pitiful enough to pay. It was a long walk to his shit establishment, but it would give me time to clear my head from the booze. I went upstairs to retrieve a bottle of pixie’s breath and started over.
The west end of Low Town was quiet, the merchants gone home and the nightlife pressed toward the docks, so I walked the dozen blocks to the canal in relative solitude. This late in the evening the Herm Bridge looked ominous instead of just dilapidated, its marble features made indistinct by time and petty vandalism. The ragged hands of stone Daevas curled in supplication to the heavens, their faces worn to wide eyes and gaping mouths. Beneath it the River Andel ran sluggish and slow, carrying the city’s waste in a stately procession toward the harbor and out to sea. I continued on, stopping at the entrance of a nondescript building a half mile west.
Noise from the second floor drifted down to the shadows beneath. I took a hit of breath, then another and another until the bottle was empty and the buzzing was like a crowd of bees swarming around my ears. I dashed it against the wall and took the steps two at a time.
The Bleeding Virgin was the kind of dive that made you want to scrub your skin with lye as soon as you walked out-it made the atmosphere at the Earl look like high tea at the royal court. Torches shed greasy light on the unpalatable interior, a crumbling wooden infrastructure set over a handful of rooms that Harelip rented by the hour, along with a stable of sad-looking whores. These last doubled as servers, the dim illumination sufficient to display a lengthy commitment to their vocation.
I grabbed a spot across from a breach in the wall that served duty as a window and waved down one of the waitresses. “You know who I am?” I asked. She nodded, dun hair atop a stretched face, crooked eyes dull and unfazed. “Get me something that hasn’t been spit in and tell your boss I’m here.” I flipped her a copper and watched her walk off wearily.
The breath was kicking in hard, and I held my fists tight at my sides to keep them from shaking. I glared at the patrons warily and thought about how far one well-placed act of arson would go toward improving the neighborhood. The server returned a few minutes later with a half-full tankard. “He’ll be out soon,” she said.
The beer was mostly rainwater. I choked it down and tried not to think about the child.
The back door opened and Harelip and two of his boys slid in. Tancred was aptly named-the crevice in his face split his mouth straight through, an aberration his thick beard did nothing to hide. Beyond that, there was little to recommend him one way or the other. Somewhere along the line he had acquired a reputation for being a hard man, though I suspected this was an outgrowth of his deformity.
The two hangers-on looked violent and stupid-the kind of cheap street toughs Tancred liked to keep around. I knew the first-Spider, a squat half-Islander runt with a lazy eye he’d picked up from getting rambunctious around a troop of guardsmen. He used to run with a small-time crew of river rats, busting into cargo barges late at night and making off with whatever they could find. I’d never seen the second, but his pockmarked face and sour odor bespoke ill breeding as surely as his surroundings and choice of career. I assumed they were both armed, although only Spider’s weapon was visible, an ugly-looking dirk that jutted obtrusively from his belt.
They fanned out to cover me. “Hello, Tancred. What’s the good word?”
He sneered at me, or maybe he didn’t-the lip made it tough to tell.
“I hear your people have been having trouble with their lode-stones,” I continued.
Now I was pretty confident he was sneering. “Trouble, Warden? How do you mean?”
“The canal is the line between our two enterprises, Tancred. You know the canal. It’s that big ditch to the east of here, filled with water.”
He smiled, the fleshless stretch between his upper lip and nose rendering his rotting gums starkly visible. “Was that the line?”
“In our business it’s important to remember your agreements. If you’re having trouble, it might be time to look for work more in keeping with your natural talents. You’d make a lovely chorus girl.”
“You’ve got a sharp mouth,” he growled.
“And you’ve got a crooked one-but we are as the Creator formed us. Regardless, Tancred, I’m not here to debate theology-geography is the interest of the moment. So why don’t you go ahead and remind me where our boundary is?”
Harelip took a step backward, and his boys moved closer. “Seems to me it might be time to redraw our map. I don’t know what you’ve got going with the syndicates, and I don’t care how friendly you are with the guard-you don’t have the muscle to hold the land you got. Far as I can tell, you’re an independent operator, and there ain’t no place for an independent operator these days.”
