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. Sakra’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 Sakra 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.
Lying there against the wall, staring at the shredded body of the man I had been tracking for the last half day, I thought to myself that at the very least the Kiren hadn’t made a liar out of me-in all my years I had never seen a death so horrible. Whatever torment he now suffered was a release from that which had sent him there.
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?”
“I’d say divine justice, but I don’t have such a grim view of the Daevas.” I leaned in close enough that no one else could hear me. “The thing next to us is the shell of the man responsible for the last corpse we had a conversation over. As to what killed him, if it has a name I don’t know it. But if I was responsible, you wouldn’t have found his remains, nor would I have passed out next to the corpse.” I noted with a petty sort of joy that our contact had smeared a swath of sanguinary fluid on his duster.
A crowd of heretics had gathered at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, chittering loudly, fear and anger in their eyes. The frost needed to cover up the body, and they needed to set up a decent perimeter, and they needed to do it quick. What the hell had happened to Black House since I’d left? It’s all well and good to engage in a little bit of casual violence against a suspect, but not at the expense of professionalism. Who did they think they were, the hoax?
The years we had spent tracking the lowest scum of humanity through the general detritus of civilization were enough to convince Crispin of my reliability as a witness, but the guarantees of a disgraced ex-agent-cum-criminal wouldn’t be sufficient for the brass. “You have any proof?”
“None whatsoever. But if you get his name and residence you’ll find a memento he kept, maybe a piece of her clothing. You’ll probably find a few of them.”
“You don’t even know his name?”
“I don’t have time for these trivialities, Crispin-I work in the private sector now.”
The crowd was getting rowdy, shouting past the loose cordon of troops blocking off the alley, although about what I still couldn’t tell. Did they want my head for killing one of their kind? Had word somehow spread of the man’s crimes? Maybe it was just the contempt for police countenanced by all reasonable people. Regardless, this whole thing was starting to get ugly. I saw one of the guardsmen get into it with a member of the mob, stiff-arming him back into his fellows and shouting ethnic slurs.
Crispin noticed what I had. “Agent Eingers, take Marat and stop those assholes from making this situation any worse. Tenneson, you’re in charge. Guiscard and I are taking the suspect to headquarters.” He turned back to me. “I’m putting you in irons,” he stated flatly. Not a shocking development, but I wasn’t thrilled with it either. I stood up straight and Crispin chained my hands firmly but without unnecessary cruelty. Guiscard took his place in front of me without comment. His characteristically unpleasant personality was mellowed, and I noted with some surprise that he hadn’t taken part in his comrades’ abuse.
The pair of them frog-marched me to the mouth of the alley, where two of the agents were trying without success to placate the crowd. Guiscard, acting as point, made an attempt to clear a path for us, but the heretics, normally a docile race, were unresponsive. A standoff seemed imminent, and not one that would redound to my advantage. Not in handcuffs anyway.
Crispin’s hand rested on the hilt of his blade, dangerous but not immediately threatening. “By the authority bequeathed to me as agent of the Crown, I order you to disperse or be considered outside the protections of the Throne.”
The crowd was having none of it, the brutality of the hoax and the indignity shown to the corpse sufficient to drive them to uncharacteristic defiance. Though the heretics’ natural inclination toward obedience was sufficient to stop them from surging on us, they made no move to follow Crispin’s command.
Crispin closed his hand around the gem hanging at his throat. He closed his eyes briefly, and the jewel glowed with a soft blue light that leaked out through his fist. This time his words allowed no challenge. “By the authority bequeathed to me as agent of the Crown, I order you to disburse or be considered outside the protections of the Throne. Make way or consider yourself an enemy of the Crown. ” And although he hadn’t raised the volume at which he spoke, his voice echoed through the assemblage, and the crowd of Kirens broke, quieting respectfully and swamping against the walls.
The Crown’s Eye was another thing I really missed about being an agent.
Crispin nodded to a pair of guardsmen, who took up flanking positions as we continued back to the main street. Halfway around the block, out of sight of the Kirens, Crispin put his hand against the wall and broke down. “A moment,” he gasped, his mouth open, his
lungs working desperately to take in air. The Eye draws its strength from its owner, and even an experienced agent like Crispin couldn’t use its power without exhausting himself.
We waited nervously for Crispin to regain his wind. I was getting antsy-it would go ill if the crowd regrouped and fell on us in the narrow confines of the alley. Guiscard rested his hand on his superior’s shoulder. “We need to keep moving,” he said, and his eyes were hard. Crispin took one more breath and fell into line.
They escorted me across half the city, like a dignitary with an honor guard, although in the past I’d never gotten the impression they were bound. It was the second time I had been brought to Black House in chains. It wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as the first.
Black House is, frankly, less imposing than it probably should be. A squat, unattractive edifice, more like an oversize merchant house than the headquarters of the most dreaded police force on the face of the planet, it sits obtrusively but without grandeur at a busy intersection straddling the boundary between the Old City and Wormington’s Shingle. Three floors of a city block and a maze of warrens beneath the ground remind the populace that the unwavering gaze of the Crown is always upon them. There is little ornamentation, and from the outside the structure fails to inspire or intimidate.
It is, however, mostly colored black. So there’s that.
When we reached the grim entranceway Crispin sent the guardsmen back to the crime scene, then he and Guiscard walked me inside. We moved deeper into the building, past the unmarked door that led to the underground rooms where the real interrogations take place, and I breathed a quick sigh of relief. That was one experience I wasn’t eager to repeat, neither as participant nor victim. When we reached the main hallway Crispin broke off, presumably to report to the higher-ups, leaving Guiscard to continue as my escort. I braced myself for further abuse, but the Rouender showed no desire to rekindle our conflict. He opened the door to the holding area, a featureless stone room, empty save for a cheap wood table and a trio of uncomfortable chairs. He set me down in one of them. “Crispin will be back soon,” he said.
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