Michael Swanwick - The Dragons of Babel

All in a breath Nat swept up cards and money, abandoning the folding table, and the crowd, few of whom had reason to love the gendarmerie, scattered. Will made straight for the patrolman, gesturing angrily!" Arrest that scoundrel!" he demanded. "He's a cheat. He took my money!" The bronze-faced huaca tried to brush past him, but Will stepped directly in his way. "I demand satisfaction!"

"Get the fuck out of my face," the huaca snarled, and pushed Will aside. Too late, Nat had already slipped down the passageway between the Roxy and the paint store next door and disappeared.

The patrolman rounded on Will. But Will was wearing an Uptown suit with a rep tie, so the huaca couldn't tell if he were somebody who could be roughed up with impunity or not. So he was let go with a chewing-out and a warning.

Will gathered up Esme and because his piano teacher was ill and his fencing master at a competition and so he had no lessons today, they spent the rest of the afternoon playing the pachinko machines in the Darul as-Salam Arcades.

That evening they met as usual in the back room at the Rat's Nose, where Nat regularly held court. Hustlers and trolls, pimps, sprets, thieves, spunks, lubberkins, and hobthrushes came and went, backs were slapped, small favors were promised. Information, much of it minor and the rest dubious, was swapped in voices lowered to the edge of inaudibility. Will nursed a small beer and listened to it all.

He had learned a great deal in the past twelve months. Not just the petty scams and cons by which he and Nat scrounged a living, but the ways of the city as well. He'd learned that in Babel "What the fuck do you want?" meant "Hello." that "I'm going to have to run you in" meant "Give me ten dollars and I'll look the other way," and that "I love you" meant "Take off your trousers and lie down on the bed so I can grab your wallet and run."

He'd also learned that magic came in high and low forms. High magic manipulated the basic forces of existence, and even in its smallest manifestations a badly cast spell could fill every television set for miles around with snow. Hence it was easily detectable by anyone on guard against it. Low magic, however, could be as simple as the ability to deal a card from the bottom of a deck or to pluck a coin from an imp's ear. Done right, it was undetectable. But even if you were careless and got caught, you still had a decent chance of talking your way out of it if your wits were sharp enough. So, in its way, low magic was the more powerful.

Nat was low magic down to the soles of his feet.

But he wasn't exclusively a small-con grifter. Nat was laying the groundwork — or so he swore — for a long con, something big and fabulously lucrative. To which end, Will spent his free time in an endless round of lessons: music, deportment, diction, fencing... This last Will had almost quit after seeing a rank amateur, waving his epee about as if it were a broom, knock the blade out of his fencing master's hand. But "It is a useless skill and therefore valued," the swordsfey St Vier had explained. "If you want to kill a gentleman, use a gun. If you wish to impress him, best him with the sword. The latter is far more difficult, however, so I suggest you apply yourself to your studies."

Now, there was a lull and only they three in the room, so Will said, "Three card Monte is getting old, Nat. It's gotten so that it's a job like any other."

"You've got a point there, son." Nat leaned over and peered under the table, where Esme was reading through her collection of comic books for the umpteenth time. "How's it going down there, little grandmother?"

"'Kay," Esme said abstractedly.

"So when do we — " Will began.

A haint walked through the wall.

He was portly in the manner of the affluent, and wore a three-piece suit with a brocade vest embroidered with suns, moons, and zodiacal signs. Gold watch chains looped from every pocket. His skin was purple as a plum. "Tom Nobody, you old rascal!" He flung out his arms. "I heard you were back in town."

"It's Nat Whilk these days, Salem." Nat stood and they hugged each other with theatrical gusto. Then he said, "Will, this is the honorable Salem Toussaint, alderman."

The politician had a good handshake and a way of not quite winking as he shook that said, We're all rogues here and so we should stick together, Will liked him instantly. But he did not trust him. "I saw you earlier today," Will remarked.

"I know you did," Toussaint turned back to Nat. "Reason I'm here is, I need a white boy to run errands Uptown, where my usual runners might be a smidge conspicuous. Somebody with his eyes open. Discreet. Able to think on his feet."

"Somebody not terribly honest, you mean," Nat said.

Salem Toussaint smiled broadly, revealing two gold teeth with devil-runes cut into them. "How well you know me!"

"My boy and I are working on something, but it'll take a few months for me to lay the groundwork. You can have him until then."

Will was by now too much the professional to say anything aloud. Nevertheless, he turned and stared. Nat laid a hand on his shoulder. "You've got edge, son," he said. "Now pick up a little polish."

Chiefly, Will's job was to run errands in a good suit-and-haircut while looking conspicuously solid. He retched tax forms for Toussaint's constituents, delivered stacks of documents to trollish functionaries, fixed L&I violations, presented boxes of candied John the Conqueror root to retiring secretaries, absentmindedly dropped slim envelopes containing twenty dollar bills on desks. When somebody important died, he brought a white goat to the back door of the Fane of Darkness to be sacrificed to the Nameless Ones. When somebody else's son was drafted or went to prison, he hammered a nail in the nkisi nkonde that Toussaint kept out in the hall, to ensure his safe rerun. He canvassed voters in haint neighborhoods like Ginny Gall, Beluthahatchie, and Diddy-Wah-Diddy, where the bars were smoky, the music was good, and it was dangerous to smile at the whores. He negotiated the labyrinthine bureaucracies of City Hall. Not everything he did was strictly legal, but none of it was actually criminal. Salem Toussaint didn't trust him enough for that.

One evening, Will was stuffing envelopes with Ghostface while Jimi Begood went over a list of ward-heelers with the alderman, checking those who could be trusted to turn out the troops in the upcoming election and crossing out those who had a history of pocketing the walking-around money and standing idle on election day or, worse, steering the vote the wrong way because they were double-dipping the opposition. The door between Toussaint's office and the anteroom was open a crack and Will could eavesdrop on their conversation.

"Grandfather Domovoy was turned to stone last August," Jimi Begood said, "so we're going to have to find somebody new to bring out the Slovaks. There's a vila named—"

Ghostface snapped a rubber band around a bundle of envelopes and lofted them into the mail cart on the far side of the room. "Three points!" he said. Then, "You want to know what burns my ass?"

"No," Will said.

"What burns my ass is how you and me are doing the exact same job, but you're headed straight for the top while I'm going to be stuck here licking envelopes forever, and you know why? Because you're solid."

"That's just racist bullshit," Will said. "Toussaint is never going to promote me any higher than I am now. Haints like seeing a fey truckle to the Big Guy, but they'd never accept me as one of his advisers .You know that as well as I do."

"Yeah, but you're not going to be here forever, are you? In a couple years, you'll be holding down an office in the Mayoralty. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if you made it all the way to the Palace of Leaves."

"Either you're just busting my chops, or else you're a fool. Because if you meant it, you'd be a fool to be ragging on me about it. If Toussaint were in your position, he'd make sure I was his friend, and wherever I wound up he'd have an ally. You could learn from his example."