Tomorrow, the Killing lt-2

by Daniel Polansky

  He leaned back in his chair and settled his hands around the slight round of his belly. ‘But you haven’t served me.’

  And therein lay the rub. Special Operations were the elite of Black House, a few dozen men that pulled the strings of Empire, faceless centurions making sure the foundations held together. That was power, real power, to get a peek at the machinery that whirred beneath the surface, bend it as you saw fit. That was power a slum kid from Low Town could only dream about. Had dreamt about, long nights sleeping in the gutter and swearing to get out of it.

  Of course, like anything else worth having, it came at a price.

  ‘Well?’ the Old Man asked after a while, as if the answer was of no concern. ‘What’s it to be?’

  16

  I spent the first half hour of the next morning in bed, tracing the cracks in the ceiling. One upside to the drought was that it made the spiderweb fracturing of my home solely an aesthetic concern. When the weather broke I’d need to find someone to fix it, or spend the rainy season getting dripped on.

  I put that out of my head and pulled on my shirt, then my pants, then my boots. Then I sat back down and removed them again, replacing them with the sweat-stained fabric I’d worn during my last meeting with Edwin Montgomery.

  The plants in the general’s garden had gone from wilted to dead since I’d last been there, victims of the unrelenting heat. After forty-five minutes in the sun I thought I might join them, lie down next to the withered rose bush and stop breathing. I had to bang at the door for a long time before a servant opened it, squarely built and about my age, but with a mane stained white as an octogenarian’s.

  ‘I’m here to see the general,’ I said.

  He closed the door without speaking, then opened it a few minutes later and waved me in.

  Botha was waiting for me outside the general’s study. His clothes were neatly pressed, and he seemed unaffected by the weather. I found myself disliking him more than was appropriate.

  ‘I didn’t imagine we’d be seeing you again, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Ain’t it wonderful, at our age, that the world still finds ways to surprise us?’

  ‘It is indeed. Unfortunately, the Master is even older, and I’m afraid not up for a similar shock.’

  ‘I’ll make sure not to set off any fireworks.’

  He didn’t find that amusing, but then I got the sense Botha was infrequently overcome with merriment. ‘The general don’t need to be worked up by a two-bit hustler.’

  ‘When’d you get a look at my price sheet?’

  Botha cracked a knuckle. It echoed like a shot through the stale air of the room. ‘I’m not letting you in there.’

  ‘It’s called the chain of command, and it means you don’t get to make that decision.’

  ‘As far as you need be concerned, my word comes from the Firstborn himself.’

  ‘I’m an atheist.’

  Long fingers contracted into fists. His shoulders rolled forward. ‘It’s never too late to see the light.’

  I wasn’t sure how it would play out – I hadn’t anticipated a tussle before my morning meeting, and Botha was not, best as I could tell, composed of pulled taffy. On the other hand, I was getting in to see his boss one way or the other, and I know a lot of others, and mostly they involve bladed weaponry.

  A voice from inside called us off. A weak voice, a voice that wasn’t about to do any singing. Still, I could hear it well enough, and so could Botha. He let his arms slip back to his sides, but his eyes never left mine, even when he opened the door for me to slide through.

  Edwin Montgomery had not struck me, the last time I’d seen him, as about to leap up from his desk and dance a quadrille – but neither had he seemed a man rapping weakly on the door of She Who Waits Behind All Things. Two days had pushed him distinctly in that direction, however. He was colored like a newborn larva, and wore a dirty robe open halfway down his sunken chest. What hair he’d last possessed seemed to have abandoned him in his hour of need. His breathing had ceased to be an unconscious reflex, each intake of air requiring the full measure of his strength.

  I had squared Botha’s attitude as general belligerence, but now I was starting to wonder if I’d mistaken it for the loyalty of a faithful servant. The general did not, indeed, appear to be in any condition for an interview. Looking at him I wanted to cut short our conversation and call for a doctor, though even our enlightened age has yet to develop a remedy for the passing of time. Nor was it lost on me that the news I was about to provide was unlikely to act as a tonic. But he needed to hear it – more importantly, I needed to tell it, clear myself of responsibility to the Montgomery family.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said, feebly. ‘You’ll have to excuse Botha. He can get a bit . . . overprotective.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s got your interests at heart.’

  ‘He always did,’ Montgomery said heavily, as if there was something more in it.

  I took an unoffered seat. ‘I appreciate you agreeing to see me again, General.’

  His skull tilted down an eighth or so of an inch, then returned to its original position. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I found Rhaine.’

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated.

  ‘She’s in Low Town, like you expected. In an inn called the Queen’s Palace.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘I tried talking to her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she wasn’t interested in what I had to say.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Honestly, sir, I’m not sure where to go from here. I can’t force her to return.’

