She Who Waits (Low Town 3)

by Daniel Polansky

  He waved at a seat across from his desk. I took it. Hume stood next to the door. Either he was trying to intimidate me or he thought repose a sin.

  ‘I didn’t bother to tell this to your man, because I don’t suppose he’s got his hands around the purse strings,’ I began, ‘but you want to talk to me, it’ll set you back ten of the yellow.’

  Hume sputtered. ‘You’re a common whore then, to sell your time for money?’

  ‘You’ve got a very skewed conception of the economics of prostitution if you think many of them are making ten ochres a session.’

  ‘I don’t visit whores.’

  ‘Come around sometime, I’ll introduce you.’ I turned back to Egmont, who’d watched this back-and-forth without comment. He opened a drawer in his desk and counted out fifteen ochres with deliberate disinterest. ‘There now,’ he said, pushing the little pile over to me. ‘I should be commanding your full attention.’

  I scooped six months’ labor at a mill into my pockets. ‘Enough of it,’ I said.

  Egmont reached into another drawer in his desk, pulled out a pipe, long and black and well-crafted. Apparently tobacco was the one vice the Steps allowed themselves. He packed it slowly, lit it with a long match, made sure it had a good draw. It was boring and pretentious, but my pockets bulging, I wasn’t in a position to call him on it. ‘Do you know what I do for a living?’ he asked.

  ‘Look pretty?’

  ‘I keep my eyes open.’

  I spent a while staring into them, waiting to see if he’d blink. When he didn’t, I nodded approvingly. ‘You deserve a raise.’

  ‘And I make sure a lot of other people keep their eyes open. Brothers throughout the city, from the corridors of the Palace to the grimiest dockside tavern.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think that last to be any place for a religious man.’

  ‘Recently I’ve been receiving disturbing reports from your neck of the woods, reports of chopped up bodies, of savagery most foul.’

  I put a hand to my breast, fluttered my eyes with horror. ‘Violence? In Low Town? My heart’s all a twitter!’

  ‘Even by your rather … jaundiced standards, I would think that business with the dockworker and his wife would deserve notice.’

  ‘The world’s only getting less sane.’

  ‘And that’s coupled with word of a new drug on the streets, something they’re calling the fever.’

  ‘There’s nothing you know about Low Town that I didn’t know a day and a half before. I hope you’re holding onto your high cards, because as of right now you just pissed those fifteen ochres straight down a sewer.’

  He swiveled his chair to face the window, stared at the bustle of the market for a while. It’s a funny thing, but somehow I already knew what he was going to say. It’s not really so difficult, predicting the future. Assume the worst, you’ll rarely be wrong.

  ‘Does “Project Coronet” mean anything to you?’ Egmont asked finally.

  Like I said, I could make a pretty good living as a fortune teller. No, that’s a lie – people don’t get their palms read to find out their destiny, they go to get reassured. Happy ignorance has never been my forte. ‘It rings bells.’

  ‘I’d love to hear the note.’

  I made like I was trying to recall specifics, playing for time. What did he know? Not much, I had to think. Coronet was top secret, only a half dozen people in the Empire had clearance even to hear the name, and Egmont wasn’t one of them. But then, he had heard the name, and perhaps a good deal more. ‘It was a project Black House was working on back in the day, personally overseen by the Old Man. It never came to anything, at least not before I was … retired.’

  ‘Don’t soft-pedal it – from what I hear, Coronet was to be the Old Man’s crowning achievement, the ace in the hole that would ensure the permanency of his rule. That is, if it didn’t have the unfortunate tendency to drive some of its recipients violently insane.’

  ‘You’re well informed,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I don’t understand what any of this has to do with anything.’

  ‘No? I’m thinking that the effects of this … red fever, are awfully reminiscent of Coronet.’

  ‘Coincidence, nothing more. The project was scrapped a long time ago.’

  ‘And you’re certain of that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As you said – Coronet was meant to make sure the Old Man never lost his grip on the wheel. I know they never got Coronet to work for the simple reason that if they had, you’d be dead, and so would your boss, and so would everyone else in your organization.’

