She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (32 page)

Their entry was preceded by roughly twenty seconds of screaming, a duet that grew louder as they approached. There were two of them, a boy and a girl to judge by the harmony. Physically, they took after their mother, which is to say they’d never win any beauty contests. I got the sense they took after her in spirit as well, which is to say they’d never win anything. Such was their dedication to the battle that neither noticed my presence. I resolved not to do anything to interrupt their single-mindedness.

They stopped doing each other violence long enough to raise the issue with the magistrate. ‘Mom,’ the girl began, extending the word to about seven syllables. ‘Junior stole my sweetie.’

Junior could go without eating a sweetie. Could have gone without eating dinner or tomorrow’s breakfast as well. Really, the entire household would have been well served dedicating themselves to a few weeks’ fast.

‘That’s because she broke my dolly!’

It occurred to me then that perhaps I’d misjudged Junior’s sex, not at all an impossibility given that apart from a slight difference in height the two siblings were virtually identical, down to the hideous bowl-cut some sick bastard with a barber pole had chosen to inflict on them. I made a more concrete effort to ascertain the genders of the children in front of me, and came away confirming my initial conclusion. Junior was a boy, and had a dolly, or at least had had one in the recent past. Which was none of my business, of course, I mean I didn’t know a damn thing about raising a child. My toys when I’d been his age had been a well-used knife and a set of lock picks that I had, ironically perhaps, stolen.

Mom did not seem overcome with worry at the violence of her progeny, seemingly more concerned with the discovery that her carafe of wine was not inexhaustible. She held the neck over her glass for a firm five-count to make sure, then groaned her way to her feet and over to the cabinet for a second bottle. The children recommenced fisticuffs in the interim.

I was saved by Carroll’s arrival from the second floor, tromping down the stairs with something less than enthusiasm. Mrs Carroll would only be saved by the arrival of grim death, but that was her burden to carry and not mine.

Fifteen years had changed Carroll very little. He was still that dull brand of plump which can’t quite commit to obesity. His eyes were flat little slits in his face, his nose too small, his mouth far too large. He’d grown bald since I’d seen him last. Maybe he’d always been bald, I couldn’t remember. I hadn’t spent that much time looking at Fourth Sorcerer Carroll. There wasn’t much to see. If he hadn’t been an Artist, he would have been nothing. As it was, he was pretty close.

He didn’t recognize me, but then it had been a while, and there was really no reason to think that Coronet had represented a pivotal point in his development, any sort of critical nadir. Likely he’d continued on the same path, going in to work every day, putting his hand at whatever abomination the higher ups asked of him, coming home every night to his fat wife and ugly children. ‘I suppose this conversation would best be conducted in my study.’

‘I suppose it would.’

‘Call me when dinner’s ready,’ he told his wife with forced ease.

Mrs Carroll poured herself another glass of wine. I followed her husband into the adjoining corridor and towards what I assumed was his office.

The hallway was lined every few feet with tables displaying frilly decorative pillows, cloying strands of doggerel sewn into them. The walls were hung with paintings of things adolescent girls believe beautiful – pink posies, smiling kittens and the ilk. How to fit the décor with the woman who had presumably instituted it was a puzzle beyond my ability to solve. In our short acquaintance Mrs Carroll had shown herself to be a person well stocked with vice, but honesty bids me to add that sentimentality did not seem one of them.

I’ve always wanted an office, hardwood bookshelves and the bound volumes to fill them. Sadly, it was an affectation incongruous with the career I’d ultimately assumed, nor was I ever exactly sure on where it would fit in with the Earl’s established floor plan. Carroll’s was, give him his due, a lovely manifestation of the ideal. Small but well stocked, the volumes mostly history and, strange to say, poetry, arranged alphabetically by author. A comfy-looking armchair sat next to a small end table, and Carroll fell into it. It was the only seat in the room. Apparently Carroll did little entertaining. ‘I don’t understand why we need to go over this again.’ His voice was hollow as a dead tree.

That was a very curious statement, I thought, but continued forward as if I’d expected it. ‘You don’t need to understand why we do what we do. You just need to do what we tell you.’

