Free She Who Waits (Low Town 3) by Daniel Polansky Page A

continued, cutting another slice of apple, then pointing the blade of my clasp knife down towards his feet. ‘You clean up so nice and then you don’t even bother to change your shoes.’
    If you’d told me five years back that the Sons of Ś akra – better known amongst those of us unaffiliated with the organization as the Stepsons, or just the Steps – would have risen to a position of social prominence, would include in its ranks nobles and members of parliament, I’d have laughed right in your face. A pack of zealots listing as a cardinal vice everything from hard liquor to sex on feast days – hardly the sort of creed to find fashion amongst the hedonistic citizens of Rigus. But that was before trade with the Free Cities dried up, and the mills started to shut down, and the last two harvests had all but withered on the vine. Since then their ascent had been impressively rapid, buoyed by the collapse in trade and industry and the general sense of misery that seemed to loom omnipresent over the city. Despair breeds conviction, when you can’t afford a pleasure it gets damn easy to decide it’s not one you’d lower yourself to enjoy.
    Nowadays their church services were packed to the rafters with old women weeping and young men beating their breasts, and their brown-robed leaders made a ruckus in parliament about anything they could find to make a ruckus about. They ran orphanages and poor houses and occasionally led raids down into Kirentown, proving that theirs were loving gods with the aid of brick bats and cobblestones. Otherwise they could be found throughout the city, passing out tracts and preaching and generally being a nuisance to those of us whose labors focused on this world rather than the next.
    In truth, I hadn’t been paying much attention to them, seeing as the only thing I care less about than politics is religion. I’d spent enough time in the corridors of power to know that the people you think are running things aren’t ever the people that are really running them. And I’d been alive long enough to know that if the Firstborn reigns above, he’s not paying much attention to what we’re doing down below.
    ‘I hadn’t thought them so recognizable,’ Hume said, taking a moment to inspect his treads.
    ‘I tend to notice jackboots when they’re threatening to march over my face.’
    He bristled. He seemed like the kind of person who bristled easily, though I was hoping our association would be too brief to confirm that one way or the other. ‘There are many false rumors spread about the Sons of Ś akra, spread by our enemies, jealous of the love we have amongst the common folk and our success in parliament. We seek nothing more than an active role within government, for the greater glory of King and country.’
    ‘You can’t imagine how little this conversation interests me,’ I said, tossing away the core of my apple and pulling out a fresh one from my satchel. ‘I assume you haven’t been following me through Low Town to debate politics, and I can assure you that I didn’t lead you here hoping for a lecture on your sect. Now how bout you tell why you
were
shadowing me, before I make good on these threats I keep offering.’
    ‘My superior has a proposition for you. We wanted to know what sort of person we were dealing with, before we offered it.’
    ‘I’m the sort of person who doesn’t like being followed. I wonder whether that point would best be conveyed to your boss from you, or with your corpse?’
    ‘I may not seem like much to you, but my people feel otherwise. They’d be unlikely to take my being harmed with much grace.’
    ‘A lot of men have said that sort of thing to me before I made them dead. I wonder that it gave them much comfort.’
    Credit where it’s due, the credible – though in this case, fictitious – threat of his demise didn’t rattle Brother Hume overly. One of the benefits of being certain about the afterlife, I suppose, is you aren’t