She Who Waits (Low Town 3) Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Daniel Polansky was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He can be found in Brooklyn, when he isn’t somewhere else. The AV Club called The Straight Razor Cure, Daniel’s debut and the first novel in his Low Town series, ‘an assured, roaring, and rollicking hybrid, a cross-genre free-for-all that relishes its tropes while spitting out their bones.’ She Who Waits is Daniel’s third novel.

  You can follow Daniel on Twitter @DanielPolansky, or visit his website to find out more: www.danielpolansky.com.

  The Low Town Novels

  The Straight Razor Cure

  Tomorrow, the Killing

  She Who Waits

  SHE WHO WAITS

  Daniel Polansky

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Daniel Polansky 2013

  The right of Daniel Polansky to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 4447 2143 0

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To my family and friends; I am grateful there are enough of you to make enumeration impractical.

  1

  That autumn the bottom fell out.

  You could tell it was coming if you were paying attention, though most weren’t. A low background hum, the faint smell of brimstone. They’ll deceive you, those stutter steps into the abyss. You get to thinking the descent goes on indefinitely.

  Everything ends. Looking back, it’s not surprising that things came apart – it’s surprising how long they stayed together.

  ‘Warden, you around?’ asked a voice from behind me.

  ‘No,’ I said, my first lie of the day.

  It was nearly noon, late for breakfast but awfully early to be boozing, though I suppose the handful of drunks sharing the bar with me disagreed. I’ve often suggested to Adolphus that we keep to stricter hours, keep out the clientele until after nightfall. At other times I’ve suggested maybe going one further and just not letting anyone in at all. I really didn’t have any business owning a half-stake in the Staggering Earl, in so far as I find people unpleasant as individuals and altogether loathsome when amassed into a crowd.

  The voice walked over to my table, revealed itself as belonging to Fat Karl Widdershins. Karl lived two doors down, though he spent the majority of his waking hours inside the confines of the Earl. A drunkard living off his pension, Karl’s recreational activities centered around inebriated stumbling interspersed with the occasional bout of spousal abuse. Which is to say he was all but indistinguishable from the better half of our patrons. He didn’t bother to sit down, just buzzed around my shoulder. ‘There’s something you ought to come take a look at,’ he continued.

  The only thing I felt like looking at right then was the plate of runny eggs and fried ham in front of me. After that I was thinking I might spend some time looking at a full glass of beer, and then at some point probably at an empty one. ‘I’m busy.’ It was my second lie of the day.

  ‘The guards have Reinhardt cornered inside his house. They’re getting ready to make a move on him.’

  ‘That’s unfortunate for Reinhardt.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know why?’

  I didn’t, in fact, though Karl was thrilled to his socks to tell me. I don’t know what it is about the species that makes us enjoy passing along bad news – if Reinhardt had hit today’s racket numbers, I didn’t imagine Karl would have ran himself breathless coming to tell me. ‘Why?’

  ‘His kid came sprinting out of his building a half-hour back, screaming that Daddy had chopped up Mommy with a butcher knife.’

  The ham and the eggs would wait. I slid off my chair and out the front door.

  Reinhardt was a Valaan from the far north, one of those rocky islands so barren and brutal that it made the slums of the capital pleasant by comparison. He’d served his stint in the war, settled into Low Town, spawned children and taken a wife. Not quite in that order. He was a foreman down at the docks, made decent money, nothing to a noble or a banker but good enough for a man that labored for a living. We weren’t friends, or anything close to it, but maybe I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t keep an eye on those veterans that lived in the neighborhood and hadn’t turned their skills over to a syndicate. He used to nibble away at my stock of breath, a vial or two on the weekend, a handful at Midwinter and High Summer. At some point he’d started to show up more often, and we’d had a long conversation at the back of the Earl, come to an arrangement. I’d spot him a vial a month for recreation, two on the holidays, and apart from that I wouldn’t find him knocking at my back door, wouldn’t need to think about him taking money away from his rapidly expanding brood. That had been a year back, maybe a year and a half. Since then I hadn’t seen much of him, and was glad of that fact.

  It was the kind of autumn afternoon where you can smell winter in the air, that scent that’s part wood smoke and part the cold that makes the first necessary. Karl walked a few steps ahead of me, playing the guide, though there wasn’t a corner of Low Town that I didn’t know better than a toddler does his mother’s teat. Reinhardt’s apartment was down near the docks, one of a hundred crammed into a tenement that had been intended for a quarter of that. I didn’t sprint down there, but that was only because I was still pretty hung over.

