She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (11 page)

‘I’m worried about all of us.’

‘He can’t go on like this, tending bar.’

‘It’s worked out fine for Adolphus.’

Adeline had this look she’d give you, not quite contemptuous, she was too kind for that – more like she was disappointed in your refusal to live up to your potential. ‘You know as well as I do that Wren isn’t Adolphus.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘He isn’t.’

‘How long you think it’ll be before Alain or one of the others realizes how valuable he’d be to them?’

‘They know to stay away from him.’

‘But he doesn’t know to stay away from them.’

‘It’s not something I’m unaware of, all right? But there aren’t so many options for a street child.’

‘He’s clever.’

‘No one likes clever people, they make regular people feel stupid.’ I sighed and went to pour another shot. Discovered the bottle was empty. Sighed again. ‘He’s too old to join a trade, and anyhow I can’t quite see him cobbling shoes.’

‘He’s already got a trade.’

I took a casual look around, making sure we were unobserved. ‘Not one he can practice.’ Since the end of the Great War, the Crown had gradually tightened control over the Empire’s practitioners. Anyone with the spark was required to register with the Crown, and actually working magic without a license was strictly forbidden and unpleasantly punished. I’d made Wren a criminal by keeping him off their rolls – a cruel decision, but the alternative was unacceptable.

‘What does Mazzie say?’

‘She says she’s taken him as far as he can go. She says we ought to find him another teacher – a proper Artist.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That both the Artists I knew are long dead.’ Though I could only claim one scalp between the pair. ‘Mazzie says we ought to look outside of the city. Maybe outside of the Empire.’

‘That might not be such a bad idea.’ Adeline was sharp, sharp enough that she didn’t feel compelled to show it off. But she saw what I did, had noticed the smell of smoke, had enough presence of mind to note the direction the city seemed to be running towards.

‘It might not.’

One last smile, then she paced back to the kitchen. Another nice thing about Adeline – she didn’t belabor a point.

‘I might be able to get him something at a counting house,’ I said to her back. ‘There’s a merchant or two who owes me something – the boy’s a good haggler. It might do him good, get him out of Low Town.’

‘He wouldn’t take it. He wants to be you, you know.’

‘
Ś
akra, that’s a depressing thought.’

I went to pour myself a tipple, and remembered I was out of liquor. I thought about calling for Adeline but decided against it, opting instead to fill some paper with tobacco and leaven some dreamvine over the top of it – just enough to ease me into a nice stupor.

So the boy wanted to be me, did he? Maybe it was time for him to see what that really meant.

T
he morning found me trudging through the east gate and out past the city limits. To the north and west the metropolis’s suburbs have started to devour the neighboring villages, and you could walk a long ways without seeing tilled earth or a tree worth the shade. But out this direction the land was worthless, low-lying swamps that flood in the spring, miles and miles of ground you could buy with a few spare copper. It was autumn, however, and the road was dry, and the sun still warm.

For a different man it would have been a pleasant enough errand, a few hours constitutional in bucolic surroundings. Me, I go mad without the bustle. This was business, pure and simple. If my druthers meant anything, I’d have still been asleep. But then, they rarely mean much.

After a mile or so the road turned to track, vague and increasingly ill-defined. Then that began to split, peeling up into the hills or down towards the water. I know the city better than the lines on my face, but this wasn’t the city, and I kept to the bit of turf that I was certain of. This wasn’t a place to get lost – the natives here weren’t any friendlier than in Low Town, and past the walls my name doesn’t carry much weight. Further on and the land itself started to seem foul, gnarled oaks embracing each other, knee-high weeds overgrowing the route. The whole country had been like this, back in the day, before the city’s founders had drained the swamp and erected the monument to greed and vanity known as Rigus. You got the sense it hadn’t quite forgiven the insult, was still waiting for the chance to repay it. I took a fork in the road, following it as it ascended into a steep ravine.

