Daniel Polansky - Low Town

“I knew a priest once who liked to say that the Oathkeeper prefers to work through imperfect vessels.” I suspected it had been the Frater’s favorite aphorism because he couldn’t go an hour without a half vial of breath, but that was neither here nor there. “And has the sorcerer made good on his promises?”

“Not yet. But I’m confident in the eventual success of our enterprise.”

Did this enterprise include the murder of two children and opening a door to the abyss? I wouldn’t put it past either of them, but then suspicion isn’t the same as certainty, let alone evidence. I’d pushed the duke as far as he’d go, so I went quiet. He’d called me here for a reason; if I waited long enough, I figured he’d get to it.

“It wouldn’t surprise you to hear that I made inquiries into your past, into your conduct and character, before deciding to do business with you.”

“My life’s an open book.” With the pages torn out, but someone with the Blade’s draw wouldn’t have had trouble getting the outline. “And I’m not that easily surprised.”

“They say you’re a modest criminal presence, not attached to any of the bigger players. They say you’re reliable, quiet.”

“Do they?”

“They say something else too-they say you used to play on the other side of the fence, that you wore the gray before taking up your current occupation.”

“They’ll say I was a babe in swaddling clothes if you go back far enough.”

“Yes, I suppose they would, wouldn’t they? What incited it? Your fall from grace?”

“Things happen.”

“True, exactly as you say. Things happen.” His eyes traced patterns on the wall behind me, and the fire crackled in the corner. His face took on a wistful quality that tends to augur monologue, and, sure enough, the pregnant pause gave birth to soliloquy.

“It’s strange, the paths a man finds himself on. In the storybooks everyone’s granted some critical moment, when the road forks and your options are laid out clear in front of you: heroism or villainy. But it’s not like that, is it? Decisions follow decisions, each minor in and of itself, made in the heat of the moment or on the dregs of instinct. Then one day you look up and realize that you’re stuck, that every muttered answer is a bar in the cage you’ve built, and the momentum of each choice moves you forward as inexorably as the will of the Firstborn.”

“Eloquent, but untrue. I made a decision, once. If the consequences were worse than I had anticipated… that’s because it was a bad decision.”

“But that’s my point, you see. How can you know which choices matter and which choices don’t? There are decisions I have made that I regret, that were-that were not who I am. There are decisions I would unmake, were it possible to do so.”

By the Lost One, he was worse than the heretics. What was he admitting to? The children were dead-there was no do-over coming on that. Or was I reading subtlety where none existed? Was Beaconfield the sort of patrician who likes to reminisce with us low folk about the difficult and forlorn nature of human existence? “One way or the other, we pay what we owe.”

“Then there is no hope for any of us?”

“None.”

“You’re a cold man.”

“It’s a cold world. I’ve adjusted to the temperature.”

His jaw tightened. “Quite right, quite right. We play our hands out to the end.”

Beaconfield began radiating something that might have been threatening or might have been just general aristocratic disdain-it was tough to tell. I was relieved when a knock signaled the end of our meeting.

We both rose and moved toward the exit. The Blade opened the door, and Tucket muttered a few words to his master before disappearing.

“Thank you for your services,” Beaconfield began. “It occurs to me I may need to make use of them in the future, perhaps before Midwinter. You’re still at the Staggering Earl, then, with your comrade from the war and his wife?” he asked, the threat obvious and unanticipated.

“A man’s home is his castle.”

He smiled. “Indeed.”

It had been a long day, as long a day as I could remember, and as I headed back the way I’d come part of me hoped that I’d be able to make the exit without running into the duke’s next appointment. But the rest figured that he was worth taking another run at, and this latter portion was gratified when I reached the top of the steps and saw Brightfellow seated on a bench below, looking every bit as prepossessing as he had during our first meeting. He pushed himself up to his feet and broke into a broad grin, and so numerous were Beaconfield’s parlor steps that I got to spend a good fifteen seconds staring at it as I descended.

I hadn’t expected Brightfellow to have transformed himself into a respectable member of the human race in the day since we’d seen each other, and he’d been kind enough not to refute my assumption. If he wasn’t wearing the same soiled black suit as when we’d met, he was in a close enough cousin to make my confusion reasonable.

But there was something about the man that struck me, something that I’d noticed earlier but hadn’t been able to square with the rest of him. A lot of men affect hardness, fortifying themselves with dreams of their potential menace like it was sack wine. It was something of a local pastime in Low Town, rent boys and bumblefucks leaning against crumbling brick walls, convincing one another that they were deadlier than an untreated wound, that their reputation kept passersby on the far side of the street. After a while they become part of the scenery. There are some things a man can’t fake, and lethality is one of them-a lapdog might learn to howl, even bare its teeth on occasion, but that don’t make it a wolf.

The real ones don’t put on airs. You can feel what they are in the bottom of your stomach. Brightfellow was a killer. Not like the Kiren who’d taken Tara, not a maniac-just a murderer, an everyday sort of fellow who’d put a few members of his species in the ground and not felt any particular way about it. I set that thought squarely in my mind as I went to meet him-that the buffoonish exterior was only part of who he was, and maybe not a big part either, a sliver he’d ballooned up to cover the rest.

I pulled out my tobacco pouch, rolling up the cigarette I’d wanted to light from the moment I’d stepped inside the Blade’s mansion, figuring the smoke might do something to cover up Brightfellow’s unwashed meat. He held his cap in hand, and his uneven teeth formed a false smile.

“Well, if it ain’t the funny man himself. How you doing, funny man?”

“Tell me something, Brightfellow-do you make a point of eating liver before you see me, or is it such a regular part of your schedule as to make the coincidence unavoidable?”

He laughed nastily, grinding his yellowed ivories against one another. “Caught my name, did you, funny man? Nice to see I’ve gained a little renown-sometimes I think all my hard work goes unappreciated.”

“And what exactly is it you do?”

“What do you think I do?”

“I figure that most of the people around here are employed to clean off whatever shit the duke finds himself stepping in. And since you smell distinctly of a latrine, I figured you for being in that same general line.”

Brightfellow barked out another ugly chuckle. That laugh was a real weapon-it let him slip blows and keep coming. “I have the honor of being the Duke of Beaconfield’s court mage, and I strive daily to be worthy of it,” he said, doing a pretty good impression of the butler, though with enough of his toothy smile to make clear it wasn’t more than that.

“And what exactly does a court magician do, other than occupy the lowest rung to which an artist can descend, short of selling love potions at traveling fairs?”