Daniel Polansky - Low Town

The odor I had smelled on the girl’s body could have been a cleaning agent. It could have been a dozen other things as well, but this gave me something to go on.

“That’s a start at least.” Having gathered the nerve to return I found myself reluctant to leave. Part of me wanted to sit down in his soft blue chair and let it envelop me, to share a cup of tea with my old mentor and speak of days past. “I appreciate your help. And I appreciate you receiving me. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“I hope you find the person who did this, and I hope this isn’t the last time you visit. I’ve missed you, and the trouble you track to my door-like a stray cat with a dead pigeon.”

I returned his smile and made a move for the exit, but his voice stopped me, suddenly stern. “Celia wants to see you before you leave.” I tried not to flinch at her name but suspect I failed. “She’s in the conservatory. You still remember the way.” It was not a question.

“How is she?”

“She’s up to be commissioned to First Rank in a few weeks. It’s quite an honor.”

Sorcerer First Rank was the highest grade a practitioner could receive, held by perhaps twenty artists in the realm, all of whom had performed noble services in the interests of the country-or had done the right favors for the right people. The Crane was entirely correct: it was quite an honor, especially at Celia’s age. It was also not at all what I had been asking. “And how is she?”

The Crane’s eyes fluttered away and I had the only answer I needed. “Fine,” he said. “She’s… fine.”

I made my way back down the steps, stopping in front of a clouded glass door a level beneath the summit. I resisted the temptation to reach into my coat for a sniff of breath. Better to do this quick, and sober.

The conservatory was beautiful, like everything in the Aerie. Cultivated plants from across the Thirteen Lands thrived in its sultry environs, flowering in a spectrum of colors that complemented the blue stone of the walls. Bright violet strands of queen’s fingers jutted out against vines of orange drake’s skin; fierce blossoms of Daeva’s posies cast their scent throughout the room; and stranger things still thrived in the damp hothouse heat.

She heard me come in but didn’t stop what she was doing, tending a small fern in the corner with a decanter of filigreed silver. A blue dress pulled tight across the bottom of her back and stopped just below the thigh, though as she stood straight it eased its way down to her knee. She turned to meet me and I caught a first glimpse of her face, familiar despite the time apart, soft brown hair above dark almond eyes. Hugging the curves of her honey-colored neck was a cheap necklace, a lacquered wooden medallion with a strand of twine running through it, Kiren characters emblazoned on the front.

“You’re returned.” It wasn’t clear from her tone how she felt about it. “Let me look at you.” She brought her hands up near my face, as if to caress or slap me. Either would have been appropriate. “You’ve aged,” she said finally, opting for the former, running her fingers over my calloused hide.

“They say time does that,” though whereas the years had withered my features and scored my face, for her the effects had been nothing but positive.

“That’s what they say.” As she smiled I saw something of the girl she had been in the open and friendly way she looked at me, in the speed with which she forgave my absence, in the light she radiated instinctively and without deliberation. “I visited the Earl every day for a month after you left Black House. Adolphus said you were out. He kept saying it. After a while I stopped coming.”

I didn’t respond, neither to amend her belief as to how I’d left the Crown’s service or to explain my absence.

“You leave us for five years, disappear completely without a message, without a word.” She didn’t seem angry, or sad even, the wound no longer tender but still visible. “And now you can’t even offer an explanation?”

“I had my reasons.”

“They were bad ones.”

“They might have been. I make a lot of bad decisions.”

“I won’t argue that.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it was enough. “It’s very good to see you,” she said, laboring over each word as if she wanted to say more.

I stared at my boots. They didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. “I hear you’re to be commissioned Sorcerer First Rank. Congratulations.”

“It is an honor I’m not sure that I deserve. Certainly the Master’s word went far in smoothing my ascension.”

“This means you get free rein to destroy any stray bit of architecture you find objectionable and turn misbehaving servants into rodents?”

Her face assumed the strained pose I’d often see her adopt as a child when she didn’t get a joke. “I have trained myself to follow in the footsteps of the Master, and thus studied the specialties he has perfected-alchemy, spells of warding and healing. The Master never saw fit to learn the patterns by which a practitioner does evil to his fellows, and I would not think to pursue avenues he has determined to ignore. It requires a certain kind of person even to practice the darker shades of the Art. Neither of us is capable of it.”

Anyone is capable of anything, I thought, but didn’t say it.

“He’s extraordinary. I don’t think we ever quite realized it as children. To be given the honor of learning at his feet…” She held her tiny hands to her chest and shook her head. “Do you understand what his spell of warding means to this city? To this country? How many died from the plague? How many would have died if his safeguards didn’t still protect us to this day? Before his working, they needed to run the crematorium twenty-four hours a day in the summer just to keep up-and that was when the plague was at its ebb. When the Red Fever hit, there wasn’t even anyone left to dispose of the bodies.”

A memory crept to my mind, a child of six or seven walking gingerly over the corpses of his neighbors, careful not to step on their outstretched limbs, screaming for help that would never come. “I know what his working means.”

“You don’t know. I don’t think anyone does, really. We don’t have any idea of the numbers killed in Low Town, among the Islanders and the dockworkers. With sanitation like it was, it could have been a third, half, even higher. He’s the reason we won the war. Without him, there wouldn’t have been enough men alive to fight.” Her eyes trailed reverentially upward. “We can never repay him for what he did. Never.”

When I didn’t respond, she blushed a little, suddenly self-conscious. “But you’ve got me started again.” Her loose smile revealed a thin cobweb of lines stretching across her skin, lines that contrasted sorely with my memories of her as a youth, images I knew to be defunct but couldn’t discount. “I’m sure you didn’t return to us to hear my tired bromides to the Master.”

“Not specifically.”

Too late I realized my half answer allowed her to conjure her own explanation for my arrival. “Is this a forced interrogation? Am I to tie you down and tease it out of you?”

I hadn’t planned on telling her-but then I hadn’t planned on running into Celia at all. And it was better to let her know my real motive, rather than stoke whatever fantasies she had been clinging to. “You heard about Little Tara?”

She blanched, and her sultry grin dripped away. “We aren’t so far removed from the city as you seem to think.”

“I found her body yesterday,” I said, “and I stopped by to see if the Master knew anything about it.”

Celia gnawed at her bottom lip-the tic, at least, one thing that had held over from our time as children. “I’ll light a candle that Prachetas might bring comfort to her family, and one to Lizben, that the girl’s soul will find her way home. But frankly I’m not sure what business it is of yours. Let the Crown handle it.”