She Who Waits (Low Town 3)

by Daniel Polansky

  He wasn’t wrong. I’d come back from the Professor’s to find the Earl busy bordering on raucous, an inimical counterpart to my mood. I’d taken a corner seat at the counter and stitched my mouth into a shape which would not attract company. Then I’d started drinking.

  ‘I wish you’d knock it off,’ he continued. ‘You’re scaring away the customers.’

  I glanced around at the small mob surrounding us. ‘We seem to be doing all right.

  ‘All right, sure,’ Adolphus said, leaning fleshy arms onto the bar. ‘But compared to what? Often I find myself thinking of the success I could have if you weren’t weighing me down.’

  Adolphus the Grand was a sight to bring despair to the mind of any middle-aged man. In the height of youth he’d been as perfect a specimen of the human race as could be imagined, if you discounted aesthetics and just went on sheer physical ability. He was half again as tall as a tall man, and twice as big as a big one. His hair was black as midnight and he had a beard thick as razor wire. Course he was cur-ugly, but that wasn’t no hindrance to killing a man.

  Twenty years later he was still strong, and he was still ugly, but only the last had increased with age. To the pockmarked skin and crooked teeth his parents had given him, and the single eye the Dren had taken away, you could add a dense cobweb of wrinkles and a gut that would shame a prize pig. I wouldn’t have bet against him in an arm-wrestling competition, and there was more than enough left to keep the drunks honest, but he was a far way from what he’d been. And if a superhuman like Adolphus couldn’t last two falls with time, what chance did we mortals have?

  ‘Can’t be good for your back, carrying me so long,’ I said.

  ‘I’m serious. If it wasn’t for you this would be the most happening joint in the city. I’d have a half dozen pretty girls serving drinks, and an ogre in a suit manning the door.’

  From the drunk a few seats over came a loud belch, followed by the scent of onion and minced meat. ‘This isn’t exactly the velvet rope crowd,’ I said.

  ‘You feel like talking about it?’ Adolphus asked.

  ‘Do I seem like I feel like talking about it?’

  ‘No – but you have a backwards way of doing things. A person could take this brooding as a sign you had something to get off your chest.’

  ‘Or they might take it as a sign I genuinely want to be left alone.’

  Our conversation was interrupted by a patron shouting from the other end of the bar. ‘Hey, one-eye! You bringing my beer or not?’

  Adolphus broke his attention off me for a moment, swung around to face our heckler. ‘Denis Traub, you’ve owed me three argents since weekend-last, and you’ll get your beer when I feel like fucking bringing it.’

  The crowd laughed, Denis Traub included. People liked Adolphus. He was friendly and sympathetic, and he didn’t mind letting a tab slide a ways, as Denis Traub could attest. I liked Adolphus too, though for different reasons.

  ‘You give away a lot of booze,’ I said.

  ‘You want to be the bartender?’

  ‘Very much no.’

  ‘Then stick to your own end of things. I don’t tell you how to hustle pixie’s breath and bitch endlessly.’

  ‘I don’t need much help with either.’

  Adolphus turned to the tap and filled a few glasses. He made like he was going to go over and serve them, but then he pulled up short and went back to talking to me.

  ‘I guess that thing today wasn’t lovely.’

  ‘Wasn’t lovely,’ I agreed.

  ‘Well, the world sometimes isn’t. No point in holding onto it.’ He gave me Denis Traub’s ale. ‘Have a drink.’

  I had one. ‘It’s not nightmares that concern me.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘You knew Reinhardt, didn’t you?’

  ‘Here and there.’

  ‘You think him the sort to do what he did today?’

  ‘I did not. But it isn’t my first time being wrong. Nor yours, though I know that’s hard to hear.’

  ‘No point being nasty.’

  Adolphus shook his big head back and forth. ‘I’m not used to this end of the argument. Normally you’re the one pushing on the fallen nature of man.’

