’t that man at the end of the bar been giving you the eye all night, all fucking night, and what’s his problem exactly, and why don’t you go over and ask?

  After finding Rhaine’s body I went back to the Earl, poured myself a tall draft and went to work wrestling that suicidal quarter of my consciousness into submission, or at least silence.

  I had been aware of the youngest Montgomery’s existence for a grand total of three days, had spent perhaps forty minutes in her presence. In that time she had struck me as spoiled, self-indulgent and foolish, and her unfortunate outcome eminently predictable. The world is happy enough to distribute cruelties to the undeserving – best to save sympathy for those souls brought low through no fault of their own.

  She had been nothing to me, not a lover, not a friend even. Contemptuous and acerbic even when she wasn’t trying. A spoon-fed cunt from Kor’s Heights that had gotten what she’d asked for.

  I was alone in the bar, so I had to get up from my perch to refill my beer.

  She had heart though, you had to give that to her. That last time I’d seen her she’d known what she was up against, seen the odds and stuck it out anyway. At first I’d thought her bravery petulance, the whole escapade a ‘fuck you’ to her old man. But I’d been wrong, it was more than that. You could call it rank sentimentality, and I did, but you couldn’t dismiss it. She had wanted justice for her brother, and died looking for it.

  And the fact that I’d known the truth, that I might have set her straight but hadn’t – well, you couldn’t very well pretend that didn’t mean something.

  I was empty again. A trip to the tap rectified the situation.

  The general had heard the news by this point. It might kill him – the Lost One knew he hadn’t been the picture of health that morning. If it didn’t then he’d have the misfortune of adding a daughter to the son he’d buried. The Daevas were cruel, to repay his years of service with such misfortune.

  Course the Daevas hadn’t killed her – I knew where that honor rested.

  But then again what I’d told Rhaine that first day was true: there’s no such thing as justice, only revenge, and once you get it you realize how little it means. Edwin Montgomery’s son rotted in the ground, and his daughter would soon join him. Giving them company wouldn’t change that. I did the best I could for Rhaine while she was alive. It hadn’t been enough, but there was no point compounding failure with catastrophe.

  It made sense, when you looked at it like that. When you lined it up. The wise thing to do was forget it. Have a few drinks, then go upstairs and sleep them off. Wake up and have a few more. Repeat until it didn’t seem necessary.

  I am not a wise man. Clever, on occasion, but never wise.

  Adolphus came in through the back, trying to take up less than his usual amount of space. ‘You hear?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I pulled myself up from my seat, stretching my arms over my head, trying to shake loose three pints of booze.

  ‘Where are you headed?’

  ‘I’m gonna go pay a visit to the man who killed Rhaine Montgomery.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘The same person who killed her brother, I suspect.’

  19

  The wooden platform outside of the Veterans’ Association Headquarters was in use, a decent-sized crowd of onlookers watching a one-legged veteran howl his way through a stock speech. That is to say I assumed he was a veteran, though half the beggars in Low Town claim an honorable wound and a few coin on top of it, liars with bound legs spinning sob stories for fools. He looked the part at least, and he was making a fine go of it, rolling himself up to a good boil despite the heat.

  ‘When the Throne called, we stood back to back, back to back against the enemies of our nation! When the blood roiled like the tides, when our brothers-in-arms fell like wheat at the harvest, still we kept faith, still we stood strong against the Dren menace!’

  Some menace, an ocean and half a world away – you travel a thousand miles to kick a hornets’ nest you ought not moan so over being stung. The rest of the crowd seemed to remember it differently, however, muttering along in agreement.

  ‘Whatever was required of us, we gave! Gave without asking for compensation, gave till we had nothing left! We didn’t do it for pay, and we didn’t do it for medals! We did it so that our children would know a world without the fear of foreign enslavement. That they might grow up free and strong, proud subjects of the Rigun Empire!’

  Oh, the children, the children, always with the children. Real bloodthirsty motherfuckers, our hypothetical progeny. More men have died on behalf of future generations than through disease, famine and drink.

