She Who Waits (Low Town 3)

by Daniel Polansky

  I’d first noticed him back at Keogh Street, near Brennock, and if for some reason you’d felt like tossing away the benefit of the doubt you might have allowed him some reason to be there. But an hour later we were deep into the bowels of Low Town, passing through the sorts of areas only natives would have reason to be. So it wasn’t really so much any failure of camouflage on his part – he didn’t belong in Low Town, and when you’d been there as long as I had, that was easy to see.

  We were just south of the river, on the edge of the spider-web spread of alleys and side streets known as the warrens. It was market day, and even in the slums the autumn markets were pretty good, rich with the smell of roasted chestnuts and burned coffee and blood from the butcher stands and smoke from everyone. Set up in the middle of the thoroughfare a group of Islanders were playing a folk song, an upbeat thing with a nonsensical chorus of yelps and half-rhymes.

  I stopped in front of a fruit stand, rich from the harvest, plump red apples and sour-looking cherries. It was being run by what I took to be the daughter of the owner, a doe-eyed girl with blond hair hanging past her shoulders. Wasn’t an easy life these peddlers had, a little farm on the outskirts of the city two-thirds entailed to the bank, the grinding need of the land, the pittance it gave out in return.

  But for the moment she looked bright as the foliage, and she gave her little set speech as if it was the first time. ‘Good morning, sir. Apples are three a penny, cherries are two copper for a tenth-stone. All are fresh from our family farm, sir, barely eight miles away sir, in North Hempston.’

  I gave her a smile and began inspecting the produce, though of course I hadn’t much need for them. I’d only called a halt after noticing the lanky Kiren leaning against a cask of dry cider next to the stand, sipping at a cup of what I assumed to be the same, a floppy boater obscuring his face down past his nose, the brim of the hat and the brim of the mug meeting in the middle.

  ‘Hey Warden.’

  ‘Knocker.’

  The first big surge of Kiren had showed up some fifteen years back, driven by an internecine conflict in the old country the nature of which we pale faces were too simple to understand. They’d followed the path tramped down for them by previous waves of immigrants, the weak-willed or honest being ground up for cheap labor, those unsuited to carrying water carving out territory at the expense of their countrymen new and old. It wasn’t long before the Kiren had gained a reputation for exoticism and brutality that had once been firmly the property of the Tarasaighn. Their hitters were short men with dark eyes that spoke an incomprehensible tongue and seemed no more mindful of blood than a fish is water. With their numbers and desperation they’d quickly become a force to be reckoned with throughout the city, would have become top dog if they’d continued to grow at the same rate.

  But of course, they didn’t. You can’t stay hungry forever. What the father earns the son squanders, and that’s a universal reality, true regardless of skin color.

  Knocker was of the first generation to be born on foreign shores, knew no other world than Low Town. I’d first noticed him a few years back, he’d been running confidence scams near the docks, once took a few ochres worth of breath off one of my less acute couriers. I’d kept an eye on him since then, an up and comer to make use of or run off.

  I was surprised to see him awake this early. If he’d stuck to habit he’d have been up half the night, dicing and generally being a nuisance. For all his bluster there was a sort of sweetness to him, though perhaps it was more a lack of savagery than any particular sense of decency. Regardless, he still hadn’t seen fit to slap a blade on his side and call himself a killer, and for a boy his age, in Low Town, that made him damn near a saint.

  ‘Feel like doing me a favor?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Feel like making an argent?’

  ‘Depends on how.’

  ‘There’s a guy following me a few blocks back or so, got a too-big sword hanging from too-clean pants.’

  Knocker spat some of the slime in his throat onto the slime in the street. ‘Do I look blind to you, or just stupid?’

  ‘You aren’t using a cane.’

  ‘What you want done to him?’

  ‘I want you to get a friend or two together and shake him down, then let him follow you into the warrens.’

  ‘How many ways you expect me to split an argent?’

  ‘Fine, two then.’

  ‘Where you want him led?’

