She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (40 page)

He went on a coughing jag that lasted a very long time. ‘Where’s Mom?’

‘I paid a boy to come by and tell her the priest at the church of Lizben had a message for her. I figure we’ve got another twenty minutes before she realizes he doesn’t.’

‘You gonna let me see the end of it?’

Walking over, waiting in the alley outside of his house, I’d wondered how I’d react to seeing him. Anger, bitterness – what was the point of any of that? Death was coming for the Rhymer, a cruel one, crueler than I’d have wished despite everything. ‘Seems a little pointless.’

‘Pointless,’ he agreed.

‘But I need to know the particulars.’

‘A freeze came in to see me my second month in the cage. Said he could make all my problems go away. Said he knew the two of us were friends, said all I needed to do was keep my ears open, and pass along what went through them. I told him to go fuck himself.’

‘But he came back,’ I supplied after a long moment of silence.

‘Once a month, every month. I was already getting sick then, I could feel it in my bones. I knew I wouldn’t outlast my sentence. I thought it was prison, I thought maybe if I got out in time I could recover.’

‘Why you still talking to them? Black House can’t give you any more time.’

‘Mom,’ Yancey said, and somehow he managed to look even worse. ‘They said if I didn’t stay snitch, they’d go after my mom.’

And there, at raw bottom, was why there was no point in trusting anyone. Yancey wasn’t a punk, wasn’t a rat, hadn’t sold me out for money or power. Honor, virtue, these are abstractions – what do they mean set against the warm touch of a spouse, the thousand remembered kindnesses of a parent, the pregnant hopes for a child? Yancey would have done almost anything for me, but he would have done anything for his mother. And how much hate could you hate him for that, really? You don’t break a man by his vices, you break him where he’s the most decent. You find what he loves, and you kill him for it.

‘What did you give them?’ I asked.

He shrugged, then winced – it was a painful effort to raise his shoulders three inches. ‘What they asked for. Haven’t had much to tell them this last year though, other than the color of my wallpaper and how much it hurts to breathe.’

‘They know about the berth you booked for us?’

He turned his face to the ceiling, blank eyes and an open mouth. ‘Yeah.’

That was salvageable. There were plenty of other ways out of Rigus. In fact this might work to my advantage – so long as the Old Man thought he knew what my escape route was, he wouldn’t spend any time looking for another.

‘That’s not so bad,’ I told him. ‘That’s nothing that can’t be fixed.’

‘That’s not all they know,’ Yancey said, with a grim certainty that made me extremely uncomfortable.

I thought hard then, about the last three years, about my collection of sordid deeds, petty crimes and mild treasons. The Rhymer knew about my dealing of course, had helped set up many a buy – but the fact that I sold drugs was open knowledge, hardly the sort of thing to interest the Old Man. Mostly there was very little about me at this point that would have interested the Old Man. My evils were so far beneath his as to be barely worth notice. And I don’t make a point of unveiling myself, not even to people I trust. But still there was something, a nugget of fear that grew to envelop me once I finally found my way to examining it.

‘Mazzie,’ I said, and as I formed the word I knew I was right. ‘By the Firstborn, they know about Mazzie.’

I didn’t bother for confirmation, nor did I stop to say goodbye. I was out of the room and down the stairs as quick as my feet would carry me.

‘I’m sorry,’ Yancey said to my back, struggling to raise his voice. ‘I’m sorry!’

So was I, but it wouldn’t do neither of us any good.

I
t was too far away to sprint to. At my age a lot of places are too far away to sprint to. I kept a rapid clip through the drizzle that echoed in my chest. By the time I’d made it to the Isthmus the cloud cover had evaporated, the sun doing its best to undo the work the rain had put in the last half day. In a few hours the mud would be dirt, but just then it sucked at my boots like you’d pull a lover back into bed.

There was no concrete reason to think that the Old Man had moved on Wren, but then, fear is better than certainty. These swarmed around me, mocking my stupidity and sluggishness, taunting me with thoughts of Mazzie dead and Wren dead with her, dead or locked up below Black House, which was as bad, which was worse. All my clever maneuvering had been for shit, I’d lost the only thing in the Thirteen Lands that meant anything.

