She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (25 page)

I took a puff. ‘Did you get this from my stash?’

‘Yes,’ Wren said.

‘At least you’re honest in your dishonesty.’ Since it was technically my joint, I resolved to sit on it for a while. Adolphus didn’t mind, despite his bulk a few pulls were all it took to set him on his posterior. If it bothered the boy, he had sense enough not to say anything about it. I watched the fire spark in the corner, and tried not to think about the chaos that eddied around me.

Wren ended that quick enough, quicker than I’d have liked, certainly. ‘You put in a solid day?’ he asked.

‘We didn’t all spend our afternoon stealing from people we live with.’

‘Full day, then?’

‘Full enough.’

‘I guess it’s overtime.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Your Step is in the doorway,’ Wren said, ‘and he seems excited.’

I didn’t bother to look. Wren’s smirk was sufficient to let me know he wasn’t lying. Why exactly the child took such pleasure in seeing the world make trouble for me, I’d never understand.

‘You all right to handle him?’ Wren asked. ‘He hasn’t made you yet – you could probably still slip out the back. I’ll run him around for you.’

This was somewhere between insult and challenge, and I didn’t bother responding to it. I took another hit, let the vine spackle over the cracks in my mind. Then I contorted my face into a grimace, turned suddenly and rushed over to greet our new arrival.

‘There you are,’ he started. Likely would have continued even, if I hadn’t grabbed him stiffly by the arm and hustled him into the back corner.

‘Are you out of your mind, coming here?’ I asked him, swiveling my head back and forth as if inspecting the walls for peepholes. ‘What could you possibly be thinking?’

He was at a brief loss for words. ‘I … I thought …’

‘Do you have any idea the heat you could bring down on me if anyone saw us together? How fast my throat would be cut, and yours twice as quickly?’

‘I was here last week.’

‘That was different!’ I said adamantly. ‘That was last week! Last week isn’t this week! These are two different weeks we’re discussing!’

‘Then your efforts have yielded success?’

‘Absolutely!’

‘Of what fashion?’

‘Of what fashion?’

‘What developments have you to tell regarding …’ He cut himself short in an admirable display of subtlety. As if to make up for it, he initiated a spastic round of facial jerks and low whistles meant to replace the object of his prior sentence. One of the old men playing chess looked over.

‘I get it,’ I said.

‘Well, what have you been doing about it?’

‘What have I been doing? What have I been doing?’ What had I been doing? ‘I’ve been running down every lead from every contact I could frighten, buy or cajole. This Coronet thing goes deep, Simeon, right to the bone. There are men, powerful men, who’d give everything they have to stop us from finding out the truth!’

‘So you’ve learned something?’

‘You think this is a game, Simeon?’ I was enjoying this whole thing more than I should have been. Normally dreamvine affects me very little, a garnish of good humor to set off my well-spoiled personality. But that moment I was really feeling it – I had to work not to giggle. ‘Do you think this is a game?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

‘Good – just so you know it’s not. It’s not a game.’

He nodded seriously – we were clear on that much at least. ‘What have you found out?’

I stared into his eyes for a solid five-count, my own pupils wide as a mad man’s. Then I shrugged. ‘What have they told you about Coronet, Simeon?’

He rearranged his skullcap. ‘What I need to know.’

That meant nothing. ‘You’re a lucky son of a bitch. I wish I was in your boat, wish I could reach right into my brain and scrub it free of knowledge, scour my skull till it was as empty as yours.’ It seemed to occur to him dimly that this was not a compliment, so I plowed on before the realization fully overtook him. ‘But I can’t – you can’t do that with brains, you know – it’s not like washing laundry.’

I could see the inner processes of his mind functioning on his face, knew that somewhere within a line of truth had been indelibly etched –
A Brain Is Not Like Laundry
. Next to it read,
This Is Not A Game
.

‘I need you to tell Egmont something – but only Egmont, no one else, do you understand? You can’t imagine Black House’s reach – they’ve got ears everywhere, in every closet and cranny, the drawers of every night table, the bottom of every chamber pot.’ That last might have been a little much, but if so Hume seemed not to have noticed.

‘No member of the Brotherhood would ever stoop so low!’ He had one hand tightened on the pommel of his rapier, the other raised up against his heart.

