Low Town (2 page)

In the years since he had come to the neighborhood, Mac had managed to carve out a small territory by virtue of his skill with a blade and the unreserved dedication of his whores, who, to a woman, were as enamored of him as a mother is her firstborn. I often thought that Mac had the easiest job in Low Town, seeming to consist mostly of ensuring that his streetwalkers didn’t kill one another in competition for his attentions, but you wouldn’t know it from the scowl etched across his face. We’d been friendly ever since he’d set up shop, passing each other information and the occasional favor.

“Mac.”

“Warden.” He offered me his cigarette.

I lit it with a match from my belt. “How’re the girls?”

He shook some tobacco from his pouch and started on another smoke. “That lost child has them worked up worse than a clutch of hens. Red Annie kept everyone up half the night weeping, till Euphemia went after her with a switch.”

“They’re a sensitive bunch.” I reached into my purse and surreptitiously handed him his shipment. “Any word on Eddie the Quim?” I asked, referring to a rival of his who had been chased out of Low Town earlier in the week.

“He works a stone’s throw from headquarters and doesn’t think he needs to pay off the hoax? Eddie’s too stupid to live. He won’t see
the other side of winter—I’d go an argent on it.” Mac finished rolling his cigarette with one hand and slipped the package into his back pocket with the other.

“I wouldn’t take it,” I said.

Mac tucked the tab loosely into his sneer. We watched the ebb of traffic from our post. “You get those passes yet?” he asked.

“Going to see my man today. Should have something for you soon.”

He grunted what might have been assent and I turned to leave. “You oughta know that Harelip’s boys have been peddling east of the canal.” He took a drag and exhaled perfect circles of smoke, one following the other into the clement sky. “The girls have seen his crew off and on for the last week or so.”

“I heard. Stay slick, Mac.”

He went back to looking menacing.

I spent the rest of the afternoon dropping off product and running errands. My customs officer finally came through with the passes, though at the rate his addiction to pixie’s breath was progressing, it might well be the last favor he’d be able to do for me.

It was early evening by the time I was finished, and I stopped off at my favorite street stand for a pot of beef in chili sauce. I still needed to see Yancey before his set—he was performing for some toffee-nosed aristocrats near the Old City, and it would be a walk. I was cutting through an alleyway to save time when I saw something that clipped my progress so abruptly that I nearly toppled over.

The Rhymer would have to wait. Ahead of me was the body of a child, contorted horribly and wrapped in a sheet soaked through with blood.

It seemed I had found Little Tara.

I tossed my dinner into a sewer grate. Suddenly I didn’t have much of an appetite.

I burned a few seconds taking stock of the situation. The rats of Low Town are an immodest bunch, so the fact that her body was intact suggested that she hadn’t been left out long. I crouched down and set a palm on her tiny chest—cold. She’d been dead for some time before being dumped here. Up close I could see the indignities her tormentor had inflicted more clearly, and I shuddered and withdrew, noticing as I did so a strange smell, not the sickly sweet scent of decayed flesh but one abrasive and alchemical, harsh against the back of my throat.

Retreating from the alley to the main street, I flagged down a pair of street urchins idling nearby. Among the lower classes my name carries some small weight, and they presented themselves as if they expected me to draft them into a scheme and were excited at the opportunity. I gave the duller looking of the two a copper and told him to find a guardsman. When he was around the corner I turned to the one who remained.

I keep half the Low Town guard in whores and watered-down beer, so they wouldn’t be a problem. But a murder of this sort would demand the attention of an agent, and whomever they sent might be foolish enough to think me a suspect. I needed to get rid of my merchandise.

The boy stared up at me with brown eyes deep set against pale skin. Like most street children he was a mutt, features of the three Rigun peoples intermixed with any number of foreign races. Even by the standards of the dispossessed he was painfully thin, the rags he wore as clothing insufficient to hide the bony protrusions of his shoulder blades and elbows.

“You know who I am?”

“You’re the Warden.”

“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.