She Who Waits (Low Town 3) (35 page)

In short, my experiences in the realm of honest affection were rare, bordering on nonexistent. Few women not turned off by the fact that I was, in the kindest of estimations, quite homely, weren’t likely to overlook the fact that I was a bit of a bastard as well. There were a handful of high-class working women I visited infrequently, none for long enough that sentiment could accrue on either end. If we were to be honest, I would say I thought it was a weakness, getting hooked on a pair of bright eyes.

Time would prove me more correct than I could possibly have imagined. In retrospect, it might well have been better if I’d spent my youth chasing after dames, like a gallant in the ballads. Perhaps having my heart broken a few times would have given me some understanding of the singular deceit which is the sole province of the female sex. Probably not, though. If we had any idea what we were in for when we let another person touch us, the human race wouldn’t last beyond the next generation.

She was beautiful. Too beautiful. I should have known looking at her. In truth, she was more than beautiful. I’d seen beautiful women before, laid with them, all paid for but so what? I knew the touch of a long limb, the feel of ripe breasts against my chest, the slender curve of a thigh. And I knew how little any of that meant, when you light a candle and have to look into their eyes. But somehow her beauty seemed to speak of something beyond the superficial. She looked like someone … she looked like someone you wanted to see again.

Hell, I don’t know.

Watching her move across the floor, float I would have said, I was over-conscious of my unkempt hair. Of my torn ear and asymmetric eyes. Of the scars I’d accrued over twenty-nine years of barely surviving things. I smoothed the folds of my suit unconsciously – it was well made and fit correctly, but it did little enough to improve the body inside of it. I wouldn’t have had the courage to speak with her. That was another sign, though of course I wasn’t interested in seeing it.

She ordered a drink at the bar. The keep was quick in bringing it to her. She spent a languid few moments draped over the counter, sipping a glass of red wine. Eyes watched her, mine amongst them.

‘Quite a beauty,’ Crispin said, a smile on his face like he’d beaten me in chess.

I shrugged and turned my gaze pointedly towards a wall. ‘She’s all right.’

‘Just all right?’

‘Not really my type.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have any trouble.’

‘With what?’

‘Her rapid approach.’

I half thought him kidding, was shocked to look back to the counter and discover that she wasn’t there, and more shocked to recognize in the mass of flesh directly in front of me the most perfect creature I had ever seen.

‘Albertine Arden,’ she gave me her hand. I held it too long, but she didn’t seem to notice, or she didn’t seem to mind.

I turned to introduce Crispin and discovered he was on the other side of the room, covering our bill at the counter. He was a good friend, Crispin. If he’d been a better friend he would have struck me across the back of the head with a beer bottle, dragged me forcibly back to my home.

‘I was to meet a colleague here,’ she said. ‘But she seems to be slow in arriving. Perhaps I might wait for her?’ Her Rigun was perfect, better than a native’s. She had the barest hint of an accent, but only with certain words, and you strained to hear it, like the scent of a subtle perfume.

After a moment I realized I hadn’t answered. ‘Of course,’ I said, nodding at the seat Crispin had vacated. ‘Please.’

She angled one leg over the other. Distantly, I was aware of the attraction, but my eyes remained locked on her own. ‘This pretty outfit you wear,’ she said. ‘It means you are someone important?’

‘I’m the second most important person in Rigus,’ I said. It was only mostly a joke.

‘That must be very tiring.’

‘I drink a lot of coffee,’ I admitted. But what I wanted to tell her was – I run the secret side of the secret police. I’m important and only getting more so, and it’s worth your time to talk to me, I promise you, despite what I look like and what you look like. Albertine was a very good spy, because she rarely needed to do any spying. You came right out and gave it to her.

For the moment, however, I managed to keep my mouth shut. ‘And you? What do you do?’

‘I am an importer in a merchant house,’ she said. Her eyes hung on mine, but her finger curled with the sunlit straw of her hair. ‘It is quite terribly boring, but at least it offers the opportunity to spend some time in your city.’

‘How do you find it?’

‘Lonely,’ she said.

There was a lump in my throat.

‘Have you ever been to Nestria?’

‘Three years,’ I said, ‘but probably not the same places you have.’

‘You were in the war?’

I nodded.

She shook her head in false sympathy. ‘Such a terrible thing, what men do to each other.’

