She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (7 page)

The wind snapped at us, carried the particolored smoke out into the firmament near as soon as we breathed it.

‘So that’s Low Town,’ Yancey said.

I nodded.

‘And how are you?’

I shrugged. Things were not great, but then again I was not rapping on the last door. ‘I’m old,’ I said, feeling it.

‘You’ve been saying that for years.’

‘It’s only gotten truer.’

‘How’s business?’

Business was a steady moneymaker in the degradation of fools, taking resources off men too stupid to use them properly, out of the hands of their womenfolk, the stomachs of their children. It hadn’t bothered me as much, back when I was on the breath. Part of that had been because nothing particularly bothers you after a good whiff, but part of it had been that I could at least pretend I wasn’t selling anything I wasn’t already doing. That had been a lie, of course, but a tolerable one. You could claim prohibition as the chief ill, and it was – if the Crown had any sense they’d slap a tax on it and sell it in shops, stoke their coffers and choke the life out of the criminal organizations that flourish off its sale. But even if they did, it wouldn’t make the trade smell any sweeter. At the end of the day I was helping people kill themselves, and there’s no dignity in that.

‘Booming,’ I said, with sad accuracy.

‘You feeling that way, maybe it’s time you started looking for an out.’

We all of us only have the one out, and Yancey was well on his way to taking it. ‘Thing about being a small-time criminal, there’s not much in the way of retirement.’

‘You ain’t so small time.’

‘I don’t have an organization – there won’t be anyone following behind me, kicking up a percentage.’

‘How about the boy?’

‘You know the answer to that.’

He hocked and spat some of what was killing him over the side. ‘So step off.’

‘To where?’

‘Not here. Isn’t that the point?’

‘Just leave everything?’

‘What you got keeping you here? A shithole bar, a network of pushers and lowlifes. The junkies will find another person to buy breath from, I can promise you.’

‘The bar’s not so bad.’

‘I don’t have the time to flatter anyone,’ he said, and looking at him I was forced to agree. ‘Stick around, you won’t live to enjoy your dotage.’

‘I’ve stumbled through so far.’

‘You used to be hungrier.’

After that we didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat there and let smoke blow away. It started to rain, light but getting harder, and I helped Yancey up out of his spot and into the house. By the time I’d gotten him back downstairs he was ready to pass out on my shoulder. I eased him into his bed, pulled the covers up around his neck, blew out the weak light coming from the lantern on his night table.

‘You’re all right,’ he said to me as I was leaving. His eyes were little slits in his head, and his voice was weak. ‘You’re all right.’

There weren’t but a handful of people who would say that to me and mean it. I didn’t like the thought that there would soon be one less of them.

S
o back when I was a kid I spent a few months working as a spotter for a Valaan named Martinus the Bull. That wasn’t really his name, but it was what he told you to call him, and Martinus was not the kind of guy with whom you argued nomenclature, making up for a limited wit with biceps the size of ripe melons. Anyway, we had this little scam where I’d hang around some of the more lucrative dice games, wait around for a player to walk off deep in the black, then shadow them back through the city and mark him out for Martinus and his boys to thump. It was a dangerous gig – the sort of person who pulls out of a dice game heavy in the purse is often the same sort of person capable of defending it, and as a general matter of policy the people running these little gambling dens dislike it when their best customers are robbed, and have concrete and unsavory ways of making manifest this displeasure. And all the money I made for Martinus, I didn’t see much of it, and most of that I ended up gambling away, cause how long really can you watch a group of men throw the bones and not want to give them a toss yourself? I bowed out of the whole thing about six weeks before one of the less forgiving tycoons had some thugs find Martinus in an alleyway and cut a half-circle into his throat. If I could have held onto such a fine sense of timing, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble over the years.

Anyway, I found myself thinking about old Martinus the next morning, while running a few vials over to a whorehouse in Brennock, when I turned around and caught a guy tailing me.

