Low Town: A Novel Read online

  “You know the Staggering Earl?”

  He nodded, his dark eyes wide but unclouded. I thrust my bag toward him.

  “Take this there and give it to the cyclops behind the bar. Tell him I said he owes you an argent.”

  He reached out for it and I dug my fingers in the crook of his neck. “I know every whore, pickpocket, junkie, and street tough in Low Town, and I’ve marked your face. If my package ain’t waiting for me, I’m going to come looking for you. Understand?” I tightened my grip.

  He didn’t flinch. “I ain’t bent.” His voice surprised me with its cool confidence. I had picked the right urchin.

  “Off with you then.” I released the bag and he sprinted around the corner.

  I went back into the alley and smoked a cigarette while I waited for the hoax to show up. They were longer than I thought they’d be, given the gravity of the situation. It’s disturbing to discover your low opinion of law enforcement is still unduly appreciative. Two burnt tabs later the first boy returned, a pair of guardsmen in tow.

  I knew them vaguely. One was fresh, new to the force six months, but the second I’d been paying off for years. We’d see how much good that would do if things curdled. “Hello, Wendell.” I held my hand out. “Good to see you again, even under these circumstances.”

  Wendell shook it vigorously. “You as well,” he said. “I had hoped the boy was lying.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that. Wendell knelt beside the body, his chain coat dragging in the mud. Behind him his younger counterpart was turning the shade of white that prefaces vomiting. Wendell shouted a reproach over his shoulder. “None of that. You’re a damn guardsman—show some spine.” He turned back to the corpse, unsure of his next move. “Guess I should call for an agent, then,” he half asked me.

  “Guess so.”

  “Run back to headquarters,” Wendell ordered his subordinate, “and tell them to send for a chill. Tell them to send for two.”

  The guard enforce the customs and laws of the city—when they aren’t paid to look the other way—but investigating crime is more or less beyond them. If a murderer isn’t standing over the corpse with a bloody knife, they’re not of much use. When there’s a crime that matters to someone who counts, an agent of the Crown is sent, officially deputized to carry out the Throne’s Justice. The frost, the cold, the snowmen, or the gray devils, call them what you want but bow your head when they pass and answer prompt if they ask you something, ’cause the chill ain’t the guard, and the only thing more dangerous than an incompetent constabulary is a competent one. Normally, a dumped body in Low Town doesn’t warrant their attention—a fact that does wonders for the murder rate—but this wasn’t a drunk drowned in a puddle or a knifed junkie. They’d send an agent for this.

  After a few minutes, a small squad of guardsmen arrived. A pair of them began cordoning off the area. The remainder stood around looking important. They weren’t doing a great job of it, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them.

  Bored of waiting, or wanting to impress the newcomers, Wendell decided to take a stab at police work. “Probably some heretic,” he said, scratching at his double chins. “Passing through the docks on the way to Kirentown, saw the girl and …” He gestured sharply.

  “Yeah, I hear there’s a lot of that going around.”

  His partner chimed in, baby face spouting poison, choked-back bile heavy on his breath. “Or an Islander. You know how they are.”

  Wendell nodded sagely. He did indeed know how they were.

  I’d heard that in some of the newer mental wards they set the mad and congenitally stupid to rote tasks, having them sew buttons onto mounds of fabric, the futile labor working as a salve to their broken minds. I wonder sometimes whether the guard is not an extension of this therapy on a far grander scale, an elaborate social program meant to give the low functioning an illusion of purpose.

  But it wouldn’t do to spoil it for the inmates. This burst of insight seemed to exhaust Wendell and his second, and they lapsed into silence.

  The autumn eve chased the last shreds of daylight across the skyline. The sounds of honest commerce, as much as such a thing exists in Low Town, were replaced by a jittery quiet. In the surrounding tenements someone had a fire going, and the woodsmoke almost covered up the state of the body. I rolled a cigarette to block out the rest.

