She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (4 page)

‘Just a moment,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll light a candle.’

There was some scuttering about. In the pitch black it seemed very loud, and the odor was almost overpowering, mildew and flesh-reek and wyrm-smoke baked into the foundations.

Finally, there was the sound of a match being struck, and the dim light of a candle helped me with my bearings.

‘You aren’t the Queen.’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘Well,’ the Professor said, shrugging. ‘Come in anyway.’

The Valaan tend towards tall and broad, but the Professor wasn’t one to walk with the crowd, and he’d bucked convention by being short, fat and round as a cannonball. His clothes had been expensive when he’d bought them, loud purple pants and a silken shirt, but these days you’d be hard pressed to pawn them off on a rag-picker. He extended his hand like he wanted me to kiss it. He had to settle for a handshake, though he didn’t seem to mind.

Pleasantries completed, the Professor returned to the big green comfy chair that sat in the corner of the room, set his candle on top of a neighboring table. Apart from a wooden stool in the corner, they were the only furniture left in the room. I could remember a time when the walls had been lined with shelves and the shelves lined with books, but they’d disappeared long since, sold off volume by volume to pay off the Professor’s cravings. I’ve heard people speak of themselves as addicted to reading, but I think those people never stole from their family so they could afford this month’s serial, or sucked off a sailor for a new book of short stories.

‘What do you want?’ the Professor asked, feigning annoyance. Whatever else he had lost, he maintained a keen sense of the theatrical.

‘Do I have to want something?’

‘You only come by and see me when you want something.’

‘You wound me.’

‘So you’re just here to chat?’

‘No, you were right. I do want something.’

He laughed and gestured towards the stool. I dragged it over and perched myself across from him.

Seen from the outside, crime looks as anarchic as a jungle, every man against the other. But in fact it’s as strictly hierarchical as a counting house or a caravel. Every member of the fraternity knows their place within it, from the biggest syndicate kingpin to the most decrepit Low Town streetwalker.

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to picking pockets. You start off as a slip, ferrying away with the purse once it’s been snatched, returning with the proceeds, getting your ass whipped red if you’ve been cutting into the group’s take, or maybe even if you haven’t. You pay your dues in that long enough and you move on up to stall, bumping into passerby, distracting the fish for those few critical seconds during which they lose a week’s wages.

That’s as high as most folk go. It doesn’t take anything but a set of hands and feet to be a slip, not much more than that to work as a stall. You want to take a turn making the grab yourself, you’ll need sly fingers and hungry eyes, and the sort of nerves that don’t get rattled by making something that was someone else’s yours. We call that working point, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

Of course, if you get right down to it, picking pockets isn’t so far from getting your pocket picked. It’s not like people go to the corner grocer with their life savings – you’re lucky to end your days with half an ochre, and you’ve still gotta split that a couple of ways. People who have a lot of coin on them tend to notice us that don’t, and the guards in the Old City are less apt to look the other way at a felony, or at least demand enough in bribes to make the whole thing pointless.

Anyway, if you do decide to start cutting purses you can expect to spend about six months as a slip, maybe a solid year or two as a stall. I made point in nine months, and what I learned, I learned from the Professor.

‘How you been?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I get by, I get by,’ he said, in no great mood to discuss the present. ‘What happened to that dagger you were carrying?’

‘In one of your pockets, I suppose.’

He laughed, pulled out the blade and threw it over to me. He did this every time I saw him, though even knowing it was coming I never caught him doing it.

‘That was your downfall, you know. Once you started carrying one of those it was all over,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘You could have been one of the greats, if you’d kept at it. One of the all-time greats.’

This was untrue. I’d been a good pickpocket – still was, if it came down to it – but I’d never been anything close to elite. My hands weren’t quite fast enough, and the few fractions of a second between what the Professor was capable of and what I could manage were enough to get you jailed. Besides, to be a really great pick, you had to be the kind of person that other people didn’t mind letting get close. Needed to look friendly, or at least harmless. And I never really could pass for harmless, not even when I’d been a kid.

