She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (8 page)

The warrens aren’t so big, maybe a square quarter mile, maybe less. If you know what you’re looking for you can pace through it in ten minutes easy, though of course, if you don’t, you could wander around for half a day before finding an exit, in the unlikely event that the people living there decided to allow you free passage. Point being, it was easy to make up lost time, navigating swiftly through the labyrinth while Knocker led my pursuer around in circles for awhile.

I reached our destination and took a seat on a broken crate in the back end of the alley. From inside my satchel I took out a clasp knife and started to peel one of the apples I’d bought, separating out the red skin from the flesh beneath. The wreckage of Old Man Gee’s den stared at me, ruined windows like vacant eyes, the bottom floor collapsing in on itself like a set of broken teeth. It was the sort of place to give you the heebie-jeebies, if you were the sort of person to get them. I wasn’t, really, though I could see why the neighborhood kids maintained that strange lights could be seen coming from the place on moonless evenings, and a wailing heard above the wind. Never held much belief in that sort of thing myself – all the men I’d seen go into the ground, I never knew a one of them to come back for a visit. Still, it would be just like the daevas to curse Old Man Gee by sticking him in his old den. All that effort spent slipping the place, just to spend eternity staring at it.

My ruminations were cut short by the sudden arrival of Knocker, who sprinted in stage left with a face red from labor and a smile wide with sin. He dropped the purse at my feet, grabbed three argent from my hand and then dodged back across the street and out of view. I could hear his pursuer, formerly my pursuer, chugging towards me at a fair clip.

Knocker had led the man a merry chase – if he’d intended to lose him he wouldn’t have had any trouble. The man was fit, and enthusiastic enough about catching his quarry, but his sword was too long to comfortably run with, he had to hold it back so it wouldn’t trip him up. It was an awkward sort of locomotion, and it wasn’t improved when he came around the corner and saw me waiting for him – near enough jumped out of his coat.

‘Fancy running into you here,’ I said.

It was the first chance I got to look at him up close. I wasn’t impressed. His skull was prominent beneath his face, the hair above it cut to flat stubble. His limbs were long and fleshless – indeed from heel to brow you’d have been hard pressed to carve an ounce of fat from his frame. Give me a fat man any day, at least it means he enjoys something. In the scheme of things, gluttony is a pretty mild evil.

Wrath is a far more serious one, and he was moving quickly towards it before I cut him off. ‘Don’t do anything stupid – I didn’t lead you here to offer a convenient spot to be stabbed. The man I’ve got waiting on the rooftop yonder with a crossbow is a paranoid sort, and if you were to make any move he were to interpret as threatening – pull your blade say, or maybe just come any closer to me – well, I couldn’t vouch for your safety.’

Despite my warning, he went ahead and put his hand on his basket-hilt, though what good he imagined the sword would do against a bolt I can’t imagine. ‘You’re bluffing,’ he said, but he said it the way people say things they wish were true.

‘You’re welcome to die thinking that.’

His eyes stayed angry, but he eased his hand away from his weapon. ‘What are you doing here, and why do you have my purse?’

‘I’m here because I live here. Lived here my whole life, nearly. Might even say I belong here. On the other hand you, my friend, look about as out of place as a whore in church.’

He let out a quick hiss of breath, like I’d landed a punch. ‘I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I’ve got business to attend to at the docks, I was just cutting through the market to save time.’

I smiled a little, ate another piece of my apple. ‘I’m trying not to let myself get insulted, friend, but you’re making it awful difficult. It’s one thing to follow me around like a border collie, a person could have all sorts of reasons for doing that. But now you’re standing there telling me that black is white and up is down and toenail tastes like taffy. It’s rude – it suggests you think me an idiot. No one likes being called an idiot.’

I watched him consider and discard a series of lies. ‘All right,’ he confessed. ‘I was following you. But I’m not here looking for trouble.’

‘Then you picked the wrong neighborhood to go strolling in.’

‘I was hoping the two of us might have a talk.’

‘We’re talking right now. And I have to admit, thus far it’s been less than entertaining. And when I get bored I get grumpy, and when I get grumpy my man gets fretful. And when that happens people have a way of falling down and not getting back up.’

