A Novel (10 page)

CHAPTER

9

I SLIPPED FROM THE
carriage as we rounded the first corner, dropping silently to the cobbles and sprinting off into the night without a word to the driver. It was an empty gesture, but it gave me a feeling of control, even though I didn't know where I was going. I couldn't go to Seventh Street, and I wouldn't go to the Drowning. But one of the few advantages of spending most of your daylight hours hundreds of feet in the air is that you get to see the land laid out like a map, so I know Bar-Selehm as well as anybody.

Most of the streets were empty, enjoying a few hours of quiet before the morning shift dragged workers from their beds, but all along the industrial riverbanks, the factories and dockyards would still be humming with activity. In the insalubrious hinterlands, the pubs and gin houses and opium dens never slept, and I had no desire to stumble through there at this time of night.

I watched a sleek gray mongoose emerge from an alley and pad down the steps of the Flintwick underground station, then picked my way south, toward the Financial District, choosing a series of alleys that emerged into a flagged square surrounded by law offices. The center was dominated by three bashti trees and a bronze statue of some long-dead prime minister. At the east end of the square, atop a flight of broad stone steps, was the Martel Court, a grand structure with a colonnade, a domed hall, and a single clock tower surmounted by a figure of Justice. The statue was gilded and high enough that it provided an orientation point for the city east of the Factory District, almost as conspicuous as the Beacon. At night, it was lit by gas lamps, ignited by a watchman from the observation gallery forty feet below, and they reflected off the eyes of a bushbaby or genet up in one of the bashti trees.

Between the base of the statue and the clock below it was a maintenance room, abandoned since the building was constructed. I stumbled upon it one night last fall, when Morlak had beaten me for breaking one of his substandard hammers. I had fled, roaming the city till I could find somewhere safe from him and his informants. They caught me on the third day, when I went to steal food from the kitchen of the Windmill tavern on Cross Street, and I paid dearly for my truancy, but they never found my bolt-hole. So long as I was careful going up and down, and was quiet when the watchman came to light the lamps, I would be safe there.

I circled the building once and spotted the watchman sitting in a sentry box with an oil lamp, reading a newspaper and smoking a long-stemmed pipe. Awake, in other words, but only just. I made my way to the northeast side and climbed into an ornamental apse with a statue of some ancient judge, setting my boot on his knee and pulling myself up. It was windy out on the balcony beneath the great clock, a chill winter breeze that stirred the smog and made my hair fly. I climbed the ladder to where the globes of the gas lamps sat, then pushed the shutter up and hoisted myself into the space beyond.

I took stock of the room as I released my hair. The blanket I had used last time was still there, as were some of my old books. There was no sign that anyone had been up since. For a few hours, I was safe. I set the “habbit” toy beside me, lay down, and listened to the night, thinking of Berrit, and Morlak, and Willinghouse.

*   *   *

I DREAMED OF SCALING
one of the iron foundry chimneys, the tallest in the city. I had a satchel of tools and replacement bricks over my shoulder, which got heavier and heavier with each rung of the ladder I climbed, but I kept going because I thought I would be able to see Papa from the top. When I got there, I opened the satchel, expecting it to contain a baby, but found myself blinded by the light of the Beacon, though I did not remember stealing it. Turning away, I realized that someone was up there with me: Willinghouse, but now he had a terrible gash in his chest that hissed impossibly when he tried to speak. I went to him, used my hand to stop the bleeding, but when I took it away, I was horrified to find that my fist was clutching the bloody spike with which I had stabbed Morlak.

I woke with a start, and the first thought in my head was that today I was supposed to collect Rahvey's baby. I reached for the familiar softness of the habbit and pressed it to my throat as if trying to stanch a wound.

