Free Low Town by Daniel Polansky Page A

behind me came a fierce chill accompanied by the stench of feces and decomposing flesh. My stones shriveled up into my body and I lurched sideways, covering my nose with my arm as I took shelter against the worn brick wall.
    It was eight or maybe nine feet tall, although determining its exact height was difficult because it didn’t walk but hovered a few feet from the ground. Its shape was a blasphemous imitation of a biped, though sufficiently altered to make confusion with a member of the human race impossible. Lolling, obscene arms stretched downpast the length of its body, each tipped by a pair of fanlike hands wider than my head. It was tough to make out more than that, as most of its body was covered by something that looked like a thick black cloak, but upon closer examination seemed more a strange carapace. I caught glimpses of the frame beneath the casing, hard and white as bone.
    I hadn’t ever thought I would see one again—another plea to Śakra unanswered.
    Its face was a contorted parody of my own, a husk wrapped tightly across ossein, eyes rabid and cruel. I felt a terrible pain in my chest and collapsed to the ground, the agony coursing through me so terrible that my long history of injury seemed as nothing before it. A scream died stillborn on my lips. For an awful moment I thought of everyone I would betray, every humiliation I would endure and evil I would perpetrate to ease the torment. Then the thing turned its head away from me and floated onward, and the torture ended as abruptly as it had begun. I remained on the ground, my strength utterly spent.
    It stopped a few paces before the giant. The lower hinge of its jaw seemed to dislocate, stretching down a half foot to reveal an open and amaranthine void. “The child was not to be mistreated.” Its voice was shattered porcelain and bruises on a woman. “As she suffered, so now shall you.” The Kiren looked on with terror undiluted by conscious thought. With a speed that belied its earlier deliberateness the thing struck, locking a clawed hand around the man’s throat. Without apparent effort it lifted his body off the ground and held him there, motionless.
    Between the half decade I had served in the trenches, and my long hours spent breaking criminals in the prisons beneath Black House, I had grown confident that there was no utterance of pain with which I was not familiar—but I had never heard anything to compare to the Kiren’s screams. He let loose a noise that spread into the depths ofmy skull like rusted screws, and I pressed my hands to my head so hard I thought I might burst my eardrums. Gore poured forth from his nostrils, less a nosebleed than an open wound in his sinuses, and he whipped his head back and forth, struggling against the grip of the abortion. So furious were the Kiren’s attempts to free himself that he crippled his hand raw against the unyielding substance of his foe, his fingers snapping as he clawed at the rough black covering. Some internal pressure erupted and his right eye burst in its socket, and his screams redoubled against the inside of my head.
    Then they stopped, the muted sputtering and the fat swelling in his throat indicating he had bitten straight through the root of his tongue and was now struggling unsuccessfully to swallow it.
    For all the many evils that stained my memory, I had no analog for this horror.
    Finally the thing shook what was left of the body, like a terrier with a rat. There was a sharp crack and the corpse dropped to the ground, a tattered mass of ripped orifices and torn flesh. Its errand finished, the abomination twisted like a leaf on the wind and glided beyond my field of vision, the aftermath of the pain so intense I lacked the strength even to follow with my eyes.
    Lying there against the wall, staring at the shredded body of the man I had been tracking for the last half day, I thought to myself that at the very least the Kiren hadn’t made a liar out of me—in all my years I