  ‘I’m thinking maybe it wasn’t him.’

  ‘Word from the guard was that you came in on Reinhardt holding the murder weapon. That he turned it on himself out of remorse, or fear out of what was coming.’

  ‘I mean it was him that chopped up his wife obviously – I’m just not sure that it was his fault.’

  ‘You’re about as clear as a coal fire.’

  ‘You remember last week, that greengrocer near the warrens snapped, went after one of his patrons with a hatchet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And the week before, when they found Old Tom Shepherd hung in his basement, the bodies of two whores keeping him company?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Lot of people been killing people lately.’

  He shrugged, nonplussed. ‘This is Low Town.’

  There was that.

  ‘So you think there’s something more to this than meets the eye?’ Adolphus asked.

  ‘I think there might be.’

  ‘Any idea what that is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Adolphus’s face was big as a shovel head, and every feature marring it was similarly oversized. It was like having a conversation with someone while staring at them through a magnifying glass. ‘If you want to talk, talk – if not, keep quiet. Saying nothing loudly is no good middle ground.’

  ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

  Adolphus looked at me a long time without answering. Then he reached over and took hold of the half mug of beer I had left, set it beneath the counter. ‘You’re cut off.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘I’m serious too – you only get maudlin when you’re full of liquor, and soon after you get maudlin you get violent. I’ve got enough to worry about without having to figure out where I’m gonna hide a corpse.’

  ‘I guess you’ve got less to regret than I do.’

  ‘You’ve no monopoly on remorse.’

  But I continued on without hearing him, anxious to add further errors to my tally. ‘What do you really have blackening your slate? A cruel word to Adeline, maybe a backhand to a drunk that didn’t quite warrant it. I’m not talking about vice, Adolphus. I’m talking about sin.’

  ‘You forget where we met each other?’ he said, and I could feel the weight of his eyes pulling at mine. ‘Five years I spent in the trenches, same as you. I wouldn’t think you’d need a reminder of the things we done there.’

  ‘But you couldn’t very well say that was our fault, could you? I mean not like other things.’

  Adolphus scratched a fingernail down the crooked grooves of his face. ‘What are we talking about, exactly?’

  ‘I’ve done things make the war look like a tea party,’ I said. ‘I’ve done things make the war look like a prayer service.’

  Time passed. The room was loud and getting louder, inebriated half-wits talking to keep themselves from thinking. The wife couldn’t keep her mouth shut for a thirty-second stretch, and the kids weren’t any better, you unload cargo for ten hours and come home to a pack of spoiled little ingrates wailing like they’d been beaten. And you’re lucky you have a job, what with those damn heretic Kiren willing to break their backs for a clipped copper, and they should ship them all back to where they came from, wherever that was, and let’s have another beer, and whose turn is it to pay? Bipeds, all of us, but that was as much relation as I’d admit.

  ‘No one gets to our age without doing things they wish they hadn’t,’ Adolphus said finally. You make good, or you forget about them.’

  ‘Some things can’t be made good.’

  ‘That’s a nice excuse not to try.’ Adolphus reached beneath the counter and grabbed the glass he’d taken from me. ‘Finish your drink and go to bed. I’ve got customers to serve.’
He set a quick hand on mine as he passed me the drink. Then he was gone down the line, spreading solace to drunkards.

  I watched him walk away, the best friend I ever had – which is underselling it really, because I never had very many, and most of those weren’t any good. For a moment I thought maybe I ought to have told him what was on my mind, disregarded that notion near as quick as I thought it. Part because it wasn’t clear in my head yet, part because telling him wouldn’t have done any good; if my worries held water there wasn’t anyone could handle it but me.

  But mainly because there are some things that you don’t tell anybody, no matter who that person is, no matter how quick they are to believe in the brighter shades of your character. Adolphus had been my friend for twenty years. I’d served with him in the war, saved his life more than once, put up half the stake in the Earl, lived above him for more than a decade. And I knew if he ever had any really clear idea of who I was I’d be as dead to him as a rose bush in December, he’d turn his face from mine and never look back.

