Daniel Polansky - Tomorrow, the Killing

As a rule, the guard don’t do their duty – but even on those rare occasions when the fancy strikes them, they don’t do it here. To those unacquainted with the terrain, which was to say anyone not born and still living there, cutting through the gangways and tenements was a sure sentence of death.

I had memorized the directions Yancey had given me before coming – nothing says ‘mug me’ like standing around a street corner staring at a set of notes. But out of necessity, since the Isthmus is without street names or administrative markings of any kind, he was forced to rely on local landmarks as points of navigation – and since these were apt to be the victim of vandals or the Islanders’ constant redevelopment schemes, my going was slow. It was a chancy thing, even early in the day. The thugs and sharps who lived and worked here were too small fish to have heard of my reputation as a man it was best not to try and rob, and my skin marked me as a potential target. So I stitched a scowl across my face and kept my hand on the hilt of my dagger, and while I didn’t look in the eyes of any of the adolescent hyenas that lolled outside of every third domicile, neither did I look away.

And after a few false starts and wrong turns, I found myself in front of the house of Mazzie of the Stained Bone.

The high-class practitioners, the real Artists, Academy-trained and government recognized, could afford to do what they did any way they felt like doing it. Some preferred to keep up appearances – dark robes and grim prophecies, staining their beards white and letting them grow down to the floor. But for every one of those there were two you couldn’t tell from a solid shopkeeper or banker, who went about their business without pretense or drama. The bottom feeders and base dwellers didn’t have that luxury. They needed the public to know who they were and what they did, needed to advertise their services while warning off anyone that might want to do them harm.

Still, standing in the sun outside of Mazzie’s hovel, I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t laying it on a bit thick. The shack she inhabited was, in the broad-strokes, largely indistinguishable from those that surrounded it, but she’d gone to an elaborate effort to peacock it. Near every inch of the outside was festooned with the trappings of her profession, or at least those that the ignorant public was familiar with. Strange shapes and odd patterns had been drawn on the walls with discolored paint, labyrinthine squiggles without beginning or end, exotic figures just recognizable enough to be disturbing. Tufts of feathers added accent, ornamentation of bone and offal. These last let off quite a stench. I doubted any were more than decorative – a functioning Working is too expensive to keep hung outside to be rained on. Still, they fulfilled their purpose, which was to creep hell out of anyone looking at them. Outside of staking the corpse of a newborn outside her door, there was little Mazzie could possibly have done to more actively ward off guests.

The way I saw it, there were two possibilities. The first was that Mazzie was a fraud, and the elaborate show she put on was just that, her reputation earned by trickery and theater. This I more or less discounted – Yancey was no fool, and I doubted his recommendation would be so far off base. And besides, what little had made its way out from the slums of her activities hinted at more than parlor tricks and sleight of hand. The second possibility, considerably more disturbing, was that Mazzie of the Stained Bone was just what she seemed to be – a witch-woman, heir to millennia of folk-traditions and rituals, beliefs that had flourished out of reach of the rigid High Laws that constrained the Art within the Empire proper. Not exactly the sort of person to whom you wanted to entrust the education of your surrogate child.

But then again my options were distinctly limited. Since the founding of the Academy during the Great War, the government had tightened their control over the nation’s practitioners, one more way to centralize and strengthen its rule. I knew by grim example that the Crown had no more rigid sense of ethics than the most twisted back alley conjurer. Nothing Mazzie could teach Wren would be any worse than what he’d learn from the authorities, and at least it would go down unleavened with hypocrisy.

I held my nose and snatched up my balls, then knocked loudly on the door.

‘Enter,’ said a voice from inside, and I did.

The interior was everything one would have expected from the front. Whatever other benefits it offered, Mazzie’s profession had not made her a wealthy woman – or if it had, she’d put little of the coin into home furnishings. Her hovel was a single room with a curtain pulled against the back wall to provide some privacy for the sleeping area. One corner was taken up with a large iron stove, cooking away despite the heat. A shutter hole in the ceiling was open, leaking in a few strands of sunlight on the sole inhabitant.

Short and squat, black as soot and sin, Mazzie of the Stained Bone sat in a chair behind the table. The end of a fat cigar nested itself in her crooked teeth. She inspected me with a set of brown eyes rich as chocolate – in another woman they would have been called beautiful. Her stubbed nose flared as if to catch my scent, a wide hoop of ivory curling out from one nostril. She might have been thirty, or forty, or fifty. She might have been a hundred. She might never have been born.

‘I’m the Warden. Yancey the Rhymer sent word I was coming.’ I hoped this was true.

‘I know who you are. Sit down,’ she said, nodding at the chair opposite. ‘Let’s speak.’

I did as bidden. My stool was identical to the one Mazzie was settled over, though her ample buttocks at least provided some cushion against the stiff wood.

‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ she began, ‘but I don’t think you’d like my blend.’

‘I’m not here for tea.’

‘What you here for then?’

I took out my tobacco pouch and started on a smoke. ‘Shouldn’t you know?’

‘You give out a lot of samples, in your business?’

‘Not so many.’

She rolled her thick cheroot to the end of her mouth. ‘Guess we in similar lines.’

‘Course, in my line, word gets out that I’m not reliable, that I ain’t selling what I’m talking, my customers are apt to take it serious. Apt to come visit me some evening, pull my tongue through my throat.’

‘I can see how that might happen.’

‘So what’s the verdict?’ I sealed my smoke and caught the end between my teeth, then lit it with the stroke of a match. ‘We in similar lines?’

She dropped a length of ash onto the dirt floor. ‘We are indeed.’

‘Somehow I thought we might be.’ We sat puffing at each other, the difference in size between my thin spliff and the hogleg rooted in her mouth giving me a distinct feeling of inferiority. ‘I’ve a boy needs training.’

She’d known already, either a tip from Yancey or from some other, more arcane source. ‘No reason to bother old Mazzie. They got a school for that.’

‘You registered with the Crown, Mazzie? They take a tax off your . . .’ I waved my hand at the squalor, ‘. . . enterprise?’

‘The Crown? I’ve lived under three of them, child – two back in Miradin, and the last twenty-five years under your Queen Bess,’ she said, ticking royalty off on her broad fingers. ‘Ain’t none of them done nothing for Mazzie.’

‘It seems neither of us are staunch monarchists, then.’

She scratched aimlessly at her chin. ‘Never taken on no white child. No boy child neither.’

‘I’ll leave him in the sun awhile. Nothing to be done about the cock.’

‘No light thing, taking on an apprentice.’