  ‘An unpleasant thought.’

  ‘Depends who’s thinking it.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ Egmont continued. ‘I very much do. But I’m afraid the similarities are too strong not to take notice.’

  ‘And this is where I come in?’

  ‘Exactly. I’d like you to confirm what you think you know – find out who’s selling red fever. Make certain that it has nothing to do with Coronet, that these … disturbing parallels are coincidence and nothing more.’

  ‘And if they aren’t?’

  ‘We’ll have to cross that bridge if we come to it.’

  I sucked my teeth and scratched my chin. I squinted my eyes and shifted in my seat. I gave various other impressions that I was weighing his offer with great seriousness. ‘I suppose I could look into it,’ I said. ‘But why would I want to?’

  ‘I would think you’d have an interest in finding out why the good citizens of Low Town have taken to slaughtering each other without reason or preamble. Or do you enjoy watching serial killers spring up in your neighborhood?’

  ‘Maybe I do, Egmont – maybe it’s chocolate cake to me. Maybe I wake up every morning with my heart in my throat that today will be the day I get to walk in on a mother-made corpse. You don’t know me well enough to be making any sort of assumptions about my character.’

  I know you’re a businessman, and I know that anarchy is bad for business.’

  ‘Anarchy is the natural state of things in my part of the world. A little more chaos won’t change anything.’

  ‘It doesn’t look good, bodies sprouting like weeds. I’d think it would be in your interest for you to tamp down on that sort of violence.’

  ‘A few more corpses south of the river?’ I shrugged. ‘No one cares. Believe me, no one cares. I could start burning down city blocks and it wouldn’t lift the eyebrow of anyone that mattered.’

  ‘I’m surprised to find you so difficult to convince. My understanding is that your relationship with Black House is … less than amicable.’

  ‘You don’t avoid rattling the cage because you love the tiger.’

  Egmont had an ugly laugh, one quick syllable that came out his nose. ‘As it happens, we hunt tiger.’

  ‘I don’t see any pelts.’

  ‘Come back in a few months, I’ll have one stretched over the fireplace.’

  ‘Confidence is the mark of victors. Also fools.’

  ‘Do I seem a fool to you?’

  ‘I don’t make snap decisions,’ I said.

  He gave me a blank smile, like holding up a buckler. ‘Putting aside the question of my intellect, for the moment – what would it take to peak your interest in the matter, as your sense of public spirit is insufficient?’

  ‘Five hundred ochres.’

  Five hundred ochres could buy a house in the Old City, or get you a fifty percent stake in a trading ship. Five hundred ochres could set a family up for life in the provinces, or give you a solid month of hedonism at a top-shelf brothel. Five hundred ochres could get enough men killed in Low Town to populate a cemetery, or get a blessing said in your name at the church of Prachetas every day for ten years. Five hundred ochres could do a lot of things.

  ‘That’s a … sizable sum,’ Egmont said.

  ‘For me it is. You could dig it out from between your seat cushions.’

  ‘Perhaps not quite,’ Egmont allow
ed. I didn’t expect him to quarrel over the price, and he didn’t disappoint me. Money doesn’t mean much to someone like Cerial – nor women, nor booze. He was a junkie for straight power, like the Old Man, like I’d been. It’s the most dangerous of all possible addictions, for the devotee, and for those around him. ‘What would we be guaranteed in exchange for this honorarium?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be guaranteed anything. I’ll talk to a few people that I know, follow along with what they say. They come through for me, I come through for you. They don’t, you come through for me anyway.’

  ‘It’s not much of an arrangement.’

  ‘I didn’t invite you here.’

  ‘No, I suppose you didn’t.’ Egmont made as if to think it over, though it was naught but play. We were acting out a previously constructed scenario. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll send it over. Brother Hume will be your contact. He’ll stop by and see you in a few days.’

  ‘It might be better if I wasn’t constantly seen to be associating with you people.’

  ‘Worried for your reputation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want Black House to get wind of our arrangement.’