*   *   *

THE SUN WAS NOT
yet up, and the night had turned genuinely cold. I was thirsty, but Willinghouse's goat curry was the best meal I had had in months and would sustain me a while longer. I performed the Kathahry in the dusty stone chamber, moving from pose to graceful pose of the balance and agility exercises. They were once a Lani ritual, part martial art, part religious observance, but few people did them now, and I had kept them up only because as a steeplejack, my life had depended on strength and flexibility. Vestris taught me. Rahvey sometimes copied us, but halfheartedly and only because she didn't like being left out. It was one of the things—like reading—that I had felt privileged to share with my beautiful eldest sister.

Long ago.

By the time I was done, the sun was rising over the bay, and Bar-Selehm's ragged industrial skyline was momentarily beautiful again. In an hour, as the day warmed fast, the streets would throng with people, and the Martel Court would be teeming with the anxious and desperate, watched over by dragoons and suited men with sheaves of papers bound with ribbon. It was time to move, but not to Rahvey's house. Not yet. I had said I would take the child today, but I had not said when, and there were other things I had to do.

I bought a newspaper at the stand on Winckley Street, enjoying the disbelief in the girl's eyes when I put a silver sixpence on the counter and asked if she could make change.

“There's nothing about the boy,” she said, watching the way my eyes raked the front page. “The one who fell.”

I nodded but didn't speak.

I scaled the water tower on the corner of Old Town, using a combination of access ladder and downspout to reach the roof. Watched by a pair of iridescent bee-eaters, I read the newspapers cover to cover as the light hardened and the temperature rose.

There was no news about the Beacon, although—along with a story about potential land deals between white investors and the unassimilated Mahweni, with the tribal protests that always happened as a result—it still dominated the headlines. The coverage had moved to rabble-rousing. Why had there been no arrests? If the Beacon was still in the city, why had it not been seen? If it wasn't in the city, where was it and how had it been moved? The Parliament had planned a special session to debate the matter, but wasn't that merely a distraction from the lack of progress?

Colonel Archibald Mandel, Secretary of Trade, had made a speech requesting an immediate ban on the sale of luxorite, not just in the city, but nationally and internationally as well. This measure would prevent the Beacon from being broken up and entering the legitimate market. Those whose livelihood depended on the trade had responded angrily, saying that the government should be looking more closely at some of those foreign powers who had no luxorite of their own, particularly the Grappoli.

It was always the Grappoli, our neighbors to the northwest, whose troops, if the papers were to be believed, had been poised to cross vast tracts of bush to lay their hands on Bar-Selehm for close to a hundred years.

The family of Mr. Ansveld, the luxorite trader who had been found dead, issued a statement saying that they had no knowledge of why the “beloved family man” would have taken his own life, and they requested that journalists leave them to their grief in private. A neighbor reported Mr. Ansveld's son saying that had the conditions not made the suicide verdict undeniable, he would not have believed it.

I scowled and rubbed the back of my neck, which had started to burn, then flipped through the large tissuelike pages until I found the continuation of the story.

“
Mr. Ansveld's body
,” I read,

was found at 8:47 on the morning of the sixteenth by the building's custodian in the company of Messrs. Jacoby Smithe
(
Under Secretary of Trade
)
and Hanson Boothes
(
of the Luxorite Commission
)
, who were scheduled to meet with Mr. Ansveld that morning. The fourth-story room—which is windowless—was locked and bolted from the inside, and tools had to be brought up from stores to effect entry. Mr. Ansveld appeared to have cut his own throat with a razor that was found at the scene.

I rubbed the back of my neck again, but did not move into the shade of the hatch. I combed through the rest of the paper, scanning the pages until I found a grainy halftone picture: a group of stuffy-looking white men in high-collared shirts and sober suits facing unsmilingly forward. The caption called them the Shadow Committee of Trade and Industry. Second and third from the left were two familiar faces, considerably younger than the others, one of them badly scarred: Mr. Josiah Willinghouse and Mr. Stefan Von Strahden.

Shadow Committee
.

So my would-be employer had told a half truth. He was who he said he was, but he did not, strictly speaking, work for the government. He was a member of the opposition, the party not currently in power. Yes, he would work on bipartisan projects and initiatives with the current administration, but he was not in a position to make law, determine funding for state projects, or any of the other prerogatives of the ruling party.

