Low Town (5 page)

I rolled a smoke. Yancey hated to be interrupted in the middle of a performance, regardless of the setting. I once had to pull him off a courtier who made the mistake of laughing during his set. He had that unpredictable temper common to small men, the kind of rage that flares up before fading away just as quickly.

After a moment he finished his verse, and the tiny audience responded with muted applause. He laughed off their lack of enthusiasm, then looked up at me. “If it ain’t the Warden himself—finally managed a visit to your friend Yancey, I see.” His voice was thick and mellifluous.

“I got caught up in something.”

“I heard.” He shook his head regretfully. “Bad business. You going to the funeral?”

“No.”

“Well I am, so help me pack this up.” He began breaking down
his set, wrapping each of the tiny hide drums in a collection of cotton sacks. I took the smallest of his pieces and did the same, slipping in his fistful of product as I did so. As a rule, Yancey was apt to injure any man foolish enough to touch his instruments, but he knew what I was up to and let it pass without comment. “The noble folk were disappointed you didn’t show last night.”

“And their sorrow weighs heavy on my soul.”

“I’m sure you lost sleep. You want to make up for it, you can come by the Duke of Illador’s estate Tuesday evening round ten.”

“You know how important the opinion of the peerage is to me. I suppose you’ll be expecting your usual cut?”

“Unless you feel like upping it.”

I did not. We continued in silence until the onlookers were out of earshot. “They say you found her,” Yancey said.

“They say things.”

“You steady on it?”

“As a top.”

He nodded sympathetically. “Bad business.” He finished packing up his set in a thick canvas bag, then slung it over his shoulder. “We’ll talk more later. I want to get a decent spot in the square.” He bumped my fist and walked off. “Stay loose.”

The docks were virtually deserted, the usual mass of workers, merchants, and customers long departed for the funeral, like Yancey happy to set aside a few hours of work to take part in a spectacle of public mourning. In their absence a dull quiet had settled over the area, a distinct contrast to the usual bustle of commerce. Making certain no one was watching I reached into my satchel for a hit of breath. My headache eased and the pain in my ankle receded. I watched the gray sky reflect off the water, thinking back to the day I had stood on the docks with five thousand other youths, preparing to board a troop ship to Gallia. My uniform had looked very fine, I’d thought, and my steel helm had glittered in the sun.

I contemplated lighting a joint of dreamvine but decided against it. It’s never a good idea to get faded in a maudlin mood—the vine tends to heighten your anxieties instead of blunting them. Solitude was proving an ill fit, and my feet found themselves shuffling north toward the church. It seemed I was attending the funeral after all.

By the time I got there the service had started and the Square of Benevolence was packed so tight you could barely see the dais. I skirted the crowd and sneaked into an alleyway off the main plaza, taking a seat on a stack of packing crates. It was too far back to hear what the high priest of Prachetas was saying, but I was confident it was very pretty—you don’t get to a point in life where people put gold on your outerwear unless you can say very pretty things at opportune moments. And anyway the wind had picked up, so most of the crowd couldn’t hear the speech either. At first they pushed closer, straining their ears to make him out. When that didn’t work, they got anxious, children pulling at their parents, day laborers shuffling their feet to keep warm.

Sitting on the stage, a respectful ten paces behind the priest, was the girl’s mother, recognizable even at this distance by the look on her face. It was one I had seen during the war on the faces of boys who had lost limbs, the look of someone who suffered a wound that should have been mortal but wasn’t. It tends to settle like wet plaster, grafting itself permanently to the skin. I suspected this was a mask the poor woman wouldn’t ever be able to shed, unless the torment became too much and she put steel to her wrist some cold night.

The priest reached a crescendo, or at least I thought he had. I still couldn’t hear anything, but his grandiloquent gestures and the mumbled beatitudes from the crowd seemed to indicate some sort of a climax. I tried to light a cigarette but the wind kept taking my flame, and I exhausted half a dozen matches before giving up. It was that kind of afternoon.

Then it was over, the oration completed and the invocations
offered. The priest held the gilded icon of Prachetas aloft and descended from the dais, the pallbearers following behind with the coffin. Some of the crowd left with the procession. Most did not. It was getting cold after all, and the cemetery was a long walk.

I waited for the crowd to filter out from the square, then pushed myself up from my seat. At some point during the speech I hadn’t heard I’d decided to violate my self-imposed exile and return to the Aerie to speak with the Blue Crane.

Fucking funerals. Fucking mother. Fucking kid.

The Aerie reigns above Low Town like Śakra the Firstborn over Chinvat. A perfectly straight pillar, dark blue against the gray of the tenements and warehouses, stretching up endlessly. With the exception of the Royal Palace, with its crystalline fortifications and wide thoroughfares, it is the single most extraordinary building in the city. For near on thirty years it has subjugated the skyline, offering glorious contrast to the surrounding slums. It was a comfort, as a youth, to have visible evidence that the remainder of what you saw was not everything there was to see—that some portion of existence prevailed unpolluted by stench and piss.

The hope had proved false, of course, but that was my fault and no one else’s. It had been a long time since I’d seen the tower as anything but a reminder of squandered promise and the foolish hopes of a foolish boy.

They had leveled an entire city block to make room for the Square of Exultation, as the courtyard surrounding the Aerie was called, but no one had minded. This was in the dark times after the great plague, when the population of Low Town had shrunk to a fraction of what it was in years prior. In place of the tenements was built a maze of white stone enclosing the tower itself, intricately complex but barely waist
high, allowing anyone willing to look foolish to hop over the walls. As a child I had spent countless hours here playing rat-in-a-hole or bowley pegs, stalking through the rows of granite or running tiptoe along the fortifications.

