Low Town by Daniel Polansky Read Free Book Online Page B

absence.
    “You leave us for five years, disappear completely without a message, without a word.” She didn’t seem angry, or sad even, the wound no longer tender but still visible. “And now you can’t even offer an explanation?”
    “I had my reasons.”
    “They were bad ones.”
    “They might have been. I make a lot of bad decisions.”
    “I won’t argue that.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it was enough. “It’s very good to see you,” she said, laboring over each word as if she wanted to say more.
    I stared at my boots. They didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. “I hear you’re to be commissioned Sorcerer First Rank. Congratulations.”
    “It is an honor I’m not sure that I deserve. Certainly the Master’s word went far in smoothing my ascension.”
    “This means you get free rein to destroy any stray bit of architecture you find objectionable and turn misbehaving servants into rodents?”
    Her face assumed the strained pose I’d often see her adopt as a child when she didn’t get a joke. “I have trained myself to follow in the footsteps of the Master, and thus studied the specialties he has perfected—alchemy, spells of warding and healing. The Master never saw fit to learn the patterns by which a practitioner does evil to his fellows, and I would not think to pursue avenues he has determined to ignore. It requires a certain kind of person even to practice the darker shades of the Art. Neither of us is capable of it.”
    Anyone is capable of anything, I thought, but didn’t say it.
    “He’s extraordinary. I don’t think we ever quite realized it as children. To be given the honor of learning at his feet …” She held her tiny hands to her chest and shook her head. “Do you understand what his spell of warding means to this city? To this country? How manydied from the plague? How many would have died if his safeguards didn’t still protect us to this day? Before his working, they needed to run the crematorium twenty-four hours a day in the summer just to keep up—and that was when the plague was at its ebb. When the Red Fever hit, there wasn’t even anyone left to dispose of the bodies.”
    A memory crept to my mind, a child of six or seven walking gingerly over the corpses of his neighbors, careful not to step on their outstretched limbs, screaming for help that would never come. “I know what his working means.”
    “You don’t know. I don’t think anyone does, really. We don’t have any idea of the numbers killed in Low Town, among the Islanders and the dockworkers. With sanitation like it was, it could have been a third, half, even higher. He’s the reason we won the war. Without him, there wouldn’t have been enough men alive to fight.” Her eyes trailed reverentially upward. “We can never repay him for what he did. Never.”
    When I didn’t respond, she blushed a little, suddenly self-conscious. “But you’ve got me started again.” Her loose smile revealed a thin cobweb of lines stretching across her skin, lines that contrasted sorely with my memories of her as a youth, images I knew to be defunct but couldn’t discount. “I’m sure you didn’t return to us to hear my tired bromides to the Master.”
    “Not specifically.”
    Too late I realized my half answer allowed her to conjure her own explanation for my arrival. “Is this a forced interrogation? Am I to tie you down and tease it out of you?”
    I hadn’t planned on telling her—but then I hadn’t planned on running into Celia at all. And it was better to let her know my real motive, rather than stoke whatever fantasies she had been clinging to. “You heard about Little Tara?”
    She blanched, and her sultry grin dripped away. “We aren’t so far removed from the city as you seem to think.”
    “I found her body yesterday,” I said, “and I stopped by to see if the Master knew anything about it.”
    Celia gnawed at her bottom lip—the tic, at least, one thing that had held over