Tomorrow, the Killing

1

Man 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.

‘This is my daughter,’ he said, sliding the object across the desk. ‘Her name is Rhaine, after her mother, who died bringing her into the world.’

It was a heart-shaped locket, a shell of gold wrapped around a thumbnail portrait. I snapped open the catch. Miniatures are a particularly inaccurate way to represent a fragment of reality. A square-inch oil, detail blurred to ambiguity by the requirements of size and the demands of an abstract notion of beauty. I thought it altogether unlikely that the subject of the sketch bore the slightest resemblance to the painting I held in my hand.

There was no great likeness between the general and his issue, but then the girl in the pendant must have been five decades younger than the man who sat across from me. And in fairness the dominating feature was her hair, red as the last moment of sunshine before evening, and time had long ago bleached the general’s own locks. Apart from that she looked like everyone looks in a portrait: pearl skin, a slender nose mimicking the arc of her neck. The one quality offering a nod to her ancestry was her striking blue eyes, evidently a Montgomery family trait.

‘She’s lovely,’ I said, though given the source I wasn’t altogether sure that was a welcome compliment.

‘She is indeed,’ he said. ‘She’s also vain, willful, spoiled – and missing.’

I figured the last the most pertinent. ‘How long?’

‘Two days.’

‘I notice you didn’t say taken.’

‘No, I didn’t. I have reason to believe she departed of her own accord.’

‘That would be?’

‘We had a . . . row, I suppose. We’ve had a lot of them lately, but I’m afraid this was the breaking point.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, General,’ I said. ‘But the young are as quick to rage as they are to reconcile. I’m sure she’ll show up soon.’ Though of course I wasn’t sure of that at all.

‘I don’t think so. She’s headstrong, like her father.’ Primed, he managed to continue without my assistance. ‘She finished her schooling six months ago – an education, I assure you, that was as expensive as it was irrelevant. The interim since her graduation has been . . . trying for the both of us. She’s not content to be married off, and while I don’t blame her, I’m not sure sleeping till mid-afternoon and shouting at the staff is a better substitute. Truth told, I’m not sure either of us knows what to do with each other.’

This was more information about the family Montgomery then I felt I needed. ‘Be that as it may, General, I’m not sure what part I could play in your domestic issues.’

He pulled himself up in his seat, not so easy a task, given his age. ‘I have reason to believe that she’s somewhere in Low Town, hiding out. I want you to find her, and I want you to tell her . . . I want you to ask her to return.’

I scratched at the beginnings of a beard. ‘What makes you think she’s in Low Town?’

‘If she had stayed within Kor’s Heights, within her old circle, I’d know about it. And the nature of our fight led me to believe that she had taken it upon herself to look into something in your borough.’

That was indecipherably vague, but upon consideration I didn’t think I wanted clarification. ‘I don’t work for the Crown any longer, General,’ I said.

‘So I’ve been informed.’

It wasn’t much of a secret – though I doubted the general had an exactly accurate conception of my new slate of duties, or he would have sought help from a more appropriate source. ‘And missing persons isn’t my bailiwick these days.’ Never was, really – even when I’d worn the gray I’d been more involved in making them disappear. ‘I’m sure if you contacted Black House, they’d be happy to help you with your problem.’

‘They would, they would indeed – they’d be happy as hell to help, to track down Fightin’ Ed’s wild daughter, and to remember it as long after as they’d need to.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve had enough dealings with the Old Man to last a lifetime.’

‘If it’s discretion you’re worried about, there are any number of firms who can offer it. I could give you the names of some reputable men.’

‘I don’t want discretion,’ he said, not quite testily, but with less friendliness than he’d been offering. ‘I want silence. I don’t want the whisper, the hint of this, ever to get out – I want it never to have happened, and none of the bigger operators can promise that.’ After a moment he cooled himself down a little, wiping at the flecks of spittle that had formed beside his mouth. ‘Besides, I’d heard that you were the man to speak to about what goes on in Low Town.’

‘And who’d you hear that from?’ I asked. I had trouble believing the general spent much time in rooms where my name was bandied about.

‘Iomhair Gilchrist,’ he said, and smiled at my reaction. ‘You don’t much care for old Iron Stomach?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. If the Creator hadn’t given us dung beetles, we’d have to spend a lot more time cleaning our shoes.’

‘He’s not a regular at Sunday dinner. But his avarice makes him easy to predict. I’m rich, he knows it, and that keeps him in my stable.’

‘All the money in the world wouldn’t buy him a spine – he’s a coward, and useless in a pinch. Even if you could trust him not to screw you, you still couldn’t trust him not to screw up.’