  It wasn’t late but it was late enough. Walking up the stairs to my room I could hear the clatter of the not-candy in the tin in my pocket – like a locust atop carrion, like a death rattle, like the end.

  5

  Around noon the next day I walked into a lunch place across the street from the house that Truss dealt from. I took a seat by the window and ordered a plate of eggs.

  Following up on a re-supply is a pretty easy process. You stake out a place and wait for someone to walk inside who isn’t obviously a junkie. Then you follow said non-junkie back to his headquarters. It was just a question of killing time till Truss’s stash ran down, though there was no way of saying how long that would be. Work this dull I’d usually pass on to Wren, but for the moment I wanted to play things close to the vest.

  Time dragged on. My server kept coming over to refill my coffee, though my bladder was about ready to burst as it was. I felt kind of bad about taking up a seat for so long, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was that gregarious sort that only appears when you want to be left alone.

  The sun had moved a fair way from its zenith before I saw the man I was looking for slip into Truss’s. He was out again five minutes later, and I was waiting for him.

  With my second look I was certain I hadn’t seen him before, a tall, broad-shouldered character of indeterminate parentage. He wasn’t dressed well enough to be working for the Rouenders, and his olive skin meant he wasn’t part of Ling Chi’s crew. He wasn’t looking for a tail, and he wouldn’t have noticed me even if he was. We made our way south down Broad Street, then cut west on Paul. I felt a brief flash of something when I realized where we were heading, but ground it down and kept walking.

  It had been six years since the Blue Crane – the greatest sorcerer in the Empire, the city’s noble protector, plague-banisher and the common man’s friend – had put a straight razor to his wrists, and in the interim his estate had pretty much gone to shit. I’d heard the Crown had tried to sell it, but there weren’t many interested in purchasing a palatial tower located in the heart of the slums, especially not one with such ominous affiliations. The locals had avoided it for a time, love or fear of its ex-tenant keeping the site intact. But people have short memories, in Low Town and everywhere else. These days the Aerie no longer enjoyed any special status, and the locals treated it with their usual sense of civic pride.

  The maze that I had played in as a child was littered with cigarette butts, broken bottles and all sorts of refuse. The tower itself – a magnificent structure, azure-hued stone shooting straight up into the skyline – had become the preferred canvas of anyone with a can of paint and an adolescent’s grasp of vulgarity. ‘THE CRANE LIVES’, read one epitaph, a sentiment which I appreciated but couldn’t agree with. Next to it, in bigger letters and a cleaner hand someone had written ‘FUCK THE CRANE’. There were a few more dealing with the former owner, but mostly it was just the usual nonsense, tags and doggerel verses of the more profane variety. Some enterprising young fellow had managed to scale the sheer face of the edifice and stolen the head off the gargoyle that once sat in watch above the doorway. Vagrants had been using the area as a sleeping space, to judge by the worn palettes scattered about. A toilet as well, to judge by the odor.

  I told myself I wasn’t bothered, seeing the place like this, and there was no one around to contradict me.

  We continued south for a little while longer, till we were just off the east docks. My man disappeared inside a small pub, shuttered windows and a ‘closed’ sign on the door. I gave him five minutes to settle, then walked in after him.

  The bar was a bar – tables and chairs and whatnot. Sitting at one of these last, in the back, was the man I had come to see. I knew he was the man I had come to see because the only other person in there was the one I’d been trailing, and even in a small-time operation, the boss doesn’t run product.

  ‘We’re closed,’ the seated one said as the door shut behind me. He was picking at his fingernails, and didn’t bother to look up.

  The guy I’d been tailing recognized me, though. ‘Sully,’ he said.

  ‘I said we’re fucking closed,’ Sully repeated, still working furiously at his talons.

  ‘Sully!’ his partner said again, rather more nervously.

