She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (42 page)

Adeline was all but impossible to lie to. What took a Questioner an hour and a selection of sharpened metal to learn she could pick up in a second-long glance. Generally she tempered her insight with an astute capacity for not asking certain questions. I wished she hadn’t asked this one. ‘What are you two going to do?’

‘We’re going to handle some things that need to be handled. I need someone to watch my back, just for the next couple of days. Don’t worry about us – the things we’ve been through, this barely qualifies as a scrape. You’ll be listening to his stupid jokes before you know it.’

I think she must have known this was a lie; my story was full of holes big enough to drive a wagon through. But she didn’t call me on any of them. Perhaps some part of her mind – that bit below full consciousness which is concerned only with self-preservation – perhaps it knew that to inspect my claim too deeply would make it impossible for her to keep going. ‘All right,’ she said finally, though of course it wasn’t that at all.

I counted ten ochres from my purse and handed them to Wren. They represented most of my current stash, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be needing money much longer. ‘This is hers,’ I said, ‘but I trust you to hide it better. Two go to the Captain, once he drops you in Kinterre – two and not a damn copper more. There’s an account drawn up at the Ormando banking house, in New Brymen.’

‘How much?’

‘A little north of a thousand ochres.’

Wren released a thin intake of breath, though by my way of thinking it was an awfully paltry sum for a lifetime ill spent.

‘I don’t trust the men taking you there any more than I trust anyone else outside of this room, and you shouldn’t either. Lock the door, sleep in shifts. The first hint you smell of anything you ace the captain, and you do it public like, with the Art – you can do that, right?’

‘I can do that,’ he said, nodding fiercely.

‘They’ll be pissing themselves to think they’ve a practitioner aboard, and that should keep them honest for the rest of the voyage. But don’t kill more than two of them, or there won’t be enough people left to run the ship.’

‘I got it.’

‘I mean don’t kill anyone if you don’t have to. That would really be best.’

‘I got it,’ he repeated, aggravated.

That was all I had to say to him. Actually I had much more to say to him, hours and hours of monologue, but that was all I did say to him.

‘Adolphus will join us soon,’ Wren said or asked, I wasn’t sure.

‘I don’t have the time to repeat myself. You’ll see him in Kinterre in two weeks, or in the Free Cities in a month and a half. Find yourself at the
Kor’s Bitch
tomorrow morning before dawn. Don’t leave the room till then.’

That was the end of it, there was no point in a dramatic farewell, both because I was still pretending this wouldn’t be the last time we’d see each other and because I’m just generally not one for melodrama. Adeline isn’t either, but I suppose she’s further in that direction then I am, because before I could bolt out the back she stepped forward and took me into an awkward embrace.

I didn’t want a hug from Adeline. I was about to start doing some things for which being human was a distinct liability, and the smell of her hair and the feel of her fat arms holding me were sharp reminders of the few steps I still was away from monster. I squeezed her back and tried to keep my mind off the twenty years I’d known her, the meals she’d made me, the confidences we’d shared. Of what she’d meant to the best friend I’d ever had, that she’d been mother to the boy who was nearly my son.

Then it was time for Wren. My mouth was dry and I had a pretty bad headache, the pixie’s breath the cause and the remedy. Wren was watching me with an intensity that made me want to look away, so I didn’t look away, I looked back at him, harder, till he slid his eyes off mine. I reached my hand out. He took it after a moment, squeezed it harder than was really necessary. ‘Look after yourself,’ I said.

They weren’t much for last words, but they were all I could find right then. I left by the back exit, flinching when the door closed.

I
huffed breath till my head was the size of a watermelon, then went to kill a man. A lot of men, most likely.

The address Guiscard had given me was in the far east corner of Offbend, a half hour’s walk through some of the city’s less savory boroughs. I had daggers in my belt and my boot, and my trench blade swinging at my side. The crossbow hung on my back, more bolts than I’d need in my pouch. I moved at a rapid clip, steel rattling with every step. The carnivores looked away as I passed, made sure to give me a wide berth.

