Daniel Polansky - Low Town

I was hustling through Alledtown when I caught the flicker of Wren’s hideous woolen coat as he ducked behind an apple cart. I wondered if he’d been waiting for me outside the gardens, but dismissed it as unlikely. He must have been shadowing me since I’d left the Earl, all the way from Low Town, through the greenery, and now back into the city. That wasn’t an easy thing to do-I might have said impossible, if you’d asked me prior to him doing it.

After I was done swallowing my surprise I just got angry, real fucking pissed, the thought of that fool child dogging my footsteps, with Crowley, Beaconfield, and Sakra only knew who else doing their concerted best to end my existence near enough to send me apoplectic.

I hooked down a side street, following it around the back exit of a dive bar. Then I faded behind some packing crates and put my back to the stone, pulling the lapels of my coat up over the bottom half of my face and letting the shadows cover the rest.

Wren must have figured me oblivious by that point, and he stalked around the turn with less care than he should have. Before he thought to check the alcove I’d jacked him up, pinning his arms against his head and lifting him above the ground.

He cursed a blue streak and flailed madly, fighting to gain some leverage, but he was still just a pup. I gave him a good shake and tightened my grip until he started to go limp. Then I dropped him ass first into the mud.

He scrambled to his feet, apple-sized fists guarding his face, fire in his eyes. I’d have to tell Adolphus that his afternoons spent teaching the boy boxing hadn’t gone to waste.

“This is how you make yourself useful? Ignoring my orders anytime it suits you?”

“I’m tired of being your fucking errand boy!” he screamed. “All I do is tend bar and run messages! So I came after you-what’s the harm?”

“The harm?” I feinted to his gut, then sent the heel of my off hand against his brow. He stumbled backward, trying to keep his balance. “Yesterday some dangerous men made a credible effort to kill me. What if they’d come back and noticed you following me? You think you’re too young to have a man open up your insides?”

“I’ve made it this long,” he said, all pride and steel.

My composure cracked, and my rage spilled out in a torrent. I battered aside his guard and threw him up against the alley wall, forcing my forearm into his sternum. “You survived this long because you’re garbage, lower than a fucking rat, not worth the effort to down. Raise your head above the gutter and see how quick they come after you, knives sharpened for the pink of your throat!”

I realized I’d shouted these last words an inch from his face, and that my lesson was likely to do the boy permanent injury if I didn’t cut it short. I let my elbow off his chest and he dropped to the ground, and this time he stayed there.

“You gotta be smarter than you are-do you understand? There are lines of smart Low Town boys lying in unmarked graves. You’ve gotta be smarter than that, smart all the time, smart every minute of the day. If you were the son of a cotton merchant it wouldn’t matter, you could afford your youth. But you aren’t, you’re ghetto trash, and don’t ever forget it-because Sakra knows they won’t.”

He was still angry but he was listening. I rubbed sleet out of my hair, water melting against my brow and running down my cheeks. Then I extended a hand and helped him back to his feet.

“What did you see?” I asked, surprised at how quickly my temper had cooled, surprised that it had run so warm a moment earlier.

He seemed as willing as I was to return to the calm back-and-forth we’d perfected. “I saw one noble kill another, and I saw you walk off with him. That was the Blade, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He suggested it was unlikely I would die in my sleep.”

Wren sneered at that, still convinced I was invincible. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him folk queue to put me down, and if he doesn’t step up he might find himself late to the party.” Wren smiled, and despite what I’d said earlier, I was glad I left him his illusions, maybe even a little proud that he thought so well of me. “Where does Adolphus think you are?”

“I told him you sent me round to Yancey’s, that you wanted to get something else on Beaconfield.”

“Try not to lie to them.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

The snowfall was getting worse. I was starting to shiver. “If I let you trail along for a while, you promise to head back to the Earl when I tell you?”

“I promise.”

“And is your word any good?”

He narrowed his eyes, then gave a quick up and down with his chin.

“All right then.” I set off down the alley, and after a moment he caught up with me.

“Where are we going?”

“I need to see the scryer.”

“Why?”

“Now would be the part of the morning where you walk next to me in silence.”

We reached the Box thirty minutes later, and when I told the boy to wait outside he nodded and stretched against the wall. Happily the Islander who let me in last time was manning the door, and despite his age he was sharp enough to recognize me, and decent enough to let me in unaccompanied.

Marieke was bent double at her desk when I entered, raking over a weathered, leather tome with an intensity that would have frightened a syndicate heavy. I slammed the door shut and she whirled her head around, preparing to excoriate whatever poor bastard was foolish enough to intrude upon her work. When she saw it was me, she breathed out slowly, a little bit of her seemingly inexhaustible anger draining away with it.

“You’re back,” she said, careful to make sure she didn’t sound happy about it. “Guiscard stopped by earlier. I figured you would have come with him.”

“We had a falling out. I needed my freedom, and he’s a one-man sort of gal.”

“Do you think that was funny?”

“Give me a few minutes and we can try again.” On the slab in the center of the room a shroud covered a body about the size of a child. Beneath it Avraham lay in permanent repose, soon to be set beneath the ground. For him there would be no grand funeral, no public outpouring of grief, and the weather being what it was, I doubted the High Priest would manage the trip from his chapel to the plot of land near the sea where the Islanders buried their people. Low Town had enjoyed the autumnal pathos, a moment of communal mourning amid the vibrant foliage, but with the mercury falling no one was in any great hurry to leave his house just to pay sympathy to the family of a little black boy. And anyway, at the rate children were disappearing from Low Town the whole thing had lost its novelty.

“I assume you didn’t have any more luck reading this one than you did his predecessor?”

She shook her head. “I’ve tried every trick in the book, worked through every ritual, meditated over every scrap of evidence, but-”

“Nothing,” I finished, and for once she didn’t seem to mind being interrupted.

“You come up with anything solid on your end?”

“No.”

“You keep talking like this and I’m never gonna get a word in edgewise.”

“Yeah.” Thus far our conversation had been within a stone’s throw of pleasant-I could almost fool myself into thinking the scryer had taken a shine to me.

“Does the Bureau of Magical Affairs know about the talisman you’ve got sewn into your shoulder?” she asked.

“Of course. I make a point of telling the government every time I do something illegal.”

The beginnings of a smile worked themselves through Marieke’s growl, but she snapped its neck before it could mature. “Who put it there?”