Daniel Polansky - Low Town

I finished my meal and headed upstairs before the bar got busy. Somewhere on the walk home from the Aerie my ankle had started to ache again, and the short climb was more unpleasant than it should have been.

I lay down on the bed and rolled a long twist of dreamvine. The evening wafted in through the open window, airing out the musk. I lit the joint and thought about tomorrow’s work. What I had smelled on the body was strong, stronger than anything you’d use for cleaning a kitchen or bathroom. And a household cleaner wouldn’t be enough to throw off a decent scryer. Maybe the soap plants, or one of the glue factories with their heavy solvents. The Kirens had a monopoly on that kind of work, which was why I’d sent the boy to clear my presence with their chief. Wouldn’t do to make trouble for my real business while I was off pursuing this diversion.

I blew out the lamp and puffed ringlets of colored smoke into the air. This was a good blend, sweet to the tongue and strong against my chest, and it filled the room with threads of brass and burnt sienna. Halfway through I stubbed the tab against the underside of my bed and fell asleep, the low-grade euphoria spreading through my body sufficient distraction to drown out the noise of our patrons below. • • •

In my dreams I was a child again, lost and homeless, my mother and father taken by the plague, my little sister crushed during the grain riots that had destroyed the remnants of civil authority three weeks earlier. That was my first fall on the streets of Low Town. When I learned to scavenge for food, to appreciate filth for the heat it released around you while you slept. When I first saw the depths the average man will sink to and learned what there was to win in wading deeper.

I was in the back corner of an alley, my legs pulled tightly against myself, when I was jolted awake by their approach.

“Faggot. Hey, faggot. What you doing in our territory?” There were three of them, older than me, only by a few years but those few years would be enough. Its tendency to spare children was one of the most curious of the Red Fever’s effects-it was quite possible these were the oldest living human beings within ten square blocks.

I didn’t have a single object of value-my clothes were rags that wouldn’t have survived removal, and I’d lost my shoes at some point in the chaos of the last month. I hadn’t eaten in a day and a half and I was sleeping in a dugout I’d scraped against the walls of a side street. But they didn’t want anything from me apart from an opportunity to practice violence, our surroundings sharpening the natural cruelty of children to a fever pitch.

I pulled myself off the ground, hunger making even this exercise exhausting. The three of them sauntered over-ragged youths, their attire and appearance not much improved from my own. The speaker was a fever survivor, the angry cankers discharging from his face attesting to a barely victorious battle with the plague. Apart from that there was little to recommend him from his fellows, famine and misery rendering them almost indistinguishable, gaunt scavengers, ghouls amid the rubble.

“You’ve got some nerve, you little cocksucker, coming into our neighborhood and not even having the common decency to ask permission.”

I stood mutely. Even as a child I found the inane exchanges that preface violence to be absurd. Just get to it already.

“You ain’t got nothing to say to me?” The leader turned back toward the other two, as if shocked by my poor etiquette, then struck a blow to the side of my head that sent me spinning to the ground. I lay in wait for the beating I knew was coming, too inured to wonder at the fairness of it, too inured to do anything but bleed. He kicked me in the temple and my vision went blurry. I didn’t scream. I don’t think I had the strength.

Something about my silence seemed to get to him, and suddenly he was on my chest, his knees pinning me to the ground and his forearm pushed against my neck. “Faggot! Fucking faggot!”

From somewhere distant I heard my assailant’s comrades trying to call him off, but their protestations proved ineffective. I struggled briefly, but he struck me again across the face, terminating my halfhearted attempts at self-defense.

I lay on the ground with his elbow on my throat, the world swirling around me, blood thick on my tongue, and I thought-so this is death. It took a long enough time coming. But then She Who Waits Behind All Things must have been busy in Low Town that year, and I was a small boy. She could be forgiven for such a minor oversight, especially now that She had come to rectify her mistake.

The light started to fade.

A great rushing sound filled my ears like the roar of falling water.

Then my hand closed around something firm and heavy, and I brought a rock up against the side of the boy’s head, and the weight on my neck lessened and I brought my fist up again and then again until his grip was slack and I was on top of him now and the sound I was hearing were his screams and my own and still I kept at it and then I was the only one screaming.

Then silence and I was standing over the boy’s body and his friends weren’t laughing anymore but instead looking at me like no one had ever looked at me, and even though there were two of them and they were bigger than I was they backed off warily, then broke into a run. And as I watched them retreat I realized I liked the look I had seen in their eyes, liked not being the one to wear it. And if that meant getting my hands slick with little pieces of the boy’s brain, then so be it, that wasn’t much of a price to pay, not much of a price at all.

A wild spurt of laughter bubbled up from my gut, and I vomited it forth at the world. • • •

When I awoke my chest was heavy and my breath short. I propped myself up and forced my heart into rhythm, counting the beats, one-two, one-two. It was nearly dawn. I slipped my clothes on and headed downstairs.

The bar was quiet-our patrons gone home to beat their wives or sleep off their buzz. I took a chair at a side table and sat in the dark for a few minutes, then headed toward the back.

The fire had died to its embers, and the room was cold. On the ground next to the furnace lay a wad of unused bedding. There was no trace of the boy.

I walked out the front door of the Earl and leaned against a wall, rolling a tab and shivering. Morning was still a few minutes off, and in the twilight the city was the color of smoke. My hacking cough, spurred on by the autumn chill, echoed loudly through the abandoned streets. I lit a cigarette to ease it. In the distance a cock announced the dawn.

When I found the motherfucker who did for that girl, I’d make what happened to Harelip look like the caress of a newfound lover. By everything holy, he’d be a slow time dying.

Eight hours and six ochres later and I was no closer to my goal. I’d been to every operation making or using a heavy solvent from Broad to Light Street without so much as a bite. A few coppers were usually enough to get me information-if that didn’t work I’d flash a paper that said I was a member of the guard and ask less affably. It was easy enough getting answers-it’s always easy to find answers that don’t lead anywhere.

Wren had caught up with me shortly after I’d set out from the Earl, not offering an explanation for his disappearance, not saying anything at all, just falling in line behind me. He was getting restless, presumably not anticipating that working for me would prove to be so boring. I wasn’t enjoying our business any more than he was. The longer the search continued, the more absurd it seemed to have trusted the outcome of the investigation to my olfactory sense, and I was starting to remember that one of the virtues of my adopted trade was that people came looking for me and not the other way around. But the memory of a dead girl and my innate obstinacy drove me onward, hoping against the better dictates of reason that I’d get a lucky break.