‘I don’t know who you think I am,’ he began, drawing himself up to his full height, hand back on the hilt of his blade.

‘I think you’re very far from home,’ I finished for him. ‘And I think I’d knock off the bluster if I wanted to ever get back there.’

I put a little edge on that last one, and he seemed to feel it. He relaxed his grip on his weapon, and he even tried to force a smile, an awkward, fluttering thing that died stillborn on his narrow lips. ‘This wasn’t the way I’d intended our conversation to go. Perhaps I went about finding you the wrong way – but I assure you, my attentions are entirely peaceful. My name is Simeon Hume,’ he said. ‘And I’m here on behalf of—’

‘The Sons of
Ś
akra,’ I finished. ‘Yeah, I know.’

An unexpected shot of truth hits harder than a fist to the gut, if you can time it right. The unconvincing smile on Hume’s face became an altogether honest look of shock.

‘It’s an amateur mistake, frankly,’ I continued, cutting another slice of apple, then pointing the blade of my clasp knife down towards his feet. ‘You clean up so nice and then you don’t even bother to change your shoes.’

If you’d told me five years back that the Sons of
Ś
akra – better known amongst those of us unaffiliated with the organization as the Stepsons, or just the Steps – would have risen to a position of social prominence, would include in its ranks nobles and members of parliament, I’d have laughed right in your face. A pack of zealots listing as a cardinal vice everything from hard liquor to sex on feast days – hardly the sort of creed to find fashion amongst the hedonistic citizens of Rigus. But that was before trade with the Free Cities dried up, and the mills started to shut down, and the last two harvests had all but withered on the vine. Since then their ascent had been impressively rapid, buoyed by the collapse in trade and industry and the general sense of misery that seemed to loom omnipresent over the city. Despair breeds conviction, when you can’t afford a pleasure it gets damn easy to decide it’s not one you’d lower yourself to enjoy.

Nowadays their church services were packed to the rafters with old women weeping and young men beating their breasts, and their brown-robed leaders made a ruckus in parliament about anything they could find to make a ruckus about. They ran orphanages and poor houses and occasionally led raids down into Kirentown, proving that theirs were loving gods with the aid of brick bats and cobblestones. Otherwise they could be found throughout the city, passing out tracts and preaching and generally being a nuisance to those of us whose labors focused on this world rather than the next.

In truth, I hadn’t been paying much attention to them, seeing as the only thing I care less about than politics is religion. I’d spent enough time in the corridors of power to know that the people you think are running things aren’t ever the people that are really running them. And I’d been alive long enough to know that if the Firstborn reigns above, he’s not paying much attention to what we’re doing down below.

‘I hadn’t thought them so recognizable,’ Hume said, taking a moment to inspect his treads.

‘I tend to notice jackboots when they’re threatening to march over my face.’

He bristled. He seemed like the kind of person who bristled easily, though I was hoping our association would be too brief to confirm that one way or the other. ‘There are many false rumors spread about the Sons of
Ś
akra, spread by our enemies, jealous of the love we have amongst the common folk and our success in parliament. We seek nothing more than an active role within government, for the greater glory of King and country.’

‘You can’t imagine how little this conversation interests me,’ I said, tossing away the core of my apple and pulling out a fresh one from my satchel. ‘I assume you haven’t been following me through Low Town to debate politics, and I can assure you that I didn’t lead you here hoping for a lecture on your sect. Now how bout you tell why you
were
shadowing me, before I make good on these threats I keep offering.’

‘My superior has a proposition for you. We wanted to know what sort of person we were dealing with, before we offered it.’

‘I’m the sort of person who doesn’t like being followed. I wonder whether that point would best be conveyed to your boss from you, or with your corpse?’

‘I may not seem like much to you, but my people feel otherwise. They’d be unlikely to take my being harmed with much grace.’

‘A lot of men have said that sort of thing to me before I made them dead. I wonder that it gave them much comfort.’

Credit where it’s due, the credible – though in this case, fictitious – threat of his demise didn’t rattle Brother Hume overly. One of the benefits of being certain about the afterlife, I suppose, is you aren’t horrified at the thought of reaching it. ‘I work for a man who is very much interested in meeting with you.’