  Two sentences seemed to stretch the limits of his focus. He’d aimed his gaze vaguely through the window at his dying gardens, though the dust and the morning glare obscured the view. ‘I’m sure you did your best,’ he said finally.

  ‘Sir, perhaps now is the time to cash in a favor or two. Get in touch with someone from the Throne, Black House if you have to. I know you said you didn’t want to draw yourself any attention, but Rhaine is in over her head. Alive and noisy is better than the alternative.’

  A thread of spit trailed down from his upper lip. After a long moment he brushed it away and spoke. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘If I was you, sir, I’d do it as soon as I could.’ Trying to balance urgency with an appreciation for the fragility of the man’s health.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but he had gone back to looking out the window. ‘Immediately.’

  It was all I could do. It was what I did, at least, offering a farewell that he didn’t answer and standing to leave.

  ‘Wait,’ he called me back, briefly returning to cognizance. ‘A man . . . a man pays his debts.’ Hands shaking violently, he managed to pull a purse from a drawer and dropped it on the desk. The string was loose, and I could see the yellow inside.

  I answered quickly, before avarice could kick in. ‘You don’t owe me anything, General – I just wish I could do something else for you.’

  Two days earlier he would have argued with me to take it. Now he just nodded vaguely and went back to staring out the window.

  Botha was waiting by the front door, not quite smirking. ‘Did you have a productive meeting, sir?’

  ‘Aces, Botha. Aces.’

  ‘I suppose this will be the last we’ll be seeing you.’

  I was seized with a sudden desire to squeeze my fingers around his throat, break his face into a pulp, go at him full-bore and see who ended up standing. ‘I suppose you’ve supposed a lot of things that didn’t turn out true, haven’t you, Botha? A man like you, he’s probably better off waiting for people to explain things to him, rather than go round supposing shit he don’t know nothing about.’

  For whatever reason this didn’t seem to touch him – the inclination that had nearly brought us to blows a few minutes earlier had disappeared entirely. He smiled and dipped his head, the closest to servile I’d yet seen him manage, then opened the door out into the dead garden. I tried to catch the general’s
eyes through the window of his study, but the glare of the sun was too bright, and I had to turn away.

  17

  Back at the Earl I ditched the suit for my regular attire and slipped a long dirk into my belt. The unmade bed seemed more inviting than usual, but I forced myself to settle for a hard snarl of breath. The vapor was sweet and sickening as raw honey, and I let it expand into my cranium, pushing the general’s decline, the whole Montgomery family, out of my thoughts. I had another meeting to attend this morning, and it was to take place in very different surroundings.

  Suddenly the vial was empty. I tossed it aside and grabbed another one, then tripped myself out.

  The Isthmus did not welcome trespassers, indeed, seemed to have been deliberately laid out to repel them. It runs southeast of the Beggar’s Ramparts, along that corner of the docks which extends into the borders of Kirentown, though few enough heretics found themselves in the maze of narrow alleyways and unpaved side streets. Indeed, it was rare to see anyone whose skin tended north of ebony.

  As such, it was one of the few sections of Rigus with which I was not intimately familiar, though in fairness, only a current resident could claim to be. The neighborhood was in a constant state of flux – no sooner was a shack erected, cheap wood with a thick cloth overhang, than it was torn down and replaced with another, or erased entirely. The Isthmus was a living outgrowth of an insular and dispossessed people, instinctively arranged to confuse and impede outsiders.

  As a rule, the guard don’t do their duty – but even on those rare occasions when the fancy strikes them, they don’t do it here. To those unacquainted with the terrain, which was to say anyone not born and still living there, cutting through the gangways and tenements was a sure sentence of death.

  I had memorized the directions Yancey had given me before coming – nothing says ‘mug me’ like standing around a street corner staring at a set of notes. But out of necessity, since the Isthmus is without street names or administrative markings of any kind, he was forced to rely on local landmarks as points of navigation – and since these were apt to be the victim of vandals or the Islanders’ constant redevelopment schemes, my going was slow. It was a chancy thing, even early in the day. The thugs and sharps who lived and worked here were too small fish to have heard of my reputation as a man it was best not to try and rob, and my skin marked me as a potential target. So I stitched a scowl across my face and kept my hand on the hilt of my dagger, and while I didn’t look in the eyes of any of the adolescent hyenas that lolled outside of every third domicile, neither did I look away.

  And after a few false starts and wrong turns, I found myself in front of the house of Mazzie of the Stained Bone.