  You could sense their arrival before you could see them, the packed Low Town masses scuttling out from their path like flotsam swept aside by a flood. The freeze prided themselves on the uniformity of their costumes, each an interchangeable member of the small army that controlled the city and most of the nation. An ice-gray duster, its upturned collar leading to a matching wide-brimmed hat. A silver-hilted short sword hanging at the belt, both an aesthetic marvel and a perfect instrument of violence. A dusky jewel trapped in a silver frame dangling from the throat—the Crown’s Eye, official symbol of their authority. Every inch the personification of order, a clenched fist in a velvet glove.

  For all that I would never speak it aloud, for all that it shamed me to even think it, I couldn’t lie—I missed that fucking outfit.

  Crispin recognized me from about a block away, and his face hardened but his step didn’t slow. Five years hadn’t done much to alter his appearance. The same highborn face stared at me beneath the fold of his hat, the same upright carriage bore mute witness to a youth spent in the tutelage of dance masters and teachers of etiquette. His brown hair had retreated from its former prominence, but the curve of his nose still trumpeted the long history of his blood to anyone who cared to look. I knew he regretted me being here, just as I regretted him being called.

  The other one I didn’t recognize—he must have been new. Like Crispin he had the Rouender nose, long and arrogant, but his hair was so blond as to be nearly white. Apart from the platinum mane he seemed the archetypal agent, blue eyes inquisitorial without being discerning, the body beneath his uniform hard enough to convince you of his menace, assuming you didn’t know what to look for.

  They stopped at the entrance to the alleyway. Crispin’s gaze darted across the scene, resting briefly on the covered corpse before settling on Wendell, who stood stiffly at attention, doing his best impression of a law enforcement official. “Guardsman,” Crispin said, nodding sharply. The second agent, still unnamed, offered not even that, his arms firmly crossed and something like a smirk on his face. Sufficient attention paid to protocol, Crispin turned toward me. “You found her?”

  “Forty minutes ago, but she’d been here a while before that. She was dumped here after he finished with her.”

  Crispin paced a slow circle around the scene. A wooden door led into an abandoned building halfway down the alley. He paused and put his hand against it. “You think he came through here?”

  “Not necessarily. The body was small enough to be concealed—a small crate, maybe an empty cask of ale. At dusk, this street doesn’t get much traffic. You could dump it and keep walking.”

  “Syndicate business?”

  “You know better than that. An unblemished child goes for five hundred ochres in the pens of Bukhirra. No slaver would be foolish enough to ruin his profit—and if he was, he’d know a better way to dispose of the corpse.”

  This was too much deference shown to a stranger in a tattered coat for Crispin’s second. He sauntered over, flushed with the arrogance that comes from having one’s hereditary sense of superiority cemented by the acquisition of public office. “Who is this man? What was he doing when he found the body?” He sneered at me. I had to admit he knew how to sneer. For all its ubiquity it isn’t an expression that just anyone can master.

  But I didn’t respond to it, and he turned to Wendell. “Where are his effects? What was the result of your search?”

  “Well, sir,” Wendell started, his Low Town accent thickening. “Seeing as how he reported it, we figured … that’s to say …” He wiped his nose with the back of his fat hand and coughed out a response. “He hasn’t been
searched, sir.”

  “Is this what passes for an investigation among the guard? A suspect is found standing beside a murdered child and you converse cordially with him over the corpse? Do your job and search this man!”

  Wendell’s dull face blushed. He shrugged apologetically and moved to pat me down.

  “That won’t be necessary, Agent Guiscard,” Crispin interrupted. “This man is … an old associate. He is above suspicion.”

  “Only in this matter, I assure you. Agent Guiscard, is it? By all means, Agent Guiscard, search me. You can never be too careful. Who’s to say I didn’t kidnap the child, rape and torture her, dump her body, wait an hour, then call the guard?” Guiscard’s face turned a dull shade of red, a strange contrast to his hair. “Quite a prodigy, aren’t we? I guess that set of smarts came standard with your pedigree.” Guiscard balled his fist. I swelled out my grin.