The Professor knew it was a lie, but it was a good segue into talking about the past. He started unraveling the yarn about how he’d once stolen a pocket watch from the Duke of Stockdale, then returned it because he’d been so moved by the inscription. It wasn’t a true story, and I’d heard him tell it before. But I didn’t interrupt. It was part of the tithe, letting him recall his glory days.

And I owed him something, a lot of people did. He was the Professor because at one point he’d all but run a school for wayward youth, turning ill-bred larcenous miscreants into – well, more successful ill-bred larcenous miscreants. Of the five best pickpockets in Rigus, three of them had come up under the Professor’s tutelage. That was how he scraped by these days, former protege’s coming by to drop off a few coins to the man that had gotten them started in the business. If they were smart, they’d take a look at how it ended, learn one last lesson from the greatest pickpocket in the history of Rigus about stepping off before you’re forced. Most of them probably weren’t that smart.

‘… but you didn’t come here to listen to an old man ramble,’ the Professor ended.

‘Always good to catch up. But like you said, I only visit when I want something.’

‘And what would that be?’

Even when the Professor had been at his best, he’d been a sight too flashy, with his colored handkerchiefs and a touch of rouge on his cheeks. He had this trick he’d do, hand a mark some ‘dropped’ item while removing another of greater value, returning a wallet with one hand and lifting a golden bracelet with the other. Watching the vic stumble all over themselves offering their thanks, it was just about the funniest thing we’d ever seen.

Till one day it wasn’t. He miffed a snatch on the wrong chump one evening, got beaten half to death for his trouble. Kind of thing that could have happened to anyone. Will, if you ply the trade long enough.

Anyway, that was pretty much the end of the Professor as a serious ‘pocket. His body healed but his nerves were shot. He could still manage a smooth lift from a friend, but that thing that let him smile into a man’s eyes while impoverishing him, that thing was gone. For a while he managed to fake it with the assistance of pixie’s breath, a quick shot of courage before going into battle. But the thing about being a junkie is that it doesn’t leave room for much else. For a while a person is a junkie and a bartender or a junkie and a father or a junkie and a thief, but after a while he’s just a junkie.

Not that I’m one to judge. If it wasn’t for the Professor and his cohort, I’d have to work an honest living. I’m a real swell character, in case you hadn’t already gotten the drift.

I slipped the tin I’d taken from Reinhardt’s out of my pocket, tossed it over. He caught it, rattled it up next to his ear, opened it, looked inside. Then he whistled a jaunty little tune. ‘How did you get your mitts on this?’

‘I found it in my sock drawer when I woke up this morning. House elves, is what I’m figuring.’

‘See if you can’t get them to come out my way.’

‘They’re sedentary sorts, house elves. Don’t like to move much.’

I don’t think I’m being unduly flattering in suggesting I have some passing familiarity with narcotics. But still, there’s being an expert, and then there’s being an expert. You want to know about bread, ask a baker. Want to know about iron, ask a smith. Want to know about greed, ask a banker, or a politician, or pretty much anyone else you see. But you want to know about drugs, you ask a fiend. They’re not exactly a rare species, not in Low Town at least. Course, one that you can trust further than you can piss, that’s a bit more difficult to find.

‘What you know about it?’ I asked.

‘They’re calling it the red fever.’

The red fever had killed half the city and most of Low Town when I’d been about five. Amongst the numberless dead had been my parents, sister and pretty much everyone else I’d ever known. It was still spoken of in hushed tones – your average citizen makes the sign of the Firstborn when speaking of it.

It was a pretty good name for a drug. I was surprised it had taken so long for someone to use it. ‘Who’s calling it that?’

‘Everybody. It’s the big talk. Expensive as hell, but they say it’s the closest thing to heaven a sinner is likely to find. You try it?’

‘No. You?’

‘A bit out of my price range, as I said. A hit will set you back an argent.’

An argent was a lot of money for a real down and outer, maybe three or four pipes of choke, if I had my junkie math down. A person in the Professor’s position would need to save up for it, and people in the Professor’s position were not renowned for their thrift.

‘Where’s it coming from?’

‘Part of the mystery. Just showed up on the streets about a month ago.’

‘You must know where I can cop some.’