  ‘And after all our sacrifices, all our struggle – this is how the Crown thanks us! The Private’s Silver is ours, brothers, ours by right of blood!’

  Noble sentiments were all well and good, but it was money that drove my ex-comrades into a frenzy. We’d gained numbers since I’d come in, or at least we’d lost space, the beefy veteran behind me climbing my heels for a better view.

  ‘Roland Montgomery had a dream – that those men who fought to save the country might have a hand in running it. Though he was taken from us—’

  A voice yelled, ‘Murdered by Black House!’

  ‘Though he was taken from us,’ the speaker continued smoothly, sharp enough not to slander the government outright though happy enough to inspire it, ‘still we hold the faith! As we held it at Beneharnum, and at Sarlaut! As we held it at Aunis, and Darlaux, and Sulmne! As we hold it to this very day, firm in the face of any man who seeks to strip us of our rights and honors! Next week, brothers, I hope you’ll join us on our march to the palace – to remind the Queen of what her people have done for her, and to demand just recompense for our efforts!’

  The crowd erupted. I slipped away, running the gauntlet of back-slapping buffoons and teary-eyed nostalgics.

  I found Hroudland standing stiff-necked near the entrance, his face beatific though he must have heard the sermon before. He was a true believer, it seemed, though I wouldn’t have credited him as such. I filed the information away happily – zealots are easy to play.

  Something of the speech had stayed with him, because he greeted me with a friendly smile despite my history of disrespect. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said.

  ‘Hroudland. I need to see the commander.’

  It took a moment for that to sink in. Hroudland was one of those rarest of military men, an individual whose rank had not outdistanced his talents and, as the main requirement of the middle ranks is attention to detail and a lack of imagination, he was having trouble dealing with this new development. ‘The commander’s busy.’

  ‘I’m not here to waste his time.’

  A longer moment still, then he nodded and walked me inside. I took a seat against the wall and watched him disappear through the back.

  The entrance hall wasn’t packed, but it was damn full for a weekday afternoon, dozens of men preparing for the march. The whole place was animated with an energy that hadn’t been there the last time I’d come
through, that probably hadn’t been there for years, since before the Association had legitimized itself. The Crown’s ill-considered attempt to decrease their rapidly expanding debt was bearing sour fruit, turning the apolitical into fanatics, reminding an untapped army of long-standing grievances. Still, they weren’t sharpening knives or threatening to murder city officials, which I took to mean the news of Rhaine’s murder was as yet unknown to them. Except, of course, for those members of the assemblage who had been detailed to kill her.

  I sat mostly unnoticed in the corner, one more unkempt, middle-aged man in a small sea of them. One of my compatriots, a thuggish-looking sort with a head of white hair, kept staring over at me through crossed eyes, but he blinked away when I fixed my attention towards him. Instead I turned it on the portrait of Roland that stood above the fireplace. I didn’t like it, I decided. The stern line of his face didn’t match my memory of his upbeat grin, solid in the heat of battle or a crowded taproom.

  Three-quarters of an hour sauntered past until an orderly waved me through the public area and into the hallway beyond. Inside I waited silently while a pair of guards removed my dagger and gave me a thorough once over. They’d upped security since yesterday, or else they just wanted to fuck with me. Afterward one of them escorted me to Pretories, knocking on the door and waiting for an affirmation before allowing me entry.

  Joachim sat behind his desk, a thick bundle of papers evenly separated in front of him. ‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘As you can see, we’ve got a lot going on at the moment.’ He pointed at the seat across from him, but I remained standing.

  ‘Rhaine’s dead.’ I kept my voice flat, and low. It could have been accusing, or despondent.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rhaine Montgomery is a corpse in the Low Town muck.’

  Pretories gave a credible impression of being shocked: he slumped back into his chair, squeezed his forehead with one hand, and allowed an appropriate interval to pass without speaking. ‘You’re certain?’