Low Town (33 page)

“We had a falling out. I needed my freedom, and he’s a one-man sort of gal.”

“Do you think that was funny?”

“Give me a few minutes and we can try again.” On the slab in the center of the room a shroud covered a body about the size of a child. Beneath it Avraham lay in permanent repose, soon to be set beneath the ground. For him there would be no grand funeral, no public outpouring of grief, and the weather being what it was, I doubted the High Priest would manage the trip from his chapel to the plot of land near the sea where the Islanders buried their people. Low Town had
enjoyed the autumnal pathos, a moment of communal mourning amid the vibrant foliage, but with the mercury falling no one was in any great hurry to leave his house just to pay sympathy to the family of a little black boy. And anyway, at the rate children were disappearing from Low Town the whole thing had lost its novelty.

“I assume you didn’t have any more luck reading this one than you did his predecessor?”

She shook her head. “I’ve tried every trick in the book, worked through every ritual, meditated over every scrap of evidence, but—”

“Nothing,” I finished, and for once she didn’t seem to mind being interrupted.

“You come up with anything solid on your end?”

“No.”

“You keep talking like this and I’m never gonna get a word in edgewise.”

“Yeah.” Thus far our conversation had been within a stone’s throw of pleasant—I could almost fool myself into thinking the scryer had taken a shine to me.

“Does the Bureau of Magical Affairs know about the talisman you’ve got sewn into your shoulder?” she asked.

“Of course. I make a point of telling the government every time I do something illegal.”

The beginnings of a smile worked themselves through Marieke’s growl, but she snapped its neck before it could mature. “Who put it there?”

“I can’t remember. I’m high a lot.”

She set her hands against the desk behind her and arched her spine backward, a startlingly uninhibited display given her almost pathological self-consciousness, the rough equivalent in a normally functioning human of dropping her drawers and taking a shit on the floor. “Fine, don’t tell me.”

That was my preference anyway. “If I slipped off this covering and checked the boy for spots,” I asked, “would I find any?”

She gave a conspiratorial glance around, unnecessary, given that we were in an enclosed room, but understandable all the same. “Yes,” she said. “You would.”

It was what I expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. The Blade had done another child, taken him from beneath my nose, hidden him somewhere in the catacombs beneath his mansion, drained his life, and left him facedown in the river. And as if somehow these blasphemies were insufficient, he’d infected the boy with the plague, weakened the wards that protected the city from its return—all because he couldn’t stand the thought of honest labor or forgoing a few exotic debaucheries.

“If you took off the sheet and saw the rash,” she responded, “would you have any idea why it was there?”

“I’m looking,” I said, though my effort would mean little enough if the city again found itself awash in Red Fever.

Her eyes, normally as bright as the unclouded sky, fogged up. Uncertainty was a guise Marieke wore infrequently, and with more than her usual discomfort. “Right now, you’re the only one who knows. I don’t trust Black House, and I didn’t want to start a panic. But if another there’s another …”

“I understand,” I said. After a moment I asked the obvious question. “Why tell me?”

“I flashed something off you the first time we met, who you are and where you’re going. Something that told me I ought to let you in on it.”

That would explain the fit. That would explain, for that matter, why someone so congenitally incapable of kindness would even take the time to speak with me.

“Don’t you want to know what I saw?” she asked. “Everyone always wants to know what’s ahead of them.”

“People are fools. You don’t need a prophet to tell the future. Look at yesterday, then look at today. Tomorrow is likely to be the same, and the day after.”

It was time to leave. Wren was outside in the cold, and I had a ways left to go before I’d earn my day’s rest. I took a long look at Avraham. He’d be the last, I told myself, one way or another.

Marieke interrupted my thoughts. “Did you survive it, the first time?”

“It killed me,” I said. “Can’t you tell?”

She blushed a little, and rushed forward. “I meant did you …”

“I know what you meant,” I said. “And yeah, I survived it.”

“What was it like?”

People asked me that sometimes, if they knew I’d been in Low Town during the worst of it. “Tell me about the plague,” like it was some piece of neighborhood gossip or the outcome of a prizefight. And what could you tell them, and what did they want to hear?

Tell them about the first days, when it didn’t look to be any worse than every other summer—one or two from a block, the old and the very young. How the sick marks on the houses began to grow, to spawn and multiply till there was scarcely a shack or tenement that didn’t have an X scrawled on its front door. About the government men who came to burn them, that sometimes they weren’t so careful to make sure everyone inside was dead or to contain the flames.

Tell them about the second night after they put Momma and Papa on the wagons, when the neighbors ransacked our house, just walked in, not happy about it but not ashamed either, leaving with the few argents my father had managed to save, giving me a blow to the face when I tried to stop them. The same neighbors we borrowed sugar from and sang hymns with at Midwinter. And who could blame them, really, because nothing anyone did mattered anymore.

Tell them about the cordons around Low Town, the fat-faced
guards who gorged themselves on bribes but didn’t let a single poor bastard out, ’cause as far as they were concerned we were scum, best kept from decent folk by the head of a pike. That I kept my eyes open for years and years afterward, looking to even the score, that I keep my eyes open today.

Tell them about Henni’s face when I came back without food the third day in a row, not angry, not sad even, just resigned—my poor little sister putting her hand on my shoulder and telling me it would be all right, that I’d have better luck tomorrow, and her voice so sweet and her face so thin that it broke your heart, just broke your fucking heart.

