Daniel Polansky - Low Town

I suppose it’s the nature of reverie to end.

A body doesn’t look like anything else, and even with the spread of night blurring the landscape I was certain the one lying at the foot of the crossing was Crispin’s. I broke into a quick jog, knowing it was useless, that what had come for Crispin hadn’t left him injured.

He’d been terribly mutilated, his fine face bruised and battered, his aquiline nose caked with blood and pus. One eye had burst in the socket, white ooze leaking, the gleam of his iris offset inside. His face was frozen in a hideous grimace, and at some point during his torment he had bitten through most of the flesh of his cheek.

It was dark but not that dark, and Herm Bridge isn’t a back alley but a minor thoroughfare. Someone else would stumble on the body soon. I knelt beside his corpse and tried not to think about the time he had invited me to his family’s house for Midwinter, his eccentric mother and spinster sister playing the grand piano, all of us drinking rum punch till I passed out by the fire. I slipped my hand into his coat pocket. Nothing. A quick search of the rest of his clothing revealed the same. I told myself that the stench was hallucinatory, that he hadn’t been dead long enough to rot, and the cold would keep him whole for a while longer anyway, that I needed to concentrate on my task. It’s what he would have done. By the book.

Finally I hit on the bright idea of checking his hands, and after a moment of frustration in opening their vise-clench, found a half-torn sheet of paper Crispin had been holding-whether to keep it from his attacker or as some sort of a talisman I would never know.

It was a government form. At the top was a bureaucratic code, followed by a warning against unauthorized viewing. Below, under the title Practitioners, Operation Ingress was a list of names and a one-word description of their status- Active, Inactive, Deceased. I was unsurprised to see a great many marked with the third. I scanned to the bottom and felt my heart stutter a beat-the last legible name on the list, just above the tear, read Johnathan Brightfellow.

So Beaconfield was behind it after all. It was a hell of a way to have my suspicions confirmed. A hell of a way.

I did one more thing then, something that I barely thought about even while I was doing it, something cheap and ugly and only partly justified by necessity. I reached up to Crispin’s throat and ripped his Eye from off his neck, then stuffed the gem in my pocket. The ice would figure that whoever had killed him had taken it, and though I didn’t know how yet, I had a feeling it would come in handy.

I forced myself to my feet and looked down at Crispin’s shattered body. I felt like I ought to say something but wasn’t sure what. After a moment I put the paper into my satchel and slipped off. Nostalgia is for saps, and vengeance doesn’t send out heralds. Crispin would have his eulogy when I settled up with the Blade.

I cut back toward the main thoroughfare at a fast clip, stopping in front of a partially constructed town house bordering the river. After making sure no one was in sight, I wedged open a plank of nailed wood and sneaked inside, slumping against a wall in the darkness.

After a short wait a group of workmen stumbled upon Crispin’s body. They spent a few moments yelling things at each other I couldn’t hear, then one sprinted off, returning shortly after with a pair of guardsmen who further degraded the crime scene before leaving to make contact with Black House. I took the opportunity to backtrack a block and buy a bottle of whiskey at a dive bar, then hustled back to my hiding spot.

I returned in time to sit aimlessly for twenty minutes while the freeze responded to the murder of one of their own with impressive alacrity. When they did show, they rolled deep, a whole pack of them, ten or twelve with more coming and going throughout the next few hours. They swarmed around Crispin’s body like ants, looking for evidence and canvassing witnesses, following procedures rendered irrelevant by the fact that Crispin’s murder had few parallels in the city’s history. At one point I thought I spotted Guiscard’s patrician mug standing over his partner’s body and talking animatedly with one of the other agents, but there was a lot of ice gray swirling around, and I might have been wrong.

I alternated pulls from my whiskey bottle with snorts from my rapidly diminishing supply of breath. It was almost eleven by the time they wrapped up their search and tossed Crispin’s body on the mortician’s cart. His mother and sister had died some years prior, and I wondered who would take care of the funeral or that comically monstrous structure he had been raised in. It went hard to think of it shuttered, its antiques sold off at auction, its ancient title passed to whatever tax farmer had the coin to afford it.

I crept out of the abandoned house, the street at this point empty of traffic, agent or otherwise, and I began the long walk back to the Earl, despair bleeding through my best attempt at narcotization.

I woke the next morning to find my pillow soaked through with a liquid that I very much hoped was not vomit. Blinking myself out of sleep I rubbed at my nose and found a crust of dried blood. Not bile at all, just the aftereffects of a hard night of breath. I wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

A thick wad of phlegm landed in the chamber pot and I followed it with a selection of other waste, then opened the window and emptied them into the alley below, wincing at the freezing gust that came in as I did so. A dark cloud hovered over the cityscape, swallowing the light such that it was difficult even to determine the time. Down on the street I could see those few poor souls forced to travel holding tight to their outerwear and struggling through the gale.

I cleaned my face with water from the basin. It was cold and stale, there since yesterday or the day before. The reflection in my hand mirror revealed red-shot pupils, each individual vein swollen perversely.

I looked like shit and felt worse. I hoped it wasn’t too late for coffee and some eggs.

Downstairs the front room was empty, the foul weather keeping out any patrons, Adolphus and his wife busy in the back. I sat down at the bar and pulled out the form I had taken from Crispin, running down the names of each practitioner listed and seeing if any of them triggered a flash of memory.

None did. With the exception of Brightfellow, whose name was not so common that I could reasonably expect him to have a double running around, I hadn’t heard of any of them. I turned to the second column. Of the twelve others on the list, eight were deceased and three were active. The dead are difficult to dig up information from, and I couldn’t imagine anyone still in the service of the Crown would be excited to talk to me about the classified experiment they had set loose on the world a decade past. That left only one entry-Afonso Cadamost, a Mirad transplant to judge by his name.

Celia’s help had been invaluable, critical even, but there were things she couldn’t tell me. I needed to know exactly what it was I faced, the nature of Brightfellow’s hideous creature and how to stop it. To do that I needed to speak to someone with dirty hands-and I had an idea this Cadamost’s were as foul as they came.

Which was all very well, but of course I had no idea how to find him. I could sound out my contacts, but it probably wouldn’t do much good. He wasn’t necessarily in Rigus or even alive-just ’cause the government doesn’t know something happened doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; you can trust the continued solvency of my business on that one.

I was ruminating when Adolphus came in, his face ashen and trembling, preparing to unburden his soul of the terrible news. It was becoming a singularly unpleasant morning ritual.