He nodded, not like he agreed with me, but like it didn’t matter. ‘Whatever else he is, he knows his business, and his business is knowing people, and he says you know yours.’

That was quite a little play on words, though I figured it was best not to call him on it. ‘As flattering as it is to hear Iron Stomach thinks so highly of me, the fact remains, finding lost children isn’t my line.’

I got the impression that Montgomery had expected this conversation to go easier. He took a long breath and rocked back in his chair, marshaling his forces before returning to battle. ‘You never met Rhaine, did you?’

I had perspired through my shirt. I figured if I sat here much longer I’d soak my way through the overcoat as well. ‘Not that I recall.’

‘When last you and I met she would have been a child. In many ways I suppose she’s still a child now. Roland quite doted on her. So did I. There were times when it seemed it was the only thing the two of us could agree on. And of course she returned his affection. After his death I fear it turned to adoration. The longer he’s been gone the more closely he resembles a saint.’

I concentrated firmly on the window behind the general, dull with dust and the glare of the sun.

‘He always spoke highly of you, Roland. Even when he had little good to say of the Crown, of Black House in particular – he always spoke very highly of you.’

‘That’s nice to hear,’ I said. It was the least definite statement I could think of.

‘Yesterday I asked Iomhair for the names of three men who were solid enough to find my girl, and whom I could expect not to put my business out into the street. When yours came back at the head of that list, I must admit that . . .’ he groped silently for words. It was clear the general was not one generally given to strong displays of emotion – I found myself wishing he’d hewn closer to his traditional habit of restraint.

‘I’m not a religious man, you understand. But somehow when I saw your name I couldn’t help but feel that the Daevas had some hand in it, in bringing you back into my life after such a long absence.’

I was far more keen to see the hand of the infernal in our renewed acquaintance than the divine. ‘Roland was a friend,’ I said. The fact that this was one of the few truths I’d bothered to tell over the course of the conversation was not lost on me. ‘And if I thought I could help you, I wouldn’t hesitate. But I’m not the sort to promise something I can’t deliver, and I can’t deliver this. I don’t know Rhaine, don’t know her habits, associates, don’t know anything about her. Low Town is a big place, and even I don’t have ears in all of it. And say I found her, what then? I’ve no leverage to force her to return, and cruel though it may be, the law wouldn’t allow me to drop her in a sack and carry her here by force.’ Laying them out like that they seemed like good excuses, not excuses even, explanations. I hoped he’d take them. ‘I’m sorry, sir – but there just isn’t anything I can do for you.’

He settled his antique body back into his chair, his face a shadow of what it had been a scant moment earlier. Nothing like breaking an old man’s heart before lunch. ‘Of course,’ he said, his voice indistinct. ‘I understand. Forgive me for wasting your time.’

‘It was no trouble,’ I returned, and then, wanting to say something to steady him, ‘It was good seeing you again, General. I have . . . fond memories of you, and your son.’ We were back to lies. I did have happy memories of Roland – but they were mixed evenly with some very terrible ones.

He didn’t seem to hear me, which was just as well. The leather seat stuck to my ass as I stood. ‘I’ll take my leave of you, then.’

He nodded a farewell, lost in thoughts far from happy.

The palm of my hand was settled against the brass door handle when the image of a man flashed through my mind. A man who looked something like the general, but with the same shock of auburn hair as the woman in the locket I’d left lying on the table. His eyes were bright as a torch, the kind of eyes you’d follow anywhere – wild eyes, dangerous eyes, eyes that promised you things you shouldn’t believe in.

‘I could keep my ears open,’ said the idiot in the badly tailored suit. ‘I’m not promising anything, but . . .’

Montgomery shot up from the table, nearly sprinting towards me, forgetting his age in the excitement. ‘Damn decent of you, damn decent of you!’ He pressed the locket into my hand, and his grip was firm. ‘I’ll pay you anything you need, you don’t worry about that. Just send me a bill and I’ll cover it, double it – anything you need.’

At that moment I needed to get the hell out of his house, and I was about to do so when something occurred to me. ‘One more thing, General,’ I said. ‘What was the fight about?’

The happy set of his face flushed away. ‘It was about her brother,’ he answered. ‘And the circumstances of his murder.’

I left without saying anything further, through the parlor and past Botha’s scowl, out the long hallway that led to the front room, through the gilded door and into the street. The sun shone down on a man who wished he’d had the last five minutes to do over again. Wished he’d had more than that, really, but who’d have settled for the last five minutes.