  Crispin cut between the two of us and began barking orders. “None of that. There’s work to be done. Agent Guiscard, return to Black House and tell them to send a scryer, if you double-step it there might still be time for him to pick something up. The rest of you, set up a perimeter. There’s going to be half a hundred citizens here in ten minutes and I don’t want them mucking up the crime scene. And for the love of Śakra, one of you find this poor child’s parents.” Guiscard glared at me ineffectually, then stomped off. Wendell and the rest of the guardsmen fanned out.

  I shook some leaf out of my pouch and started to roll a smoke. “New partner’s quite a handful. Whose nephew is he?”

  Crispin gave a half smile. “The Earl of Grenwick’s.”

  “Good to see nothing’s changed.”

  “He’s not as bad as he looks. You were pushing him.”

  “He was easy to push.”

  “So were you, once.”

  He was probably right about that. Age had mellowed me, or at least I liked to think so. I offered the cigarette to my ex-partner.

  “I quit—it was ruining my wind.”

  I wedged it between my lips. Years of friendship stretched out awkwardly between us.

  “If you discover something, you’ll come to me. You won’t do anything yourself,” Crispin said, somewhere between an inquiry and a demand.

  “I don’t solve crimes, Crispin, because I’m not an agent.” I struck a match against the wall and lit my smoke. “You made sure of that.”

  “You made sure of that. I just watched while you fell.”

  This had gone on too long. “There was an odor on the corpse. It might be gone by now, but it’s worth checking.” I couldn’t bring myself to wish him luck.

  A crowd of onlookers was forming as I left the cover of the alleyway, the specter of human misery always a popular draw. The wind had picked up. I pulled my coat tight and hurried my steps.

  Back at the Staggering Earl the weekend trade was in full swing. Adolphus’s greeting echoed off the walls as I fought my way through the tight ranks of patrons and took a seat at the bar. He poured a glass of beer and leaned in as he handed it to me. “The boy arrived with your package. I put it in your room.”

  Somehow I had expected the urchin would come through.

  Adolphus stood there awkwardly, a look of concern on his mangled face. “He told me what you found.”

  I took a sip of my drink.

  “If you want to talk …”

  “I don’t.”

  The ale was thick and dark, and I made my way through a half-dozen drafts trying to get the sight of twisted hands and pale, bruised skin out of my head. The crowd surged around me, factory workers finished with their shifts and bravos planning the night’s escapades. We were doing the kind of business that reminded me why I was part owner, but the mass of amiable lowlifes imbibing cheap liquor were poor company for my mood.

  I drained my cup and stood. Adolphus waved away a customer and came over. “You leaving?”

  I grunted assent. The look on my face must have betokened violence, because he put one huge paw on my arm as I turned away.

  “You need a blade? Or company?”

  I shook my head, and he shrugged and returned to chatting up patrons.

  I had been saving a visit to Tancred the Harelip since I saw one of his runners moving dreamvine on my territory a half month prior. Tancred was a small-time operator who had managed to claw his way to minor prominence by an unsavory combination of cheap violence and low cunning, but he wouldn’t be able to hold on to it for more than a few seasons. He’d underpay his boys, or try to cheat the guard out of their percentage, or piss off a syndicate and die in an alley with a poniard in his vitals. I hadn’t ever seen any great need to hasten his appointment with She Who Waits Behind All Things, but mistakes don’t get made in our business. Selling on my territory was sending me a message, and etiquette demanded a response.

  Harelip had carved a thin slice of turf west of the canal, near Offbend, and he ran his operations from a dump of a bar called the Bleeding Virgin. He made most of his money from the trades that were too small or ugly for the syndicate boys to touch, moving wyrm and bleeding protection money out of whatever neighboring merchants were pitiful enough to pay. It was a long walk to his shit establishment, but it would give me time to clear my head from the booze. I went upstairs to retrieve a bottle of pixie’s breath and started over.