  The war had done mad things to everyone, broken most of those it hadn’t killed, turned stout men into drunks and quiet boys into murderers. But the war had been gone fifteen years, and while you never forgot it – while you might wake up in a sweat and breathing heavy, your wife or the whore you’d boug
ht bug-eyed at your madness – at some point most of us had brokered an uneasy truce with memory. It was like anything, you put it behind you or you let it put you in the ground, and most of us had made our decision one way or the other long years back.

  ‘This is as far as I go,’ Karl said as we got in sight of our destination. ‘I just thought I’d let you in on the gossip. The rest isn’t any of my business.’

  ‘You’ve an admirable sense of community,’ I said, tossing over a copper coin. Karl bit it, then disappeared back the way we’d come.

  There were a handful of guards standing outside of Reinhardt’s building, looking useless and maybe a bit frightened. One of them, so innocent as to be unaware that I effectively paid his salary, made to brush me off. But his captain shut him down, even opened the door for me. They give good service, the hoax.

  I didn’t know exactly which hundred square-feet were Reinhardt’s, but another coterie of law enforcement was waiting on the second stairwell, and I figured they weren’t doing so for their health. The men upstairs were the very cream of Low Town’s finest, hardened veterans of a thousand back-alley shakedowns, clean as a latrine and bent as a penny-nail.

  I knew the lieutenant, as I knew all of the officers in the neighborhood and most of the patrolmen. He was about fifty, an aging Tarasaighn with muscle all but warped away to fat. You could see he was a drunkard by his nose, which was the color and rough shape of a radish, though several times the size. I couldn’t remember his name right at that moment, but then it didn’t really matter. ‘By the Firstborn,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’

  This statement shouldn’t have bothered me, but the truth is at bottom there’s some part of me that never quite got over the world being upside down. ‘What’s the situation?’

  ‘Got word a half-hour back that Reinhardt’s daughter was running through the streets, screaming about blood. Came up here to see what’s what, but he’s not answering and neither is his wife. We were getting ready to kick in the door.’

  Getting ready, getting ready, getting ready but not doing it. The hoax were tough as all hell when jumping on a manacled prisoner, but going toe-to-toe against a veteran with death in his immediate history was enough to unglue them. ‘Where’s the kid?’

  ‘Back at the station. She’s pretty shaken up.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’ I muttered, then said, ‘I know the man. We go back a ways.’

  ‘Yeah?’ the lieutenant said, eyes brightening, thrilled at this sudden opportunity not to do his job. ‘Any chance you could talk him down?’

  ‘We’re about to find out.’ I knocked three times, loud enough to get the attention of anyone inside but not so hard as to bust the door down. A narrow middle, as these tenement houses were about as flimsy as wet paper. ‘Reinhardt, you in there? It’s the Warden – I’m coming in, I’m by myself, and I’d as soon not have any surprises, dig?’

  No response. It was moments like this – a lot of moments, if we’re being honest – that I found myself aching for a hit of breath. Steady your mind, settle your hands, get you so the idea of seeing blood or making it doesn’t seem any particular trouble. But I’d sworn that off a few years back, and the fact that I still missed it was a pretty good argument that I’d been wise in doing so.

  The door was unlocked. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. It swung open easy and I came in quick after it, like I’d done a thousand times back when I was an agent. And like every other time, the muscles in my neck tensed up, anticipating the shiv.

  A fate delayed. She Who Waits Behind had left the building – though she’d been in residence not long before.

  Reinhardt’s daughter had not been lying, I could tell that before I saw the body, tell it from the smell of blood in the air, hanging like washing over a line. I could taste egg yolk in the back of my throat, managed to swallow it before it came out on the floor.

  I’d only met Gertrude once or twice, and she hadn’t occupied any particularly distinct spot in my memory. All the same I was pretty sure that when we’d seen each other last, she’d had both her arms attached to her body. I’d say she was cut up like a hog but that would be a lie, because you slaughter a hog for food, and you do it careful. It’s not pretty and it’s not clean but it wasn’t anything like the specimen of madness on the floor in front of me. I’ll spare the specifics, though sadly it isn’t because I’ve forgotten them.

  It was a small apartment, a back bedroom and a slightly bigger living area, and though Reinhardt was in the corner it took me a while to realize it. Not wise on my part, as I had firm and concrete evidence of his willingness to kill. But I was stymied, all the same. You never quite get numb to the things you see. At least, I never did.

  He was sitting on a stool that was too small for him, big ass balanced carefully, awkward and incongruous with the rest of the scene. He was staring at the kitchen knife in his hands, the blade slick with red. I stepped a long ways around Gertrude, and got a little closer to her murderer but not so close that I wouldn’t have a chance to flee if he jumped me.