The square was likely the only portion of Low Town that the populace had not actively worked to dilapidate. No doubt the Crane’s reputation as being among the most skilled practitioners of magic in the nation had some part in cutting down on vandalism, but the truth was that, almost to a man, the people of Low Town idolized their patron and would accept no desecration of his home. To speak ill of the Crane was to call for a beating in any tavern between the docks and the canal, and a shiv to the gut in some of the harder ones. He was our most beloved figure, more highly esteemed than the Queen and the Patriarch combined, his charity funding a half-dozen orphanages and his alms joyfully received by a grateful public.

I stood in front of the house of my oldest friend and lit a cigarette, the wind having died down enough to allow me my petty pleasures. There were very good reasons why I hadn’t visited my mentor in five years, and I blew tobacco smoke in the chilly air and piled one atop another till they loomed over the whim that had carried me this far. I could still call an end to this idiocy, return to the Earl, light some dreamvine, and sleep until tomorrow. The mental impression of soft sheets and colored smoke faded as I stepped through the first archway, my feet threading their way forward against my better instincts, instincts I seemed to be ignoring a lot lately.

I negotiated my way through the maze, half-forgotten memories guiding me right or left. My cigarette went out but I didn’t have the energy to relight it, and I stuffed the butt into my coat pocket rather than dirty the Crane’s patio.

One last turn and I was facing the entrance, an outline of a door in the sheer wall, absent knocker or other obvious means of ingress.
Perched on an indentation above it was a gargoyle, white stone like the maze, its maw locked in something closer to a smirk than a grimace. Seconds passed. I was glad no one was around to witness my cowardice. Finally I decided that I hadn’t traversed the maze for nothing, and rapped twice on the frame.

“Greetings, young one.” The voice the Crane had created for his watchman was incongruous with its purpose, lighter and friendlier than one would expect from the creature’s composition. Its concrete eyes looked me up and down slowly. “Perhaps not so young these days. The Master has been alerted, and will receive you in the loft. I have standing orders to allow you entry should you ever arrive.”

The crack in the facade widened, stone sliding against stone. Above it the gargoyle’s face contorted smugly, no small feat for a creature composed of mineral. “Although I didn’t think I’d ever need to follow them.”

Not for the first time I wondered what in the name of the Firstborn had possessed the Crane to imbue his creation with a sense of sarcasm, there being no great shortage of it among the human race. I stepped into the foyer without responding.

It was small, little more than a platform for the long circular stairway that led skyward. I began the climb to the upper floors, my path illuminated by evenly spaced wall sconces leaking a clear white light. Halfway up I stopped to catch my breath. This had been a lot easier as a child, sprinting up the curving stone with the abandon of someone who was not a hardened tobacco addict. After a rest I continued my ascent, fighting the urge to retreat with every step.

A spacious living room took up most of the top floor of the Aerie. The furniture was neat and functional, making up in clean aesthetic what it lacked in opulence. Two large chairs sat before a narrow fireplace built into the dividing wall that separated this area from the Master’s private quarters. The decor had remained unaltered since I
had first glimpsed the interior, and unbidden memories came to mind of winter afternoons by the fire and of a childhood best forgotten.

I watched him, silhouetted against the great glass window looking southeast over the harbor. From that height the stink and hustle of Low Town evaporates, giving way to the endless ocean in the distance. He turned slowly and placed his withered hands over mine. I was conscious of my desire to look away. “It’s been too long,” he said.

The years showed. The Crane has always been wizened, his body too thin to support his height, scraggly tufts of white hair sprouting from his head and bony chin. But also he’d always possessed an improbable energy which seemed to make a lie of his age. I could detect little trace of it any longer. His skin was stretched thin as paper, and there was a jaundiced tinge to his eyes. At least his costume remained unchanged, an unadorned robe, rich blue like everything else in his citadel.

“My greetings to you, Magister,” I began. “I appreciate you seeing me without an appointment.”

“Magister? Is that how you greet the man who rubbed unguent on your scraped knees and made you boiled chocolate to ward off the cold?”

It was clear he wasn’t going to make this easy. “I thought it inappropriate to presume on past intimacies.”

His expression soured, and he pulled his arms firm across each other. “I understand your reticence to return—even as a child you had more pride than half the royal court. But don’t suggest that I turned my back on you, or ever would. Even after you left the Crown’s service and … took up your new vocation.”

“You mean after I was stripped of my rank and started selling drugs on the street?”

He sighed. I could remember him making that same sound when I came to him with a bruised eye from fighting, or he realized I’d stolen
whatever new toy I was playing with. “I spent years trying to break you of that habit.”

“What habit?”

“This way you have of taking everything as an insult. It’s a sign of low breeding.”

“I am lowbred.”

“You could work harder to hide it.” He smiled and I found myself doing the same. “Regardless, you have returned, and as grateful as I am to see you, I can’t help but wonder to what I owe the reappearance of my prodigal son? Unless you reappeared at my doorstep after five years solely to inquire of my health?”

When I was a child, the Crane had been my benefactor and protector, doing me what kindnesses the fiercest urchin in Low Town would accept. As an agent, I had often turned to him, both for advice and for the assistance his prodigious skill could offer. Yet for all my practice this newest round of supplication choked me on its way out. “I need your help.”

His face tensed up, a fair reaction to a plea for aid from a man he hadn’t spoken to in half a decade, particularly one on the wrong side of the law. “And what services do you require?”

“I found Little Tara,” I said, “and I need to know if you’d picked up anything on her from your channels. If there’s a divination you think might be helpful, I’d ask you to do that as well, and without alerting Black House or the appropriate ministry.”