Tomorrow, the Killing

18

There is a corner of every man’s soul that would prefer him dead. That whispers poison in his ear in the still hours of the evening, puts spurs to his side when he stands atop a ledge. For the weak and the misbegotten, the suggestion alone proves sufficient, and the unfortunate runs himself a hot bath and adds his life-blood to it, or drinks a few pints of backyard whiskey and goes swimming in the canal. But most of us are too stubborn or cowardly to make a clean go of it, and this bit that hates us has to start thinking sly. Have another drink, it says, and maybe one more on top. Polish it off with a hit of breath, and ain’t that man at the end of the bar been giving you the eye all night, all fucking night, and what’s his problem exactly, and why don’t you go over and ask?

After finding Rhaine’s body I went back to the Earl, poured myself a tall draft and went to work wrestling that suicidal quarter of my consciousness into submission, or at least silence.

I had been aware of the youngest Montgomery’s existence for a grand total of three days, had spent perhaps forty minutes in her presence. In that time she had struck me as spoiled, self-indulgent and foolish, and her unfortunate outcome eminently predictable. The world is happy enough to distribute cruelties to the undeserving – best to save sympathy for those souls brought low through no fault of their own.

She had been nothing to me, not a lover, not a friend even. Contemptuous and acerbic even when she wasn’t trying. A spoon-fed cunt from Kor’s Heights that had gotten what she’d asked for.

I was alone in the bar, so I had to get up from my perch to refill my beer.

She had heart though, you had to give that to her. That last time I’d seen her she’d known what she was up against, seen the odds and stuck it out anyway. At first I’d thought her bravery petulance, the whole escapade a ‘fuck you’ to her old man. But I’d been wrong, it was more than that. You could call it rank sentimentality, and I did, but you couldn’t dismiss it. She had wanted justice for her brother, and died looking for it.

And the fact that I’d known the truth, that I might have set her straight but hadn’t – well, you couldn’t very well pretend that didn’t mean something.

I was empty again. A trip to the tap rectified the situation.

The general had heard the news by this point. It might kill him – the Lost One knew he hadn’t been the picture of health that morning. If it didn’t then he’d have the misfortune of adding a daughter to the son he’d buried. The Daevas were cruel, to repay his years of service with such misfortune.

Course the Daevas hadn’t killed her – I knew where that honor rested.

But then again what I’d told Rhaine that first day was true: there’s no such thing as justice, only revenge, and once you get it you realize how little it means. Edwin Montgomery’s son rotted in the ground, and his daughter would soon join him. Giving them company wouldn’t change that. I did the best I could for Rhaine while she was alive. It hadn’t been enough, but there was no point compounding failure with catastrophe.

It made sense, when you looked at it like that. When you lined it up. The wise thing to do was forget it. Have a few drinks, then go upstairs and sleep them off. Wake up and have a few more. Repeat until it didn’t seem necessary.

I am not a wise man. Clever, on occasion, but never wise.

Adolphus came in through the back, trying to take up less than his usual amount of space. ‘You hear?’

‘Yeah.’ I pulled myself up from my seat, stretching my arms over my head, trying to shake loose three pints of booze.

‘Where are you headed?’

‘I’m gonna go pay a visit to the man who killed Rhaine Montgomery.’

‘Who was that?’

‘The same person who killed her brother, I suspect.’