She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (17 page)

‘You’ve moved up in the world, since last I’ve seen you.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve risen in the ranks, if that’s the same thing.’

‘Is it?’

He shrugged again. It was a habit he’d come to late in life – his earlier iteration was never uncertain about anything, and if he had been, certainly wouldn’t have shown it. ‘The Old Man won’t be around forever. Somebody’s got to keep all the pieces moving.’

‘Do they?’

‘I know your feelings on the subject – let the edifice crumble, right?’

Those weren’t exactly my feelings, actually, but if that was the part he wanted me to play, I figured I might as well go along. ‘Sometimes the rot goes too deep to paper over. You have to tear it down, and start from scratch.’

‘And the people living inside?’

‘A few nights in the rain never hurt anyone.’

‘It’s much prettier as a metaphor than in reality. The world is imperfect, I’m not unaware of that fact. Someone still needs to run it. Better us than a pack of brown-robed fanatics.’ But the way he said it he didn’t seem altogether sure, and he kept rambling on, trying to prove the point to one of us. ‘It all sounds very nice, railing against corruption, calling for a more equitable society. What does it amount to really? Perpetual antagonism against the Dren, a sin-tax on everything they don’t like. The instituting of their narrow moral viewpoint on a nation far vaster and more diverse than they can conceive. And if they ever did acquire power, what would they discover? Purity is no virtue in a King – compromise is the essence of rulership.’

‘How noble of you to spare them such a burden.’

‘You’d see no improvement in your lot, should the Sons succeed in their aims. They don’t take so … nuanced a view on recreational narcotics as do we at Black House. Amongst their other aims is to re-institute the death penalty for drug dealers.’

‘There isn’t a country in the world that enforces all its own laws. Whoever ends up ruling in the Old City, I don’t anticipate their suddenly concerning themselves with what we do in Low Town.’

‘Is that the feeling? One monarch is the same as another? Seems awfully short-sighted.’

‘I sell poison – it’s a short-sighted way to make a living.’

‘If the Steps come to power, it won’t be business as usual. I’m under no illusions that we currently live in paradise, but I assure you, things would get much worse.’

‘They generally do,’ I admitted. ‘All the same, I’ll take your prediction with a grain of salt. You are not, after all, a disinterested party, but the heir apparent himself. I wouldn’t expect you to throw away your patrimony.’

He didn’t answer that for a while. ‘You did,’ he said.

I reached over and started on a cigarette from the supplies Guiscard had left on the table. I rolled it slowly, and thought about the past. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t righteousness that brought me down, was foolishness. When I was in your spot I did whatever was required of me.’

Guiscard reached over and lit my smoke. ‘That’s all they ask of us,’ he said.

T
here were five people in the room, but only two of us mattered.

The Old Man of course, looking like he always did, blue-eyed and smiling. He didn’t wear the traditional agent garb, never did. A well-cut suit, modest and old-fashioned, served him better. And of course he never carried a weapon. Even the suggestion of physical violence was beneath him.

With Crowley, however, it was a virtual guarantee. He was short and squat as a cask of ale, with overlong arms and a head like a bullet from a sling. His eyes were black pinpricks set above a nose red from drink and bent from injury. His hair was shorn close to his skull, and his ice-blue uniform unkempt. Crowley wasn’t much for vanity – he made up for it by doubling down on the other available vices.

Despite the way he looked, talked and acted, Crowley wasn’t altogether worthless. He was a solid enough field man, and he had a blunt sort of cleverness that gave him a clear eye on the closest path between two points. That said, he wasn’t there because he had much in the way of advice to offer or assistance to give. It was his little bonus – Crowley didn’t care for money, and he didn’t really understand what power was. He just liked to sit next to the Old Man, get his head patted, feel important.

Bohemond was the High Chancellor’s chief aide. His presence in the room was a courtesy, and if no one went out of the way to express this to him, neither was his opinion given any particular weight. The High Chancellor back in those days was an old-blooded Rouender on whom the Old Man had enough dirt to cover six-square feet. The current High Chancellor is the same in all of these particulars. Although I don’t know him personally, I’d be close to certain he has a fellow like Bohemond running about for him. A man whose job is to notice little and commit to less, who has the words ‘plausible deniability’ etched on the innermost chamber of his heart.