  ‘I can’t imagine your former employers are watching your every move.’

  I supposed I didn’t really care one way or the other – Black House obviously already knew what I was getting into. But it was foolishness on Egmont’s part to be so cavalier about a piece he’d put into play. It was hard to square his evident intellect with such an obvious misstep, the second he’d made so far today.

  ‘One thing you might want to think about, if you plan on going up against the Old Man,’ I said from the doorway. ‘He’s always watching.’

  Hume walked me out, past a pair of daggers shot from the eyes of the woman at the front desk.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, before depositing me at the entrance.

  ‘What fools call luck,’ I said, ‘wise men recognize as the will of the Firstborn.’

  Said Firstborn had not gifted Brother Hume with the capacity to recognize sarcasm. He nodded seriously, then shut the door in my face.

  Outside, I lit a cigarette and tried to piece together the half-truths I’d been eating the last few days. They didn’t add up to a full meal – I’d just have to follow along with the program until I saw the chance to break something.

  Of course, I already knew the answer to most of Egmont’s questions. Uriel the Unredeemed was distributing red fever, though who he was getting it from and why they were giving it to him, I couldn’t yet say. Regardless, there was no point in telling Egmont anything at this stage, not until I knew why he wanted to know it. I wouldn’t get anything else from going straight at Uriel, not unless I had him tied to a post and a knife in my hands. Maybe not even then.

  That only left Touissaint, and the cats. I hustled north.

  14

  The whiff you got coming in there, cat piss and sour milk, was enough to let you know you oughtn’t go further. I gritted my teeth against it and waited while the door swung shut, the broken bells above me shaking faintly. The sign on the front read pawnshop, and I suppose there was nothing when you immediately walked in there to make you argue otherwise. If you looked a moment longer, you’d notice the place hadn’t been cleaned in a long time, and a not altogether thin layer of dust had spread everywhere. You’d also realize there was no one up front to sell you anything, or buy anything from you. And finally, you’d recognize that the stock consisted entirely of tools of war, a contrived and bizarre menagerie of violence.

  For my part I never understood why a person would sustain any particular attraction to an instrument of murder, want to adorn or, Firstborn save us, name it. Some of that’s my history, I guess. During the war there was the odd fellow here and there who had some ancestral heirloom or just a strong inclination towards a particular shape of metal, but most of us stuck to whatever they handed out, and what they handed out was cheap, easy to make and ugly. Agents of Black House carry a short sword of the highest possible manufacture, but they’re all identical, part of the uniform. In my current career the emphasis tends to be on things that can be hid under a coat, drawn and replaced quickly. Flash is no virtue for a potential murder weapon.

  So I didn’t really get the point of the collection, though it was one of Touissant’s few passions. Weapons hung on every wall and overflowed off the shelves – foolishly impractical things, claymores a broad man couldn’t have strapped to his back, let alone wielded. Matched sets of curved long blades, as if anyone had ever gone into battle holding two equal-sized weapons in front of him. It’s astonishing, if demoralizing, to consider the sheer variety of objects humankind has crafted to what is ultimately a relatively simple end.

  I spent a few moments avoiding resting against anything sharp. The shop was poorly lit, but here and there you could make out a curl of calico or a spot of bright red fur. Touissant’s second love, even greater than that he held for edged weaponry, was for the ever-expanding clowder of strays that he accumulated and cared for. No doubt in the feline community he had a reputation for generosity and greatness of spirit in direct contrast to that which he enjoyed amongst his own species. Cats are famously counted amongst the cleanest of animals, though all that fur licking smacks of self-love to me, or at the very least an awfully concrete narcissism. Regardless, there were enough in there to repopulate the genus, and on those few occasions I visited they seemed to be well in the process of doing so, fat tabbies chasing snarling short-hairs around razored steel.

  After longer than I’d have liked, Touissant’s man came in from the back room and waved me in.

