Low Town (34 page)

I was halfway there when I heard them, easy enough as they made no attempt at stealth. Probably they figured their numbers were sufficient advantage, though more experience might have taught them never to offer succor to the enemy, however certain the contest may seem.

Apart from their childlike exuberance they had set the ambush quite professionally. By the time the pair behind me had drawn my attention, their comrades had already circled around to my front. A quick glance was enough to let me know I wasn’t being jumped by a gang of street toughs braving the cold—beneath their thick black cloaks I caught flashes of bright cashmere. Each of them wore a half mask the same color as their capes, masquerade style, fashioned to cover the lower half of the face with that of a wild animal.

I hadn’t been paying much attention because of the snow, thinking that and the irregularity of my hours would be sufficient protection. Was the invitation fake, I wondered now, ginned up by the Blade to lure me out of hiding? It hadn’t looked like it, nor did it strain credulity
to think of Mairi and her cool black eyes turning around and selling me off the moment her door had slammed shut.

I filed that in the growing stack of things I would think about if I survived the next five minutes and ducked into an alleyway, sprinting through the treacherous snow. Behind me I could hear them whooping, hounds running a quarry to ground. The buildings in the area were all garment factories in the new style, long rows of laborers at unforgiving machines, closed since last year’s trade war with Nestria. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a side entrance to one of them and threw my shoulder into it, smashing through whatever rotted lock had been holding it shut.

I entered a cavernous structure a good hundred yards across, broken windows offering enough light to navigate the huge sewing contraptions decaying in the interior. Against the back wall I saw a steep metal staircase and above it a pair of long-abandoned offices, and I sprinted up the steps. The gangway led toward a second stairwell and another locked door, the latter proving no greater impediment than its brother below.

I scrambled forward onto a flat roof, the wood warped and treacherous. The cityscape spread out ahead of me, a panorama of civic rot broken up by the huge industrial smokestack that crowned the factory. My subterfuge had gained me only a few seconds, and I drew my blade to deal with the one coming up behind me.

His mask was carved into a narrow beak, like a finch’s, and he was laughing, laughing and drawing his blade, a thin fencer’s épée that looked more like a child’s toy than the means to commit murder. He started to say something, but I didn’t have time for pleasantries and I closed quickly, hoping to put him down and continue my escape.

He was fast, and younger than me by a good ten years, but a lifetime of fencing was poor preparation for the business at hand. The powdery snow fouled up his footwork, and his style, honed in less
lethal circumstances, bespoke the natural tendency toward offense one adopts when the worst a miscalculation promises is the loss of a match. I’d have him in a moment.

But I didn’t have a moment. I could hear his compatriots on the stairwell and I knew if I didn’t finish him quickly I’d learn how difficult breathing becomes with a foot of steel in your innards. After his next pass I feigned a stumble, dropping forward on one knee, hoping he’d take the bait.

The thought of tagging me proved irresistible, and he pushed forward for a killing stroke. I ducked lower, so low my face was nearly touching the roof, and his rapier passed over my shoulder harmlessly. Bracing my left arm against the frozen wood I surged upward, swiping with my trench blade and cleaving his arm at mid-joint. He shrieked and I spent a quick quarter second in astonishment at the high pitch of his voice before my follow-up severed his neck to the spine. Conscious of the men close behind, I sprinted over his corpse and made my way forward.

I climbed the cast-iron ladder ten feet to the top of the chimney. Reaching the summit I sprang to my feet and looked down at my pursuers, the thought occurring to me that if any of them had brought a crossbow I was as good as dead. None had. Two stood staring back at me, swords clutched tightly in their hands, while the third checked on his dead friend. I laughed, filled with the exhilaration that accompanies violence. “Blue blood spills like any other!” I shouted, my trench blade dripping ichor. “Come get me if you’ve got the stones!”

I took three quick steps and leaped into the air, bracing myself as I smashed through the glass panes of the adjacent building. I tumbled as I fell, awkwardly and not without injury. Stumbling to my feet I rushed into the room beyond and took up position in the black interior, hoping my pursuers were foolish enough to follow the way I had come.

A half minute went by, and then I heard a boyish yell and saw two of them hit the floor, their cloaks apparently not proving a critical impediment to the maneuver. The jump didn’t put either of my pursuers down for long. They charged after me, cognizant of the danger that hesitation posed.

I tossed a dagger at the first one through the door, aiming at his chest but throwing high, the blade burying itself in his throat—a rare dividend of incompetence. He dropped to the ground, his last few seconds painful. I wasted no time mourning his loss, and pressed on to the one behind him. Between the death of his comrade and the bad light, he didn’t last long. There was a moment of terror as I maneuvered him back toward the broken windows, and I put him down with a flurry of blows.

I stood at the edge and thought about going over, dropping the two stories and heading out into the night, but I wasn’t sure if my ankle could take another fall. And truth be told, I wanted the last one, wanted to see his face as he realized I’d done for the other two, wanted to put my hands on someone after days of running around in the dark.

So I sprinted down the second-floor landing, just in time to see him break through the front door. Somewhere along the line he had dropped his cowl, but he retained the jet-black muzzle that obscured his identity. He was larger than his comrades, and in place of the thin dueling blades they had sported, he held a long saber with a thick bronze guard.

I reached into my boot for my second throwing dagger. Gone—it must have fallen out at some point during the scuffle. I hefted the trench blade backhanded, the blunt side against my forearm. We’d do this old-fashioned. The two of us circled warily, getting a sense of each other, then he feigned a blow to my chest and I lost myself in the clash of steel on steel.