  The high-class practitioners, the real Artists, Academy-trained and government recognized, could afford to do what they did any way they felt like doing it. Some preferred to keep up appearances – dark robes and grim prophecies, staining their beards white and letting them grow down to the floor. But for every one of those there were two you couldn’t tell from a solid shopkeeper or banker, who went about their business without pretense or drama. The bottom feeders and base dwellers didn’t have that luxury. They needed the public to know who they were and what they did, needed to advertise their services while warning off anyone that might want to do them harm.

  Still, standing in the sun outside of Mazzie’s hovel, I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t laying it on a bit thick. The shack she inhabited was, in the broad-strokes, largely indistinguishable from those that surrounded it, but she’d gone to an elaborate effort to peacock it. Near every inch of the outside was festooned with the trappings of her profession, or at least those that the ignorant public was familiar with. Strange shapes and odd patterns had been drawn on the walls with discolored paint, labyrinthine squiggles without beginning or end, exotic figures just recognizable enough to be disturbing. Tufts of feathers added accent, ornamentation of bone and offal. These last let off quite a stench. I doubted any were more than decorative – a functioning Working is too expensive to keep hung outside to be rained on. Still, they fulfilled their purpose, which was to creep hell out of anyone looking at them. Outside of staking the corpse of a newborn outside her door, there was little Mazzie could possibly have done to more actively ward off guests.

  The way I saw it, there were two possibilities. The first was that Mazzie was a fraud, and the elaborate show she put on was just that, her reputation earned by trickery and theater. This I more or less discounted – Yancey was no fool, and I doubted his recommendation would be so far off base. And besides, what little had made its way out from the slums of her activities hinted at more than parlor tricks and sleight of hand. The second possibility, considerably more disturbing, was that Mazzie of the Stained Bone was just what she seemed to be – a witch-woman, heir to millennia of folk-traditions and rituals, beliefs that had flourished out of reach of the rigid High Laws that constrained the Art within the Empire proper. Not exactly the sort of person to whom you wanted to entrust the education of your surrogate child.

  But then again my options were distinctly limited. Since the founding of the Academy during the Great War, the government had tightened their control over the nation’s practitioners, one more way to centralize and strengthen its rule. I knew by grim example that the Crown had no more rigid sense of ethics than the most twisted back alley conjurer. Nothing Mazzie could teach Wren would be any worse than what he’d learn from the authorities, and at least it would go down unleavened with hypocrisy.

  I held my nose and snatched up my balls, then knocked loudly on the door.

  ‘Enter,’ said a voice from inside, and I did.

  The interior was everything one would have expected from the front. Whatever other benefits it offered, Mazzie’s profession had not made her a wealthy woman – or if it had, she’d put little of the coin into home furnishings. Her hovel was a single room with a curtain pulled against the back wall to provide some privacy for the sleeping area. One corner was taken up with a large iron stove, cooking away despite the heat. A shutter hole in the ceiling was open, leaking in a few strands of sunlight on the sole inhabitant.

  Short and squat, black as soot and sin, Mazzie of the Stained Bone sat in a chair behind the table. The end of a fat cigar nested itself in her crooked teeth. She inspected me with a set of brown eyes rich as chocolate – in another woman they would have been called beautiful. Her stubbed nose flared as if to catch my scent, a wide hoop of ivory curling out from one nostril. She might have been thirty, or forty, or fifty. She might have been a hundred. She might never have been born.

  ‘I’m the Warden. Yancey the Rhymer sent word I was coming.’ I hoped this was true.

  ‘I know who you are. Sit down,’ she said, nodding at the chair opposite. ‘Let’s speak.’

  I did as bidden. My stool was identical to the one Mazzie was settled over, though her ample buttocks at least provided some cushion against the stiff wood.

  ‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ she began, ‘but I don’t think you’d like my blend.’

  ‘I’m not here for tea.’

  ‘What you here for then?’

  I took out my tobacco pouch and started on a smoke. ‘Shouldn’t you know?’

  ‘You give out a lot of samples, in your business?’

  ‘Not so many.’

  She rolled her thick cheroot to the end of her mouth. ‘Guess we in similar lines.’

  ‘Course, in my line, word gets out that I’m not reliable, that I ain’t selling what I’m talking, my customers are apt to take it serious. Apt to come visit me some evening, pull my tongue through my throat.’

  ‘I can see how that might happen.’

  ‘So what’s the verdict?’ I sealed my smoke and caught the end between my teeth, then lit it with the stroke of a match. ‘We in similar lines?’

  She dropped a length of ash onto the dirt floor. ‘We are indeed.’

  ‘Somehow I thought we might be.’ We sat puffing at each other, the d
ifference in size between my thin spliff and the hogleg rooted in her mouth giving me a distinct feeling of inferiority. ‘I’ve a boy needs training.’

  She’d known already, either a tip from Yancey or from some other, more arcane source. ‘No reason to bother old Mazzie. They got a school for that.’

  ‘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?’