  Sully looked up, saw me, blinked twice, avoided pissing himself through a great act of will.

  I walked over to the guy behind the bar, the one I’d followed from Low Town. Up close he was bigger than I realized, solid shoulders and a crew cut and a gut pushing past his waistband. He stared down at me from across the counter, trying not to show fear.

  ‘You’re pretty short,’ I said.

  He laughed awkwardly.

  ‘I said, you’re pretty fucking short.’

  This time he didn’t laugh. ‘I heard you.’

  ‘Shorter than me.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Say it.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Tell me you’re shorter than me.’

  ‘Are you fucking serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shot a look over at Sully. I put my hand up to block the view, snapped my fingers. ‘Your boss can’t make you no taller.’

  He weighed his manhood against his sense of self-preservation. ‘I’m shorter than you,’ he said, and he said it without a stutter.

  I stared at him for another few seconds, then walked over and took a seat opposite his partner. ‘You’re Sully?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Sully looked like someone who wasn’t important enough to notice. I guess Sully’s mother didn’t think that, but I did. ‘I guess I don’t need to tell you my name.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Sully didn’t answer. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  There was a full glass of beer already on the table. I reached over and raised it to my lips, chugging along till it was empty. Then I held it over the side of the table and let it fall from my hand. ‘No,’ I said.

  For some reason the sound of glass shattering served to remind my new acquaintance of the fleshy appendage snuggled up to his spine. ‘This isn’t your territory,’ he said. ‘You got no business coming in here and playing the asshole.’

  ‘I am an asshole, Sully. We haven’t even scraped the surface yet. I’m a dramatically unpleasant individual, the kind of person you don’t want hanging around. You take my word for it, the quicker I’m out of your hair, the happier you’d be.’

  ‘And how do I make that happen?’

  ‘You could kill me, if you’ve got a half dozen men tougher than you are waiting in the back.’

  Sully didn’t say anything.

  ‘No, I thought not. In that case, the simplest expedient is to give me what I want.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Let’s go through it together, shall we? Am I here because I want to drink some watered-down ale? Do I find your conversati
on profoundly stimulating? What might you have that’s of interest to me?’

  He shook his head fiercely. ‘I’m not giving up the stash.’

  ‘You can keep your drugs,’ I said. ‘I’ve got plenty.’

  ‘Then what the hell is this about?’

  ‘I want to know where you’re getting them,’ I said, raising my voice for the first time.

  The atmosphere in the room, which I think might rightly have been described as frosty, chilled further.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘That’s bad news for one of us.’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘You said that already.’

  ‘And I’ve heard your reputation.’

  ‘Word spreads.’

  ‘But you’ve overplayed your hands, and your big talk ain’t nothing but. What are you going to do? Beat it out of me? In my own bar, in broad daylight?’

  ‘No,’ I said, pointing a finger at his man at the bar, but keeping my eyes on Sully. ‘I’m gonna beat it out of him. You I’m just gonna kill straight off, so he knows I’m serious.’

  Sully’s little spark of fortitude burned out as swiftly as it had ignited. ‘Let’s just stay calm here.’

  ‘I’m not agitated,’ I said. ‘I’m just violent. What gets done to you will be the consequence of cautious premeditation.’

  ‘My man wouldn’t like his name being mentioned.’

  I leaned back into my chair, folded my arms together and made like I was pondering. ‘I understand. You’re worried about the future.’

  ‘Damn right.’

  ‘Let me tell you something about the future – it isn’t the present. And in the present I’m guaranteeing you that there’s nothing that your supplier will do to you tomorrow that I won’t do to you today, now, right this very moment. Might as well postpone getting dead. When you think about it, isn’t that all we’re ever doing?’

  Sully turned his eyes to the man at the bar, then to the ceiling, then to the table we were sitting at.

  ‘So,’ I began again, after he’d stewed for an appropriate interval. ‘Who’s your supplier?’