She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (29 page)

‘Heathens,’ Hume muttered behind me. I turned and cut him short with a quick chop of my hand. The Steps were not popular amongst the Asher – contradicting fanaticisms tend not to mix well. And while Simeon’s fervor for the Seven daevas might incline him towards being beaten to death by a mob of black robes, my own sense of piety didn’t extend nearly so far. Outsiders in general were not welcome near the Enclave, not that day of all days.

Because today was the Eve of the Anamnesis, the highest holiday on the Asher calendar – something like our Midwinter, though the two have about as much in common as a handjob has to a swift kick to the balls. At the end of each autumn, as the last gasp of color gives way to the grim emptiness of winter, the Asher gather to pay homage to god in their own curious fashion.

‘What is all this?’ Hume asked, no keen student of comparative religion.

‘This is the day the Asher commemorate their damnation,’ I said, ‘and resign themselves to its continuation.’

Philosophers and poets break themselves against an implacable truth – existence is bitter and uncompromisingly cruel, and no entity responsible for its creation and upkeep could be called decent. That it is, in short, impossible to imagine a divinity who is at once absolutely powerful and absolutely good.

The Asher have a simple explanation to this thorny problem. Their god does not love them, quite the contrary. The pain and bitterness of human life, their own suffering in particular, is not a flaw in the system – it is the very purpose of it. Life is not a gift, it’s a punishment. Their affinity, one might even say affection, for physical violence is a direct consequence of this belief. A sharp death, dearly bought, was an Asher man’s sole shot at evening up accounts with the almighty. The female equivalent, I am told, is death in childbirth.

It had a certain something to it, I had to admit. Logical, at the very least. Of course, the Asher do not accept converts – not that there’s any great swell of folk looking to join – so I never had opportunity to explore the particulars in detail. Also, black is not my color.

I cut through the crowd as best as I was able, making sure Hume was close behind. Wouldn’t do to have him fall back and be caught by Crowley. The Asher made no particular effort to assist our passage, standing in tightly packed ranks, scowling when they bothered to notice us at all. That was fine – any trouble they gave us I figured would go double for our pursuers. At first it was impossible to make out the centerpiece of the event, but as we muscled our way towards the far end of the square I got a better look at what exactly everyone else was staring at.

A line of Asher children, seven or eight years of age and not yet wearing the traditional black frocks, stood in solemn procession before a bonfire. The girls carried a range of toys: dolls, wooden carts, the occasional book. The boys held almost exclusively practice weapons: mock swords, ash spears.

At the front, nearest to the flames, stood two of their holy men, white-bearded and shirtless, well-muscled despite being past middle age. The first, older and with wilder eyes, held a book open in his hands, a fat black tome that looked primordially ancient. The other carried aloft a naked blade, the glittering sickle-swords that are the inheritance of the Asher race.

Without warning the elder began speaking in a foreign language, the tongue the Asher had taken from their homeland two thousand years prior, before the cataclysm that had made them permanent exiles amongst the Thirteen Lands.

‘Once there was a people,’ his adjunct repeated in unaccented Rigun, the sword steady.

The first continued his unintelligible chatter.

‘A happy people,’ the second priest said. ‘A proud people. A strong people. A people made so by the blessings of the One Above.’

The assembled children stared fixedly, and unmoving, at the scene in front of them. From a distance they could have been mistaken for intricately wrought stonework. Such attention would have been uncanny in adults. In children I found it little short of disturbing.

‘An arrogant people. A foolish people. A people who turned their back on what they had been given.’

The high priest’s melody was constant and discordant. He seemed never to pause for breath.

‘When the One Above saw what had become of his children, he grew angry, and he spoke: “I will break the back of my children, and I will leave them to crawl in the dust, and to beg for mercy that shall not come, no, not until the moon comes to the sea, and the sun submerges into the last dark.”’

The adjunct continued his oration blandly, as if reading a shopping list. His blade remained perfectly still, and his chest was thick with sweat.

‘We remind ourselves that we do not deserve the kindnesses we have received. That we are unworthy of the gifts we possess, of the joys we experience.’

The high priest finished his last line, and fell silent.

‘Till death redeems us,’ his second said.

‘Till death redeems us,’ the assemblage echoed.

