Tomorrow, the Killing
Read Tomorrow, the Killing Online
Authors: Daniel Polansky
Tags: #Fantasy, #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #War & Military, #Action & Adventure, #Urban Life
Table of Contents
TOMORROW THE KILLING
Daniel Polansky
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company Copyright © Daniel Polansky 2012
The right of Daniel Polansky to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British ISBN 978 1 444 72138 6
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
London NW1 3BH
To the Sibs, in order of appearance:
David, Michael, Marisa and Alissa.
M
an is a puerile creature, easily misled by the superficial. Some fool from the neighborhood, a mark you wouldn’t trust to clean a chamberpot, comes up to you on the street in a clean suit and you find yourself ducking your head and calling him sir. It works backways as well – that selfsame halfwit puts on a uniform and gets to thinking he’s hard, wraps up in a priest’s vestments and mistakes himself for decent. It’s a dangerous thing, pretense. A man ought to know who he is, even if he isn’t proud to be it.
I tugged loose the collar of my dress jacket and wiped sweat from my brow. It was a hot day. It had been a hot week in a hot month, and it didn’t look to be getting cooler. The drawing room wasn’t built for the wave that had baked the city this last month, left wells dry and stray mutts foaming in the alleys. Though for the inhabitants of the mansion I supposed the drought was more a question of ruined outfits and canceled garden parties – what was life and death in Low Town was an inconvenience in Kor’s Heights. Even the weather afflicts the rich differently.
Which is to say it wasn’t just the heat making me sweat, nor my raiment. I didn’t like being here, didn’t like heading this far north, not before nightfall, not at all if I could help it. Even the densest member of the city guard could figure I wasn’t native. So when the footman had come knocking at the door of the Staggering Earl the day prior – not a runner asking for a few fistfuls of product, not a contact begging a favor – but a full-fledged steward, dressed in crimson livery and looking as out of place as an abbess in a whorehouse, I’d nearly sent him home. But curiosity made me open his message, that almost virtue which leads men to ruin and scrapes the ninth life off cats. The letter requested my attendance at a meeting the next morning, and it was signed ‘General Edwin Montgomery’, and by the time I got to the end of it I was wishing one of the local thugs had upended the emissary before I’d found another way to fuck myself. Given what was between us, I couldn’t very well refuse his entreaty – though looking back on how things unfolded, it would have been better for everyone if I had.
It probably doesn’t need to be said that I’m no great respecter of authority, nor of that particular brand of idiots who had sent me and several hundred thousand other souls out to die during the Great War – but Montgomery was all right. More than all right, he was a fucking legend, maybe the only man who’d ever borne high rank who deserved it. Most of his colleagues hadn’t ever so much as seen the front, happy to set their headquarters in captured châteaux, working their way through the enemies’ wine cellars and tallying up casualty rolls in grim little ciphers. After it was over, when the glow of victory began to fade and the backlash against the high brass crested, Montgomery had been one of the few whose name never started to rot. At one point there had been talk of making him the Minister for War, maybe even High Chancellor. But then, we’d all hoped to be something else, at some point.
I hadn’t seen him for more than ten years. I hadn’t ever anticipated our meeting again, and was far from thrilled to find myself wrong.
I stifled an urge to roll a cigarette and tried not to fidget in my chair. Montgomery’s servant, a densely built Vaalan, watched me from his position in front of his master’s door. He was a military man, that was easily caught, from his proximity to the general and the coiled vigor of his physique. His eyes were etched unforgiving below the granite ledge of his forehead. His face seemed well suited to taking a beating, and his arms and shoulders well suited to delivering one. In short, I didn’t imagine he had trouble chasing vagrants away from the back door – but, as with all of us, age was gaining. His hair, snipped low in a regulation short-cut, was more salt than pepper, and if only the faintest hint of flesh covered his dense core, still I suspected it was a half-stone more than he’d ever carried.
His name was Botha. I was impressed with myself for remembering it, given that I’d met him all of twice. In fact, I was having difficulty squaring our relatively limited acquaintance with the bleak stare he was aiming in my direction, the sort one reserves for the man who raped your sister, or at least killed your dog.
‘Been a while,’ I offered.
Botha grunted. I got the sense that as far as he was concerned, the pause could have extended out a good ways longer.
‘You think you could rustle me up some finger sandwiches? The little ones, with cucumber and a bit of mutton?’
Having perfected his indifference against actual arrows, their rhetorical equivalent had little effect. He scuffed an imaginary bit of dirt off his shoulder.
‘Isn’t it appropriate to offer refreshments when entertaining guests?’
‘You aren’t a guest,’ he muttered, the barest break in a steady and uncompromising countenance.
‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I? That would make me company or family, and either way I’d like a finger sandwich.’