He wasn’t the worst shadow I’d ever shaken, but he was far from the best either. He had the basics down – kept himself at a reasonable distance, made sure his eyes weren’t near me when I turned around. But his costume wasn’t quite right, he was too well dressed to be a laborer and too clean to be a criminal. He might have passed for an artisan or maybe a counter at one of the merchant houses, except for the long sword swinging at his side. This in itself was something of a giveaway, weapons of that length being uncommon in Low Town, outside the price range of most of the rabble, and rightly seen as an encumbrance in stealth and movement. Some of the Bravos carried them, quick-handed fools trying to make names as duelists, but no bully-boy in the city would be caught dead in such bland garb, or be awake before late afternoon.

I’d first noticed him back at Keogh Street, near Brennock, and if for some reason you’d felt like tossing away the benefit of the doubt you might have allowed him some reason to be there. But an hour later we were deep into the bowels of Low Town, passing through the sorts of areas only natives would have reason to be. So it wasn’t really so much any failure of camouflage on his part – he didn’t belong in Low Town, and when you’d been there as long as I had, that was easy to see.

We were just south of the river, on the edge of the spider-web spread of alleys and side streets known as the warrens. It was market day, and even in the slums the autumn markets were pretty good, rich with the smell of roasted chestnuts and burned coffee and blood from the butcher stands and smoke from everyone. Set up in the middle of the thoroughfare a group of Islanders were playing a folk song, an upbeat thing with a nonsensical chorus of yelps and half-rhymes.

I stopped in front of a fruit stand, rich from the harvest, plump red apples and sour-looking cherries. It was being run by what I took to be the daughter of the owner, a doe-eyed girl with blond hair hanging past her shoulders. Wasn’t an easy life these peddlers had, a little farm on the outskirts of the city two-thirds entailed to the bank, the grinding need of the land, the pittance it gave out in return.

But for the moment she looked bright as the foliage, and she gave her little set speech as if it was the first time. ‘Good morning, sir. Apples are three a penny, cherries are two copper for a tenth-stone. All are fresh from our family farm, sir, barely eight miles away sir, in North Hempston.’

I gave her a smile and began inspecting the produce, though of course I hadn’t much need for them. I’d only called a halt after noticing the lanky Kiren leaning against a cask of dry cider next to the stand, sipping at a cup of what I assumed to be the same, a floppy boater obscuring his face down past his nose, the brim of the hat and the brim of the mug meeting in the middle.

‘Hey Warden.’

‘Knocker.’

The first big surge of Kiren had showed up some fifteen years back, driven by an internecine conflict in the old country the nature of which we pale faces were too simple to understand. They’d followed the path tramped down for them by previous waves of immigrants, the weak-willed or honest being ground up for cheap labor, those unsuited to carrying water carving out territory at the expense of their countrymen new and old. It wasn’t long before the Kiren had gained a reputation for exoticism and brutality that had once been firmly the property of the Tarasaighn. Their hitters were short men with dark eyes that spoke an incomprehensible tongue and seemed no more mindful of blood than a fish is water. With their numbers and desperation they’d quickly become a force to be reckoned with throughout the city, would have become top dog if they’d continued to grow at the same rate.

But of course, they didn’t. You can’t stay hungry forever. What the father earns the son squanders, and that’s a universal reality, true regardless of skin color.

Knocker was of the first generation to be born on foreign shores, knew no other world than Low Town. I’d first noticed him a few years back, he’d been running confidence scams near the docks, once took a few ochres worth of breath off one of my less acute couriers. I’d kept an eye on him since then, an up and comer to make use of or run off.

I was surprised to see him awake this early. If he’d stuck to habit he’d have been up half the night, dicing and generally being a nuisance. For all his bluster there was a sort of sweetness to him, though perhaps it was more a lack of savagery than any particular sense of decency. Regardless, he still hadn’t seen fit to slap a blade on his side and call himself a killer, and for a boy his age, in Low Town, that made him damn near a saint.

‘Feel like doing me a favor?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Feel like making an argent?’

‘Depends on how.’

‘There’s a guy following me a few blocks back or so, got a too-big sword hanging from too-clean pants.’

Knocker spat some of the slime in his throat onto the slime in the street. ‘Do I look blind to you, or just stupid?’