  ‘You know that dead end off Ash Lane? Across from what was Old Man Gee’s wyrm den, before Old Man Gee torched himself inside it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There.’

  From behind his ear, obscured by the long black tangle of his hair, Knocker brought the last half-inch of a joint to his lips. He lit it with a match from his boot, sucked at it a while.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re too lazy to make a dishonest silver,’ I prompted.

  ‘Bad for my rep, getting caught slipping a purse.’ He banged a bony fist against his stained white undershirt. ‘I’ve got a name to live on – I’m the sharpest pickpocket south of the Andel. People can’t be hearing I miffed a simple snatch.’

  ‘No one would believe it.’

  He puffed his sallow chest out, considered that for a moment. ‘What happens once I get your man to the warrens?’

  ‘You leave. But first I give you two silver.’

  ‘Can I keep his purse?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He isn’t so tiny.’

  ‘Are we just going to sit here all morning trading insights?’

  ‘Point being, more certain if I had three friends, ’stead of two.’

  ‘You seem a popular fellow – I’m sure you won’t have any difficulty rustling up support.’

  ‘Three men, three argents.’

  ‘By the Lost One, you’re exhausting. Fine, three argents, but that’s the ceiling, and this has already gone on longer than it should have. You don’t want to earn supper, you aren’t the only man in Low Town up for trouble.’

  I watched his spliff burn down to where the ember was near touching his lip, wondered if it was a parlor trick for my benefit or if he just couldn’t bear to waist a single curl of vine. ‘All right, I’m in – but I wouldn’t do it for anyone else.’

  ‘I’ll remember you in my prayers.’

  He nodded and went back to sitting very still. I bought three apples from the blonde girl, who was either too young to understand our conversation or old enough to know it was better not to. I gave her an extra copper and she smiled rather fetchingly. Then I stepped back into the crowd, let it carry me south.

  The market ended after a few hundred yards, and the mass of people eased out and quieted. A little further down I pulled off the thoroughfare and took a backways look at the action. It was something of a risk – if my shadow was paying attention it might be enough to spook him. But if Knocker and his boys miffed their play and things went to blood I wanted to make sure I’d have the chance to intervene.

  And indeed, I was halfway concerned when I turned around and spotted Knocker approaching the target all by his lonesome – three argents split best one way, apparently. ‘You got a spare copper, mister? Spare copper for me to get something to eat for my mother?’

  ‘Shove off heretic, I’ve got nothing for you,’ the outsider growled, with more force than you needed to put on it.

  ‘Just a copper, a copper’s all I need? For my mom, see? Been a week since she’s had a decent meal. You ain’t gonna go ahead and tell me that you can’t toss a copper for my mother to get a loaf of bread?’ All the while Knocker doing his best impression of a wyrm-fiend, hands waving meaninglessly, slack-jawed, bug-eyed and blinking.

  ‘Don’t make me tell you off again,’ the mark said, this time with a palm on the hilt of his blade.

  Knocker put his hands up in front of him like he was about to beg forgiveness – a dead giveaway if you knew him – then he gave the man a solid push.

 
It’s the most basic thing in the world for all it can be hard to remember – never let anyone get behind you. Knocker dazzled the mark with a show, while the one confederate he had chosen to assist him, a mixed-race boy no older than twelve, slid in from offstage and took up position on all fours behind him.

  The muck he fell into was good for his back, but bad for his dignity. Also bad for his dignity was Knocker slipping his purse before he could react, then laughing and sprinting off down an alley.

  Here was the one part where my plan might go sideways – because if our patsy had any sort of head on him at all, he’d give the purse up for lost, brush the mud off his pants and head back home. Chasing a native through alien streets is a sure way to find yourself not living. But something about this guy made me think he kept his brain near the hilt of his weapon, and my suspicion was gratified when I saw him sprint off in the direction of his attackers.