A slip of the tongue?
I wondered.
A minor embroidery designed to impress? Or a calculated misdirection?

If it was the latter, it had been a foolish one if it could be dashed by reading a newspaper. Still, it gave me pause, and I felt a tiny disappointment that the circles in which I was moving—albeit secretly—were not quite so elevated as I had thought. It was, I knew, a stupid response, perhaps even a dangerous one, and I found myself thinking about that phrase of his about the troubling occurrences that might overwhelm us all.

Whatever was going on, it was bigger than the death of a Lani boy, or even that of a luxorite merchant.

*   *   *

THE LEADER OF THE
Westside boys was called Deveril, a man in his midtwenties with a taste for slim, dusty suits; gold teeth; and a battered top hat with a crow's feather stuck rakishly into the band. His parentage was mixed, largely Lani, but his eyes were the deep, dark brown of the Mahweni, and his hair tended to twist and curl. He wore it in chaotic braids that spilled from under his top hat—half undertaker, half pirate.

He gave me an alarming smile and waved me into his “office,” away from the prying eyes of the boys heading out for their day's work. The Westside gang was based in a half-collapsed warehouse, and the standing of the members could be read by how close their quarters were to being structurally intact. Deveril's office doubled as his bedroom, the only room there that had four walls and a ceiling.

He sat in a rickety chair tipped so far back, it seemed about to go over, his feet in hobnailed boots up on a stained desk scattered with paper. “You wannna know about Berrit, eh?” he said musingly. “Poor little bugger. Should never have traded him.”

“Why did you?”

“Business,” he said. “That's how it goes sometimes.”

“Morlak requested him specifically?”

“Berrit? Nah,” he sneered, as if the question were idiotic. “To tell you the truth, I was offloading him. The boy was useless for anything but street sweeping and shoe shining, and even, then he was as like to cost me for getting bootblack all over the punters' trousers.”

“So Morlak didn't request him?”

“Didn't know he existed till I put the boy in front of him.”

“Did he test him, watch him work?”

“Nah,” said Deveril, tipping his top hat forward so that the brim shaded his eyes. “Why do you want to know? He was only with Seventh Street ten minutes. You can't have known him.”

“He was going to be my apprentice,” I said.

He pointed at me, nodding solemnly, as if this explained everything.

“Was he sad to go?” I asked.

“Not so far as you could tell,” said Deveril. “Kept himself to himself, you know? Didn't really, as it were,
socialize
with the rest of the chaps. But no, didn't seem sad.”

“How long had he been here?”

“Eight months. Maybe nine.”

“And he came straight from the Drowning?”

“That's right. His grandmother set it up when his mother died. Tough old bird, she was. Wanted a five-shilling finder's fee for bringing him, if you can believe that. Never even looked at him while she haggled. I gave her two, and she left without another word to him. Just walked out and never looked back.” He gave a hard, knowing smile. “No one much cared about Berrit,” he said. “Till you. What's that all about?”

“Was anyone else involved in the Morlak trade?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“Like who?”

I shrugged. “Berrit told people he thought he was moving up.”

Deveril gave me a shrewd look. “And you reckon that, Mr. Morlak not being everyone's cup of tea, there must have been someone else involved to make little Berrit feel good about the move. Not that I know of, no. Though he said he had friends in high places.”

“When did he say that?”

“Last time I saw him. After Morlak had agreed to the trade, Berrit came back for his few bits and bobs. I had a little sit-down with him, make sure he was all right, you know?”

“And he was?”

“Better than,” said Deveril. “Quite content, flashing around his advance wages.”

“Advance wages?” I parroted. That did not sound like Morlak at all.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Deveril. “That's when he said it. I asked him where that had come from, and he gave me this look. Sort of sly, pleased with himself, you know? And he said, ‘Friends in high places, Mr. Deveril.' Always very respectful was young Berrit. I appreciated that.”