Daniel Polansky - Low Town

He looked up as my shadow dropped over him, struggling to make me out against the kaleidoscopic backdrop. During our brief acquaintance I had yet to see Brightfellow sober-but neither had I really seen him drunk. He’d struck me as the sort of person who needed a shot or two to get through the day, who isn’t at peak condition until his blood reaches a few points proof.

He was well clear of that point, at the end of an active effort to reach insensibility. His eyes were carmine dots surrounded by swelled flesh, thick beads of sweat trailing down the slant of his forehead and off his stubbed nose. At first he managed something of his usual bravado, sneering at me with a credible imitation of homicidal loathing. But it faded quickly, buried beneath the booze he’d been swilling, and his head sank back down to the ground.

“Long night?” I asked, taking the seat next to him. His rank press leaked through the perfume he’d doused himself with.

“The fuck you want?” he asked, forcing each syllable through an uncooperative maw.

“You looked so pretty, I thought I’d ask for a dance.”

He let that one pass. Indeed he seemed barely to register it.

I sipped at my glass of champagne. It was my fourth or fifth, and the fizz was playing havoc with my stomach. “Really a bunch of hateful motherfuckers, aren’t they? To think that half the nobles in Rigus are here defiling themselves. I’d say they need religion, but I’m pretty certain that’s the First Abbot over there, passed out in the punch bowl.” The First Abbot was not passed out in the punch bowl-he was passed out next to the punch bowl, but it sounded better the way I said it.

“I’d see every one of them rotting in the ground,” Brightfellow answered, and I nearly recoiled at the malice in his voice. “I’d put them there.”

“Would the Blade get a pass?”

“Not if I’m handing them out.”

“Then what the hell was the point? When this thing falls, it’ll be the end of both of you.”

“You know why you do everything you do?”

“I can usually hazard a guess.”

There was a long pause, so long I thought maybe the sorcerer had slipped full-on into stupor. Finally, with a great deal of effort, Brightfellow swung his eyes up to meet mine. “You were an agent,” he said. “And now you aren’t.”

“Yeah.”

“Was that your choice?”

“In a sense.”

“Why’d you make it?”

“A woman.”

“That’s a pretty good answer,” he said, and turned back toward the blur of the crowd. “I didn’t think it would go this far. I didn’t want it to.”

Something about Brightfellow’s self-pity reignited my fury. “Don’t mistake me for a priest-I’m not interested in your confession, and I’m not selling redemption. You dug your hole, now lie in it.” I sneered, though since he wasn’t looking, the effect was wasted. “I’ll tip the Blade in after, so you don’t get lonely.”

I thought that was a pretty good shot and I thought it’d rattle him. But when he spoke, his voice was level, and he didn’t sound angry, just certain and sad. “You’re a fucking idiot.”

I took a twist of colored dreamvine from a dish beside us. “You might just be right about that one.”

He didn’t say anything else, and I got up and faded into the background, and after I finished my glass of champagne I didn’t grab another.

Up front the Blade and his entourage were drinking and smoking and occasionally laughing uproariously. I wondered where he was getting his supply of cronies-I’d done for four of them two nights earlier, but he wasn’t having difficulty finding replacements, nor did the death of his previous coterie seem to weigh heavy on the duke’s soul. Every so often he would toss me what he thought was a threatening glance, though having been tutored in intimidation by the likes of Ling Chi and the Old Man, I found myself unimpressed.

The doctor was in the building by this point. The night was only getting later, and my initial awe had given way to the generalized contempt I felt for my betters, sybarites so degenerate even their base pleasures were synthetic and hollow. The prospect of pawing at one of the servers was less than enticing, so I just sat alone, worrying what would happen if I’d misjudged Kendrick or if Celia’s working had rung false or if my alchemical skills hadn’t been up to the task.

It happened without preamble. One of the servers dropped her tray and followed it soon after, huddled on the ground weeping-apparently she had dipped into the master’s stash a bit early. By coincidence the next to go was a young fop standing over her, who fell to his knees and soured the air with bile. Like a wave it passed through the crowd, groups of people overcome with nausea, clutching their bellies and scanning desperately for an appropriate place to boot.

Any fool can cut pixie’s breath with something that will kill a man-spite’s bloom or a few drops of widow’s milk-but to mix in something nonlethal is more difficult. And of course it wouldn’t have been possible if Beaconfield hadn’t run through the first cache of breath I had given him and demanded more for the party. But he had and I did, and here we were. Whatever the Blade thought, I hadn’t come to negotiate or to engage in another tete-a-tete. He wasn’t much of a sparring partner, all told, and it was a long trek up here to tell a man I hated that I hated him.

I’d come to make sure the hour I had spent dropping three grains of mother’s bane into every vial of pixie’s breath I’d sold Beaconfield that day in the gardens hadn’t been wasted. I’d promised the doctor a distraction, after all.

The duke hadn’t yet made the connection between me and the illness sweeping his guests, and I decided to head out before that changed. At least I could rest comfortably knowing I had done my part to make what would likely be the Blade’s final Midwinter party the most memorable one yet.

I slipped out through the main door and started back toward Low Town. If Kendrick couldn’t find a way to break into Beaconfield’s study while the entirety of the party was violently ill, then his reputation was pretty damn far from earned. I took the joint from my pocket and put it to my lips, lighting it despite the snow. All in all, it had been a fine evening, clean as clockwork.

So I couldn’t understand why I spent the walk home in anxious silence, unable to shake the nagging feeling I’d fucked myself sideways.

The next morning I bundled up tight and headed out to meet the doctor, and against the storm there was a bounce in my step I hadn’t had for days. Unless my thief had completely blown his assignment, I’d be able to clear myself of the Old Man’s sentence with a solid day to spare, and that was enough to make me forget the snow for a few minutes.

Once inside the Daevas’ Work pub I took a back booth and ordered a cup of coffee. A few minutes later the doctor came in, brushing ice off his thick winter coat. He sat down and slipped me a packet of papers underneath the table. “From a false bottom inside his desk, and the dart trap was coated with fen-eel venom.”

“I hope it proved difficult enough to interest you,” I said.

He didn’t answer, and I started to flip through the file he’d given me. Mairi might be a treacherous whore, but her sources weren’t bad. The first half of the package consisted of the Blade’s ledgers, and it didn’t take an accountant to see that he was deeper in red than a virgin on her wedding night. I had motive.

But that wasn’t the interesting part. Coupled with the ledger were a series of correspondences between Beaconfield and several men I knew to be the espionage agents of various foreign embassies. It seemed that before moving on to child murder, the Blade had studied treason. Miradin, Nestria, even the fucking Dren-there wasn’t a country on the continent poor Beaconfield hadn’t tried to sell his soul to. None of it had gone very far-like most amateurs in the field of spycraft, Beaconfield mistook gossip for intelligence. In fact, the letters listed little more than the polite refusal of various low-ranking operatives to contract for the Blade’s services. His incompetence would be no defense at trial of course, and his status as a peer made any contact with a foreign emissary a hanging offense.