She Who Waits (Low Town 3) Read online

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. The appearance of the hoax did something to steady me. I was back on solid ground. It was a point to hold onto, amidst all the madness – the guard were hopeless and incompetent. If there was anything in the apartment to give indication as to why Reinhardt had decided to murder the mother of his children then play havoc with her remains, I’d be the one finding it.

  Not that there was much to look through. Whatever impulse had driven Reinhardt to murder had left the rest of the room all but untouched: no broken furniture or shattered crockery, nothing to suggest the sort of scuffle which would have preceded his violence. I nosed around the shelves a bit, saw little of note. An old vase with a bouquet of flowers withering inside, some prayer medals, a tarnished candelabra. Keepsakes you’d have called them if they were yours, junk if they were anyone else’s.

  I opened the door to the bedroom, a windowless box the size of a small tomb. It was too dark to make anything out. I struck three matches trying to find a candle, struck a fourth lighting the one I’d found. Even with its assistance there wasn’t much to see: a marital bed that wouldn’t get any more use and a closet with a broken leg, leaning on a wooden crate. Inside this last was a winter coat too big to be anyone but Reinhardt’s. Inside the front pocket of the winter coat was a small tin about the size of a playing card. Inside the small tin were a pair of red crimson disks, looking like nothing so much as hard candy. I closed it and slipped it into my pocket.

  I’d spent about ten minutes inside the bedroom, though you couldn’t have known it by Haimlin, who hadn’t moved three steps in my absence. The crowd of hoax that had formed in the hallway outside seemed no more willing to enter with Reinhardt dead than they had been when he was up amongst the living. At some point they’d get around to tossing the joint, though they wouldn’t have found anything even if I hadn’t already taken the only thing worth finding.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ Haimlin said finally.

  ‘I have,’ I said, then nodded goodbye and headed outside.

  2

  I walked east. There was work that needed doing, if you could call what I do work, and I was happy for anything to take my mind off what I’d just seen.

  Strolling down Cove Street a pusher, new to the game or just dumb as all hell, tried to sell me a vial of hop, apparently ignorant that his boss’s boss cops breath from me and thanks the Firstborn for the privilege. Hooking through Cross Market I spotted two urchins setting a tinker up for a smash and grab, one loud and flamboyant, while the other slinked in from the side. The tinker bought protection from me but my sympathies were with the children, and I kept silent. At a bordello past Pritt Street I dropped off an ochre of dreamvine to the madam. It was early, and the girls were lounging on the balcony, cackling the news of the day between fucks. We passed a moment trading gossip, and I got back to moving.

  I was only in Kirentown for the length of time it took to follow Broad Street to the docks, but it wasn’t near fast enough to outrun Ling Chi’s eyes. He owns Kirentown like I own the leather in my shoes, and a fly don’t land on a fresh turd without him hearing about it. A pair of heavies picked me up after a block and a half, pastel tattoos swirling from collarbone to brow, machetes swinging freely at their waists. They offered polite greetings and made sure I kept an even pace out of their territory.

  A caravel from the Free Cities had come into port, and there was work unloading for anyone who wanted it, rare those last six months since the Crown instituted a tariff on anything coming from Nestria. It would be a good night at the Earl, and at the whorehouses and the wyrm dens. Tomorrow morning I’d have a line of distributors slinking in to re-supply. I cut through the bustle and had a quick word with the ship’s purser, a high-yellow Islander with a stutter that became more prominent whenever it was time to settle accounts. I gave him a piece of paper with a dishonest man’s signature at the bottom and he gave me a purse heavy with coin. Back out again I dropped the smallest of these into the bowl of a fake cripple – I mean he was a real beggar, but his legs worked fine.

  It went on that way for a while. Low Town is a lot of things – the Empire’s dumping grounds, an open-air prison, the beating heart of the city. But it’s also my business, a broken-down engine that needs constant tinkering. Palms to grease, backs to stab. It takes a lot of energy, running in place.