One-forty-three Stamford Avenue was a detached two-story wooden house at the end of a street of slum tenements. It was bigger than I had anticipated, which was worrisome. Crowley had brought six men when he’d come looking for me last time, minus the two Adolphus had taken care of meant four that I knew about for certain. It was best to assume there were more, that he’d re-upped after the fiasco at the Earl, that he knew I was coming for him and was well prepared.

It didn’t matter. Crowley could have had a dozen men in there, two dozen, a hundred. The end was imminent, and I was bringing it to them.

I needed to get the attention of the men on the inside, focus them in my direction. A warning maybe, except that I didn’t want any of them taking heed of it and making a break. I settled for a statement of fact, though if you didn’t know better you might have mistook it for a threat. ‘Every man here is a corpse!’ I screamed. No one said anything, but from inside I could hear the bustle of movement.

I never had much use for crossbows. They break easy and they’re slow to reload, and they’re inaccurate as hell, or at least I am with them. But they’re powerful – a bolt will go through an oak door like it was paper, and come out the other end bloody. It was a good opening, which was why I’d taken it out from my stash.

I’d taken something else out as well, a cloudy jewel in a silver setting. Crispin’s Eye, the same one I took from his body after I’d gotten him killed six years earlier.

But first things come first. I nocked a quarrel to the crossbow and settled along the sights. This was one of the newer versions, a simple trigger as the firing mechanism. I hadn’t used one since the war, was unprepared for the kick against my shoulder that would swell into a bruise if I survived the next few minutes. The bolt spiraled towards the door, and I quickly forgot about it.

The Eye was warm in my off hand, warmer than a normal stone would be, and I concentrated on that warmth, let it roll through my palm and down my arm. Let it go deeper, coasting with my blood as it pumped into my body, down into my chest and somewhere deeper still. Swam in it, let it overtake me, breathed it down in place of air. It felt like I was under forever, though I knew from previous experience that it had lasted only a fraction of a second.

When I opened my eyes it was on a new world. A horsefly fastened around the discharge of a nearby outhouse, and I could count the beat of its tiny wings. The bolt I’d just fired spun lazily through the ether, and if I wanted I could have numbered each bristle of its feathers. I could have reached out and grabbed it in flight, sprinted ahead and beat it to the target.

Instead I dropped the crossbow, its descent slow as a feather’s, then sprinted around the back. By the time the bolt reached its destination I had reached mine, though I heard its effects with uncanny clarity – heard it puncture wood and rupture flesh, heard the sharp intake of breath and the scream that followed.

I made the second-floor terrace in a single leap, grabbing the balcony with an outstretched hand and swinging myself up after – an impossible feat, but then I wasn’t human any longer. The back door was locked and barred. I touched it with the palm of my hand and it burst like a ripe blister, splintering wood through the interior.

Inside were two men, very much not expecting to die. Their heads were turning towards me, swiveling in surprise or terror, it was never quite clear, because before sentiment could manifest on their faces I did for both of them, two strikes with my trench blade, the hardened steel cutting through flesh as easily as air.

I was into the next room before their bodies bounced off the ground. An injured man lay groaning on a bed in the corner. His face was wrapped tight with cloth, Adolphus’s handiwork presumably, and I took a thin sort of pride in thinking of my old friend’s strength. I finished what he had started, one quick severing stroke doing for the man’s body and the bunk he lay on top of.

Three down in less time than it took to finish a sentence, four if you counted the one downstairs, screaming his short way to death. I was burning through my future quickly now, sunny afternoons in the shade and cool autumn evenings, but I didn’t expect I’d ever see them so there wasn’t any point in being miserly. There were more men than I’d thought there would be, I could hear them shuffling below – but what did numbers matter? Stack the deck all you want, I had the high card stuffed into my cuff.

Down the steps and there was one in front of me, and then there were just parts of him – a hand clutching a sword in the corner, a half-shorn head in the other, lips still quivering. The next one was faster, or maybe the buff was starting to wear off, whatever it was he got his sword up to parry. My movements were too swift for the steel to take it any longer, and my blade shattered, fragments flying off in all directions. I was too quick for this also, ducking beneath the shrapnel, but my opponent was just a man, and he screamed as the cloud of metal entered his face and his neck, leaving him blind and disfigured and well on the way to death.