He was good, and his weapon was well suited to dealing with the thick edge of my own. The pain in my ankle wasn’t making things any easier, and I found myself struggling to maintain the pace. I needed to do something to alter the odds—when it comes to lethal engagements, three and one isn’t much of a record.

We locked swords and I forced myself against him, then spat a thick wad of phlegm into his face. He had sufficient wherewithal not to wipe it away, but I could see it rattled him.

I moved back a few steps. “Were those your friends I killed?”

He didn’t answer, closing the distance I’d put between us and making me uncomfortably aware of how little space there was to maneuver. I made a quick play for his head, but he deflected it without difficulty and launched a riposte that nearly took off my own. By the Firstborn, he was fast. I couldn’t keep this up much longer.

“I bet they were. School yard chums, I bet.”

We engaged again, and again I came off the worse for it, a cut across my left bicep, indicating his advantage in speed. I continued my provocation, doing my best to seem unconcerned by the wound. “Make sure you don’t forget the first one’s hand when you bury him, else he spends eternity a cripple.”

The smell of blood fired his temper and he came at me with a roar. I slipped my off hand into my pocket and gripped the spiked knuckles, barely parrying a wild, two-handed stroke that would have caved in my skull had it connected. While he was off balance I struck twice, landing a pair of hooks to his body, each blow leaving my fist wet with blood. One hand dropped to his side, and I gave him a firm shot across his jaw, the blow driving through his mask and into the flesh beneath. He screamed, the sound wheezing through shattered teeth and mutilated tissue, and I followed it up with a blow from my trench blade that sent a chunk of bone whistling from his chest. He screamed again and collapsed.

Their clothing and weapons were evidence enough, but if I needed more proof of Beaconfield’s involvement, I had it. With his face uncovered I recognized the man dying at my feet as the Blade’s second from earlier that morning.

I crouched beside him, drops of his blood falling off my weapon.

“Why is the Blade killing children?”

He shook his head and coughed out a response. “Fuck you.”

“Answer my questions and I’ll see you get bandaged up. Otherwise I gotta go at you ugly.”

“Bullshit.” The word was four syllables, broken by his labored panting. “I won’t die a punk.”

He was right of course—there was no way I could get him to a doctor before his body lost the spirit. Couldn’t cut him for the same reason—and anyway, I didn’t think I had it in me to torture someone just then.

“I can make it quick for you.”

It was a struggle for him to nod his head. “Do it.”

A trench blade isn’t built for thrusting, but it would do. I slipped the point through his chest. He gasped and brought his hands up around it reflexively, cutting his palms on the metal. Then he was gone. I wrenched the weapon out of his rib cage and got to my feet.

I hadn’t killed a man in three years. Hurt plenty, sure, but Harelip and his ilk were still above ground, or if they weren’t, it wasn’t because of me.

Bad business all around.

I had underestimated the Blade—he had moved quickly and surely, and if his approach lacked subtlety, it had very nearly made up for it with brutal efficacy. But then he’d underestimated me too, as the scattered corpses of his companions could attest. I doubted Beaconfield could muster another attack, but it still seemed imprudent to head back to the Earl. I’d stop by one of the apartments I kept scattered about the city and check back in tomorrow.

With the flush of combat fading, my body began to remember its injuries, my ankle sore from where I had landed on it, and the wound on my arm starting to ache unpleasantly. I wiped my blade with a spare rag and moved to leave. Brennock was a manufacturing center, and I thought it unlikely anyone had heard the screams, but I didn’t care to wait around to see my suspicions confirmed. Slipping through the broken front door out into the night, I discovered the snow had picked up again, heavier than before, and I headed into it, knowing whatever tracks I left would soon be covered.

I woke the next morning in a single-room apartment in the shadier section of Offbend to discover that the cut running across my left arm had turned into a nasty-colored thing, bright and livid. I put on my clothes and coat, trying to avoid contact with the wound as I did so. Walking out, I banged my shoulder against the wall of the flophouse and had to stop myself from screaming.

I couldn’t go back to the Earl like this—they’d be cutting off my arm in half a day. And I didn’t want to alarm Celia any worse than I already had, so the Aerie was out too. Instead I headed south toward the harbor and a street doctor I knew, an aged Kiren woman who sewed up injuries in the back of a dress shop. She couldn’t speak a word of Rigun, and her dialect of heretic was sufficiently unrelated to mine as to make dialogue effectively impossible, but despite that and her irascible temper she was as good a battle medic as you could ask for, quick, practiced, and discreet.

The snowfall had ceased, although it seemed to have continued through most of the night and would likely pick up again in an hour or two. In the brief interlude, however, it felt like the whole city was out on the streets, the thoroughfares packed with lovers walking arm in arm, and children celebrating the approaching festivities. These
manifestations of the season started to die off as I made it to Kirentown, whose inhabitants were uninterested in the upcoming holiday, assuming they were even aware of it.

I turned down a nondescript side street, hoping the ache in my chest didn’t signal a fever. The alley was organized according to the commercial instincts of the heretics, a dozen shops subdividing the hundred-yard stretch of street, each announcing its wares with brightly colored signs covered with Kiren characters and pidgin Rigun. I stepped into one midway down the alley, distinguished only by its curiously bland bill, a small, fading tablet that read simply
DRESS
.

Inside sat a frowning grandmother, ancient as stone, the sort of creature whose youth seemed even theoretically impossible, as if she had sprung from the womb wizened and oak-tree old. She was surrounded on all sides by bolts of colored cloth and bright ribbons, strewn about without regard for organization or aesthetic. Anyone foolish enough to enter in the hopes of purchasing the advertised merchandise would find themselves quickly disabused by the state of disrepair, but then the old bitch made more than enough with her illicit dealings to forgo the troublesome sideline of legitimate mercantilism.