I guess I could have told her a lot of things.

“It wasn’t no big deal,” I said, and for once Marieke had the good sense to keep her damn fool mouth shut.

And by that point it was time to leave, leave before I did something I shouldn’t, and I gave Marieke a last quick nod—and I guess I looked hot because she tried to offer some sort of apology—a powerful show of contrition by her lights—but I ignored it and headed into the cold and sent Wren home with a curt dismissal. And even though I was too near downtown for it to be safe I jammed a vial of breath beneath my nose and pulled from it until my head was so filled with the buzz that there wasn’t room for much else, and I leaned myself against a wall until I felt steady enough to start the long walk home.

I holed up at the Earl for a few hours, drinking coffee with cinnamon while the storm buried the city under a solid layer of white. Toward the end of the afternoon I smoked a joint of dreamvine and watched Adolphus and Wren build a snow fort based upon what was, in my estimation, a lack of sound architectural principles. My concerns proved valid when a portion of the east wall collapsed, offering a decisive avenue of entry for an invading force.

They were enjoying themselves. I was having more trouble getting into the spirit of the season. The way I figured it there was at least one group of people trying to kill me, and possibly as many as three. Beyond that, the certainty of the Old Man’s deadline loomed omnipresent, a hum settled an inch behind my eyes. I couldn’t stop running over the math—seven days minus three days is four days, seven minus three days is four days, four days, four days.

Worse come to worst I could flee the city—I had made contingencies in case of similar circumstances, lives I had set up in remote regions that I could wrap myself up in and never return. But with the Old Man involved I couldn’t be certain any of them would last—nowhere in Rigus would be deep enough if he put his mind to smoking me out. I might have to flip, offer what I could to Nestria or the Free Cities and have them settle me in some distant province. I still
knew where enough dirt was buried to be of interest to someone, I hoped. But that would mean I’d have to make provisions for Adolphus and Adeline—and Wren now too. I couldn’t leave them to catch my heat.

Deal with that when it comes, I told myself and started going over it all again, hoping to catch something different this time. I laid out the pieces in my head, one at a time, running over how Beaconfield had gone from a dilettante to a mass murderer.

He wakes up one day and realizes he doesn’t have enough ready coin to shortchange his tailor, and starts thinking of a way to rectify the situation. Probably Brightfellow wasn’t his first option, probably he’d had a few false starts. At some point he gets in touch with the sorcerer, and the two start talking. He wasn’t always a hack, doing chicanery for the upper crusts—he was a real practitioner, and he might have a way out, a happy ending on tap, so long as the duke isn’t squeamish about the means. The duke is not. They contract out Tara to a Kiren, some acquaintance of Brightfellow’s, but they pick wrong: their man botches the job and they have to kill him before he can be followed up the chain. They put the operation on ice for a few months and retool—no more freelance work, all the kidnappings are to be done in-house. First Caristiona goes, than Avraham, stolen and sacrificed, then dumped where their bodies couldn’t be traced.

It was thin, damn thin. I had motive and means, but no more. What connected the children? Why had the last two been infected with the plague? Too many questions and damn little in the way of concrete evidence. Brightfellow’s name on a slip of paper that I didn’t even have anymore, lost during my tumble in the canal. A few threats during a conversation that the Blade would deny having. I knew Beaconfield was guilty, but a hunch wouldn’t be good enough for the Old Man, and moving on the duke wouldn’t do me any good if I couldn’t square myself with Black House.

Now I wished I had taken the opportunity to pump more out of
the Blade during our last conversation, rather than use it to score points. The Old Man used to give me shit about it, back during my stint under his tutelage—that I couldn’t quite control my temper. He said that was why I’d never be as good as him, because I let the hatred get through my teeth. He was a sick motherfucker, but he was probably right.

I needed to speak to Guiscard, needed to find Afonso Cadamost, needed to figure out what I was up against. I wasn’t too concerned about the men Beaconfield could muster, but what about Brightfellow and his blasphemous pet? Could it be targeted on me? From what distance? How could I defend myself against it, and most critically, how the hell did I kill it?

These were all questions I wished I had answered before declaring open warfare on the Smiling Blade.

I was sitting in front of the fire, reading from Elliot’s
History of the Third Isocrotan Campaign
, when a messenger boy entered, dressed in a heavy coat and calling my name. I waved him over and he handed me his letter.

“Bad out there?” I asked.

“Getting worse.”

“It usually is.” I tossed him an argent as tip—I figured I probably wouldn’t need it to buttress my retirement fund. He nearly pumped my arm out of my socket thanking me.

The envelope was made of fine pink parchment, with a stylized capital
M
on the back flap.

I read it over twice more, then consigned it to the flames, watching the rose-colored vellum curl up and dissipate with a quick pop. Apparently Mairi thought whatever she had to tell me would go better after hours. I returned to Elliot and the foolishness of great men.

The crowd at the Earl stayed small for most of the night, the storm heavy enough to keep out even the neighborhood traffic. I took my usual from Adolphus’s tap, eating away the time, trying not to think of Mairi’s tan flesh and dark eyes, my success mixed at best.

I headed out around ten, making sure Adeline and the boy were in the back room. Two minutes under the falling sleet and I was certain that this was a mistake. I was no youth to go tramping through the snow at the whiff of quim, whatever Mairi had to tell me could wait till morning. But having begun I was too stubborn to turn back, though the weather was so awful I resolved to cut straight through Brennock, rather than follow the canal north.