  The west end of Low Town was quiet, the merchants gone home and the nightlife pressed toward the docks, so I walked the dozen blocks to the canal in relative solitude. This late in the evening the Herm Bridge looked ominous instead of just dilapidated, its marble features made indistinct by time and petty vandalism. The ragged hands of stone Daevas curled in supplication to the heavens, their faces worn to wide eyes and gaping mouths. Beneath it the River Andel ran sluggish and slow, carrying the city’s waste in a stately procession toward the harbor and out to sea. I continued on, stopping at the entrance of a nondescript building a half mile west.

  Noise from the second floor drifted down to the shadows beneath. I took a hit of breath, then another and another until the bottle was empty and the buzzing was like a crowd of bees swarming around my ears. I dashed it against the wall and took the steps two at a time.

  The Bleeding Virgin was the kind of dive that made you want to scrub your skin with lye as soon as you walked out—it made the atmosphere at the Earl look like high tea at the royal court. Torches shed greasy light on the unpalatable interior, a crumbling wooden infrastructure set over a handful of rooms that Harelip rented by the hour, along with a stable of sad-looking whores. These last doubled as servers, the dim illumination sufficient to display a lengthy commitment to their vocation.

  I grabbed a spot across from a breach in the wall that served duty as a window and waved down one of the waitresses. “You know who I am?” I asked. She nodded, dun hair atop a stretched face, crooked eyes dull and unfazed. “Get me something that hasn’t been spit in and tell your boss I’m here.” I flipped her a copper and watched her walk off wearily.

  The breath was kicking in hard, and I held my fists tight at my sides to keep them from shaking. I glared at the patrons warily and thought about how far one well-placed act of arson would go toward improving the neighborhood. The server returned a few minutes later with a half-full tankard. “He’ll be out soon,” she said.

  The beer was mostly rainwater. I choked it down and tried not to think about the child.

  The back door opened and Harelip and two of his boys slid in. Tancred was aptly named—the crevice in his face split his mouth straight through, an aberration his thick beard did nothing to hide. Beyond that, there was little to recommend him one way or the other. Somewhere along the line he had acquired a reputation for being a hard man, though I suspected this was an outgrowth of his deformity.

  The two hangers-on looked violent and stupid—the kind of cheap street toughs Tancred liked to keep around. I knew the first—Spider, a squat half-Islander runt with a lazy eye he’d picked up from getting rambunctious around a troop of guardsmen. He used to r
un with a small-time crew of river rats, busting into cargo barges late at night and making off with whatever they could find. I’d never seen the second, but his pockmarked face and sour odor bespoke ill breeding as surely as his surroundings and choice of career. I assumed they were both armed, although only Spider’s weapon was visible, an ugly-looking dirk that jutted obtrusively from his belt.

  They fanned out to cover me. “Hello, Tancred. What’s the good word?”

  He sneered at me, or maybe he didn’t—the lip made it tough to tell.

  “I hear your people have been having trouble with their lode-stones,” I continued.

  Now I was pretty confident he was sneering. “Trouble, Warden? How do you mean?”

  “The canal is the line between our two enterprises, Tancred. You know the canal. It’s that big ditch to the east of here, filled with water.”

  He smiled, the fleshless stretch between his upper lip and nose rendering his rotting gums starkly visible. “Was that the line?”

  “In our business it’s important to remember your agreements. If you’re having trouble, it might be time to look for work more in keeping with your natural talents. You’d make a lovely chorus girl.”

  “You’ve got a sharp mouth,” he growled.

  “And you’ve got a crooked one—but we are as the Creator formed us. Regardless, Tancred, I’m not here to debate theology—geography is the interest of the moment. So why don’t you go ahead and remind me where our boundary is?”

  Harelip took a step backward, and his boys moved closer. “Seems to me it might be time to redraw our map. I don’t know what you’ve got going with the syndicates, and I don’t care how friendly you are with the guard—you don’t have the muscle to hold the land you got. Far as I can tell, you’re an independent operator, and there ain’t no place for an independent operator these days.”

  He kept nerving himself into the conflict that was coming, but I could barely hear him through the drone in my ears. Not that the particulars of his monologue much mattered. I hadn’t come over here for discussion, and he hadn’t rolled out his mob to help him negotiate.