A Drink Before We Die: A Low Town Short Read Online Free

at that moment. Anyway, I sheared my way through his fingers—actually it was about an inch further in than his fingers, not quite to the palm, I'm not sure what that part of the hand is called, or if it has a proper name—but I cut through it and then into his chest, and unlike his Vaalan confederate who was somehow still alive and standing, the Islander collapsed and died quickly.
    Unfortunately in dying he carried my weapon to the ground with him. That happens sometimes, when you kill a guy. Upside, seeing the two men he'd been in partnership with die like chickens in a farmyard had done something to unman the Kiren. You will find that also happens, when you kill a guy.
    There was a tankard of ale on one of the tables and I grabbed it and threw it into his eyes and then jumped on him, and we went to the ground together, and he screamed and I screamed, but his was fear and mine was—I'm not sure exactly, excitement or cruelty or rage? Regardless. He gave me a pretty good shot in the eyes and I gave him three in response, and mine were harder and he wasn't so skilled at getting hit as I am—I have a real gift for masochism, if you hadn't yet figured—and he pretty much stopped fighting then.
    I didn't, however. That isn't the way these things work. I hit him until his face was no longer recognizable as such, eyes shuttered, nose running down his chin, mouth like a burned out shack.
    I stood. I cleaned and retrieved my weapons. There is something that a living man feels when there are dead men around him, and I felt that. Then I went back to the table, pulled my chair upright and sat down on it.
    “I fold,” Albus said, dropping his cards and looking the other way. “I fucking fold.”
    “If only all the world had your wisdom,” I said, scooping up the pot.

5
    “Let me start off by making it clear I got no hard feelings.”
    It was a week or so after I'd left three corpses bleeding into the floor of the Bastard's Teeth—which, so far as most of the rest of the city was concerned, was likely to be my last gasp of resistance against the Consortium. Armadal continued to strengthen his grip on my territory, I barely had a false friend left in Low Town. The wise money had me dead inside of a three weeks, you could make book on it at half the bars on the docks. I understood there was even a bonus if you picked the right day.
    “I'm not quite sure I follow,” Melrose Cosgrave said. It was the first time we'd met, though I had known his uncle, who had been small and cruel and who had made his living importing women from the distant provinces of his homeland and renting them to men. His nephew seemed cut from much the same cloth, pint-sized and boy-faced, eyes nasty as a gangrenous wound.
    “About you setting your hooks into Low Town,” I explained.
    Cosgrave smiled wider and looked over at the two guards he had stationed behind me. I'd been searched before coming into the meeting, thoroughly searched, but he was still playing me like I wasn't. “If there's been any confusion about where our boundaries begin and yours end, I'm sure—”
    “Like I said, you can cut all that. Etiquette has its uses, but there's no reason to make a fetish of it.”
    “Then why are you here, exactly?” he said, the smile dripping off his face like wax off a votary. It hadn't been much of a smile to begin with, and Cosgrave seemed well rid of it.
    “I'm here to do you a favor.”
    Cosgrave laughed. The guards laughed. I laughed also, out of camaraderie. “Thanks,” Cosgrave said finally.
    “Don't mention it.”
    “And what exactly is the nature of this kindness?”
    “I thought I'd go ahead and make sure you don't die at the hands of your closest subordinate.”
    “Armadal's a close friend,” Cosgrave said, but he didn't tell me to stop talking.
    “He seems like a real friendly sort, that Armadal,” I said. “Just sweet as molasses pie, when he came in to see me two months ago.”
    “Anything Armadal's done, he's done at my