‘You cannot conceive of the duplicity of Black House, a decent, honest, simple soul like yourself. There is no perfidy of which they are incapable, no path too crooked for them to have designed it. The Old Man is as bent as a cheap nail, sharp as a saber and cruel as grim death. As sure as I’m sitting here, they have men in your organization.’ All of a sudden I’d stumbled into truth. I switched paths quickly. ‘Don’t trust anyone with what I tell you. Not your best friend, not your confessor. If your mother comes by tonight and asks what you’ve been doing today, you were sick and didn’t leave home, you understand?’

‘My mother’s dead.’

‘And we all deeply mourn her loss. But at least now she cannot betray you, as so, so many of your closest allies are no doubt, at this very moment, waiting to do.’ I looked around conspiratorially, then leaned in close to him. ‘You cannot trust the people you trust.’

‘Then how can I trust Egmont?’

‘OK, Egmont you can trust. No one else though.’ Adolphus was puttering about behind us, clearing tables and repositioning chairs. I played it up for his benefit. ‘Oh, would that I didn’t need to involve you in this, Simeon – to think of the danger I’m putting you in, simply by whispering this in your ear.’ I shook my head, as if overcome with concern at the thought. ‘It’s a terrible burden I’m placing on your shoulders.’

He strained to meet it. ‘The Firstborn sets ahead of us what challenges he sees fit – we must meet them with stout heart and even eye.’

Adolphus made a little face behind his back. I could appreciate the sentiment, though I thought it best not to echo it. ‘Good man, good man indeed.’ I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes, as if gathering my will for the next effort.

It was a surprisingly comfortable spot, a few feet down from the fire. I could have kept at it a while, maybe eased into a nap. But Hume was anxious as a virgin at a whorehouse, and refused to allow me the comfort. ‘Well? What’s the secret?’

I blinked myself back into the afternoon, took one last look around for spies peeking out from cracks in the walls, then leaned in close and whispered, ‘I know who’s selling red fever.’

‘Who?’ he near shouted, then looked around nervously and repeated in a tone so hushed I could barely make it out, ‘Who?’

‘Uriel Carabajal.’

‘Oh,’ Hume said, as if the name meant anything to him.

‘He’s an Unredeemed crime lord, owns a slice of land near the Enclave.’

‘
Ś
akra-damned black robes!’ I supposed that was as close to profanity as Hume allowed himself. ‘Is there no blasphemy to which they won’t sink!’

‘Forget about Uriel,’ I said. ‘He’s just the front man.’

‘For whom?’

‘I’m not sure yet – but it’s beginning to seem that I might have been speaking prematurely, when I called Coronet a failure. Black House is looking very hard in my direction, all of a sudden.’

‘How so?’

‘They put a tail on me – the Old Man’s top enforcer, name of Crowley.’

Hume hunched his shoulders down over the table, then took a wary look around the bar. ‘Is that him in the corner?’

It took me a while to realize he wasn’t joking. ‘No – not here right now. Tracking me generally.’

‘Oh,’ Hume said, a little disappointed. ‘I’ll let Egmont know.’

‘You’d better get a move on. If Black House sees you here it’ll be drapes for the two of us.’ Not that the Old Man needed to put me on surveillance, given that I was stooling for him. ‘And while we’re on the subject, next time you come visit me, do it in your civvies.’

He looked down at his brown garb. ‘I guess I stand out a bit,’ he acknowledged.

‘That, and your sect’s brand of moralizing doesn’t jibe so well with the natives. The local youths might decide to roll you and drop you in the canal.’

He spent a moment contemplating the feces-to-water quotient of our primary estuary. ‘All right,’ he said unhappily, then stood. ‘I’ll contact you once I’ve spoken with the Director.’

Maybe it was the vine – probably it was the vine – but before he could leave I broke out of my seat, grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him into a rough embrace. ‘Be careful,’ I hissed, then released him. ‘Keep one eye on your back, and two on your best friend.’

‘That’s three eyes.’

‘You’ll need four to survive what’s coming,’ I said.

Adolphus coughed to cover up his laugh. Anyone other than Hume would have noticed, but happily the Son was too busy trying to work out how to grow another set of peepers to pay attention. The operation proved too much for him, and he nodded frantically, then exited the Earl at a dead sprint.