A bell rang from within the room, so I never did get to find out whether I had done enough to rile him. But I wouldn’t have bet against myself – I can be an aggravating motherfucker when I set my mind to it. Botha opened the door and slipped inside. He came back out after another moment, then waved to me.
‘I’d tip you, but I’m all out of ochres, and I wouldn’t want to insult your service with silver.’
‘Maybe I’ll get compensation some other day,’ he said, slipping out sidelong as I brushed past him.
I stopped short, both of us squeezed awkwardly into the door-frame. ‘I’m diligent in repaying debts.’
He allowed me to pass, then ducked his shoulders and nodded, mimicking the actions of a servant. The master of the house awaited, and I headed inside to meet him.
The study looked like what it was. Ebony bookshelves ran to the corners, filled by an appropriately dignified selection of leather-bound tomes. A stone fireplace took up most of the back wall, even its memory too hot for the day. A solid, uncluttered desk stood in the center, and the man himself sat behind it. It was a nice set-up – for the price of the furniture alone you could buy a half-square block of Low Town. But for a man whose wealth could have afforded him the most opulent luxuries, it was distinctly in the low key.
I’d met the general in Nestria some fifteen years prior, though I didn’t imagine he remembered it. He’d toured the lines one night when I was sitting guard. That was during the first winter of the war, when you could never build a fire big enough to ward off the cold, and the first thing you did on waking was check your toes for frostbite. He’d come pacing in from the darkness, only an adjutant for company, dressed like any one of us grunts, shit on his boots and a greatcoat covered in mud. It had meant something to me. It had meant something to a lot of us.
The general was past middle age when he’d held a command during the war, and true to form, the years hadn’t left him any younger. But neither had they taken from him the towering sense of self-possession I’d noticed even during the first few seconds I’d seen him, trudging through the icy rain – as if the weather, not to say the enemy, were factors beneath his contempt. If anything age had sharpened it, the gradual withering of his body rendering clearer the absolute control that he maintained over it.
Of said body itself, there was little enough to comment. Youth provides in humanity the widest conceivable stretch of offerings, but time wears down this disparate variety into a handful of basic archetypes. By which I mean Montgomery looked like an old man – wisps of white attached to a leathery crown, the bones of his arms sharp beneath his shirt, a mouth you might suspect occasionally lent itself to slobbering. He wore a dark suit, less gaudy and better fitting than my own, though like me he was sweating through it. For all that though, his eyes were cool and sharp, and I didn’t forget that sitting in front of me was a man whose word had once determined the fate of nations.
Botha closed the door behind me. Montgomery moved to stand, but I gestured him back into his chair and quickly took the seat across from him.
‘It’s been a very long time,’ he said. I wasn’t sure from his tone how he felt about it.
‘Quite a while.’
‘You look well,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You also.’
Two lies, and we weren’t even through the pleasantries. ‘Can I offer you anything?’ he continued. ‘A cup of coffee, perhaps? I don’t suppose Botha offered you any.’
‘He might have neglected that courtesy.’
‘He was a better soldier than he is a domestic. Not much for etiquette, but a real terror with a flamberge.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said, and I could.
There was a pause while he worked up an appropriate line of small talk. I didn’t envy his task – I’d done little in the time since we’d seen each other that was appropriately alluded to in casual conversation.
He settled on the basics. ‘Is there a wife to ask about?’
‘There is not.’
‘Children?’
‘None I’ll admit to.’
It was my turn to play interrogator, but I kept quiet. I had a pretty good idea how the general had been this last decade, and I had a pretty good idea who was responsible for his unhappiness. Or I thought I did, at least.
After a while he realized I wasn’t going to carry my end, and he stumbled forward banally. ‘Damnable weather isn’t it?’
‘The flies seem to enjoy it.’
‘Do you feel close kinship with the insects?’
I shrugged. ‘People are a lot like flies.’
‘How so?’
‘We both die easy.’
The general swallowed my ugliness in a well-rehearsed guffaw. It was one of the hallmarks of the upper class, the ability to laugh away discomfort. I was acting badly but couldn’t seem to stop myself. In preparation for this discussion I’d put away a half vial of pixie’s breath, the illicit upper that I dealt when I wasn’t using, but the buzz had long drained away. ‘Perhaps you could tell me what it is I can do for you, General.’
‘To the point, I can appreciate that. I’m sure you’ve got other things to do than sit in a hot room with an old man.’
Actually my plans for the rest of the day involved doing as little as humanly possible, a laborious exercise I intended to attempt with the aid of a suitable selection of narcotics. But he was correct in deducing that I wanted out as quickly as possible – of the neighborhood, the house, his presence.
There was an awkward pause while he inspected me with a queer and uncomfortable intensity, as if uncertain of my faithfulness. I wanted to tell him to go with this instinct, but before I could say anything he opened a drawer in his desk and took something out from the bottom of it.