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

In one regard only were they similar, though this last outweighed the rest – was indeed the cause of their association, the reason I’d tracked Mazzie down three years ago and cajoled her into taking Wren on as a student. In the long gestation prior to their birth, the daevas had reached down inside them and kindled a spark which remained dormant in the rest of us, which allowed them to will into existence things wondrous and horrifying.

Mazzie was playing with a deck of oversized cards, strange things, precious looking but well used. She reordered them with easy dexterity, using a type of shuffle with which I was unfamiliar – and I’m a deft hand when it comes to cheating at poker.

‘What are you doing here?’ Wren asked. Amongst my many failures as a guardian, I had yet to learn the boy the basics of etiquette.

‘I was in the neighborhood. I thought I’d give you a walk home.’

‘We’ve got a couple of minutes yet.’

‘Finish your lesson,’ I said, stepping inside and pulling shut the curtain. ‘I paid enough for it.’

Wren turned back to Mazzie, who noted my presence in her brilliant, imperturbable eyes but gave no greeting. ‘You ready?’ she asked the boy.

‘I’m waiting, ain’t I?’

Mazzie cackled, but didn’t stop what she was doing.

‘The Zealot.’

Mazzie cut a card from the center of the deck, randomly so far as I could see, and flipped it over. On it was a robed figure kneeling beside a bound woman, holding a lit torch to a fagot of wood at her feet.

Wren smiled confidently. ‘The Crumbling Throne.’

Mazzie dropped another card onto the table – a crowned man on a stone chair, the top inlaid with gemstones, the bottom decaying into nothingness.

‘Why you looking at my hands?’ Mazzie asked Wren. ‘I got nothing to do with what’s coming.’

‘I gotta look somewhere.’

She shook her head adamantly. ‘Your eyes just gonna lie to you – don’t you listen to anything I say?’

Wren shrugged but didn’t bother to answer. Mazzie had kept up her shuffling during the back and forth, and dropped another card in the boy’s direction. ‘The False Friend.’

An ugly man standing between two halves of a mob, hands raised in supplication, a sly smile on his face.

I was conscious of the heat – over-conscious, to judge by the fact that no one else seemed to feel it. My brow was moist with sweat, and my head was heavy, like I’d wrapped it with cloth. I blinked it away, but it didn’t go.

‘Bitter Enemies,’ I heard Wren say.

Two figures locked in a death grip, a scarred man strangling his opponent into final submission.

‘The Untrue Lover.’

A man and a woman intertwined, the first beatific, the second cold and even.

‘Five for five,’ Mazzie said. ‘Let’s see you finish it.’

To judge by Wren’s smirk, certain and over-clever, this would be no problem. ‘The Broken Cage.’

Mazzie drew the last card from the deck, looked at it and smiled for a moment. But only a moment – then the grin dripped off her face like wax from a candle, and what was left was bitter and contemptuous.

The card showed a galleon breaking against a reef. It was surprisingly intricate – I could make out a tiny figure leaping off the topmast, taking his chances with a furious sea. ‘Dashed Hopes,’ she said.

The smoke from Mazzie’s kitchen fire had wrapped itself inside my throat. My ears were buzzing like I’d taken a full snort of breath. Each stroke of my pulse sounded in my ears. Wren was saying something, but it was a few seconds before I realized it was directed at me.

‘What?’ I broke out of my stupor.

‘I said that was it for the day. I’m ready when you are.’

‘Start without me, give the elderly a moment to themselves.’

‘You said you were here to walk me home.’

‘What I say is a long way from what I do – I’d have thought you’d have picked up on that after six years.’

‘Get on out of here,’ Mazzie agreed, waving her charge out the exit.

Wren grumbled himself to the door, and I stopped thinking about him. The boy didn’t need to worry about the inhabitants of the Isthmus. Mazzie had spread clear word throughout the neighborhood that he was off limits, and even the most hardened thug felt their mouth dry up at the thought of crossing her. Besides, he could handle himself, much as it galled me to admit it.

I took the seat he’d vacated and started on a cigarette. My hands were stiff and numb, and it took me longer than it should have. I managed it finally, though it was far from my best work. ‘How’s he doing?’

‘You ask after what you just saw?’

