Daniel Polansky - Low Town

“I assume she wouldn’t have let herself be slaughtered without some sort of protest.”

“Maybe she trusted whoever took her,” I said, “but I’m going to guess you’ve got a theory you’re waiting to share.”

“I’m getting to it. The wound to the throat was the cause of her death-”

“Are you sure?” Guiscard asked. He was kidding, intimidated by her and trying to leaven the mood, but she couldn’t see it, conditioned to take whatever she possibly could as an insult. Her upper lip, which had joined its twin in a placid if not particularly affable dash, curved back up to reveal her canines, and her eyes sparked in anticipation of the coming conflict.

Much as I liked the idea of watching Guiscard get himself knocked down a peg or two, it had been a long day and I really didn’t have the time for it. “What else can you tell us?”

She snapped her head back at me, in her brittle gauntness and sharp movements resembling nothing so much as a kestrel scanning for prey-but I ain’t Guiscard and after a few seconds she seemed to realize it. Sparing a quick glance for the agent, who, if his head wasn’t lodged completely up his ass, was grateful for the reprieve, she continued. “As I said, the wound to the jugular is what killed her. There were no other injuries on the body, nor any signs of sexual trauma. She was bled out, then dumped earlier this morning.”

I rolled that over. “We’re caught up on the physical evidence. You get anything off the body?”

“Not much. The echo of the void is so heavy over her, it drones out almost everything else. And even if I push that aside, I can’t get anything. Whoever did this erased his tracks.”

“The Kiren, the one who took Tara, he worked at a glue factory. I had assumed he had scrubbed her body with lye or some other chemical that hampered your work. Could that have happened again?”

“I don’t see how. I wasn’t on the Potgieter case and didn’t get the chance to scan the scene fresh. That trick with the caustic might have worked for some of my less talented colleagues-I would have been able to find my way through it. But I was at the scene of the man who killed her, and the… thing that killed him had the same resonance I hear on Caristiona.”

I’d figured as much. There wasn’t one chance in a thousand the deaths were unconnected, though it was good to have official confirmation.

“You pick up any other connections to Tara?” Guiscard piped in belatedly.

“No, the sample I had from her was too decayed.” She shook her head, angry again. “I might have had more luck if you’d had the balls to pick up a piece of her, instead of leaving it to rot in the ground.”

We don’t make a big deal out of it, but the best thing for a scryer isn’t hair, it’s flesh-doesn’t have to be a lot, just a taste. The good ones insist on it, and back when I wore the ice, I made sure to deliver whenever possible. The little finger, sometimes an ear if we don’t expect the newly deceased to get an open casket. I had no doubt if I searched the scryer’s meticulously cataloged shelves I’d find jar after jar of pickled meat, short sprouts of sinew floating in brine.

This last insult managed to nerve Guiscard into a response. “What was I to do, Marieke-slip in with a pair of garden shears before the public funeral?”

The Ice Bitch’s eyes narrowed down to dark slits, and she ripped the sheet off the corpse, letting it flutter to the ground. Below it, the child lay in stiff repose, her mouth and eyes shut, her body white as salt save the dark tufts of her private hair. “I’m sure she appreciates your willingness to uphold decorum,” Marieke said, ferocious without being animated, “as will the next one, I don’t doubt.”

Guiscard looked away. It was hard to do otherwise.

“You said you didn’t have much to tell us,” I began, after I thought enough time had passed. “What were you leaving out?”

It was a thoroughly innocuous statement, but she took a moment to work it around in her head, examine it from all angles, making sure there was nothing she could take offense over, no unintended insults to catch on and toss back. “Like I said, I didn’t flash anything off the body, and the scryings I’ve performed have come up useless. But there is something odd, something I haven’t seen before.”

She fell silent, and I figured it was best to let her take her time rather than risk a tongue-lashing by speeding her along. “There’s a…” She paused again, trying to fit her thoughts into a language that hadn’t developed terms to accommodate the full range of her senses. “An aura, a sort of glow that animates the body. We can read it, follow it sometimes, track it backward from the spot of death, see it on things the deceased lived around or cared for.”

“You mean a soul?” Guiscard asked, skeptical.

“I’m not a fucking priest,” she snapped back at him-though frankly the profanity had already pretty much given that away. “I don’t know what the hell it is, but I know that it’s not here now, and it should be. Whoever is responsible for this took more than her life.”

“You’re saying she was sacrificed?”

“I can’t say for sure. This sort of thing is rare. In theory, the ritual murder of an individual, especially a child, would generate a pool of energy-the sort of energy that could be used to initiate a working of immense power.”

“What sort of working?”

“There’s no way to tell. Or if there is, I don’t know it. Ask an artist, they might be able to give you more on it than I can.”

I’d do just that, as soon as I had the chance. Guiscard looked up at me, making sure there was nothing else. I shook my head and he began his retreat. “Your assistance is appreciated, Scryer, as always.” Guiscard was smart enough to know the value of maintaining a working relationship with someone as competent as the Ice Bitch, for all that her idiosyncrasies left something to be desired.

Marieke waved away his gratitude. “I’m going to run a few more rituals, see if I can’t shake anything out before they bury her tomorrow. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Whoever wiped her clean was good, and thorough.”

I nodded a good-bye that she ignored, and Guiscard and I headed for the door. I was already thinking about next steps when she called me back.

“You, stop,” she ordered, and it was clear enough to which of us the command referred. I gave Guiscard the go-ahead, and he stepped out.

Marieke gave me a long, piercing look, like she was trying to see my soul through my rib cage. Whatever she made out through my aging mass of bone and muscle seemed to be enough, because after a moment she reached over the body. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, drawing my attention to the child’s inner thigh and the small array of red bumps that defaced it.

I tried to speak but nothing came.

“Figure out what the fuck is going on,” she said, her constant bitterness replaced by fear. “And figure it out quick.”

I turned and stumbled out.

“What was that about?” Guiscard asked, but I brushed past him without answering. Wren was standing next to him and he set himself to say something, but I put one hand on his shoulder and skirted him along, and he was smart enough to take the hint and keep his mouth shut.

Which was good, because at that moment I was no more capable of conversation than flight. The thought banging around my head was too big to allow anything else air to breathe and had upended what remained of my equilibrium, already battered by the events of the day.

I had seen that rash before. Seen it on my father one evening when he came home from the mill, seen it on my mother a few days after. Seen it cover their flesh like a second skin, lines of pustules that crusted shut their eyes and swelled their tongues till they went mad with thirst. Seen it put so many men in the ground that after a while there wasn’t anyone left to do the burying. Seen those little red bumps upend civilization. Seen them destroy the world.