‘Yes,’ he stammered. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘Run through it again. From the beginning.’

He threw his hands up in the air. ‘I owed the man money, a lot of money, great smacking gobs of it. Coronet was my out. I knew it could be re-purposed into something the addicts would go mad over.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s nothing more to tell.’

‘The man?’

‘Uriel Carabajal, obviously.’

The human mind is fabulously successful at recognizing patterns in the chaos of existence, piecing together seemingly random strands into a coherent whole. Sometimes it works too well – you get to forgetting that at bottom there is no grand conspiracy, no web tying everything together. Just an endless number of small, petty, foolish men, each grasping desperately for what they want and damn the rest.

Carroll apparently recognized my surprise, because all of a sudden there was a sheen of grease on his forehead and plump beads of wet falling off his nose. ‘I remember you.’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘You don’t work for Black House – they threw you out!’

‘They did indeed.’

He groaned rather theatrically. ‘I’m a dead man.’

‘It sounds like you dug your grave a long time ago.’

‘I can’t tell you anything. They’ll kill me if I tell you.’

‘Well, Carroll, here’s the thing about “them” – “they” are an abstract collection of agencies and interests. They don’t have a home that I’m sitting in, or a wife and children within reach of the knife in my boot.’

‘
Ś
akra the Firstborn, who sits above, have mercy on a poor sinner,’ he intoned.

‘Given your history, I wouldn’t think you’d want to be calling the attention of any higher powers,’ I said, taking out the aforementioned knife and pointing it at him. ‘And if it’s mercy you want, you’re better off aiming your requests a sight lower.’

It’s a narrow thing, breaking a man, especially one as weak as Carroll. You push them too fast and they’re likely to go catatonic, piss themselves, weep until they can’t speak. So I gave him a moment to regain some semblance of composure before asking my next question.

‘What happened to Coronet?’

‘They shut it down. They shut the whole project down, years ago, just after you left. Said there was some sort of leak, scrapped the whole thing.’

‘What happened to the test subjects?’

Carroll looked away from me. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘Try harder.’ I said, and I put some edge on it.

‘I seem to recall something about the Children of Prachetas Sanctuary.’

‘So if Coronet is shut down, then how come you can buy it on half the street corners in the city?’

‘There were two parts to Coronet – implanting a command into a subject required use of the Art. But to get the subject into a receptive state we used a powerful narcotic, made in-house, no relation to any of the more common drugs. It induced a potent sensation of bliss.’

‘And occasionally drove the user violently insane.’

‘Not everyone,’ he insisted. ‘A fraction, a small fraction only.’

‘Does Uriel know?’

‘Of course he knows. The money he’s making, you think he cares about a few corpses?’

‘So then all of this – the murders in Low Town, the city ready to tear itself apart at the seams – all this has happened because you got into hock with the wrong people?’

‘The Unredeemed are savages. I had to give them something – this house, all my property, it’s in my wife’s name. They said they’d kill me if I didn’t make good, I had no other choice. It was all I could think of.’

I’d seen enough men in his position to understand how it worked. You’re drowning, you grab on to whatever lifeline’s offered. You don’t worry about who threw it or where it leads. ‘Where you been cooking it?’

‘We’ve got a lab set up in Alledtown.’

‘What’s the address?’

He ducked his head down into his shoulders, shook it back and forth.

‘There’s only so many times I can threaten you before I gotta make good, or lose all sense of self-respect,’ I said, wagging the knife at him. ‘We’re getting very close to that number.’

‘There’s a warehouse at the corner of Classon and Brand,’ he said. ‘In the basement.’

‘Must be slow going, just you there to oversee it. Uriel force an apprentice on to you?’

He scoffed. ‘Do you have any idea how complex the process for creating the fever is? No ignorant black robe could pull that off. I’m the only one who knows how to do it.’

‘When did Black House come to see you?’

‘Three days ago.’

After I’d told Guiscard about red fever. ‘And what did they say?’

‘That they knew what I was up to. That I was to keep going doing it, unless they told me otherwise.’

