Daniel Polansky - Low Town

He was stronger than I thought, and though I had assumed otherwise, he was a fighter. Not just skilled with his sword-that I knew of course-but a fighter, the kind of man who attacks when wounded, who doesn’t back down from pain or shock. He had grit, though you couldn’t tell it from his dress. I guess that deserves to be remembered, though it doesn’t cancel out much else. I tried for a rabbit punch to his throat, but he blocked it with his usual astonishing agility.

I don’t know how it would have ended if we’d fought straight-but then I’m not that big on fair play. The second bomb went off, directly beneath us this time, and then I was looking up at the ceiling and there was a glare in my eyes so bright it seemed to stun as well as blind me. In time the light began to fade but not the terrible ringing in my ears. I put my hands against them-no blood, but that didn’t mean anything. In the war I’d seen men go deaf who hadn’t shown any sign of injury. I screamed out loud, my throat raw but the sound itself lost.

Pull it together, pull it together. The ringing will stop or it won’t-if you lie here, you’ll be dead either way. I stood up, knowing I’d be useless in a fight, hoping to Maletus the Blade had gotten it worse than me.

He had. The floor of the study had blown out, leaving gaping holes in the wood and sending shrapnel everywhere. A jagged splinter the size of a man’s arm had lodged itself in Beaconfield’s stomach. He lay with his back arched over a fallen support beam, blood draining from his mouth. I stumbled toward him, my equilibrium utterly scrambled.

“Where is Wren?” I asked. “The boy, where is he?”

The Blade had enough in him for one final smile, and he played it for everything he could, mouthing his words slowly enough that I could make them out despite the clamor in my ears. “You’re a better killer than you are a detective.”

I couldn’t argue with that one.

This shot of energy expended, Beaconfield slumped down on the spear embedded through his torso. After a few seconds he was gone. I closed his eyes and pulled myself to my feet.

No man expends his last breath on a lie. Beaconfield had let forth the secret out of spite, a final blow thrown before meeting She Who Waits Behind All Things. He didn’t have Wren. I’d screwed something up-I’d screwed something up terribly, but I couldn’t tell where.

Time was passing, and it seemed likely someone had noticed the detonation of the Duke of Beaconfield’s mansion. I headed downstairs, knowing if I ran into trouble I was good as dead.

The back wing of the house seemed to have collapsed in on itself, tons of wood and brick burying the back hallway. In the main parlor the once beautiful carpets were destroyed by soot, shards of glass from the broken chandeliers coating everything. One of the explosions had set off a fire in the kitchen, and the blaze was rapidly moving to cover the rest of the house.

The Blade’s butler lay prostrate beside the door, his head cocked in a fashion no contortionist could have matched. Death seemed an inequitable punishment for his arrogance and general unpleasantness, but then few enough of us get what we deserve. I stepped over him and into the snow.

I was stumbling toward the outside gate when I realized the ringing in my ears had died down, not much but enough to let me know I wasn’t deluding myself-I hadn’t gone deaf, and I wanted to sink down and weep, to thank the Firstborn for sparing me. Instead I continued through the frost, jumping the hedge when I saw lights coming down the path ahead of me and sneaking back to the Earl as quickly as a broken man is capable.

I slid into the bar as quietly as I could. I needed time to think, to figure out where my reasoning had gone awry. One way or another Wren was gone, and if the Blade hadn’t taken him, that didn’t make the boy any safer. Once upstairs I ripped a vial of breath from my stash and put it to my nose. My hearing was returning slowly, though after the first hit I couldn’t make out anything but the beating of my heart, accelerated by the drug.

On the dresser sat Grenwald’s missive. I opened it with dull fingers, cutting my thumb in the haste to confirm my growing sense of dread, smearing red across the white parchment.

The top of the document was identical to the one I had taken off Crispin, but the bottom half was undamaged, the page listing every practitioner involved in Operation Ingress. I recognized Brightfellow and Cadamost.

And I recognized one more name, at the very bottom, beneath the tear that had defaced my earlier version.

I pulled my shirt over my head, then took out the straight razor nestled in the bottom of my satchel and flicked it open. The full weight of my sins began to settle across my back, and for one self-indulgent moment I wondered where to put the edge of the blade for best effect. Then I cut a shallow incision below the sapphire in my shoulder, wincing at the pain as I did so.

Five minutes later I was double-timing it through Low Town, bleeding through the hastily tendered bandage I had torn from my undershirt.

By all the Daevas, I hoped there was still time to stop it.

The Blue Crane had been dead for about six hours. His body was slouched in the oak chair in his study, azure eyes lolled back in his head, the wounds on his arms and the blade resting on the ground confirming his demise was self-inflicted. On the desk in front of him sat a scroll of parchment, two words in his scrawling chicken scratch. I’m sorry.

So was I. I closed his eyes and walked downstairs.

The door to her study was open, and I slipped inside. Celia and Brightfellow were turned away from me. Wren sat limply on a chair in the corner, unbound, his eyes glazed over insensibly.

“I say we do him now.” The last day had seen Brightfellow slip further toward collapse. He wore the same clothes as at the Blade’s party and was gesturing wildly. “Let’s do him and dump him, before anyone gets wise.”

Celia by contrast was steady as a block of quarried stone, her hands busy with the array of alchemical equipment on the table before her. “You know as well as I do the fever takes a half day to set, and we haven’t even passed it to the boy yet. I’m not going to ruin everything we’ve accomplished because you’re getting jumpy.” She poured the contents of a beaker into a smaller one, then jerked her head at Wren. “Why don’t you take a seat, keep an eye on him.”

“He’s not going anywhere. My working will keep him down for the rest of the night.”

“He’s got the gift, like the others, even if he doesn’t know how to use it yet. You can’t be sure how he’ll react.”

Brightfellow peeled a dirty fingernail between his teeth. “You said you can’t feel the gem any longer.”

“Yes, Johnathan, that’s what I said.”

“That means he’s dead, right?”

“It means exactly what it means,” she said, but not angrily.

“He must be dead,” Brightfellow repeated.

Celia lifted her head up and sniffed the air. “I doubt that,” she said, setting aside an alembic and turning to face me. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough.”

When Brightfellow saw me, what was left of his equilibrium departed completely. He turned corpse white, and his eyes flickered back and forth between Celia and me, as if in the air between the two of us there was something that would salvage the situation.

“This would mean that Beaconfield…” Celia began, implacably calm, my arrival apparently not causing the slightest hiccup in her planning.

“Has thrown his last Midwinter’s party,” I confirmed. “Poor dumb bastard. He never knew any of it, did he? I guess you brought him in after I started asking questions, to make sure you had a sucker to pin things on.”