‘And who would that man be?’

He pursed his lips but didn’t say anything. I waved my hand as if batting away a fly. ‘This is pointless – if you’ve got nothing to say, you can say nothing without me listening.’

‘Egmont,’ he said. ‘Director of Security Cerial Egmont.’

I hadn’t been paying much attention to the Steps, as I said, but still that was a name with which I was familiar. ‘And what would this meeting be about?’

‘That’s not for me to say.’

‘Cause you don’t know?’

You would think ignorance being the common state of mankind, fewer people would have trouble copping to it. ‘It’s not for me to say,’ Hume repeated. ‘Come in and meet with Director Egmont, he’ll make everything clear.’

‘Everything? That’s a tall order.’ It was clear Hume didn’t know anything more than what he’d said, and therefore pumping him any longer for information was pointless, if faintly enjoyable. ‘This has been a swell little interruption from the day to day, but I’m afraid I’m not interested in helping you.’

‘How can you say that, when you don’t know what it is we want you to do?’

‘Because it’s you asking me to do it. Your side isn’t mine. Rats don’t give no help to cats, and the cats offer their prey the same courtesy.’

‘They say politics make strange bedfellows.’

‘I sell drugs for a living, Brother Hume – I don’t lower myself to deal in politics.’

He was getting back to talking but I cut him off. ‘There’s no point in arguing with me anymore. My mind is set as a broken clock. So here’s what’s going to happen – I’m going to slip out of this alleyway, and you’re going to wait three minutes and do the same. My man on the roof is still watching you, and if he gets the sense you’re watching me, I’m afraid your superiors are going to have several things to be unhappy about. Dig?’

‘I understand,’ he said after a moment, though his eyes blazed rather furiously.

‘Good. Now after three minutes, you take your first right, then a left two more down, then straight on ahead till you hit the canal – I know, it’s not the way you came. The way you came isn’t the way you get back. That’s a crooked truth, but it’s one you run into more often than you’d think.’

He mulled that over for a while. ‘Can I have my purse?’

I fished it up off the ground and tossed it to him, noticing as I did that it was lighter than it should have been. Fucking Knocker – that kid was too damn smart for his own good.

Dull knife that Hume was, he had the thing halfway to his waistband before he bothered to check it. ‘I had eight argents in here,’ he said.

‘My fee for a consultation is a flat ochre – I assume you’re good for the rest?’

He belted his purse back on rather furiously, as if by strangling the leather he was getting some payback on me. ‘You might think about what it means to go against us.’

‘I get a deal on bolts. And on men who fire them.’

You can only push a person so far before they buck a little. That’s not true, some people you can push all day and they’ll come back begging for more, but Hume wasn’t one of these. He gave me the sneer he’d been waiting to offer since he’d seen me, the sneer of a man born on one side of the line for a man born on the other. ‘You can put on airs, but I know your big talk is nonsense. You’ve got a dive bar and a mutt boy who runs poison for you. You might act like the King himself, but it’s a bluff, and no good one at that.’

I hopped down from my spot on the crate, eased over towards him, turned my face nasty. ‘I hope for your sake that the people who make your decisions aren’t operating under that misimpression. Low Town is mine. Every broke-down whore shaking her ass on a midnight thoroughfare is keeping her eyes out for me, every lost youth leaps at the chance to do me a favor, every thug fingering his knife shivers when he hears my name, and makes sure to stay on the right side of it. The bricks in the street, the cracks in the walls, the smog and the smoke, the shit in the canal – I snap my fingers and an army rises up from the muck.’ I dropped the apple core at his feet and leaned into him. ‘There ain’t nothing here worth having – but by the Firstborn and every one of his siblings, there isn’t a man alive who’ll take it from me.’

He wasn’t quite quivering, but let’s just say if you’d been looking at us then, you wouldn’t have said he was the taller man. I went back to smiling, brushed a bit of dust off his shoulder. ‘And since this is my fiefdom, I can assure you – it’s your first right, then a left two more down, then a straight shot back to the river. You do that and you’ll be back in the Old City in a half hour.’