The first child stepped forward. Rare amongst the boys, his gift to the flames was not a fake weapon, but a simple toy boat, brightly painted, a red bow and a purple cloth sail. He ran his fingers over it almost unconsciously, his eyes fixed on the pyre in front of him.

The priest nodded.

The boat went into the flames. It was a small thing, but the fire seemed to surge in response. The child knelt down before the conflagration. ‘I ask forgiveness from the One Above.’ His voice was high but clear.

‘In his name, we refuse it,’ the priest said.

The second brought the sword down so swiftly that for a moment I thought the ritual would end with a head rolling into the dust. But the blade halted just short of decapitation, a slight cut on the back of the boy’s neck the only evidence of how near he had been to death.

The child nodded and slipped into the crowd. Another took his spot.

He had not flinched, the little boy with the boat. It occurred to me that it would be unwise to bet against Uriel in his coming conflict.

The press of the crowd eased off slightly. I managed to weave my way forward, Hume in tow. The priests continued with their ceremony, destroying the beloved objects of small children.

We stopped at the outskirts of the square. I boosted myself up onto an overturned fruit crate, and scanned the back for our pursuers.

Crowley was easy enough to make out, the only one of the multitude not wearing black. He was flanked by a few of his boys, themselves surrounded by a group of Asher. He was yelling at someone, and that someone was yelling back. He didn’t notice me, attention taken up with the fight he was starting. Crowley was very good at starting fights, though not quite so talented at finishing them.

If Crowley was smart he’d back off and try another day, but he wasn’t smart and I was pretty sure the afternoon would end with him the victim of a pretty solid beating, and his boys maybe worse. The Asher weren’t so foolish as to kill an agent of Black House, but you don’t go mucking about in a badger’s den and leave unmarked. All the same I dropped off the crate, grabbed Hume by the shoulder and pushed him ahead, the two of us sprinting west towards the Old City.

I kept it up as long as I could, until forty-plus years of bad living caught up with me and I staggered against an alley wall. Hume looked well winded, but little short of that. It does ugly things to a man, seeing the youth with life they haven’t earned still full in them. ‘I guess we lost him,’ he said.

‘For how fucking long?’ I asked, gasping for air. ‘I can’t go around dodging the Old Man’s heavies indefinitely. The Director wants proof that Black House is behind the red fever? How about the fact that I’ve got Agents of the Crown trying to kill me just for asking questions about it!’

‘I’ll set up a meeting with Egmont,’ Hume said. ‘If they want you this bad, you must really be on to something.’

‘Good – do it quick. I’ve only got but so many tricks in my satchel.’ Though you’ve yet to see half of them.

He nodded, rested his hand on my shoulder for a moment, then bolted off towards the Old City.

I spent a while waiting for my lungs to forgive me. Eventually they decided we were quits, and I rolled a cigarette to spite them.

I imagined Crowley would be too busy licking his wounds to want a rematch, at least for the moment, but all the same I decided the rest of the day was best spent away from the Earl. I headed towards an apartment I keep in Brennock. It was a long walk in the cold, but I didn’t mind – really the afternoon had gone better than I could have anticipated. Hume was firmly in my camp, an ally though he didn’t realize it. Crowley would want to kill me even more, but this was no great alteration to the
status quo
. Crowley had been trying to wipe me out for almost fifteen years. Another beating wouldn’t get him any angrier.

I
t was snowing, that’s one of the things clearest in my memory – not the worst winter we’d ever had, but a bad one, a damn bad one. I’d taken to wearing a thick wool coat and a pair of heavy fur gloves over top of the usual ice blue duster. It sort of killed the effect, but it was better than freezing.

Crispin thought the same way, or I supposed he did since he’d taken the same precautions. We didn’t see each other much by that point, our partnership had officially ended a few years before, after I’d bumped myself up to Special Operations. He had stayed where he was, chasing after people who’d actually deserved it, rather than just those unfortunates who’d stumbled in the way of the Throne. That he was there that day was coincidence, or fate if you’re apt to see things in that fashion. I was apt to see it as coincidence.