He kept nerving himself into the conflict that was coming, but I could barely hear him through the drone in my ears. Not that the particulars of his monologue much mattered. I hadn’t come over here for discussion, and he hadn’t rolled out his mob to help him negotiate.
The ringing faded as Tancred completed whatever ultimatum he was making. Spider rested a hand on his weapon. The unnamed thug flicked his tongue off a toothy grin. Somehow they had fallen under the impression that this was going to go easy-I was looking forward to disabusing them.
I finished my last swallow of ale and dropped the tankard with my left hand. Spider watched it shatter on the ground and I lashed out with my right fist, breaking his nose back into his face. Before his partner could draw a weapon, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and launched us both through the open window behind him.
For a half second all I could hear was the rush of the wind and the rapid pulse of my heart. Then we hit the ground, and my hundred-and-eighty-pound frame buried him faceup in the mud, a low crack letting me know the fall had broken a few of his ribs. I rolled off him and pulled myself to my feet. The moon was very bright against the dark of the alleyway. I breathed in deep and felt the blood drain from my head. The pockmarked man struggled to right himself, and I snapped a boot across his scalp. He groaned and stopped stirring.
Dimly I was aware that the fall had done something to my ankle, but I was too gone to feel it yet. I would need to finish this quick, before my body had time to wake to the harm I’d done it.
I walked back into the Virgin and saw Spider sprinting down the steps at full speed, blood seeping from his nose, his blade in his hand. He snarled and came at me wildly-foolish, but then Spider was the sort of man who gets rattled by a little pain. I met him halfway and dropped low, setting my shoulder into his knees and sending him hurtling down the stairs. Turning back to finish the job, I saw the white press of bone sticking out from his hand and knew there was no point in further violence. I left him cradling his wrist and shrieking like a newborn.
Back on the second floor the patrons were pressed against the walls, waiting to see the outcome. At some point while I was busy below, Tancred had grabbed a heavy wooden truncheon, and he rapped it against his outstretched palm. His warped face was twisted into a death mask and there was a long line of notches on the handle of his club, but his eyes were wide and I knew he would go down easy.
I ducked as his cudgel wheezed over my head, then balled my fist into his stomach. Tancred stumbled backward, gasping for air, waving his bludgeon impotently. On the second swing I caught his wrist and twisted it savagely, pulling him close as he screamed and dropped his weapon. I held his gaze with mine, his ruined lips trembling, then struck him a blow that collapsed his legs under him.
He lay at my feet, weeping piteously. The small crowd of spectators stared back at me, bulbous drunkard noses and mongoloid idiot eyes, a menagerie of inbred grotesques, mouth breathers, and vermin. I had the urge to grab Tancred’s cudgel and wade into them, just start clubbing heads, crack crack crack, soak the sawdust red. I shook it off, telling myself it was just the breath. It was time to end this, but not too quickly. Theatricality mattered-I wanted these dregs to spread what they were seeing.
I dragged Harelip’s limp body toward a nearby table and stretched one arm across the wood. Holding his palm flat with my left hand, I took his small finger firmly in my right. “What’s our boundary?” I asked, snapping his digit.
He screamed but didn’t answer.
“What’s our boundary?” I continued, breaking the next finger. He was weeping now, gasping for air and barely capable of speech. He’d need to make the attempt. I twisted another finger. “You’ve got a whole other hand I haven’t touched!” I was laughing and wasn’t sure if it was part of the act. “What’s our boundary?”
“The canal!” he shrieked. “The canal is the boundary!”
The bar was silent but for his wailing. I swiveled my head at the onlookers, savoring the moment, then continued in a voice loud enough to be heard by the first ranks of the audience. “Your business ends at the canal. Forget again and they’ll find you floating in it.” I pulled back his last finger and let him fall to the ground, then turned and walked slowly out. Spider sat slumped against the bottom of the stairs, and he looked away as I passed.
A dozen blocks east, the breath wore off and I put my arm against an alley wall and spewed until I could
