She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (2 page)

It was a small apartment, a back bedroom and a slightly bigger living area, and though Reinhardt was in the corner it took me a while to realize it. Not wise on my part, as I had firm and concrete evidence of his willingness to kill. But I was stymied, all the same. You never quite get numb to the things you see. At least, I never did.

He was sitting on a stool that was too small for him, big ass balanced carefully, awkward and incongruous with the rest of the scene. He was staring at the kitchen knife in his hands, the blade slick with red. I stepped a long ways around Gertrude, and got a little closer to her murderer but not so close that I wouldn’t have a chance to flee if he jumped me.

‘Hello, Reinhardt.’ I had a small blade in my back waist band, and I kept my hand on my hip so that I could go for it if things moved in that direction. Reinhardt was more fat than big these days, but he was still plenty big, and anyway those excess pounds hadn’t stopped him from going to work on the woman who’d born and nurtured his seed.

‘Hey,’ he said slowly, without looking at me. Reinhardt was an oddly shaped character, his shoulders too big and his arms too long and his legs too short. He had a face that seemed to have been assembled from a random selection of spare parts. His nose was big and angular and his lips were thin as an old woman’s and he had a head like a melon topped by a pair of ears that seemed sized for a child and jutted out abnormally. In the past I’d found his ungainly visage made him oafish and easy to like. At that moment it was uncanny and rather horrifying.

‘Maybe you could do me a favor, go ahead and toss that blade into the corner.’

If he heard me he didn’t let on. There was no sound in the room but the buzzing of the flies, croaking a symphony over their feast. Flies come quicker than you’d think, quicker than the hoax, near as quick as remorse. Up close I was reminded of what a big fellow Reinhardt was, almost tall as me sitting, with thick biceps and a gut that bulged out like a battering ram. But the look on his face was of a man with nothing left, and even with him holding the knife I still couldn’t quite bring myself to feel fear.

‘Were you fighting, Reinhardt? She just kept talking and talking and talking, and then you snapped?’

He blinked twice, hands on his weapon, eyes on his hands. ‘I don’t know how it happened,’ he said finally.

I’d heard a lot of men tell me that back when I was an agent, leading them away in chains or buried in a room beneath Black House. And I didn’t always believe them but I believed them more often than you’d expect. Because most of us aren’t as bad as the worst things that we do, though it’s those things that define us all the same.

‘The hoax are outside. They’re nerving themselves into coming in, and I don’t imagine they’ll be too long. It’d be better for everyone if you came out with me. I’ll make sure it doesn’t go rougher for you than it has to.’ Though you didn’t need to be a scryer to see that Reinhardt’s future ended with a short drop from a gibbet.

He nodded at what I was saying but it was clear he couldn’t really hear it. ‘I can remember doing it. I can remember every single second. But I don’t know why it happened.’

‘I get it.’

‘She asked me if I wanted soup for lunch and I got up from the couch and I went over to the kitchen and got the knife that she was using to chop celery and I picked it up and then I—’

‘It’s done now,’ I said, cutting him off. I didn’t need any reminder of the meat rotting behind me, not what it had been before it was meat, and not who made it that.

‘Sarah saw me do it,’ Reinhardt said, as if he had just remembered that. ‘By the Lost One, she saw me do it.’

‘It’s done now,’ I repeated, though it wouldn’t ever be done, not for him nor for his child, not while they were still up and breathing. ‘You need to come with me. There’s no sense in making a bad situation any worse.’

For the first time since I’d entered the room Reinhardt turned his attention off the weapon in his hands, looked up at me with eyes vast and empty and unblinking. ‘I’d have done her too,’ he said. ‘If she hadn’t run away. I’d have done her too.’

There’s nothing so terrible that it can’t get that little bit worse. I took a step back, and the revulsion I’d been trying to keep off my face since I’d walked inside flooded over me. I could feel my lips curl up like paper thrown onto a fire.

Maybe that look of horror was what sparked it, or maybe he’d just been waiting for the chance. Either way it happened quick – Reinhardt knew what he was doing, he’d learned to kill during the war, and he’d had recent practice since. I bet his wife had wished he’d done her as easy, one smooth shot straight into the jugular, a spurt of blood that nearly reached me from halfway across the room. His hand didn’t tremble, not with the first plunge and not as he worked it across, and though that wasn’t the most horrible part of the afternoon I’d as soon have not seen it.

The hoax rushed in, late as always, two through the door but the second one ducked out as soon as he saw Gertude’s corpse, started retching in the hallway loud enough to wake the dead. Not literally – we had a pair within earshot and neither so much as quivered.

The lieutenant at least held it together, though I wouldn’t have so much blamed him if he’d done like his partner. There are only two kinds of people in the world – the first would carry the memory of what was in that room with them to their graves. The second would get off on it. Happily the former outnumber the latter, though it’s an open question to what extent.

‘By the Firstborn,’ he said finally. Haimlin was his name, for some reason I remembered it all of a sudden.

‘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.

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.