Low Town Read Free Page A

and the woodsmoke 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 swept aside by a flood. The freeze prided themselves on the uniformity of their costumes, each an interchangeable member of the small army that controlled the city and most of the nation. An ice-gray duster, its upturned collar leading to a matching wide-brimmed hat. A silver-hilted short sword hanging at the belt, both an aesthetic marvel and a perfect instrument of violence. A dusky jewel trapped in a silver frame dangling from the throat—the Crown’s Eye, official symbol of their authority. Every inch the personification of order, a clenched fist in a velvet glove.
    For all that I would never speak it aloud, for all that it shamed me to even think it, I couldn’t lie—I missed that fucking outfit.
    Crispin recognized me from about a block away, and his face hardened but his step didn’t slow. Five years hadn’t done much to alter his appearance. The same highborn face stared at me beneath the fold of his hat, the same upright carriage bore mute witness to a youth spent in the tutelage of dance masters and teachers of etiquette. His brown hair had retreated from its former prominence, but the curve of his nose still trumpeted the long history of his blood to anyone who cared to look. I knew he regretted me being here, just as I regretted him being called.
    The other one I didn’t recognize—he must have been new. Like Crispin he had the Rouender nose, long and arrogant, but his hair was so blond as to be nearly white. Apart from the platinum mane he seemed the archetypal agent, blue eyes inquisitorial without being discerning, the body beneath his uniform hard enough to convince you of his menace, assuming you didn’t know what to look for.
    They stopped at the entrance to the alleyway. Crispin’s gaze darted across the scene, resting briefly on the covered corpse before settling on Wendell, who stood stiffly at attention, doing his best impression of a law enforcement official. “Guardsman,” Crispin said, nodding sharply. The second agent, still unnamed, offered not even that, his arms firmly crossed and something like a smirk on his face. Sufficient attention paid to protocol, Crispin turned toward me. “You found her?”
    “Forty minutes ago, but she’d been here a while before that. She was dumped here after he finished with her.”
    Crispin paced a slow circle around the scene. A wooden door led into an abandoned building halfway down the alley. He paused and put his hand against it. “You think he came through here?”
    “Not necessarily. The body was small enough to be concealed—a small crate, maybe an empty cask of ale. At dusk, this street doesn’t get much traffic. You could dump it and keep walking.”
    “Syndicate business?”
    “You know better than that. An unblemished child goes for five hundred ochres in the pens of Bukhirra. No slaver would be foolish enough to ruin his profit—and if he was, he’d know a better way to dispose of the corpse.”
    This was too much deference shown to a stranger in a tattered coat for Crispin’s second. He sauntered over, flushed with the arrogance that comes from having one’s hereditary sense of superiority cemented by the acquisition of public office. “Who is this man? What was he doing when he found the body?” He sneered at me. I had to admit he knew how to sneer. For all its ubiquity it isn’t an expression that just anyone can master.
    But I didn’t respond to it, and he turned to Wendell. “Where are his effects? What was the result of your search?”
    “Well, sir,” Wendell started, his Low Town accent thickening. “Seeing as how he reported it, we figured … that’s to say …” He wiped his nose with the back of his fat hand and coughed out a response. “He hasn’t been searched, sir.”
    “Is this