I thought about grabbing a weapon off a corpse, but decided there wasn’t any point. My hands were a personal introduction to She Who Waits Behind All Things. In the front room a man rolled on the ground with my bolt stuck in his chest, two others standing over top of him. The first had his back turned and I could hear his spine shatter as I set my foot against it, internal organs rupturing into pulp. The second had his sword out, a long saber that he tried to keep between us, an admirable if useless tactic. I slipped past his guard like he was a stone statue, brought my fist up to his cheek, watched his head rotate halfway around his spine.

There was a noise from behind me and I whirled in time to catch Crowley burst through the door. It took me a second – not really a second, it felt like a second but it wasn’t that, wasn’t a tenth of that – to realize that we were moving at the same speed. It made sense – we’d both gone all in at this point. He started to draw his weapon, the gleaming, beautiful short sword that’s the second most valuable object an agent possesses, and I wound up and kicked him in the crotch hard enough to ensure whatever bastards he had running around wouldn’t walk right for a solid week. A blow like that would have put a normal man out of action, hell, a blow like that would have outright killed most men, but Crowley and I were both well beyond that.

Still, it was enough to stun him for whatever fraction of a moment we were both operating in, and while it lasted I knocked the weapon from his hand. I had a selection of daggers about my person and I was damn sure Crowley had the same, but neither of us went for them. We went for each other, our hate so pure as to allow no intermediary.

I’m not sure what it would have looked like to someone peeking in through the window – flashes of color, vague kinetic bursts, each individual movement taking place far too quickly to make out. We were both spending our future at a tremendous pace, years, decades, there was no way of knowing. Whichever one of us survived this would come out an old man.

There was no art to our combat, just two people wailing on each other and waiting to see who dropped. He hit me in the chest with a punch that would have fractured stone, but it barely knocked the wind out of me. I returned it, three quick shots to his face, but on the third I broke a knuckle, could feel it crack against the bent cartilage of Crowley’s nose.

I could feel myself losing the buff, my motions getting laggard, the honey-sweet spot that had kept me superhuman impossible to maintain. Crowley hadn’t been under as long, or maybe he wanted it more than I did. Regardless, he was quick to take advantage of my weakness, wrapping both hands around my throat and squeezing with admirable intensity.

I fought back as best I could, short, savage blows against his face. My broken hand screamed at me every time I connected, begged me to stop, but I ignored it and kept throwing. Crowley’s face was a haunch of raw meat, an open wound above a fat neck. But he didn’t slacken his grip, indeed he strengthened it against the pain. I reared back and threw everything into one final blow, and it collapsed the socket of his eye, breaking the cavity, off-white ooze running down his face.

But still he wouldn’t let go. At bottom, I think I was not the hater that Crowley was.

The gem fell from my hand, hit the floor and rolled into a corner. Crowley dropped down into normal time, smiling through a broken jaw filled with broken teeth, his one good eye jubilant.

Things went dark, the scope of my sight closing inward. The last time this had happened Adolphus had been there to save me. I’d let him die and I’d failed to avenge him, and I deserved what was coming.

The pain started to go away. The pain is always the last thing to go away, but I held onto it as long as I could.

Then the pressure on my throat eased, and the light came back. The boy was standing there, amidst the corpses. He had his hands positioned strangely, fingers interlaced as if to throw shadows against the wall. Crowley seemed not to recognize Wren, he was so caught up in the thrill of a fresh homicide. He started to say something, but never finished.

Wren reshuffled his hands. There was a very bright glow, like staring at the sun if the sun decided to come down and say hello. The pressure on my throat eased away. It was the only thing keeping me in place, and I collapsed onto the ground.

Crowley collapsed next to me. The skin and flesh on his torso were burned away, I could count each organ, watch his gray lungs heaving, his heart beat its last. His one good eye centered on me. I watched it flutter to a close.