  The warrens aren’t so big, maybe a square quarter mile, maybe less. If you know what you’re looking for you can pace through it in ten minutes easy, though of course, if you don’t, you could wander around for half a day before finding an exit, in the unlikely event that the people living there decided to allow you free passage. Point being, it was easy to make up lost time, navigating swiftly through the labyrinth while Knocker led my pursuer around in circles for awhile.

  I reached our destination and took a seat on a broken crate in the back end of the alley. From inside my satchel I took out a clasp knife and started to peel one of the apples I’d bought, separating out the red skin from the flesh beneath. The wreckage of Old Man Gee’s den stared at me, ruined windows like vacant eyes, the bottom floor collapsing in on itself like a set of broken teeth. It was the sort of place to give you the heebie-jeebies, if you were the sort of person to get them. I wasn’t, really, though I could see why the neighborhood kids maintained that strange lights could be seen coming from the place on moonless evenings, and a wailing heard above the wind. Never held much belief in that sort of thing myself – all the men I’d seen go into the ground, I never knew a one of them to come back for a visit. Still, it would be just like the daevas to curse Old Man Gee by sticking him in his old den. All that effort spent slipping the place, just to spend eternity staring at it.

  My ruminations were cut short by the sudden arrival of Knocker, who sprinted in stage left with a face red from labor and a smile wide with sin. He dropped the purse at my feet, grabbed three argent from my hand and then dodged back across the street and out of view. I could hear his pursuer, formerly my pursuer, chugging towards me at a fair clip.

  Knocker had led the man a merry chase – if he’d intended to lose him he wouldn’t have had any trouble. The man was fit, and enthusiastic enough about catching his quarry, but his sword was too long to comfortably run with, he had to hold it back so it wouldn’t trip him up. It was an awkward sort of locomotion, and it wasn’t improved when he came around the corner and saw me waiting for him – near enough jumped out of his coat.

  ‘Fancy running into you here,’ I said.

  It was the first chance I got to look at him up close. I wasn’t impressed. His skull was prominent beneath his face, the hair above it cut to flat stubble. His limbs were long and fleshless – indeed from heel to brow you’d have been hard pressed to carve an ounce of fat from his frame. Give me a fat man any day, at least it means he enjoys something. In the scheme of things, gluttony is a pretty mild evil.

  Wrath is a far more serious one, and he was moving quickly towards it before I cut him off. ‘Don’t do anything stupid – I didn’t lead you here to offer a convenient spot to be stabbed. The man I’ve got waiting on the rooftop yonder with a crossbow is a paranoid sort, and if you were to make any move he were to interpret as threatening – pull your blade say, or maybe just come any closer to me – well, I couldn’t vouch for your safety.’

  Despite my warning, he went ahead and put his hand on his basket-hilt, though what good he imagined the sword would do against a bolt I can’t imagine. ‘You’re bluffing,’ he said, but he said it the way people say things they wish were true.

  ‘You’re welcome to die thinking that.’

  His eyes stayed angry, but he eased his hand away from his weapon. ‘What are you doing here, and why do you have my purse?’

  ‘I’m here because I live here. Lived here my whole life, nearly. Might even say I belong here. On the other hand you, my friend, look about as out of place as a whore in church.’

  He let out a quick hiss of breath, like I’d landed a punch. ‘I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I’ve got business to attend to at the docks, I was just cutting through the market to save time.’

  I smiled a little, ate another piece of my apple. ‘I’m trying not to let myself get insulted, friend, but you’re making it awful difficult. It’s one thing to follow me around like a border collie, a person could have all sorts of reasons for doing that. But now you’re standing there telling me that black is white and up is down and toenail tastes like taffy. It’s rude – it suggests you think me an idiot. No one likes being called an idiot.’

  I watched him consider and discard a series of lies. ‘All right,’ he confessed. ‘I was following you. But I’m not here looking for trouble.’

  ‘Then you picked the wrong neighborhood to go strolling in.’

  ‘I was hoping the two of us might have a talk.’