I found the first agent a half block from Mazzie’s shack, face down in a puddle, motionless, drowned in three inches of water. Two more were staggered in the narrow bend of the last curve, alive and wishing otherwise. One was deep in a fit, seizing violently, head doubling back to reach his ankles, and I very much think he would have screamed if he could have. The next stared up at me, not at me, not at anything really. His eyes blinked fearful and furious, the blood frothing over his lips a sure sign that he had bitten through his tongue.

A standard Black House kill order is carried out by six men, brutes hand-picked from the lower ranks. The Old Man always has his eye out for talent, and it’s never hard to find someone happy to make money doing violence to strangers. Six men are enough to kill damn near anyone, if they’re armed and trained and willing. Six men would have been enough to kill me a couple of times over.

Six men were, apparently, not enough to kill Mazzie.

The latter half of the unfortunate sextet lay scattered across her front yard, face down, like parishioners at worship. The object of their exaltation sat on a tree stump, thick haunches straddling the wood, isolated by the sunshine. A fat cheroot was nestled in a corner of the smile that took up most of her face. She surveyed her fief, the little plot of upturned mud, the men she had made into bodies – and she found it to be good.

I should have been happy – Wren was safe, my enemies slain. But in fact I was only frightened. I’ve seen a lot of people die before, but damn few die worse than the men expiring slowly behind me in the midday sun. ‘Hey, Mazzie.’

She didn’t hear me. At least, she didn’t react.

‘Mazzie,’ I said a second time, louder than the first.

Mazzie swiveled her smile over to me, nodded faintly. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she said.

‘What happened?’

It was a minute before she answered, so occupied was she by her moment of bliss. ‘Men come to take Mazzie away,’ she said. ‘Men came to take Mazzie away before. Mazzie got the scars to prove it, scars on her back and between her thighs. Mazzie been waiting for men to come back a second time, waiting to show them what she learned.’

Mazzie had the rather grandiose habit of referring to herself in the third person. Under the circumstances I was little inclined to call her out on it. ‘What did you do to them?’

‘Who, them boys?’ She waved vaguely in the direction of the men she’d worse than killed. ‘You tell me once, never teach Wren nothing of the void. I kept my promise – he’s pure as a virgin.’ She took the cigar out of her mouth and leaned forward. Her eyes were holes in her head that went back as far as you’d care to look. ‘That don’t mean Mazzie had nothing to teach.’

I shivered through the warmest day in a month. ‘Wren here?’

‘He in the hut. He would have helped, if I’d let him.’ She put her smoke back between her teeth. ‘I didn’t need it.’

Behind me one of the agents recovered the capacity for speech, though not movement, staring up at the sky and shaking back and forth. ‘The worms the worms the worms the worms the worms the worms the worms the worms the worms the worms …’

‘You hush now,’ Mazzie said. ‘Mazzie be getting to you in a minute.’

Whether on her order or by coincidence, the agent fell silent. I couldn’t help but wonder what he was seeing, and to be grateful that I’d never find out for certain.

‘They’re after the boy,’ I said. ‘Trying to get to me through him.’

‘Yeah.’

I tilted my head at the soon to be carrion. ‘You’ve made the list as well. They’ll be back, and back soon. Best not be here when they come.’

Mazzie was lost in days long gone, head cocked absently up at the sky, and it was a minute before she answered. ‘I ain’t going nowhere. Men want to come look for me, they’ll find me here.’

‘Black House has practitioners on the payroll – whatever you can do, they got people who can do worse.’

She shrugged, unimpressed. ‘I can do some awful things.’

For which we had ample evidence.

‘You take the boy out the back,’ she said. ‘He don’t need to see nothing. You tell him to do right by what he got inside him. You tell him to think kindly of me.’

‘I won’t need to.’ I stood there for a minute, a minute longer than I ought to have been standing there, given how much I had to do, and a minute longer than I wanted to be standing there, given what I was looking at. But I figured that I owed Mazzie another crack at saving her life. ‘It’s not like you’ve got so much here worth holding on to. We’re heading out tomorrow, for the Free Cities. I can arrange an extra berth.’