I rejoined Wren and Adolphus at the counter. The boy was halfway through a second joint. I took it from his mouth and put it to my own.

‘What spooked him?’ Wren asked.

‘High strung, these religious types.’

‘You think you overplayed your hand?’ Adolphus asked.

‘I don’t imagine Egmont pays much attention to Hume’s reports. Gotta do something to shock him out of apathy.’

‘If he doesn’t trust the man, why’s he got him following you around?’

‘That’s an excellent question.’

It had been a fun way to spend a few minutes, but there was one thing nagging at the reaches of my mind, kept me from fully enjoying the high I was cocooning myself into. I had obviously not been running about the city, roughing up informants and digging up secrets. There was no need to. I’d seen the connection between the fever and Coronet before Egmont had pointed it out to me, seen it that first day when I’d picked up a tin of narcotics from the house of a dead man. And if most of what I’d just served Hume had been the most errant nonsense, in one critical regard, I’d been as upfront as a priest – if Black House had started up Coronet again, and at this point it looked very much like they had – we were all in a fuck-load of trouble.

G
uiscard’s man in the blue hat was quicker in coming than he had been the first time. I was at the counter, consciously not drinking. He stood a man off from me and ordered quietly. Adolphus brought over a bottle and used it to fill a glass, then moved on down the line.

‘Nice whiskey here, yeah?’ I said. ‘Worth the trip?’

He rolled his eyes and shook his head about an eighth of an inch back and forth. ‘You’re a dick,’ he mumbled out of the far corner of his mouth.

I couldn’t argue. At least, I didn’t argue. I reached over and poured him a second shot, then did the same for myself. He put it down with the same ease as he had the first, dropped a coin on the table and walked out. I waited half a minute, then drank mine and followed him.

Outside a bleak afternoon had turned into an ominous evening. It’s easy to put your mood on a place, read your temper in the pedestrians and passersby. Summer and youth and maybe a pretty girl on your arm and the whole berg sings your praises. We were a long way from summer and I was a long way from youth. The city itself seemed to have some half-formed sense of what was coming, and had passed the notion on to the creatures that lived in it. Mothers pulled their children tight as you passed, old men scowled from stoops, young men with ravenous eyes congregated in the alleys. Also, I’d forgotten to wear a coat.

Idinton is mostly factories blotting the sky and choking the air, but out towards the walls there are a few sections that could give Low Town a run for its money in terms of just generally being a shithole. Maybe not quite. Blue Hat tightened his step when he got there, scowling indecipherably, making himself a part of the scenery, a graffiti-stained wall, a stretch of rubble. Everybody who moved south of the Old City had a similar outfit. I pretty much never took mine off.

Finally he stopped and lit a cigarette. I got the feeling Blue Hat didn’t smoke regularly, that he just used it as a prop. It seemed more task than pleasure. But then I imagined he was like that with everything, eating dinner in a workmanlike fashion, plowing his wife with all the enthusiasm he would a field. He stepped off finally, and I wasn’t sad to see him go.

I spent a moment looking over the building I’d been tipped to. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, and felt a mild surge of shame as I knocked at the door. It was the sort of neighborhood where people made a point of not noticing things, but still, I had a reputation to uphold. Not that there was anything for it – I was going inside.

After too long shivering in the cold the madame opened the door. Madame makes it sound too classy. Old whore would be more accurate. Hers was the breed of prostitute which succeeds from persistence and affordability, rather than through any natural gifts. I’ll spare a more detailed physical description. There’s no need to be cruel – she had a living to make, like everyone else. ‘Yeah?’ she said in a voice appropriate to someone with her history.

‘Good evening, I’m here to contract a rotting malady from an ill-fed illiterate.’

She was choked out of her mind, tiny little bug eyes struggling to make sense of what I was saying. ‘What?’

‘I’m here to see the man in the back.’

‘Oh,’ she said, dully aware that this was not, in fact, what I had said. ‘Come in, I guess.’

The parlor was cut in half with a sheet nailed to the ceiling, more space to do business, though thankfully at this particular moment the chamber was not in use. I struggled to form an image of a person so desperate for human contact as to patronize the establishment, as well as with the realization that there were apparently enough of them to warrant an expansion of the premises.