  The daylight was growing thin before I was through with business, could turn my attention towards other affairs, and my feet towards the bay. To a banker from Kor’s Heights, anything below the Old City was the deep slums, forbidden territory without an escort of guardsmen. But those of us in Low Town had a more sensitive palette, could distinguish between simple poverty and true barbarity – though even we connoisseurs generally avoided the small finger of land east of the docks jutting out into the bay. There were levels of hell that compared favorably to the Isthmus.

  Despite what half the drunks in the Earl would have you believe, the Islanders are no worse than anybody else – which is to say they’re treacherous, callow and cruel to the weak. The character of the Isthmus didn’t have anything to do with the peculiarities of the Islander people. Too much flesh, too little of everything else – we’re all a bare step up from animal. Just how small that step is becomes abundantly clear walking down narrow alleys in the late afternoon, and I moved along the unpaved roads at a speed more frantic than brisk. Best not to present myself as a target any longer than absolutely necessary, and between the fact that I had the money to clothe myself fully and my obvious foreignness, I was definitely a target. White folk don’t come to the Isthmus, if they can help it – black folk don’t generally come to the Isthmus if they can help it either.

  I’d made the journey with enough frequency to have the route more or less memorized, but the natives had the unfortunate tendency to shift the grid, close up alleyways and build over by-lanes, like silting up an estuary. More than once I’d taken a cut down a well-remembered side street only to discover a family of ten had erected a shack in the few weeks since I’d last been there, toothless grandmothers bobbling a brood of half-wits. And the Isthmus isn’t the sort of place you want to be doubling back on, running around in circles, reminding anyone who’s watching that you aren’t one of them. I was pleased when I finally made it to my destination.

  Mazzie’s hovel was nothing to brag about. In broad form it resembled every domicile on the block, a cramped one-room shack with a thick hide covering – a door was an unseen luxury in this part of town. With what I was paying her, no doubt only a sliver of what she made, she could have afforded to live elsewhere. But one of the few virtues of the Isthmus is that the Crown isn’t in any greater hurry to swing by than everyone else, providing a cover for her activities not to be found in any other part of the city. For instance, if Mazzie had lived elsewhere in the metropolis, she might have found her neighbors taking umbrage at the bull’s skulls and squiggles of cock’s blood that decorated her facade.

  Inside the room was dark, the only light coming from the cooking fire Mazzie kept perpetually stoked in the corner. The gimcrack ornamentation to the contrary, Mazzie’s was an austere existence. Her furniture consisted of little more than the boiler itself and a wooden table so ragged as to be only distantly recognized as such. A faded curtain stretched across a back corner, a bed behind it, though it wouldn’t have shocked me comatose to discover Mazzie never slept. The matron herself took up one of the room’s two chairs, and the alley rat I’d made my surrogate child took the other.

  It was a stark contrast. Wren was at the last threshold of boyhood, seventeen or eighteen; I’d picked him up off the street years back, so we weren’t altogether clear on his age. Likewise, I could only make a guess at his heritage, though he had the vague features and stern constitution of a mutt. Long threatened, his most recent growth spurt had stretched him a few inches over my own six feet, a humiliation only partly assuaged by the fact that his mustache was a scraggly brown line that I often considered shaving while he slept. Apart
from that he had dark hair and the sort of blue eyes that women would do things for one day, if they hadn’t already started.

  Mazzie was opposite in every particular. Unmixed Islander to go by the jet black of her skin and the rich cocoa of her eyes. Standing she wouldn’t have reached my collar, though her back would have been the envy of a stud-bull. A gentleman doesn’t speculate on a lady’s age, and I wasn’t sure it mattered – Mazzie was too tough to give up a step to time, she’d walk into the grave with her back unbowed and her head raised level. She wore a calico dress, and an ivory hoop the size of my palm hooked through her left nostril.

  In one regard only were they similar, though this last outweighed the rest – was indeed the cause of their association, the reason I’d tracked Mazzie down three years ago and cajoled her into taking Wren on as a student. In the long gestation prior to their birth, the daevas had reached down inside them and kindled a spark which remained dormant in the rest of us, which allowed them to will into existence things wondrous and horrifying.