‘I hear Truss has a stash, and maybe Gerald the Idle. But they’re strictly bottom-feeders, unaffiliated with anyone. They’re not making it, or bringing it in.’

‘Then who is?’

The Professor shrugged. ‘Can’t say.’

I was old enough to remember when wyrm had started to be a big moneymaker, the Tarasaighn immigrants bringing it with them from the bogs of their home country, the rest of the population quick to catch on. But that had been the last panacea that had broken into the mainstream. The good people of Rigus can be quite parochial, when it comes right down to it.

‘That seem strange to you?’ I asked.

‘Of course. You’d think whatever syndicate is sitting on this would want to make their mint while they still have a monopoly. Sooner or later the opposition will figure out the process, even up the field.’

‘Unless it’s not one of the syndicates. Could be some up and comer, doesn’t want their new game shut down before it gets started.’

He shrugged. ‘More your territory than mine.’

‘Truss over on St Marc’s street?’

‘And Gerald the Idle. You thinking of paying them a visit?’

I got up off the stool, dug an argent from my pocket and set it next to the candle. The Professor shot me a look. I sighed and added another.

He smiled and rattled the tin. ‘Can I keep this?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve still got some use for them,’ I said.

He held onto it for a moment longer than he should have. Then he handed it over to me.

I put it back into my satchel. ‘In fact, it would be a good thing if you stayed away from this altogether, hear? It’s not like breath, or even wyrm. The side effects are … severe.’ Warning him was a waste of air, I knew it even as I said it. The Professor had made the decision to die in that chair a long time ago. There was no point in clinging to any standards of prudence, no point except in chasing whatever alchemical pleasure you could get, for as long as you could get it.

‘Oh sure, sure,’ he said. ‘I’m too old to be acquiring new habits.’

Bad to end on a lie. At least it wasn’t mine. ‘I’ll see you soon, teach,’ I said, tipping my hand to my head.

‘You forgetting something?’

I held out my hand, and the Professor tossed over my coin purse.

‘Do I need to check it?’

He puckered his lips up in protest. ‘I’m an honest thief.’

One day I would walk out of the Professor’s and not ever walk back in. It’s the rare wyrm-fiend that reaches their natural end. Then again, two-copper crime lords don’t generally meet She Who Waits Behind All Things in bed, gray-haired and surrounded by their grandchildren. Just as likely the Professor would be coming to my funeral as I would be going to his.

For some reason, that thought warmed me during the cold walk home.

‘Y
ou’ve been moping for two hours,’ Adolphus said.

‘Longer than that, probably.’

‘Longer than that certainly, but the last two hours you’ve been going at it something fierce.’

He wasn’t wrong. I’d come back from the Professor’s to find the Earl busy bordering on raucous, an inimical counterpart to my mood. I’d taken a corner seat at the counter and stitched my mouth into a shape which would not attract company. Then I’d started drinking.

‘I wish you’d knock it off,’ he continued. ‘You’re scaring away the customers.’

I glanced around at the small mob surrounding us. ‘We seem to be doing all right.

‘All right, sure,’ Adolphus said, leaning fleshy arms onto the bar. ‘But compared to what? Often I find myself thinking of the success I could have if you weren’t weighing me down.’

Adolphus the Grand was a sight to bring despair to the mind of any middle-aged man. In the height of youth he’d been as perfect a specimen of the human race as could be imagined, if you discounted aesthetics and just went on sheer physical ability. He was half again as tall as a tall man, and twice as big as a big one. His hair was black as midnight and he had a beard thick as razor wire. Course he was cur-ugly, but that wasn’t no hindrance to killing a man.

Twenty years later he was still strong, and he was still ugly, but only the last had increased with age. To the pockmarked skin and crooked teeth his parents had given him, and the single eye the Dren had taken away, you could add a dense cobweb of wrinkles and a gut that would shame a prize pig. I wouldn’t have bet against him in an arm-wrestling competition, and there was more than enough left to keep the drunks honest, but he was a far way from what he’d been. And if a superhuman like Adolphus couldn’t last two falls with time, what chance did we mortals have?