Read Tomorrow, the Killing for Free Online

on the grim but lucrative business of looting the corpses. And a great many, an astonishing percentage really, milled about in aimless confusion.
    If you can maintain some sense of direction in such bedlam you’ve got an advantage, and between the two of us we managed a capable fighting withdrawal. I picked up a stray pike and held it parallel with Adolphus’s, edging it warily at anyone who came too close, falling backwards gradually and with purpose. Mostly those Dren pursuing our shattered rear didn’t bother with us, not when there were easier targets swarming all around.
    The march in had only taken us ten minutes, but going back took us twice as long, three times, hell, five, I don’t know. It seemed an eternity, dead and dying everywhere you looked, the population of a fair-sized town made into mounds of rotting flesh. And the screaming, by the Firstborn, the screaming. It was like a strong wind, thousands of men hurling their misery at you, their terror and hatred.
    At one point I tripped over a corpse and added to the song, certain that Adolphus would prioritize his own survival over our newly minted friendship. But he didn’t – he stood over me steady as a statue, and the enemy stayed clear.
    Things eased off once we got back to the baggage train. The Dren quickly lost interest in murder, turned to scooping up anything that could be eaten, drunk, sold or fucked. By nightfall we were five miles back from the front, trying to find our unit amongst the mass of broken men, the wounded dying unattended, the officers no more capable of offering succor than they had been of saving us from the catastrophe of the day.
    And that was that – twenty minutes on a bright autumn afternoon sounding the death knell on set-piece warfare, of fluttering pendants, of regimental musicians beating the score, of cavalry charges and men in tight formation. From then on it was all shovels and trenches, dugouts of mud and shit, scorching in summer and freezing in winter, and of course, always wet. Tactics switched to dead sprints across the barrens of no-man’s-land in the dark of night, armies of men as huge and profligate as locusts, suiciding themselves without order, purpose or reason.
4
    T here are vast swathes of the middle and upper classes who are born in the city, who live and work in Rigus all their lives, who marry and spawn seed and are buried beneath their fair portion of dust, and who never at any point set foot within Low Town. For these people, Low Town occupies a position analogous to an agnostic’s view of hell – abstractly unpleasant, but unworthy of overmuch consideration, given the dim odds of ever finding oneself there. They come to think of it, if they think of it at all, as something extraneous, irrelevant to their own existence.
    As widely held beliefs tend to be, this one is entirely false. Low Town is not separate from Rigus – neither its stray effluvium nor its bastard offspring. Low Town is the heart and soul of the metropolis, as much as the Old City with the palace and parliament, with its glittering citadels and wide lanes. The rich and well fed need Low Town as much as those who inhabit it, need a place away from the kindled lights, close enough to reach after nightfall but far enough away so the stink doesn’t follow them home.
    In the false distance between the two worlds the factor earns their supper. Say you’re an uptown merchant or a baronet, and you find yourself needing a den for late-evening assignations, the ownership of which ought never find its way back to your wife – no problem, sir, not a problem at all. Hand over a few ochres and you’ll get your little love nest, a quaint walk-up just over the line from Offbend, with nary a piece of paper to link you to it. And let’s suppose, having acquired such a fine piece of real estate, you have an interest in filling it with a buxom lass and a few twists of dreamvine, or a comely youth and ouroboros root, or prepubescents and wyrm –