‘You aren’t using a cane.’

‘What you want done to him?’

‘I want you to get a friend or two together and shake him down, then let him follow you into the warrens.’

‘How many ways you expect me to split an argent?’

‘Fine, two then.’

‘Where you want him led?’

‘You know that dead end off Ash Lane? Across from what was Old Man Gee’s wyrm den, before Old Man Gee torched himself inside it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘There.’

From behind his ear, obscured by the long black tangle of his hair, Knocker brought the last half-inch of a joint to his lips. He lit it with a match from his boot, sucked at it a while.

‘Don’t tell me you’re too lazy to make a dishonest silver,’ I prompted.

‘Bad for my rep, getting caught slipping a purse.’ He banged a bony fist against his stained white undershirt. ‘I’ve got a name to live on – I’m the sharpest pickpocket south of the Andel. People can’t be hearing I miffed a simple snatch.’

‘No one would believe it.’

He puffed his sallow chest out, considered that for a moment. ‘What happens once I get your man to the warrens?’

‘You leave. But first I give you two silver.’

‘Can I keep his purse?’

‘No.’

‘He isn’t so tiny.’

‘Are we just going to sit here all morning trading insights?’

‘Point being, more certain if I had three friends, ’stead of two.’

‘You seem a popular fellow – I’m sure you won’t have any difficulty rustling up support.’

‘Three men, three argents.’

‘By the Lost One, you’re exhausting. Fine, three argents, but that’s the ceiling, and this has already gone on longer than it should have. You don’t want to earn supper, you aren’t the only man in Low Town up for trouble.’

I watched his spliff burn down to where the ember was near touching his lip, wondered if it was a parlor trick for my benefit or if he just couldn’t bear to waist a single curl of vine. ‘All right, I’m in – but I wouldn’t do it for anyone else.’

‘I’ll remember you in my prayers.’

He nodded and went back to sitting very still. I bought three apples from the blonde girl, who was either too young to understand our conversation or old enough to know it was better not to. I gave her an extra copper and she smiled rather fetchingly. Then I stepped back into the crowd, let it carry me south.

The market ended after a few hundred yards, and the mass of people eased out and quieted. A little further down I pulled off the thoroughfare and took a backways look at the action. It was something of a risk – if my shadow was paying attention it might be enough to spook him. But if Knocker and his boys miffed their play and things went to blood I wanted to make sure I’d have the chance to intervene.

And indeed, I was halfway concerned when I turned around and spotted Knocker approaching the target all by his lonesome – three argents split best one way, apparently. ‘You got a spare copper, mister? Spare copper for me to get something to eat for my mother?’

‘Shove off heretic, I’ve got nothing for you,’ the outsider growled, with more force than you needed to put on it.

‘Just a copper, a copper’s all I need? For my mom, see? Been a week since she’s had a decent meal. You ain’t gonna go ahead and tell me that you can’t toss a copper for my mother to get a loaf of bread?’ All the while Knocker doing his best impression of a wyrm-fiend, hands waving meaninglessly, slack-jawed, bug-eyed and blinking.

‘Don’t make me tell you off again,’ the mark said, this time with a palm on the hilt of his blade.

Knocker put his hands up in front of him like he was about to beg forgiveness – a dead giveaway if you knew him – then he gave the man a solid push.

It’s the most basic thing in the world for all it can be hard to remember – never let anyone get behind you. Knocker dazzled the mark with a show, while the one confederate he had chosen to assist him, a mixed-race boy no older than twelve, slid in from offstage and took up position on all fours behind him.

The muck he fell into was good for his back, but bad for his dignity. Also bad for his dignity was Knocker slipping his purse before he could react, then laughing and sprinting off down an alley.

Here was the one part where my plan might go sideways – because if our patsy had any sort of head on him at all, he’d give the purse up for lost, brush the mud off his pants and head back home. Chasing a native through alien streets is a sure way to find yourself not living. But something about this guy made me think he kept his brain near the hilt of his weapon, and my suspicion was gratified when I saw him sprint off in the direction of his attackers.