‘Parlor tricks. And he missed the last one.’

‘I didn’t know you were such an expert on the Art.’

‘I know everything about everything Mazzie – it’s one of my many charms.’

She about half-laughed at that. The three years she’d been teaching Wren hadn’t made us friends, but we’d at least acclimatized to the other’s occasional presence. ‘Took me more years than I’d admit to learn that parlor trick. Took the boy six months. He’s coming along. Coming along fast. As it happens, I’ve been meaning to speak on him for a while now.’

‘I’m within earshot.’

‘When you first came to me, you said to make sure he didn’t kill himself with the gift.’

‘You’ve upheld your end of the bargain admirably.’

‘Said to teach him a few basic charms, set his feet on the path.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘I done it – done it and more.’

‘So what would you say – he’s fifth rank? Fourth?’ I tried to remember where apprentice ended and initiate began. It had been a long time since my days picking up second-hand bits of magical trivia from the Blue Crane.

Mazzie rolled back her eyes. ‘You fucking Riguns – you put a number on something, think you own it, think you know what it is.’

‘Yes, the acquisition of knowledge – an unfortunate hobby the Empire has bent itself towards.’

‘Learning’s fine. Better to remember that you don’t ever know very much. Say you go ahead and do something a hundred times – if you ain’t dumb as dog shit, you ought to make a fair guess as to what happens the hundred and first. That don’t mean you understand why it happened, don’t mean you can do anything but read a pattern once it’s been burned into your head. I spent twenty years sitting at the feet of the greatest Practitioner in Miradin. I once saw him tame a storm that would have swamped half the capital by whispering kind words over a wooden bowl.’ She spat on the ground. ‘Should have let it drown the place, but that’s not the point – he didn’t need a number written onto his forehead to know he knew how to do something.’

‘And that’s all they do in the Academy? Lie to themselves about what they know, what they’re teaching?’

She shook her head. ‘All this nonsense about ranks and scales, the idea that you could master the Art like you would your times tables – that’s a lie. The learning ain’t no lie. But the learning takes different forms for everybody. My way isn’t Wren’s way – he’s stronger, and his mind goes in different directions. I’ve taken him as far as I can.’

‘He’s learned everything you have to show him?’

‘He’s learned everything I’m going to.’

That sat just fine with me. There were things Mazzie of the Stained Bone knew of which I’d prefer Wren remain ignorant. ‘So what are you suggesting? Get another teacher? You know as well as I do, no practitioner would be willing to take on an unlicensed student – and you know double I won’t let the Crown hear of what he can do.’

‘He’s got talent – real talent, talent like I never had and never seen. And he’s smart, and he wants it. He could be a master – there aren’t half a hundred folk in the world you can say that about. But he won’t be it here. Not with me, and not if you can’t get him someone knows more of the Art than I do.’

‘You’re telling me to leave the city?’

Mazzie took a thumb-sized cheroot out from her seemingly limitless supply. ‘I told you what I’m telling you,’ she said, and pared off the tip with a curved knife far too long for the job.

‘Fair enough.’ I added the concern to a not insignificant tally. ‘But the boy isn’t what I came to see you about.’

Mazzie leaned her muzzle over the candle and lit the stub in her mouth. ‘Then what was?’

‘Yancey.’ The Rhymer was our single shared acquaintance, beyond the boy himself. Had, in fact, been the one to put me in touch with Mazzie, when I’d been looking for someone capable of training Wren that I could be sure wouldn’t be whispering anything about it to the Crown. That also made him one of a half-dozen people in the world who knew what Wren was capable of. There weren’t many men I’d have left alive knowing that secret, but I trusted Yancey as far as anybody could trust anybody.

Mazzie stretched back into her seat, puffing at her cigar till it had a decent draw. ‘I’m listening.’

‘He’s sick.’

‘I hear so.’

‘I thought maybe you’d look in on him, see if there’s something you can do. I’d make it worth your time.’

Reading Mazzie was like staring into an overcast sky at midnight – I’d have better luck playing Wren’s side of that card game. Still, I thought I saw something resembling regret. ‘He been sick for a while?’

‘The last six months. Maybe longer, but you’d notice it the last six months.’

‘Nothing to be done.’

