stupid to live. He won’t see the other side of winter – I’d go an argent on it.’ Mac finished rolling his cigarette with one hand and slipped the package into his back pocket with the other.
‘I wouldn’t take it,’ I said.
Mac tucked the tab loosely into his sneer. We watched the ebb of traffic from our post. ‘You get those passes yet?’ he asked.
‘Going to see my man today. Should have something for you soon.’
He grunted what might have been assent and I turned to leave. ‘You oughta know that Harelip’s boys have been peddling east of the canal.’ He took a drag and exhaled perfect circles of smoke, one following the other into the clement sky. ‘The girls have seen his crew off and on for the last week or so.’
‘I heard. Stay slick, Mac.’
He went back to looking menacing.
I spent the rest of the afternoon dropping off product and running errands. My customs officer finally came through with the passes, though at the rate his addiction to pixie’s breath was progressing, it might well be the last favor he’d be able to do for me.
It was early evening by the time I was finished, and I stopped off at my favorite street stand for a pot of beef in chili sauce. I still needed to see Yancey before his set – he was performing for some toffee-nosed aristocrats near the Old City, and it would be a walk. I was cutting through an alleyway to save time when I saw something that clipped my progress so abruptly that I nearly toppled over.
The Rhymer would have to wait. Ahead of me was the body of a child, contorted horribly and wrapped in a sheet soaked through with blood.
It seemed I had found Little Tara.
I tossed my dinner into a sewer grate. Suddenly I didn’t have much of an appetite.
2
I burned a few seconds taking stock of the situation. The rats of Low Town are an immodest bunch, so the fact that her body was intact suggested that she hadn’t been left out long. I crouched down and set a palm on her tiny chest – cold. She’d been dead for some time before being dumped here. Up close I could see the indignities her tormentor had inflicted more clearly, and I shuddered and withdrew, noticing as I did so a strange smell, not the sickly sweet scent of decayed flesh but one abrasive and alchemical, harsh against the back of my throat.
Retreating from the alley to the main street, I flagged down a pair of street urchins idling beneath an awning nearby. Among the lower classes my name carries some small weight, and they presented themselves as if they expected me to draft them into a scheme of some kind, and were excited at the opportunity. I gave the duller- looking of the two a copper and told him to find a guardsman. When he was around the corner I turned to the one who remained.
I keep half the Low Town guard in whores and watered-down beer, so they wouldn’t be a problem. But a murder of this sort would demand the attention of an agent, and whomever they sent might be foolish enough to think me a suspect. I needed to get rid of my merchandise.
The boy stared up at me with brown eyes deep-set against pale skin. Like most street children he was a mutt, features of the three Rigun peoples intermixed with any number of foreign races. Even by the standards of the dispossessed he was painfully thin, the rags he wore as clothing insufficient to hide the bony protrusions of his shoulder blades and elbows.
‘You know who I am?’
‘You’re the Warden.’
‘You know the Staggering Earl?’
He nodded, his dark eyes wide but unclouded. I thrust my bag towards him.
‘Take this there and give it to the cyclops behind the bar. Tell him I said he owes you an argent.’
He reached for it and I dug my fingers in the crook of his neck. ‘I know every whore, pickpocket, junkie and street tough in Low Town, and I’ve marked your face. If my package ain’t waiting for me I’m going to come looking for you. Understand?’ I tightened my grip.
He didn’t flinch. ‘I ain’t bent.’ His voice surprised me with its cool confidence. I had picked the right urchin.
‘Off with you then.’ I released the bag and he sprinted around the corner.
I went back into the alley and smoked a cigarette while I waited for the hoax to show up. They were longer than I thought they’d be, given the gravity of the situation. It’s disturbing to discover your low opinion of law enforcement is still unduly appreciative. Two burned tabs later the first boy returned, a pair of guardsmen in tow.
I knew them vaguely. One was fresh, new to the force six months, but the second I’d been paying off for years. We’d see how much good that would do if things curdled. ‘Hello, Wendell.’ I held out my hand. ‘Good to see you again, even under these circumstances.’
Wendell shook it vigorously. ‘You as well,’ he said. ‘I had hoped the boy was lying.’
There wasn’t much to say to that. Wendell knelt beside the body, his chain coat dragging in the mud. Behind him his younger counterpart was turning the shade of white that prefaces vomiting. Wendell shouted a reproach over his shoulder. ‘None of that. You’re a damn guardsman – show some spine.’ He turned back to the corpse, unsure of his next move. ‘Guess I should call for an agent then,’ he half asked me.
‘Guess so.’
‘Run back to headquarters,’ Wendell ordered his subordinate, ‘and tell them to send for a chill. Tell them to send for two.’
The guard enforce the customs and laws of the city – when they aren’t paid to look the other way – but investigating crime is more or less beyond them. If a murderer isn’t standing over the corpse with a bloody knife they’re not of much use. When there’s a crime that matters to someone who counts, an Agent of the Crown is sent, officially deputized to carry out the Throne’s Justice. The frost, the cold, the snowmen or the gray devils, call them what you want but bow your head when they pass and answer prompt if they ask you something, ’cause the chill ain’t the guard, and the only thing more dangerous than an incompetent constabulary is a competent one. Normally, a dumped body in Low Town doesn’t warrant their attention – a fact that does wonders for the murder rate – but this wasn’t a drunk drowned in a puddle, or a knifed junkie. They’d send an agent for this.
After a few minutes, a small squad of guardsmen arrived on the scene. A pair of them began cordoning off the area. The remainder stood around looking important. They weren’t doing a great job of it, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them.
Bored of waiting, or wanting to impress his importance upon the newcomers, Wendell decided to take a stab at police work. ‘Probably some heretic,’ he said, scratching at his double chins. ‘Passing through the docks on the way to Kirentown, saw the girl and . . .’ He gestured sharply.
‘Yeah, I hear there’s a lot of that going around.’
His partner chimed in, baby face spouting poison, choked-back bile heavy on his breath. ‘Or an Islander. You know how they are.’
Wendell nodded sagely. He did indeed know how they were.
I’d heard that in some of the newer mental wards they set the mad and congenitally stupid to rote tasks, having them sew buttons onto mounds of fabric, the futile labor working as a salve to their broken minds. I wonder sometimes whether the guard is not an extension of this therapy on a far grander scale, an elaborate social program meant to give the low-functioning an illusion of purpose.
But it wouldn’t do to spoil it for the inmates. This burst of insight seemed to exhaust Wendell and his second, and they lapsed into silence.
The autumn eve chased the last shreds of daylight across the skyline. The sounds of honest commerce, as much as such a thing exists in Low Town, were replaced with a jittery quiet. In the surrounding tenements someone had a fire going, and the wood smoke almost covered up the state of the body. I rolled a cigarette to block out the rest.
You could sense their arrival before you could see them, the packed Low Town masses scuttling out from their path like flotsam brushed aside by a flood. A few seconds more and you made them out apart from the
