Daniel Polansky - Low Town

I drained my cup and stood. Adolphus waved away a customer and came over. “You leaving?”

I grunted assent. The look on my face must have betokened violence, because he put one huge paw on my arm as I turned away.

“You need a blade? Or company?”

I shook my head, and he shrugged and returned to chatting up patrons.

I had been saving a visit to Tancred the Harelip since I saw one of his runners moving dreamvine on my territory a half month prior. Tancred was a small-time operator who had managed to claw his way to minor prominence by an unsavory combination of cheap violence and low cunning, but he wouldn’t be able to hold on to it for more than a few seasons. He’d underpay his boys, or try to cheat the guard out of their percentage, or piss off a syndicate and die in an alley with a poniard in his vitals. I hadn’t ever seen any great need to hasten his appointment with She Who Waits Behind All Things, but mistakes don’t get made in our business. Selling on my territory was sending me a message, and etiquette demanded a response.

Harelip had carved a thin slice of turf west of the canal, near Offbend, and he ran his operations from a dump of a bar called the Bleeding Virgin. He made most of his money from the trades that were too small or ugly for the syndicate boys to touch, moving wyrm and bleeding protection money out of whatever neighboring merchants were pitiful enough to pay. It was a long walk to his shit establishment, but it would give me time to clear my head from the booze. I went upstairs to retrieve a bottle of pixie’s breath and started over.

The west end of Low Town was quiet, the merchants gone home and the nightlife pressed toward the docks, so I walked the dozen blocks to the canal in relative solitude. This late in the evening the Herm Bridge looked ominous instead of just dilapidated, its marble features made indistinct by time and petty vandalism. The ragged hands of stone Daevas curled in supplication to the heavens, their faces worn to wide eyes and gaping mouths. Beneath it the River Andel ran sluggish and slow, carrying the city’s waste in a stately procession toward the harbor and out to sea. I continued on, stopping at the entrance of a nondescript building a half mile west.

Noise from the second floor drifted down to the shadows beneath. I took a hit of breath, then another and another until the bottle was empty and the buzzing was like a crowd of bees swarming around my ears. I dashed it against the wall and took the steps two at a time.

The Bleeding Virgin was the kind of dive that made you want to scrub your skin with lye as soon as you walked out-it made the atmosphere at the Earl look like high tea at the royal court. Torches shed greasy light on the unpalatable interior, a crumbling wooden infrastructure set over a handful of rooms that Harelip rented by the hour, along with a stable of sad-looking whores. These last doubled as servers, the dim illumination sufficient to display a lengthy commitment to their vocation.

I grabbed a spot across from a breach in the wall that served duty as a window and waved down one of the waitresses. “You know who I am?” I asked. She nodded, dun hair atop a stretched face, crooked eyes dull and unfazed. “Get me something that hasn’t been spit in and tell your boss I’m here.” I flipped her a copper and watched her walk off wearily.

The breath was kicking in hard, and I held my fists tight at my sides to keep them from shaking. I glared at the patrons warily and thought about how far one well-placed act of arson would go toward improving the neighborhood. The server returned a few minutes later with a half-full tankard. “He’ll be out soon,” she said.

The beer was mostly rainwater. I choked it down and tried not to think about the child.

The back door opened and Harelip and two of his boys slid in. Tancred was aptly named-the crevice in his face split his mouth straight through, an aberration his thick beard did nothing to hide. Beyond that, there was little to recommend him one way or the other. Somewhere along the line he had acquired a reputation for being a hard man, though I suspected this was an outgrowth of his deformity.

The two hangers-on looked violent and stupid-the kind of cheap street toughs Tancred liked to keep around. I knew the first-Spider, a squat half-Islander runt with a lazy eye he’d picked up from getting rambunctious around a troop of guardsmen. He used to run with a small-time crew of river rats, busting into cargo barges late at night and making off with whatever they could find. I’d never seen the second, but his pockmarked face and sour odor bespoke ill breeding as surely as his surroundings and choice of career. I assumed they were both armed, although only Spider’s weapon was visible, an ugly-looking dirk that jutted obtrusively from his belt.

They fanned out to cover me. “Hello, Tancred. What’s the good word?”

He sneered at me, or maybe he didn’t-the lip made it tough to tell.

“I hear your people have been having trouble with their lode-stones,” I continued.

Now I was pretty confident he was sneering. “Trouble, Warden? How do you mean?”

“The canal is the line between our two enterprises, Tancred. You know the canal. It’s that big ditch to the east of here, filled with water.”

He smiled, the fleshless stretch between his upper lip and nose rendering his rotting gums starkly visible. “Was that the line?”

“In our business it’s important to remember your agreements. If you’re having trouble, it might be time to look for work more in keeping with your natural talents. You’d make a lovely chorus girl.”

“You’ve got a sharp mouth,” he growled.

“And you’ve got a crooked one-but we are as the Creator formed us. Regardless, Tancred, I’m not here to debate theology-geography is the interest of the moment. So why don’t you go ahead and remind me where our boundary is?”

Harelip took a step backward, and his boys moved closer. “Seems to me it might be time to redraw our map. I don’t know what you’ve got going with the syndicates, and I don’t care how friendly you are with the guard-you don’t have the muscle to hold the land you got. Far as I can tell, you’re an independent operator, and there ain’t no place for an independent operator these days.”

He kept nerving himself into the conflict that was coming, but I could barely hear him through the drone in my ears. Not that the particulars of his monologue much mattered. I hadn’t come over here for discussion, and he hadn’t rolled out his mob to help him negotiate.

The ringing faded as Tancred completed whatever ultimatum he was making. Spider rested a hand on his weapon. The unnamed thug flicked his tongue off a toothy grin. Somehow they had fallen under the impression that this was going to go easy-I was looking forward to disabusing them.

I finished my last swallow of ale and dropped the tankard with my left hand. Spider watched it shatter on the ground and I lashed out with my right fist, breaking his nose back into his face. Before his partner could draw a weapon, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and launched us both through the open window behind him.

For a half second all I could hear was the rush of the wind and the rapid pulse of my heart. Then we hit the ground, and my hundred-and-eighty-pound frame buried him faceup in the mud, a low crack letting me know the fall had broken a few of his ribs. I rolled off him and pulled myself to my feet. The moon was very bright against the dark of the alleyway. I breathed in deep and felt the blood drain from my head. The pockmarked man struggled to right himself, and I snapped a boot across his scalp. He groaned and stopped stirring.

Dimly I was aware that the fall had done something to my ankle, but I was too gone to feel it yet. I would need to finish this quick, before my body had time to wake to the harm I’d done it.