  Mazzie was playing with a deck of oversized cards, strange things, precious looking but well used. She reordered them with easy dexterity, using a type of shuffle with which I was unfamiliar – and I’m a deft hand when it comes to cheating at poker.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Wren asked. Amongst my many failures as a guardian, I had yet to learn the boy the basics of etiquette.

  ‘I was in the neighborhood. I thought I’d give you a walk home.’

  ‘We’ve got a couple of minutes yet.’

  ‘Finish your lesson,’ I said, stepping inside and pulling shut the curtain. ‘I paid enough for it.’

  Wren turned back to Mazzie, who noted my presence in her brilliant, imperturbable eyes but gave no greeting. ‘You ready?’ she asked the boy.

  ‘I’m waiting, ain’t I?’

  Mazzie cackled, but didn’t stop what she was doing.

  ‘The Zealot.’

  Mazzie cut a card from the center of the deck, randomly so far as I could see, and flipped it over. On it was a robed figure kneeling beside a bound woman, holding a lit torch to a fagot of wood at her feet.

  Wren smiled confidently. ‘The Crumbling Throne.’

  Mazzie dropped another card onto the table – a crowned man on a stone chair, the top inlaid with gemstones, the bottom decaying into nothingness.

  ‘Why you looking at my hands?’ Mazzie asked Wren. ‘I got nothing to do with what’s coming.’

  ‘I gotta look somewhere.’

  She shook her head adamantly. ‘Your eyes just gonna lie to you – don’t you listen to anything I say?’

  Wren shrugged but didn’t bother to answer. Mazzie had kept up her shuffling during the back and forth, and dropped another card in the boy’s direction. ‘The False Friend.’

  An ugly man standing between two halves of a mob, hands raised in supplication, a sly smile on his face.

  I was conscious of the heat – over-conscious, to judge by the fact that no one else seemed to feel it. My brow was moist with sweat, and my head was heavy, like I’d wrapped it with cloth. I blinked it away, but it didn’t go.

  ‘Bitter Enemies,’ I heard Wren say.

  Two figures locked in a death grip, a scarred man strangling his opponent into final submission.

  ‘The Untrue Lover.’

  A man and a woman intertwined, the first beatific, the second cold and even.

  ‘Five for five,’ Mazzie said. ‘Let’s see you finish it.’

  To judge by Wren’s smirk, certain and over-clever, this would be no problem. ‘The Broken Cage.’

  Mazzie drew the last card from the deck, looked at it and smiled for a moment. But only a moment – then the grin dripped off her face like wax from a candle, and what was left was bitter and contemptuous.

  The card showed a galleon breaking against a reef. It was surprisingly intricate – I could make out a tiny figure leaping off the topmast, taking his chances with a furious sea. ‘Dashed Hopes,’ she said.

  The smoke from Mazzie’s kitchen fire had wrapped itself inside my throat. My ears were buzzing like I’d taken a full snort of breath. Each stroke of my pulse sounded in my ears. Wren was saying something, but it was a few seconds before I realized it was directed at me.

  ‘What?’ I broke out of my stupor.

  ‘I said that was it for the day. I’m ready when you are.’

  ‘Start without me, give the elderly a moment to themselves.’

  ‘You said you were here to walk me home.’

  ‘What I say is a long way from what I do – I’d have thought you’d have picked up on that after six years.’

  ‘Get on out of here,’ Mazzie agreed, waving her charge out the exit.

  Wren grumbled himself to the door, and I stopped thinking about him. The boy didn’t need to worry about the inhabitants of the Isthmus. Mazzie had spread clear word throughout the neighborhood that he was off limits, and even the most hardened thug felt their mouth dry up at the thought of crossing her. Besides, he could handle himself, much as it galled me to admit it.

  I took the seat he’d vacated and started on a cigarette. My hands were stiff and numb, and it took me longer than it should have. I managed it finally, though it was far from my best work. ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘You ask after what you just saw?’

  ‘Parlor tricks. And he missed the last one.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were such an expert on the Art.’