Raynald was the Old Man’s second brain. He spoke five languages and could break code without a pen or paper. In a certain sense he was the smartest person I’d ever met, a veritable encyclopedia of trivia – but he was toothless, he didn’t understand why people did the things they did and had never learned how to force them to do the things he wanted. In short, he was not the sort to steer the ship, though he was plenty useful in reading charts. He went and disappeared not so long after my own removal. I guess the Old Man decided to clean house.

And obviously, there was me. I’d been five years in Black House, the last three in Special Operations. My rise was nothing short of meteoric, to be commented on and railed against in the coffee houses and bars where my colleagues blew off steam. There were lots of theories to explain my rapid ascent. I was the Old Man’s child from the wrong side of the sheets, one went – though anyone who knew him knew he didn’t have time for anything as frivolous as sex. Another said that I’d saved the Old Man’s life, and this was how he repaid me – though here again, a cursory knowledge of the boss’s personality made it clear gratitude was no more in his make-up than lust.

The truth is, I was just better than any of them, and for all his catalog of vices, the Old Man could recognize talent. My existence simplified his, gave him an extra set of hands on his projects. I was competent, and ruthless bordering on amoral, and by the Old Man’s way of thinking these were the highest traits to which humankind could aspire.

Between the five of us, which is to say the two of us, what needed to happen to ensure the continuation of the Empire, happened. Obviously not officially – the High Chancellor still served at the pleasure of the Queen, the Old Man at the pleasure of the High Chancellor, and me at the pleasure of the Old Man. And the obvious decisions, the things that made it into the broadsheet, the average, which is to say ignorant, man on the street thought were important – these were mostly taken care of by people officially slotted to do so. But the framework had been erected by the Old Man, and was kept standing by our continual machinations.

The meeting, slated for two hours, was stretching past its third, and my head was starting to hurt. I poured myself a cup of lukewarm coffee from the spread on the table, and examined the handful of stale pastries that sat beside it with a critical eye. The Old Man could say a word and a diplomat on another continent would wake up tomorrow dead, but he was unable to ensure us an edible working lunch. It’s a strange world.

‘I just think it’s crucial that the niceties be observed in every detail,’ Bohemond was saying. His voice oozed out of his throat like syrup from a tapped maple.

‘Of course,’ the Old Man responded with equal unctuousness. Not quite equal. Close.

‘It is a delicate situation, after all – the Nestrians are still our allies.’

‘Bosom brothers,’ the Old Man answered.

‘We wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize our relationship.’

We were in the process of making the decision to plant dirt on a Nestrian official who was giving us some trouble. In fact, the decision had already been made, it was just a question of allowing Bohemond, and by extension the High Chancellor, to feel as if he had some role in making it. Actually, this accounted for perhaps sixty or seventy percent of our time in these things. One of the many facets of the Old Man’s genius was that he operated absolutely without ego. So long as his decision was ultimately carried out, he cared very little who received the credit. In fact, I think he preferred to work through intermediaries – easier to cut them loose if trouble came up.

‘The furthest thing from my mind,’ he answered pleasantly. ‘So it’s decided.’

The committee was informal, there was no roll call and no official vote of any kind – the thought of ever having to take responsibility for his decisions was a concept that threw Bohemond into a cold sweat. All decisions were by custom unanimous, the Old Man first amongst equals, stewarding the discussion, but not imposing his will. It was a polite fiction, but one that we all upheld.

‘While we’re on the Nestrians,’ the Old Man switched topics glibly, ‘where are we on identifying this … operative they seem to have planted in our midst?’

Counter-intelligence was primarily Crowley’s department, and he was well suited to it. He was dogged and thorough, and he didn’t care about being hated, a necessity when your job largely consists of investigating your own people. Nor did he mind putting a person to the question, if he thought it would get any information. He didn’t really seem to mind putting a person to the question regardless, if we were to be honest.

