Free A Drink Before We Die: A Low Town Short by Daniel Polansky Page B

yours.”
    “Perish the thought.”
    “Our interests in Talabous end at the river, and we've got no intentions of moving them beyond that. The way the Consortium sees it, there's enough out there for everyone. Bloodshed is antithetical to profit, and profit is what we're all interested in.”
    “An enlightened attitude,” I commented. “Who is we, exactly?”
    He smiled a little wider. “Cosgrave Melrose.”
    “Old Alistair's nephew?”
    And wider still. “The very same.”
    “You make sure to give him my regards,”  I said. “All the respect and admiration I have for that family, for everything they've done for the city. Well, like I said, you make sure and give him my regards.”
    I would not have pissed on Alistair Melrose had he been set on fire and placed amidst a nest of my most treasured possessions. I'd never met his nephew, but I felt confident my feelings would be similar. It was gratifying, however, to see Armadal's eyes get a little blacker at the praise I was heaping on his boss. “I'll send them along.”
    “Much appreciated.”
    “And in the meantime, if there's anything else that I can do to personally assure you of our good intentions, please don't hesitate to contact me.”
    “Not for a moment.”
    Armadal nodded and stood and left an argent on the table, which was more than the cost of the liquor but less than what he was looking to take from me. I made a vague feint in the direction of walking him out, but he waved me back down, thanked me again and slipped neatly into the daylight.
    “Who was that?” Adolphus asked, coming round after a moment.
    “That was Armadal Kinnaird.”
    “What did he want?”
    “To steal everything I own and then murder me,” I said. “Can I get a refill on that whiskey?”

2
    “I don't know what to tell you,” Henri de Montmortancy was saying. “It's been a slow week.”
    There are all sorts of benefits to my current avenue of employment. I set my own hours, I don't have a boss to answer to, I get to give something back to the community. But of course it has its downsides like anything else. That's why they call it work, rather than play. And for me personally the biggest drawback of being a dealer of narcotics, which is my main profession though I've been known to cadge a clipped copper in other ways as well, is that you have to spend time with people who buy and sell drugs; a subsection of the population even slightly more duplicitous and self-serving than the rest.
    “No one's buying breath?” I asked.
    He shrugged, an honest man despairing. “Not from me,” he lamented.
    I'm sure you're busy, so to save us both some time all I'll tell you about Henri de Montmortancy was that no one called him Henri de Montmortancy, they called him the Wind Cock, and they called him that because he was inconstant as an autumn storm. I supplied him with breath and in exchange he gave me seventy percent of what he got, as well as a premium for not beating him to death out of sheer pique.
    He was supposed to, anyway. Though looking down at the three ochre he had set in front of me, the entirety of my take for last month, apparently, I was starting to wonder if maybe the Wind Cock was living up to his name.
    “Hell, Henri,” I said. “I'm sorry to hear that.”
    He brightened up a bit. “Thanks, Warden.  It's this trade war we've got going with Nestria. If there ain't no cargo to unload, then the dockworkers ain't got no money, and if the dockworkers ain't got no money—”
    “Then you don't have any either. I get it, I get it.” I wondered how much of my pixie's breath had been required to give the Wind Cock the courage to lie to my face. Half a vial, was my not entirely inexperienced assessment. His eyes were pinpoint pricks, and he was doing that thing where you sniffle and blink at the same time. Frankly it was embarrassing—I'd put away the same amount myself an hour earlier, just on general principle, and the only evidence of it was that I kept ticking