  I’d known Craddock as long as I’d known Touissant, which was a damn sight too long. I disliked him inordinately, given that he’d never done anything particular to me. Mostly, he just stood next to Touissant and kept quiet, though his reserve wasn’t exactly a choice. I wasn’t sure what he’d done before he’d hooked up with Touissant, but whatever it was it had apparently pissed someone off enough to hold him down, wedge open his jaw and cut out the larger portion of his tongue. Most folk don’t survive that – the rot gets into their mouth and kills them in a week or so – but Craddock was a tough son of a bitch, and he was, obviously, still alive. He had the unpleasant habit of tossing open his muzzle and showing off his deformity when he laughed, which was frequently, at any half-hearted jibe of his master.

  I followed him down a narrow corridor into a small room. At least it seemed small, though a lot of that could have been the inhabitants.

  Touissant was the biggest man I’d ever met, and I’m counting every inch of Adolphus twice. He was too big, his body a freakish, misshapen thing, more curse than blessing, a tower of meat that rose up from the floor and didn’t stop till it brushed the ceiling. Thin strands of loose white hair trailed down past the neck he didn’t have and onto shoulders wide enough to roll a cart over. His eyes were normal sized, which made them wildly insufficient for his face, two speckles of blue in a lagoon of pink.

  If you asked the real old timers, that rare handful of folk who’d survived the plague and the innumerable petty wars since, they could tell you stories of a Nestrian who used to hire himself out as freelance muscle, an ogre with savage tendencies and the mass to enforce them. At what point he’d mounted himself onto his throne, a velvet-lined bench wide enough to comfortably facilitate an extended family of gluttons, I couldn’t say – in the years we’d been acquainted I’d never seen him out of it. Regardless, during that period he’d made a reputation for knowing things he shouldn’t have known, knowing things no one could know. Rumor credited him with a network of eyes that reached up to the foot of the Throne itself. Rumor credited other things to him as well – dark things, things spoken in hushed tones by men well used to sin. Course, that was all they were, rumors. The Firstborn knows they tell rumors about me – some of them ain’t even true.

  That said, looking at Touissant, his mammoth hands cradling a tawny kitten, there was no evil I wouldn’t have believed of him.


  ‘Come back to see us, yah?’ Touissant began. He’d come to Rigus as a child, been here for something nearing a half century, but he still spoke with a barely comprehensible accent, wheezing vowels through the back of his throat. It wasn’t any dialect of Nestrian I’d heard, and I’d heard quite a few during the war.

  ‘Couldn’t stay away.’

  There was a third man in the room, though it took a while to notice him, distracted as I was by Touissant’s bulk. Craddock was a constant, but the number three was always different – in the particulars at least, if remarkably similar in the archetype. Dark-haired and pretty was how Touissant liked them, and he’d picked this one according to the model. Pretty Boy carried a blade that was too nice to get blood on, a jeweled saber about the length of my right leg.

  ‘Come closer, come closer,’ Touissant insisted, a stilted whine I struggled to make out. ‘An old man’s eyes aren’t so good anymore.’

  ‘You don’t look any different than the first time I met you.’ This was true actually – something about the bubble of lard beneath his skin gave him a strangely youthful affect. Indeed, he looked like nothing so much as a giant baby, an oversized human whose limbs and shape remained locked into those of a toddler. Which is maybe more horrifying than it sounds.

  Touissant burbled to himself happily. Strange, how long it takes vanity to leave a man. ‘You always were such a charmer.’

  ‘I do what I can.’

  ‘What brings you around, Warden?’

  ‘Beyond the pleasure of your company?’

  ‘That doesn’t need to be mentioned.’

  ‘I need to know something.’

  ‘I know lots of things.’ The kitten seemed lost beneath the curve of his hands. ‘Lots and lots of things.’

  ‘There was a Black House project some time back, code name of Coronet.’

  ‘This would be when you wore the gray?’ he asked, gurgling in his insipid drawl. Touissant liked to drop hints of your past into casual conversation, though it was hardly a secret that I’d once been an agent.

  ‘The head of it was a man named Caroll – a dear friend, with whom I’ve sadly lost touch. I would very much like to speak to Caroll, for old times’ sake. And I’d be willing to pay for the privilege.’