The house was a misshapen thing that sprawled its way up the hill, additions like tumors grafted onto what had once been an oversized shack. A large hog pen extended off one side, crammed to overflow with humanity’s closest relative, squealing loud enough to break the dawn. There were a lot of people living in the house, but none seemed to be going to any great effort to see their trash was disposed of properly. What the pigs couldn’t eat lay strewn about at random, broken bottles and heaps of scrap metal, rotting cord wood and decayed stock. Amidst the squalor a man was chopping wood into kindling, and I stretched my legs to meet him.

Calum was big for a Tarasaighn. Big for a Valaan, big for any creature not mythic. He had a red mane that circled his skull like a vertical halo, and blue eyes large even by the standards of his frame. His ax was about two-thirds the length of my body, but he swung it without difficulty, each movement methodical but not plodding. He was bare chested against the season, and his matted red fur was thick with sweat.

He did for another sapling before passing over a greeting. ‘Warden.’

‘Calum.’

‘Suppose you’re here to jaw.’

‘If you’ve got the time.’

He left his ax in the stump and passed over to a neighboring trough. I’d assumed it had been intended for the use of swine, but if so it didn’t seem to bother him. He cupped his hands together and brought a solid pint of water to his lips, drinking some and spilling the remainder over his brow. ‘Aunt and Uncle are inside,’ he said. ‘I’ll join y’all directly.’

Calum wasn’t one for small talk. I took his suggestion and slipped inside.

By all rights, the Gitts shouldn’t still exist. They ought to be a casualty of the city’s growth, like the copse of giant oak that used to grow in the hills above Kor’s Heights. They were an anachronism, a throwback to a wilder age, before mankind had developed civilization as cover for vice. They bred like rabbits in their warrens of backwood swamp huts, and they died off nearly as fast. As far as the Gitts were concerned, labor was purely a mug’s game, and only the lowliest of them, the weakest and least capable, ever put their back to a plow. Crime, petty and otherwise, was their
metier.
They knew the bayous like their mothers’ tits, knew a dozen hamlets where a boat could stop off for a few hours without any chance of being caught by an outbound patrol, knew a hundred more where you could weigh down a body without it ever bubbling back up. Mostly they dealt wholesale, farmed the work out through a network of small-time dealers working east of the docks. It bumped up against my territory, but we’d never had any problems. The Gitts lacked the infrastructure or the drive to expand – indeed, staying still was sort of their reason for being.

On the one hand, you had to give it to them, living a few miles from the heart of human civilization without bending knee to its advance. On the other, ten minutes in their company you found yourself rooting for civilization.

The family den had started life as a one-room shanty, but it had seen unceasing decades of development since, expanding every time another Gitts popped into the world, which was all too frequently to my mind. They’d turned the front room into a communal space and filled it with furniture acquired at random from the refuse of other people. Passageways led off at all angles to further wings of the house, and an unceasing stream of Gitts stumbled out of them, pausing to yell abuse or belch or fart or scratch themselves unwholesomely before disappearing back into the warren.

Aunt Cari sat on one corner of a sofa that was dilapidated near to the point of uselessness, a stocky woman well past forty. Responsible for a gaggle of children and a posse of grandchildren, it was an open question whether she’d brought more life into the world than she’d taken out of it. Cari had been pretty once – she had the eyes and the laughing temperament of a woman men had wanted. But that was a long damn time ago, antediluvian, almost past remembering. Booze and smoke had done what the years hadn’t, her face was well-used as a soiled kerchief. She wore a dress of homespun cotton, barely strong enough to hold her sagging dugs.

Cari was loud, dirty and clever. Boyd was just loud and dirty. His face and a good deal of his collar were taken up by a bushy white beard. If you cared to spend long enough staring you could watch lice leap out of it. He had thick arms and a thicker belly, and they say he’d been swift with a razor, back when he’d served in the lower ranks of the Gitts’ empire. I imagined he could still cut a fellow up. I was certain he’d be willing to try.

Aunt and Uncle were the ones to speak to, but there were endless more of them, strung throughout the area and holed up in their shithole shack, coming in and out of the living room without thought or pause. I’d never bothered to learn any of their names. One wyrm-fiend is the same as another, and the Gitts tended to die or get jailed before you could form an attachment, even had I been the sentimental sort. Cari and Boyd held authority by virtue of having made it to early old age, a rare feat for a family that thought of the morrow as being as distant as the moon. It seemed to indicate they were tough, or smart, or just lucky. I tended to think it was mostly the latter.