We’d been killing time in Black House, drinking bad coffee and waiting for something important to happen when Crowley’s messenger had come in. A low-ranking agent, new to the force, pleased as a puppy. His boss had cornered a Miradin spy cell in north Offbend, wanted back-up before he went in. The messenger was too stupid to recognize that my grimace did not signify happiness with this development, but Crispin wasn’t. Though foreign affairs was strictly the business of Special Operations, he’d offered to come along and I’d taken him up on it. I’d also grabbed a handful of department heavies, thick mugs waiting around to jump on people, and we’d hauled ass west.

These days that part of Offbend has long become overrun by businessmen and merchants from the Old City, a gentrified enclave of refurbished townhouses and eateries with exposed brick walls. But back then, the burgeoning upper class that now populate it wouldn’t have come within a dozen blocks. There was nothing but crumbling tenements and immigrant teenagers sneering at you from the shadows.

The messenger led us to one of these faded multistory apartment buildings, but I could have guessed it was our destination by the half dozen agents surrounding it, and from the dead body that lay in the snow in front of the door, leaking red into the jet white.

There was a tiny restaurant directly across from the scene, and Crowley had requisitioned it in the peremptory fashion which makes law enforcement so beloved by the population they are sworn to serve. He sat at a chair by the window, kept warm by the fire and a strong sense of superiority.

‘Who set up the cordon?’ I asked by way of greeting.

‘I did,’ Crowley said happily. He looked exactly the same as he did twenty years later, save the scar of course. He had the same black eyes and the same stupid little smile on his face, like he’d figured out everything worth knowing and further conversation was a waste of his time. ‘Caught one of them buying information off a broker I’ve been watching, followed them back here. Guess I must have spooked them,’ he said, grinning like this development was of no consequence.

‘Guess so.’ I took off my gloves and laid them on the table. ‘Whose body was that in the snow?’

‘That was the one I tailed. They must have figured he’d sold them out, or maybe they just wanted to show how they dealt with fuck-ups.’

‘An admirable policy. A policy worth adopting.’

He didn’t know what that meant, but he kept talking anyway. ‘They’ve taken the rest of the building hostage. Say they’ve got two kegs of black powder stashed in the basement, and they’ll blow the whole place to hell if they so much as see a glint of ice blue.’

‘They say.’

‘But I don’t buy it. We go in full force, before they get the chance to entrench any further.’ He’d been drinking from a cup of coffee, the mug half empty on the table next to his flipper-hands. It was a heavy thing, ceramic. I picked it up and finished the dregs. His sunken eyes followed me, confused.

I doubt very much it was the hardest blow Crowley had ever sustained, but certainly it was one of the least expected. One minute he was upright in his chair, smug as an eldest son. The next he was on the ground, picking bits of clay out of his hair.

Not that we’d ever been friends, but I imagine this was the moment where Crowley developed his particular dislike of me.

‘You stupid fucking dog you,’ I said, watching the trickle of blood inch down his scalp. ‘You worthless rag-picking monkey.’

Crowley was not the type to allow an injury to go unreturned, but the suddenness of my attack and the fact that I was technically his superior kept him quiet.

‘Do you have any idea how long I’ve been watching this cell? Nine months. Nine months of my time. Nine months coaxing them into the open, nine months inserting people into their operation. I was about to find out who they were reporting to.’ I followed up this revelation with a solid kick to his gut. ‘Once I flipped him we’d have had a real asset, a straight line back to Miradin.’

Miradin had been our nominal ally since before the Great War, though that didn’t stop their intelligence services from operating in our capital any more than it did ours theirs. The critical difference being the people that I had ferreting out information were professionals, hard men and women, sure, but worker bees. Not so the other end. Miradin was a strict theocracy, the Emperor holding the absolute reigns of secular and spiritual power, their Black House equivalent at once a civil and religious authority, arresting pickpockets and holding
auto de fe
’s
.
One imagined that the larger part of their population held as much truck with the priests as necessary to avoid being burned at the stake, but those involved in the secret service were true fanatics. The Emperor was
Ś
akra’s direct representative, every order he gave a command from the Firstborn. Death in his service was the greatest glory imaginable, a bolthole to paradise everlasting. It meant I’d had to be especially cautious when I’d picked up on this cell, moving slowly, never allowing my presence to be noticed. It also meant that Crowley’s impetuousness was likely to result in the death of everyone in the building.