Daniel Polansky - Low Town

The giant Kiren stood abruptly, sliding through a narrow opening in the long row of tables. I rose and blocked his path, getting in close enough to smell the sour stink of his unwashed body, close enough that he could hear me drop the drunkard act and condemn him in my awkward but decipherable Kiren. “I know what you did to the girl. You’ll be dead within the hour.”

He shoved his paw against my chest and I tumbled onto the table. The crowd laughed and I joined them, chortling uproariously, enjoying my theatrics, enjoying the entire enterprise. I remained supine, listening to the ridicule of the heretics, watching him run off through the broad windows that flanked the door. Once he was out of sight, I slid myself off the table and moved quickly out the back exit, stumbling through a dirty kitchen and muttering something about the evils of drink. I pushed my way outside and started at a dead sprint, hoping to cut him off where the side street met the main thoroughfare.

I made it to the intersection and slumped against the alley wall casually, like I’d been there all day. The Kiren rounded the corner with his head turned over his shoulder, and when he saw me, his skin went so white he could have passed for a Rouender. I bit my tongue to keep from laughing, his fear potent as a stiff drink. Sakra’s cock, I had missed this-there are pleasures the life of a criminal cannot provide.

I bowed as he went past me, then peeled myself off the stone. He was almost broken now, guilt and terror overpowering him. Unsure whether to walk or run, he adopted a method of locomotion that was at once lacking in speed and subtlety. I followed at an even pace, gliding past the occasional pedestrian but not making an effort to catch up.

After a few blocks he twisted down an alley and I had him. He had taken one of those curious thoroughfares common to Kirentown that terminate within the center of the block, and provide no egress save backtracking to the entrance. A smile crept across my face. With days to plan, and all the resources of the Crown at my disposal, I couldn’t have run it any better. I slowed my pace and thought about how I would take him.

He was big, as tall as Adolphus though nowhere as broad. But like a lot of big men, I bet he never really learned to fight, to anticipate an opponent’s reaction, to recognize a weakness and seize on it, which parts of a man’s body hold firm and which parts the Creator botched in forming. Still, his lack of technique wouldn’t matter if he got those monstrous hands near my throat. I’d need to put him down fast. He had favored his right leg-I’d work with that.

When I turned the last corner the Kiren was looking around frantically for a means of escape. Like most folk with his inclinations he was terrified of danger, despite his size only inclined to enter combat when all other options had been exhausted. He swiveled back toward me and I could see his fingerhold on sanity slipping. Beads of spittle pitched from his lips as he shouted something vicious and beat one thick fist against his chest. I felt a sense of certainty wash over me, the bloom of warmth that came whenever I bowed to the inevitability of coming violence. There was no retreat now for either of us. I set my guard in front of my face and came toward him, circling left to throw off his balance.

Suddenly from behind me came a fierce chill accompanied by the stench of feces and decomposing flesh. My stones shriveled up into my body and I lurched sideways, covering my nose with my arm as I took shelter against the worn brick wall.

It was eight or maybe nine feet tall, although determining its exact height was difficult because it didn’t walk but hovered a few feet from the ground. Its shape was a blasphemous imitation of a biped, though sufficiently altered to make confusion with a member of the human race impossible. Lolling, obscene arms stretched down past the length of its body, each tipped by a pair of fanlike hands wider than my head. It was tough to make out more than that, as most of its body was covered by something that looked like a thick black cloak, but upon closer examination seemed more a strange carapace. I caught glimpses of the frame beneath the casing, hard and white as bone.

I hadn’t ever thought I would see one again-another plea to Sakra unanswered.

Its face was a contorted parody of my own, a husk wrapped tightly across ossein, eyes rabid and cruel. I felt a terrible pain in my chest and collapsed to the ground, the agony coursing through me so terrible that my long history of injury seemed as nothing before it. A scream died stillborn on my lips. For an awful moment I thought of everyone I would betray, every humiliation I would endure and evil I would perpetrate to ease the torment. Then the thing turned its head away from me and floated onward, and the torture ended as abruptly as it had begun. I remained on the ground, my strength utterly spent.

It stopped a few paces before the giant. The lower hinge of its jaw seemed to dislocate, stretching down a half foot to reveal an open and amaranthine void. “The child was not to be mistreated.” Its voice was shattered porcelain and bruises on a woman. “As she suffered, so now shall you.” The Kiren looked on with terror undiluted by conscious thought. With a speed that belied its earlier deliberateness the thing struck, locking a clawed hand around the man’s throat. Without apparent effort it lifted his body off the ground and held him there, motionless.

Between the half decade I had served in the trenches, and my long hours spent breaking criminals in the prisons beneath Black House, I had grown confident that there was no utterance of pain with which I was not familiar-but I had never heard anything to compare to the Kiren’s screams. He let loose a noise that spread into the depths of my skull like rusted screws, and I pressed my hands to my head so hard I thought I might burst my eardrums. Gore poured forth from his nostrils, less a nosebleed than an open wound in his sinuses, and he whipped his head back and forth, struggling against the grip of the abortion. So furious were the Kiren’s attempts to free himself that he crippled his hand raw against the unyielding substance of his foe, his fingers snapping as he clawed at the rough black covering. Some internal pressure erupted and his right eye burst in its socket, and his screams redoubled against the inside of my head.

Then they stopped, the muted sputtering and the fat swelling in his throat indicating he had bitten straight through the root of his tongue and was now struggling unsuccessfully to swallow it.

For all the many evils that stained my memory, I had no analog for this horror.

Finally the thing shook what was left of the body, like a terrier with a rat. There was a sharp crack and the corpse dropped to the ground, a tattered mass of ripped orifices and torn flesh. Its errand finished, the abomination twisted like a leaf on the wind and glided beyond my field of vision, the aftermath of the pain so intense I lacked the strength even to follow with my eyes.

Lying there against the wall, staring at the shredded body of the man I had been tracking for the last half day, I thought to myself that at the very least the Kiren hadn’t made a liar out of me-in all my years I had never seen a death so horrible. Whatever torment he now suffered was a release from that which had sent him there.

What with all the excitement I figured that was a good time to pass out, so I never learned who called the guard or when they brought the small cadre of agents surrounding me when I awoke. I suppose the brutal murder of a child rapist by a demonic force managed to break through even the aversion to governmental authority ingrained in the heretics.

Of course I wasn’t thinking about any of that as I was roughly shaken from my repose, my attention taken up with more immediate issues. The first of these was the unfriendly mug of a former colleague from Black House. The second was his fist balled up in front of my face.