Nothing compared to the cruelty of a woman – but I didn’t appreciate that at the time.

‘Did you learn any of my language?’

‘I did.’

‘Won’t you say something to me?’

I laughed. It was the first in a long line of chuckles, snickers and guffaws that she’d draw out of me over the course of our ill-fated relationship, banter as practiced as a surgeon’s hands. ‘I didn’t learn the sort of Nestrian appropriate for tender ears.’

Her smile seemed full with promise. She laid her hand atop my bicep. I resisted the urge to flex, but it was a close run thing. ‘I am not so easily shocked.’

We left for my place shortly after that, her suggestion, accompanied by a slight, trembling blush that made you feel she didn’t make it often. Later I would come to recognize that blush as something she could call on command, one of an arsenal of artifices that she had mastered, perfected over long sessions in a mirror or on other poor fools like myself.

I spent the next nine months cocooning myself in pleasant falsehoods, looking left when anything that smacked of truth exited stage right. Of course it was also the happiest period of my life.

Like I said – I should have known it looking at her. Because at the bottom, when it was just you pleading your case to logic, that cold, implacable and resolute force, women like her did not fall for men like me. Birds do not swim, nor fish fly. The sun gives heat, and the night steals it, and I would no more be loved than I would wake up one day to discover I’d grown a pair of eagle’s wings.

Life is what it is – but by the Firstborn, sometimes you just want to pretend.

T
he first half of the next day was uneventful. I spent it in the bar, running through the weave in my mind, gradually transitioning from coffee to beer. Things were starting to move too fast, it was hard to keep track of the particulars. More than once I found myself reaching into my satchel for a quick hit of breath, then forcing my hands out again. I didn’t do that anymore, I reminded myself. That I still very much wanted to was proof my decision to quit had been a wise one.

In short, I guess I wasn’t paying much attention. I know I wasn’t, which was why by the time I noticed Crowley he was already inside and walking towards me. He was flanked by two men whom I strongly suspected were not priests. They stood a few yards off, and let the scarred man take the seat in front of me.

‘These all you got?’ I asked.

Crowley had a bruised lip and a freshly blackened eye. The Asher had gone easier on him than I’d expected. ‘Those two Mirads at the bar with steel crowding their jackets,’ he said, nodding towards a pair of men who matched that exact description. ‘And the Valaan pretending he can’t see me in the corner.’

‘He’s doing a terrible job.’

‘I didn’t hire him for his acting. I hired him because he likes to break heads,’ Crowley smiled that smile I’d come to loathe. ‘And he’s good at it.’

I guess he’d been seeding men throughout the place all afternoon. If he’d come in with a squad of thugs I would have noticed whatever mental state I was in. ‘Black House don’t have shit on me,’ I said. ‘And our little back-and-forths have long gone from frightening to tiresome.’

‘I had something,’ he said. ‘I had a witness that said you were sticking your nose into accounts long closed, and doing it for the benefit of the Steps.’

I craned my neck over my shoulder, then peeked beneath the table. ‘Is he around here somewhere? I’d love to meet him.’

‘You’ve met him already. You killed him.’

‘He’s a dead man then, your star witness? What’s that they say about dead men – that they like to tell tales?’

He brushed a few crumbs off the table, then rubbed his hands together. ‘You’re right, I don’t have anything. But I’m gonna ace you, all the same.’

‘The Old Man won’t like it.’

‘I’m not so much in his graces these days anyhow,’ he leaned his weight to one side and farted loudly. ‘Besides, the Old Man won’t be around so much longer.’

‘You so sure of that?’

‘He’s slipping – I’ve been tagging after him for twenty-five years, I can tell. He ain’t what he was.’ This made Crowley sad, in the dim way that he was capable of feeling anything more complex than lust or sadism. He shook it away uncomfortably, and came to his feet. ‘It don’t matter anyhow – whether I’m right or wrong, whatever might come of me doing it – it’s going to get done, right now. You’re going to stand up, and follow me out, and you ain’t going to make any trouble, not one peep, or my crew runs roughshod. And the first one to drop will be the boy,’ Crowley said, and something cool leaked out my temple. ‘I forgot to mention, I’ve got a man over by him as well.’

Wren was serving drinks at one end of the counter, laughing, oblivious to the danger. Near enough to throat him, a pale bravo in a black coat pretended to drink a beer.