‘We’re close,’ he said.

I whistled tunelessly. Crowley snapped his gaze over to me. ‘We are,’ he insisted.

This was before my simmering rivalry with Crowley had turned into open hatred, which explains why we were able to sit across from each other without him trying to stab me with a fork – though even at the time our relations were frosty bordering on glacial. Crowley didn’t like the fact that I was smarter than him, that I’d usurped the position that he thought should be his. Beneath that, he didn’t like the small confidences the Old Man offered me, the perceived closeness between us. That the Old Man could no more bond with another human being than he could grow wings and take flight seemed not to have occurred to Crowley. For my part, I disliked him for being a brutal, thuggish oaf, with a propensity for violence bordering on the unprofessional. He was also very easy to provoke, an activity I enjoyed participating in for its own sake.

‘As close as you were last week? And the week before that?’

‘He’s out there, dammit, I can smell him. The frog-eaters have been a step ahead for too damn long. They’re getting an earful from somebody.’

That we were allied to the Nestrians, had backed their fading horse against the Dren, had given them a share of the spoils after they’d bailed out of the Great War early on account of general incompetence, did not alter the fact that they ran operatives within the Empire proper. Deep cover, often as businessmen or within their legitimate diplomatic apparatus. We had the same on their end of course, a ring of spies led by a quiet, uninspiring figure who owned a shop selling used books in their capital, spoke in perfect regional dialect and ran a network so efficient we knew what King Louis ate for breakfast by dinner. Said operative was picking up some disturbing chatter the last season or so – that the Nestrians had someone high up in our ranks, ferreting out crucial bits of information before we were able to act on them. I wasn’t sure I believed him, to be frank. The primary purpose of any organization is to perpetuate its own existence. Deducing, or inventing, a threat like that would be proof against budget cuts for years to come.

‘Three months you’ve been telling us you’ve got a line on the Nestrians,’ I said. ‘Six months you’ve been running around like a bull with the scent of blood, knocking into actual operations in the misguided belief you’re on the way to something solid.’

‘They figured out we had our hooks into their archduke, and they rolled up the network we were setting up in Barruges,’ Crowley said, referring to two recent reverses. ‘That’s no fantasy of mine – how the hell do you explain that?’

‘Maybe the mail boy’s been kicking out our secret memos. Maybe
Ś
akra the Firstborn visits the dreams of King Louis every evening and tells him our innnermost plans. I have no fucking idea Crowley, because it’s not my question to answer. I’m not in charge of counter-intelligence, you are. But if our positions were reversed, I can assure you that I wouldn’t come in here every week promising that next week’s meeting would be the one where I finally did my job.’

The Old Man watched over our feud without a dip in his smile. It served his interests to have his numbers two and three at each other’s throats. He would have encouraged our enmity if it hadn’t developed naturally. ‘So that would be a “no” then, on whether any progress has been made in ferreting out our mole?’

Crowley grunted.

‘Lovely. Our next order of business would be …’ The Old Man turned to Raynald.

Raynald took out a sheet of paper from his folder, though I was certain he knew the details without looking. ‘Lood De Burg, former colonel in the Army of the United Dren Commonwealth, forcibly retired along with most of the rest of his comrades since the armistice. He’s founded a political party called
Het Eenheidsfront
that seems to be getting some traction.’

‘We let them have political parties?’ Bohemond asked, an attempt at humor.

The Old Man laughed politely, then nodded at Raynald to continue.

‘It’s the usual pot of revisionist bitterness flavored with conspiratorial nonsense. They claim the war was lost by traitors on the home front, a fifth column which overturned their efforts. By this they appear to mean the Commonwealth’s population of Asher and Islander. Their platform consists of curtailing the rights of the aforementioned, an end to payment on the war debt and a policy of rapid rearmament.’

‘He sounds like a lovely fellow,’ the Old Man said. ‘What exactly do we want to do with him?’

‘I’d like to give him a few thousand ochres,’ I said.