Daniel Polansky - Low Town

At a worn counter sat an equally worn grandmother, her gray face not changing a fraction of an inch throughout the entire interview. No, none of her workers had been absent the last three days. There are only two of them, they are both women, and they work six days a week between sunup and midnight. On the merits, it was not a story sufficiently interesting to warrant the coppers I gave her.

I stepped out of the tiny shop and into the afternoon light, thinking it was time to call it off, head back to the Earl to regroup, when the wind changed direction and brought with it a familiar scent. A smile stretched the corners of my mouth. Wren saw it and cocked his head curiously. “What is it?” he asked, but I ignored him and set myself against the breeze.

Two blocks farther on and the acrid scent had grown stronger. A few more steps and it was almost overpowering, and a few steps past that I realized why. In front of us stood a massive glue factory, a stone gatehouse leading to a wide work yard where a small army of Kirens submerged bone and marrow in boiling vats. I was close. I opened the door and headed inside, Wren a half step behind me.

A quick flash of my fake papers and the manager was the very picture of amicable obsequiousness. I spoke in worse Kiren than I was capable of. “Workers, all here last three day? Any no?” I put an argent on the table and his eyes lit up. “Important info, big price.” A half second for his conscience to justify selling out a member of his race to a foreigner, and the coin disappeared and he pointed discreetly to a man in the work yard.

He was bigger than me, bigger than almost any Kiren I’d ever seen, the heretics tending toward short and wiry. He carried a huge sack of powder toward one of the tanks in the courtyard, and there was a dull, plodding quality to his movements. The right side of his face bore some light bruising, the kind that could have been made by a young girl trying frantically to defend herself against a man bent on her despoliation. Of course it could have been made by any of a thousand other things.

But it hadn’t been.

And I felt that old thrill buzzing up from my groin, filtering through my chest and into my extremities. This was the one-dead eyes only vaguely reminiscent of his fellows, the set of his face betraying his crimes even at this distance. A peculiar grin crept across my face, one I hadn’t worn since before I had been stripped of the Crown’s authority. I breathed deep of the poisoned air and bit back a chuckle.

“Boy, go back to the Earl. You’re done for the night.”

Having spent so much time on the pursuit, Wren understandably wanted to be in on the payoff. “I’ll stay.”

The Kiren was looking back at me now, and I spoke without taking my eyes off him. “This ain’t an equal partnership, you’re my lackey. If I tell you to swallow a hot coal, you’ll sprint to the nearest fire, and if I tell you to head out, you’ll disappear. Now… disappear.”

Wren held his ground for a moment before turning away. I wondered if he’d head back to the bar or fade off into the streets to repay my insult. I figured the latter but wasn’t much concerned either way.

The Kiren was trying to decipher the origins of my interest. Now his crimes were running through his memory unbidden, his mind trying to convince his nerves that my attentions were innocent, that they had to be, that there was no way I could know.

I put another argent down on the table and said to the owner in pidgin, “I wasn’t here.” The manager bowed slavishly and the argent went into the folds of his robe, a vacant grin plastered across his face. I returned it but my gaze never left the target. A few seconds’ pause to work his nerves, then I turned and walked out of the building.

This sort of operation would better be done with three more people, one to watch each exit and an extra just to be safe, but I wasn’t worried. It seemed unlikely my man would run the risk of quitting work early. I could picture him inside the dusty pen trying to convince himself his fears were unwarranted, that I was just some ignorant guai lo, and after all he had been diligent, careful with the body, had even gone so far as to clean it with the acid he had stolen from work. No one had seen. He would finish out his shift.

I sat on a barrel in an alley across from the main entrance and waited for the shadows to lengthen. Back when I was an agent I had once crouched outside a whorehouse for eighteen hours dressed as a beggar until my quarry stumbled out and I had the chance to smack him in the head with a crutch. But that was when I was in fighting trim-patience is a skill that withers quickly when not used. I resisted the urge to roll a cigarette.

An hour passed, then another.

I was grateful when the bell above the door clanged, announcing the workday’s end, and the Kiren filtered rapidly out of the mill. I pushed my aching body up from its perch and took up a spot in the back of the crowd. My target towered over his fellows, an advantage in shadowing him that I didn’t need but would take. The horde headed south, filtering into a dilapidated drinking house marked by Kiren characters unfamiliar to me. I sat outside and rolled a tab. A few minutes trailed away with the smoke. I stubbed out the butt and headed inside.

The bar was the kind common to heretics, wide and dimly lit, filled with rows of long wood tables. A surly, inattentive staff brought bowls of bitter green kisvas to anyone with the money to pay. I took a chair against a back wall, conscious of being the only non-Kiren in the place but not letting it nettle me. A server with a face that had been hit with an oak branch walked by, and I ordered a draft of what passes for liquor among the foreign born. It came with surprising speed, and I sipped it while searching the room.

He sat alone, unsurprisingly. His kind of depravity tends to mark a man, and in my experience people can practically smell it. The other workers wouldn’t describe it that way, of course. They would say he was odd, or quiet, or that he had rotting teeth and didn’t shower-but what they meant was there was something wrong with him, something you could feel if not name. The really dangerous ones learn to hide it, to camouflage their madness amid the sea of banal immorality surrounding them. But this one wasn’t smart enough for that, and so he sat alone on the long bench, a solitary figure among the clumps of laughing workmen.

He pretended not to notice my attention but downed his kisvas with a speed that belied his ease. Frankly, I was impressed with his composure-I was surprised he even had the presence of mind to follow through with his normal after-work routine. I checked my bag for the straight razor I kept attached to the canvas. It wouldn’t be much use as a weapon, but it would come in handy for what I planned after. I gave him a wave. He blanched and his eyes flickered away from mine.

It was time to step this up a notch. I drained the remnants of my kisvas, grimacing at the sour aftertaste, and moved from the back table to join my prey. As he realized what I was doing, his mouth shriveled up and he stared down into his drink. The men around him glared up at me anxiously, dislike of their compatriot contending against the instinctive antagonism of similarly colored folk toward an intruder of a different one. I disarmed them with a wide smile, half laughing, feigning drunkenness. “ Kisvas hao chi! Kisvas good!” I bellowed, and rubbed my stomach.

Their suspicions assuaged, they returned my grin, happy to see a white man play the jester. They chattered back and forth, too rapidly for me to decipher.

My target didn’t share their amusement or fall for my ploy. I didn’t want him to. I dropped myself onto a spot on the bench across from him and repeated my mantra. “Kisvas hao chi!” I continued, broadening my smile to the point of imbecility. “ Nu ren [young girl] hao chi ma? ” I asked. Desperation sweated through his sallow skin. I spoke louder. “Kisvas hao chi! Nu ren hao hao chi!”