I took a long, slow look at the inevitable. ‘I walk out with you, and the boy gets left alone.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about the kid. Once you’re out the door the rest of my men follow me. You’ve my word.’

Worth less than a bag of nightsoil, but I didn’t have any other option. I finished off what was left in my glass, tried to enjoy it as much as I could. That I’d be chasing it with blood seemed all but certain. I stood. Crowley did the same, took the spot in front of me. His men took the rear.

I kept my eyes on Crowley’s back, made sure I still had a blade up my sleeve, martialed my resources for the move I’d make once we were outside. If I was lucky I might get to bring Crowley along with me to the other side. If I was very lucky, I might even have a shot at escape. And if I was very, very lucky, I might stumble over a big bag of ochres during my flight. Pipe dreams, all of them. Crowley hadn’t waited this long just to blow his shot at offing me. The best I could hope for was to make enough trouble that they had to kill me quick.

‘Where you off to?’ a voice said. A loud voice, booming even. I looked up to see our path obstructed by Adolphus, and there was no doubt what had earned him the sobriquet ‘Grand’.

‘Black House business, fat man – get out of the way,’ Crowley bowled forward, used to these few words acting as a panacea for any trouble he got in.

But Adolphus didn’t move, and Crowley found himself stopping short. There was an awkward pause, during which Adolphus inspected the smaller man with elaborate deliberateness, ‘Where are your uniforms?’ the giant asked, placidly. Foolishly, one might have said, if one were oneself a fool.

‘What?’

‘If this is Black House business,’ Adolphus said again, loud enough so that others could hear. ‘Where are your uniforms?’

The crowd had started to perk up by then. If in the past I had given the impression that our usual patrons are friendly, or law-abiding or clean, let me rectify that. They are none of those things. If you were to count up the collected felonies committed by the ale-swillers growing old in my establishment, you’d hit three figures before you’d gone ten steps.

At a table near us sat a knotted Tarasaighn named Dougal, known within the neighborhood for his excessively large knife collection. ‘Yeah, why ain’t you in uniform?’ he asked, and if you couldn’t hear a threat in that you were deaf as a fucking post. Dougal didn’t have nothing for me, but with a pint or two in him he’d fight his mother over a half-eaten sandwich. For the first time in my life, I was happy we were in the same room.

‘Don’t look like no kind of agent I ever saw,’ someone else called out.

‘Looks like some fat thug thinks he can come in here and muscle us around,’ that was Wren’s voice, and I was grateful for it.

Somewhere in his dim simian mind, Crowley recognized danger. He held his hands up in the air, away from the sword at his side, then began to move one slowly towards his coat.

Adolphus cut that short. ‘You put your hand into your pocket, and I’m going to break you straight in two.’

‘My Eye is in my pocket,’ Crowley said. ‘I’m going to show it to you, and you’ll know I’m here on Crown business.’

‘So you say. But I might decide you’re going for a blade, and if I decided that was the case, I might have to make sure I’d stop you.’

‘My boys wouldn’t like that,’ Crowley said, remembering now that he was a man not unaccustomed to violence.

‘Nothing your boys could do before I got my hands on your throat,’ Adolphus said, but not threateningly, more like he was trying to explain something complicated to a simpleton. ‘And once that happens, there ain’t enough men in the world to stop me before I kill you. Besides,’ he continued, ‘I’ve got a boy or two here myself – and they don’t take too kindly to people impersonating the Crown. Since we’re speaking plainly, even if you were who you say you are, my boys don’t take too kindly to the genuine article, neither.’

The bar was all but silent, and in it you could hear dangerous men getting ready to ply their trade, knives unsheathed, brass knuckles slipped over fists. Copernicus Sweetroll took up position behind Adolphus, a squat Valaan with a high-pitched whine who’d killed two men I knew of for commenting on it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Red-Handed Annie slip a stiletto from a strap on her thigh – that she had the biceps of a dockworker and the temperament to match hadn’t stopped her from stepping out as a working woman for twenty odd years. The occasional trick inclined towards cruelty had discovered quick enough that Annie was similarly disposed, and more skilled at it. There were the occasional honest tradesmen who frequented the Earl, decent people, mill-workers and men plying the docks. But in that particular moment, one would have been hard pressed to recognize them.