  ‘I know everything about everything Mazzie – it’s one of my many charms.’

  She about half-laughed at that. The three years she’d been teaching Wren hadn’t made us friends, but we’d at least acclimatized to the other’s occasional presence. ‘Took me more years than I’d admit to learn that parlor trick. Took the boy six months. He’s coming along. Coming along fast. As it happens, I’ve been meaning to speak on him for a while now.’

  ‘I’m within earshot.’

  ‘When you first came to me, you said to make sure he didn’t kill himself with the gift.’

  ‘You’ve upheld your end of the bargain admirably.’

  ‘Said to teach him a few basic charms, set his feet on the path.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘I done it – done it and more.’

  ‘So what would you say – he’s fifth rank? Fourth?’ I tried to remember where apprentice ended and initiate began. It had been a long time since my days picking up second-hand bits of magical trivia from the Blue Crane.

  Mazzie rolled back her eyes. ‘You fucking Riguns – you put a number on something, think you own it, think you know what it is.’

  ‘Yes, the acquisition of knowledge – an unfortunate hobby the Empire has bent itself towards.’

  ‘Learning’s fine. Better to remember that you don’t ever know very much. Say you go ahead and do something a hundred times – if you ain’t dumb as dog shit, you ought to make a fair guess as to what happens the hundred and first. That don’t mean you understand why it happened, don’t mean you can do anything but read a pattern once it’s been burned into your head. I spent twenty years sitting at the feet of the greatest Practitioner in Miradin. I once saw him tame a storm that would have swamped half the capital by whispering kind words over a wooden bowl.’ She spat on the ground. ‘Should have let it drown the place, but that’s not the point – he didn’t need a number written onto his forehead to know he knew how to do something.’

  ‘And that’s all they do in the Academy? Lie to themselves about what they know, what they’re teaching?’

  She shook her head. ‘All this nonsense about ranks and scales, the idea that you could master the Art like you would your times tables – that’s a lie. The learning ain’t no lie. But the learning takes different forms for everybody. My way isn’t Wren’s way – he’s stronger, and his mind goes in different directions. I’ve taken him as far as I can.’

  ‘He’s learned everything you have to show him?’

  ‘He’s learned everyth
ing I’m going to.’

  That sat just fine with me. There were things Mazzie of the Stained Bone knew of which I’d prefer Wren remain ignorant. ‘So what are you suggesting? Get another teacher? You know as well as I do, no practitioner would be willing to take on an unlicensed student – and you know double I won’t let the Crown hear of what he can do.’

  ‘He’s got talent – real talent, talent like I never had and never seen. And he’s smart, and he wants it. He could be a master – there aren’t half a hundred folk in the world you can say that about. But he won’t be it here. Not with me, and not if you can’t get him someone knows more of the Art than I do.’

  ‘You’re telling me to leave the city?’

  Mazzie took a thumb-sized cheroot out from her seemingly limitless supply. ‘I told you what I’m telling you,’ she said, and pared off the tip with a curved knife far too long for the job.

  ‘Fair enough.’ I added the concern to a not insignificant tally. ‘But the boy isn’t what I came to see you about.’

  Mazzie leaned her muzzle over the candle and lit the stub in her mouth. ‘Then what was?’

  ‘Yancey.’ The Rhymer was our single shared acquaintance, beyond the boy himself. Had, in fact, been the one to put me in touch with Mazzie, when I’d been looking for someone capable of training Wren that I could be sure wouldn’t be whispering anything about it to the Crown. That also made him one of a half-dozen people in the world who knew what Wren was capable of. There weren’t many men I’d have left alive knowing that secret, but I trusted Yancey as far as anybody could trust anybody.

  Mazzie stretched back into her seat, puffing at her cigar till it had a decent draw. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘He’s sick.’

  ‘I hear so.’

  ‘I thought maybe you’d look in on him, see if there’s something you can do. I’d make it worth your time.’

  Reading Mazzie was like staring into an overcast sky at midnight – I’d have better luck playing Wren’s side of that card game. Still, I thought I saw something resembling regret. ‘He been sick for a while?’