  ‘Hello, Reinhardt.’ I had a small blade in my back waist band, and I kept my hand on my hip so that I could go for it if things moved in that direction. Reinhardt was more fat than big these days, but he was still plenty big, and anyway those excess pounds hadn’t stopped him from going to work on the woman who’d born and nurtured his seed.

  ‘Hey,’ he said slowly, without looking at me. Reinhardt was an oddly shaped character, his shoulders too big and his arms too long and his legs too short. He had a face that seemed to have been assembled from a random selection of spare parts. His nose was big and angular and his lips were thin as an old woman’s and he had a head like a melon topped by a pair of ears that seemed sized for a child and jutted out abnormally. In the past I’d found his ungainly visage made him oafish and easy to like. At that moment it was uncanny and rather horrifying.

  ‘Maybe you could do me a favor, go ahead and toss that blade into the corner.’

  If he heard me he didn’t let on. There was no sound in the room but the buzzing of the flies, croaking a symphony over their feast. Flies come quicker than you’d think, quicker than the hoax, near as quick as remorse. Up close I was reminded of what a big fellow Reinhardt was, almost tall as me sitting, with thick biceps and a gut that bulged out like a battering ram. But the look on his face was of a man with nothing left, and even with him holding the knife I still couldn’t quite bring myself to feel fear.

  ‘Were you fighting, Reinhardt? She just kept talking and talking and talking, and then you snapped?’

  He blinked twice, hands on his weapon, eyes on his hands. ‘I don’t know how it happened,’ he said finally.

  I’d heard a lot of men tell me that back when I was an agent, leading them away in chains or buried in a room beneath Black House. And I didn’t always believe them but I believed them more often than you’d expect. Because most of us aren’t as bad as the worst things that we do, though it’s those things that define us all the same.

  ‘The hoax are outside. They’re nerving themselves into coming in, and I don’t imagine they’ll be too long. It’d be better for everyone if you came out with me. I’ll make sure it doesn’t go rougher for you than it has to.’ Though you didn’t need to be a scryer to see that Reinhardt’s future ended with a short drop from a gibbet.

  He nodded at what I was saying but it was clear he couldn’t really hear it. ‘I can remember doing it. I can remember every single second. But I don’t know why it happened.’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘She asked me if I wanted soup for lunch and I got up from the couch and I went over to the kitchen and got the knife that she was using to chop celery and I picked it up and then I—’

  ‘It’s done now,’ I said, cutting him off. I didn’t need any reminder of the meat rotting behind me, not what it had been before it was meat, and not who made it that.

  ‘Sarah saw me do it,’ Reinhardt said, as if he had just remembered that. ‘
By the Lost One, she saw me do it.’

  ‘It’s done now,’ I repeated, though it wouldn’t ever be done, not for him nor for his child, not while they were still up and breathing. ‘You need to come with me. There’s no sense in making a bad situation any worse.’

  For the first time since I’d entered the room Reinhardt turned his attention off the weapon in his hands, looked up at me with eyes vast and empty and unblinking. ‘I’d have done her too,’ he said. ‘If she hadn’t run away. I’d have done her too.’

  There’s nothing so terrible that it can’t get that little bit worse. I took a step back, and the revulsion I’d been trying to keep off my face since I’d walked inside flooded over me. I could feel my lips curl up like paper thrown onto a fire.

  Maybe that look of horror was what sparked it, or maybe he’d just been waiting for the chance. Either way it happened quick – Reinhardt knew what he was doing, he’d learned to kill during the war, and he’d had recent practice since. I bet his wife had wished he’d done her as easy, one smooth shot straight into the jugular, a spurt of blood that nearly reached me from halfway across the room. His hand didn’t tremble, not with the first plunge and not as he worked it across, and though that wasn’t the most horrible part of the afternoon I’d as soon have not seen it.

  The hoax rushed in, late as always, two through the door but the second one ducked out as soon as he saw Gertude’s corpse, started retching in the hallway loud enough to wake the dead. Not literally – we had a pair within earshot and neither so much as quivered.

  The lieutenant at least held it together, though I wouldn’t have so much blamed him if he’d done like his partner. There are only two kinds of people in the world – the first would carry the memory of what was in that room with them to their graves. The second would get off on it. Happily the former outnumber the latter, though it’s an open question to what extent.

  ‘By the Firstborn,’ he said finally. Haimlin was his name, for some reason I remembered it all of a sudden.