‘You can say that without seeing him?’

‘Folk come to Mazzie, they say they sick. I tell them quit eating fried chicken livers for every meal, give them something so they can shit better. Sometimes they come to me in the winter with a child, getting that wet cough, that cough that’s gonna get worse. They come to me early enough, sometimes I can help him, smooth it over, see to it the child sees spring. Some nights I hear loud noises outside of the door, and I know the rough boys got someone who took a blade, and are trying to get the courage to bother me ’bout it. They stop being fearful, they bring the man in, Mazzie look at him, tell his friends to come back in the morning. Sometimes the man come out at first light with his flesh reknit, owing Mazzie till the day he die for true. Sometimes that man don’t walk out at all, if Mazzie decide it better he be going in the ground.’

She had a smile like the last thing you see before the end. I made sure I didn’t look away, but it was a strain. After it had gone on long enough, Mazzie ashed her smoke and continued.

‘But when a body decides it don’t want to keep breathing, nothing to be done. Least nothing I ever learned.’

‘You can’t take a look?’

‘What the point of that? Give the man hope for something ain’t coming?’ She shook her head. ‘I tell you I can’t do it. That’s all there is to say.’

‘I guess so,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll see you next week with coin.’

If there had ever been a moment when Mazzie was expressing concern as to the Rhymer’s future, it was gone completely. She grunted, my presence or lack thereof not worth an entire syllable. We had enough in common for understanding, but too much for friendship. I stubbed my cigarette and left without a final retort.

It had been a vain hope, barely that even, a passing fancy I’d decided to cling to. Forty years, you’d think a fellow would start to get used to disappointment. But it always burns the same. Wren hadn’t bothered to wait, which suited me fine. I spent the walk home eyeballing passersby, hoping one of them would jump. But none of them did – they never do when you want them to.

I
stopped off at a bar on the way back from Mazzie’s, a little neighborhood joint a few blocks from the pier. I needed a drink, and I needed to be left alone, and back at the Earl I’d only get the first. It had been a nasty day. Two stiff glasses of liquor didn’t improve it, but they at least blurred some of the details.

Folk started to trickle in around dinner time. A man asked if he could borrow the empty chair from my table, and I paid my bill and left without answering.

I followed the canal north, away from the docks and towards the big industrial districts that ring the west corner of the city. Hempden had been a nice place, once, but it wasn’t anymore. I guess that holds true of a lot of things. The population was Vaalan, with a smattering of Islander, the men working at the huge pig-iron foundries they’d built after the war. A working-class neighborhood, where a man could come in from the provinces without anything but a strong back, find himself some labor he needn’t be ashamed of doing, and that could pay for whatever family he managed to put together.

But the Nestrians stopped buying iron from us after we stopped buying wool from them, and the forges started to twinkle out, one after another. They weren’t any great shakes, as many a bitter old drunk with a mangled hand or a limp could tell you, but they were better than nothing. Their absence left a chancre where a community had once been. When you got nothing to do all day but sit around and pretend to be mean, you find that’s exactly what you end up doing. Then one day you find you aren’t pretending.

The three men on the stoop weren’t even up to that moderate task any longer, an object lesson in just how much a person could lose without dying. I had a sudden image of three toads on a log – blank eyes and mouths stretched horizontal. I smelled piss, but then I’d been smelling piss for a solid ten-block stretch, so I couldn’t pin that on them for a certainty.

‘The Professor around?’ I asked one of them.

He didn’t answer. None of them answered.

‘You going to let me through?’

The one in the middle leaned very faintly to the left, as if blown by the wind, and I slipped up the stairs. Someone had busted the front door off its hinges – I had to pick it up and move it aside. The entryway was the sort of place that made you wish your boots were thicker than they were, that you were wearing gloves and a winter cloak and a few layers of long underwear.

I didn’t linger. At the end of the hallway was a door, and I rapped at it.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Queen Bess.’

A moment’s pause. ‘But your majesty, you weren’t expected till tomorrow! We haven’t even made up your chambers!’

I opened the door, but hesitated before going inside. I’d found my way through the foyer with the little bit of light coming in from the outside, but it wouldn’t take me any further. The interior was black as the inside of a cenotaph.