  ‘We’re talking right now. And I have to admit, thus far it’s been less than entertaining. And when I get bored I get grumpy, and when I get grumpy my man gets fretful. And when that happens people have a way of falling down and not getting back up.’

  ‘I don’t know who you think I am,’ he began, drawing himself up to his full height, hand back on the hilt of his blade.

  ‘I think you’re very far from home,’ I finished for him. ‘And I think I’d knock off the bluster if I wanted to ever get back there.’

  I put a little edge on that last one, and he seemed to feel it. He relaxed his grip on his weapon, and he even tried to force a smile, an awkward, fluttering thing that died stillborn on his narrow lips. ‘This wasn’t the way I’d intended our conversation to go. Perhaps I went about finding you the wrong way – but I assure you, my attentions are entirely peaceful. My name is Simeon Hume,’ he said. ‘And I’m here on behalf of—’

  ‘The Sons of Śakra,’ I finished. ‘Yeah, I know.’

  An unexpected shot of truth hits harder than a fist to the gut, if you can time it right. The unconvincing smile on Hume’s face became an altogether honest look of shock.

  ‘It’s an amateur mistake, frankly,’ I continued, cutting another slice of apple, then pointing the blade of my clasp knife down towards his feet. ‘You clean up so nice and then you don’t even bother to change your shoes.’

  If you’d told me five years back that the Sons of Śakra – better known amongst those of us unaffiliated with the organization as the Stepsons, or just the Steps – would have risen to a position of social prominence, would include in its ranks nobles and members of parliament, I’d have laughed right in your face. A pack of zealots listing as a cardinal vice everything from hard liquor to sex on feast days – hardly the sort of creed to find fashion amongst the hedonistic citizens of Rigus. But that was before trade with the Free Cities dried up, and the mills started to shut down, and the last two harvests had all but withered on the vine. Since then their ascent had been impressively rapid, buoyed by the collapse in trade and industry and the general sense of misery that seemed to loom omnipresent over the city. Despair breeds conviction, when you can’t afford a pleasure it gets damn easy to decide it’s not one you’d lower yourself to enjoy.

  Nowadays their church services were packed to the rafters with old women weeping and young men beating their breasts, and their brown-robed leaders made a ruckus in parliament about anything they could find to make a ruckus about. They ran orphanages and poor houses and occasionally led raids down into Kirentown, proving that theirs were lov
ing gods with the aid of brick bats and cobblestones. Otherwise they could be found throughout the city, passing out tracts and preaching and generally being a nuisance to those of us whose labors focused on this world rather than the next.

  In truth, I hadn’t been paying much attention to them, seeing as the only thing I care less about than politics is religion. I’d spent enough time in the corridors of power to know that the people you think are running things aren’t ever the people that are really running them. And I’d been alive long enough to know that if the Firstborn reigns above, he’s not paying much attention to what we’re doing down below.

  ‘I hadn’t thought them so recognizable,’ Hume said, taking a moment to inspect his treads.

  ‘I tend to notice jackboots when they’re threatening to march over my face.’

  He bristled. He seemed like the kind of person who bristled easily, though I was hoping our association would be too brief to confirm that one way or the other. ‘There are many false rumors spread about the Sons of Śakra, spread by our enemies, jealous of the love we have amongst the common folk and our success in parliament. We seek nothing more than an active role within government, for the greater glory of King and country.’

  ‘You can’t imagine how little this conversation interests me,’ I said, tossing away the core of my apple and pulling out a fresh one from my satchel. ‘I assume you haven’t been following me through Low Town to debate politics, and I can assure you that I didn’t lead you here hoping for a lecture on your sect. Now how bout you tell why you were shadowing me, before I make good on these threats I keep offering.’

  ‘My superior has a proposition for you. We wanted to know what sort of person we were dealing with, before we offered it.’

  ‘I’m the sort of person who doesn’t like being followed. I wonder whether that point would best be conveyed to your boss from you, or with your corpse?’

  ‘I may not seem like much to you, but my people feel otherwise. They’d be unlikely to take my being harmed with much grace.’