There was a long pause, though I didn’t get the sense that Mazzie was giving any particular thought to my suggestion. More that she’d forgotten I was still in front of her. ‘I ain’t going nowhere,’ she said a second time.

That was what I figured. I made for the doorway, stopped when she started speaking again.

‘You ain’t going nowhere, neither.’

‘I told you, I’ll be gone tomorrow. I’ve got nothing keeping me here.’

She turned her attention away from what she’d done, looking at me with something like pity. ‘You ain’t never leaving Low Town, child. They gonna stick you in the dirt, same as Mazzie.’

There was nothing to say to that. I peeled apart the canvas curtain and walked inside.

Wren was keeping it together well enough, given everything. He sat in one windowless corner of the hovel, and he was very pale.

‘You all right?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘We’re getting out of here.’

‘What about Mazzie?’

‘Mazzie can handle herself.’ He opened his mouth to protest and I shook my head quickly. ‘There’s no time to argue – she’s made her choice. You know as well as I that there’s nothing either of us can do to change it.’

He nodded at his shoes. ‘Where are we going?’

‘You’re going to the docks. Adeline is there already, you can hole up with her until I come for you.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m doubling back to the Earl, to pick up Adolphus. I shouldn’t be long.’

Wren stood up from his seat. ‘Time’s wasting.’

It was indeed. We hustled out the back door, down a side path leading north. A few yards down there was a little gap between the hovels, and I took a last look at what we’d left behind.

Mazzie was bent double over the body of an agent. One hand held his head up by his hair, the other pressed an oversized carving knife against his throat. She hummed tunelessly. There was a flash of sun against upturned metal, and then a bright spurt of blood.

I turned away. It was the last I would ever see of Mazzie of the Stained Bone – and for all the good she had done me and mine, I can’t say I was sorry for that fact.

A
dolphus was as large in death as he’d been in life, six and a half feet of cold flesh splayed across the floor. He had two bolts in him, and a half dozen wounds from knife and sword.

Two men joined him in permanent repose. The first stared up at the ceiling with unblinking eyes and an indention several inches square intruding into his brainpan. The second lay in the corner, his skull swiveled backwards. I recognized the one that was still recognizable as being a member of the party that had intruded on the Earl a day earlier. Crowley was not a sentimentalist – it hadn’t been worth the trouble to move his people from where they fell, let alone ensure their return to the dirt.

I closed Adolphus’s eye. I took a seat at a nearby chair, one of the few still standing. I smoked a cigarette, watched the fat man on the floor begin the slow process of decay.

I made a decision.

Upstairs in my room I cracked open my arsenal, buckled on my old trench blade and made sure of my daggers. I had a crossbow I’d bought from a crooked quartermaster a few years earlier, and I stuffed that into a sack and took it along also. From the false bottom in my closet I removed a dozen vials of pixie’s breath and slipped them into my coat.

Down at the bar I grabbed a bottle of rotgut, took a swig, winced at the taste, took another. I found Wren’s bed, unmade as usual, and poured out the rest of the bottle on top of the matting. Then I lit a match and walked out the front.

I pulled a vial of breath out from my pocket, inspected it for a moment, the pink mist flecked with gold. I undid the top, felt the old movement come back natural, though it had been three years since I’d popped one for recreational use. The first hit and I couldn’t remember why I’d ever stopped.

The Earl took a while to get going. I was through my first vial by the time the fire started to show, flickers of orange through the front windows, a faint but perceptible rise in the temperature. I cracked open another and watched my home burn.

Guiscard was careful to make a lot of noise as he approached. It was a good time to be wary around me. I was looking for an excuse.

‘I wouldn’t think it wise to show up here, under the circumstances,’ I said, resting my hands on the hilt of my trench blade.

‘I’m here alone,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t have anything to do with your man’s death.’

I reached over and pulled at the lapel of his duster. ‘They don’t let you hold onto that, if you retire. I should know.’

‘This wasn’t Black House.’

‘Crowley don’t work for Black House?’

‘I told you before – Crowley’s writing his own ticket.’

‘And the team you sent after the boy? You’re going to tell me Crowley had nothing to do with that?’

Guiscard wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘It was an insurance policy – once we realized what Crowley had done, the Old Man wanted something to bring you to heel.’