Carroll ceased then to be of any interest to me, I turned my mind to what this new information indicated, tried to slot it into the picture as a whole. The reprieve I gave seemed to breathe some life into the half-man in front of me.

‘You’ve got some nerve coming in here, playing the hero.’

‘Oh?’

‘You know what they used to call you?’

‘Well-hung?’

‘The Old Man’s pet. You were in it as deep as I was, reading over those reports, licking your chops at the thought of what we were making. The collateral damage didn’t bother you then, you’d have traded a thousand lives if you thought it would get you what you wanted. How are you any different than me?’

‘I’m holding the knife.’ And I thought very much of using it just then, because Carroll deserved it and because what he’d said had gotten to me and because despite all the blood I’d shed so far that day I hadn’t yet quite had my fill. There was a second, standing in front of that sallow-faced monster, where it was a coin flip whether there would be two of us walking out of the study.

But finally I put the blade back into my boot and stood. ‘You aren’t worth the clean-up,’ I said, and meant it. ‘If Uriel finds out that I’ve been here, he’s going to kill you. He’s going to kill you anyway, once he figures out your process, but he’ll kill you right off if he finds out I’ve been here.’

‘I’ll keep my mouth shut,’ he said. ‘I’m not a fool.’

‘You are the very definition of a fool, Carroll. If you had any brains in your head you’d off yourself tonight, rather than let things string out another month or two. Cause whether it’s Uriel or the Old Man, I can promise this much – when they come for you, you won’t die easy.’

I closed the study door behind me, traipsed back through the kitchen. The kids were gone off somewhere, but Carroll’s wife remained, finishing off her next bottle of wine. If she had a wonder about what I’d done to her husband, she didn’t voice it to me.

B
rother Hume picked me up at the Earl next day around noon, and he was back in his usual outfit. The brown cap which was the hallmark of his half-cult was too big for his skull. He was adjusting it constantly – it made him look more like a schoolboy than normal.

We spent the walk in relative silence. If Wren was following the order I’d given upon waking him up rather brusquely a few hours earlier, he was dogging our steps. I knew I wouldn’t see him either way.

The receptionist at headquarters sniffed when she saw us and crooked her neck to face the wall. She had a lovely neck, as Hume seemed to notice, staring at it with undisguised longing. They didn’t make me wait this time, just ushered me into the main office.

Egmont was nowhere to be seen. His chair was though, and I thought about sitting in it just to needle Hume’s strict sense of propriety. But Hume seemed awkward enough as it was, standing in the doorway and not blinking. ‘The Director will be with you shortly,’ he said.

‘I’ll count the seconds.’

Hume remained there a while longer, then said, ‘I’ll go look for him.’

‘Take your time. I think I’ll stretch out on the desk and take a nap.’

The door closed. I waited about ten seconds, then stood quickly and started to rifle Egmont’s desk.

Even before I’d been a professional snoop I’d been a pretty excellent amateur one. Still, I had my work cut out for me. The bureau was a big oak number with enough drawers and chambers to lose a newborn in. I tried the big ones, found the first three locked and the fourth one open. Beneath a quarter-inch of seemingly meaningless notepaper, I caught a glimpse of an unlabeled leather folder.

Inside were three pages, most of them written in some sort of code, lines of doggerel and unfamiliar acronyms. I didn’t bother with them. Didn’t need to in fact, because I figured I had a pretty good idea what I was looking at from the one section that wasn’t in cipher, a list of names towards the end of the document.

Danie Cronje

Torcvil Barclay

Edward Corolinus

Petier Maggins

I’d never heard of the first three, but I knew the fourth well enough. It was hard to imagine my old subordinate shilling for the Steps, he was too dispassionate to throw in with their cause and too dull to succumb to any vice they could blackmail him with. But then, we hadn’t spoken to each other since I’d been stripped of my Eye, and things change.

By all appearances, I had found the list of double-agents the Steps had planted into Black House. I memorized the names quickly – tried to at least. My mind isn’t as sharp as it once was, though it’s an open question whether drugs or time did more damage. Then I put the folder back into the drawer, the drawer back into the desk, and my ass back into my seat.