As for Calum – well, Calum was something of a different story.

‘Warden!’ Boyd pulled himself up from his spot next to Cari, a broad smile revealing the rotting green teeth of an habitual wyrm user. ‘What you doing sneaking in here, without so much as a by your leave! If we’d have known you was coming, we’d have arranged a proper greeting!’

For reasons which I was not entirely clear, Boyd had a strong shine for me, indeed thought of us as something closely resembling friends. I had to match his enthusiasm or risk causing insult, and even by my standards such deception sat uneasy.

But I was up for it. I took him by the forearm and pulled him close, forcing myself not to react to the stench. Then I slapped him on his back and returned him to his perch. He laughed uproariously. On a side table an ashtray sat overrun with half-smoked ends. Aunt Cari pulled out the most substantial of these, lit it, took a hit and pointed it towards me.

‘A little early, but thanks just the same.’ Generally speaking I wasn’t one to turn down an offer of narcotics, but the Gitts weren’t your run-of-the-mill smoke-heads. Dreamvine was a little light for them, they’d fallen into the habit of mixing it with whatever was on hand, ouroburos root or wyrm, maybe even a few drops of widow’s milk if they were feeling feisty.

‘You know what your problem is, Warden?’ Boyd asked, taking the joint from his sister and putting it to his lips. A cold sore about the size of my thumb peaked through the white of his beard.

‘Enlighten me.’

‘You don’t never let your hair down.’

‘I’ll work on being more corruptible.’

‘How’s the bar?’ Cari asked.

‘People always gonna need a place to drink.’

‘And how’s business?’

‘People always gonna need something stronger than liquor.’

Boyd slapped his leg so hard I thought he might unloose his incisors.

‘Speaking of which – this isn’t a social call, strictly speaking. Ling Chi wants to up his order of stem.’

The best wyrm, that is to say the wyrm which would kill you the quickest, came straight from Tarasaighn, grown wild in the swamps, dried, cured, cut and shipped. I figured the Gitts had kin back in the homeland, distant cousins more inbred and primitive. A disturbing thought indeed.

‘Damn the Firstborn, but there ain’t enough choke in the Thirteen Lands to satisfy the heretics,’ Boyd said.

‘Money in the purse,’ Cari responded happily.

As a whole, the Gitts were the sort of folk who thought it good sport to catch the occasional Kiren too far from home, roll him, strip him naked and leave him in the bay. They were strong proponents of the belief that the heretics were stealing jobs from honest citizens, not that any of them had ever had a job, or were honest. But, generally speaking, greed trumps racism, one of the few virtues of the vice. I’d made a pleasant couple of ochres playing intermediary between the two organizations.

Calum had slipped in through the door while we’d been talking, but didn’t interrupt. In one corner a wooden rocking chair sat motionless, the only piece of furniture that wasn’t broken, breaking or defaced. Calum took a seat on it, pulled out a brick of chewing tobacco and cut a lump off with his boot knife.

I’d known Calum before I’d ever met his family, curiously. We’d served together in the war, different companies but the same regiment. Afterward, he’d spent a while working steady at the docks, honest labor for low pay. At the time he wouldn’t have nothing to do with his kinfolk, put a cousin through a wall when he’d come to try and beg money. An admirable independence, but one that couldn’t last. He’d returned some ten years prior, after his grandfather, at that point the head of the enterprise, got his throat slit playing loose with one of the Rouender syndicates they’d contracted with. We are what we are, in the end – you can only fight it but so long.

‘He says he wants twice what you’ve been moving,’ I continued.

Boyd looked at Cari. Cari looked at Calum. Calum looked at me.

Boyd scratched at his armpit, tufts of off-white hair sticking out from beneath his undershirt. ‘That’s a lot of stem.’

‘Don’t like dealing with the heretics. They ain’t quite human, you know, not like us.’ This from one of the youths I hadn’t been paying attention to, a pale, skinny kid missing a chin. His nose was oddly upturned, stared at you dead on – a feat his eyes, vague and tweaked, couldn’t quite manage.