A Novel (13 page)

Another failure,
I thought.

I was almost out of the street when I glimpsed a familiar face. He was white, a boy about my own age, wearing a tweed jacket over a collared shirt with a necktie. The shirt was carefully laundered, and the jacket had been mended several times, but if you didn't look too closely at his boots, he might almost pass for gentry.

He wasn't.

His name was William—Billy—Jennings, a petty thief and pickpocket who worked for one of Morlak's rivals. He was walking briskly, his eyes flicking around the street, fastening on the women with their little purses and handbags as he moved. I did not think he had seen me.

Falling into step behind him, I timed my approach to a point between two grand terraces where a narrow street ran up under the shade of a tantu tree. He half turned, sensing my presence, but I got a good grip on his left wrist and twisted it. Stifling his cry to avoid attention, he let me propel him a few yards up the street, where we would not be observed.

“What's going on?” he blustered, faltering when he saw my face. “Oh, it's you.”

“What are you doing here, Billy?” I demanded.

“Walking. What's it to you?”

“A bit high end for your beat, isn't it?” I said.

“That's rich coming from you,” he shot back.

I gave his wrist a twist.

“What do you want? I ain't done nothing.”

“Not yet today, perhaps,” I said. “But I'll bet you plan to.”

“Can't punish a man for what he ain't done yet,” said Billy, smirking slightly. “And what's it got to do with you anyway?”

“You work this street a lot?” I asked.

“What do you mean ‘work'?” he said, staring me down, though the color in his cheek gave the lie to his defiance.

“
Walk
then,” I said. “You walk this street a lot?”

“Sure,” he said. “Free country, right? A man has to get around.”

“And you see what's going on, don't you, Billy? Always on the watch?”

“What's this about?” he demanded again.

“You see anything odd around here last week?” I asked, relaxing my grip on his wrist.

“Odd? What do you mean odd?”

“Anything out of place—other than you, I mean.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“Men like you know the routines in a place like this, don't you, Billy? When the streets are busiest, when the ladies do a little shopping after a glass of luncheon wine, which makes them less careful of their belongings, a fraction slower to react when someone dips into their purses—”

“I resent that,” he cut in. “I'm a businessman, me.”

“So you'll know when people make deliveries, or when there are whispers of important deals. Especially where luxorite is concerned.”

“Luxorite?” said Billy. He looked confused and alarmed. “I don't deal in luxorite,” he said, smoothing the frayed collar of his overstarched shirt. “Too hard to move, isn't it?”

“No one's accusing you of anything, Billy,” I said. “I'm just asking if you've seen or heard anything out of the ordinary.”

“Why?” he demanded, reverting to his original tack. “Who wants to know?”

“I do,” I said. “I'm curious.”

“You can say that again,” he sneered.

I made a snatch for his wrist, but he whipped it away. “There's money in it for you,” I tried. “If you think of anything.”

“How much?” said Billy, giving me a sidelong look. “I mean, if I should remember anything, that is.”

“That depends on what you remember, Billy.”

“Yeah,” he drawled. “That's what I thought. Bloody Seventh Street gang never have any money. What kind of cash can I expect from a Lani steeplejack?”

I wanted to slap him, but something in his last word stirred his memory, and a realization dawned.

“You're the one who had the apprentice what died last week,” he said. “What was his name?”

“Berrit,” I said.

“Berrit,” he echoed. “Right. Sorry to hear it. He fell off a chimney, yeah?”

His manner was different now. People in our social bracket couldn't afford much in the way of sentimentality, but there was a kind of class loyalty that cut across some of the rivalries of race and gang affiliation.

“I don't think he fell,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “And that's connected to this stuff you're asking me?” he said.

“Might be.”

He turned away for a moment, thinking. When he looked back at me, there was a frankness in his face that hadn't been there before. “I have a lady friend,” he said, “scullery maid for one of the dealers back there.” He nodded toward Crommerty Street.

“A luxorite trader?” I asked.

“A bit,” he said. “Macinnes. Fancy bits and bobs. Number Twenty-three.”

Across the street from Ansveld's.

“And she's legit, this lady friend?” I asked.

“Why wouldn't she be?” Billy demanded, on his dignity again.

“Well, she's with you, for a start,” I said.

He frowned at that, then reached into his inside pocket, producing two buttoned pouches jingling with coins.

“I don't want your money,” I said.

“Wasn't gonna give you any,” he said. He held up first one purse, then the other. “This one,” he said, “this is for work. Some of it is, you might say, of questionable origins. This one, though—this one is strictly on the up-and-up. All hard earned and legal-like.”

“Why keep them separate?” I asked.

“This one,” he said shyly, holding the one he'd said was legit, “that's for the ring I'm saving for. My Bessie will be touched by nothing what isn't pure.”

I grinned at his earnestness and he blushed.

“Fair enough, lover boy,” I said. “Ask your scullery princess what people are saying about the death of Mr. Ansveld.” His eyes widened with recognition. “Discreetly,” I added. “And keep me out of it.”

“Or what?” he said, a little of his former defiance returning.

“Scullery maid for an upmarket merchant, eh?” I said. “And you all honorable and respectable. She might not like to hear that her beau once got his arm broken for trying to sell a pocket watch to the brother of the man he nicked it from the day before.”

Billy was famously incompetent. “He didn't break my arm,” he sputtered, but the bluster was empty. “Fine,” he added. “I'll be discreet.”

I gave him a friendly pat on the cheek, and he flinched as if I were going to hit him.

“I'll be in touch,” I said, checking the clock on the bank across the street. I had to collect the baby and attend a funeral.

 

CHAPTER

12

BERRIT'S FUNERAL TOOK PLACE
at the Lani monkey temple. Anything not wholly burned in the pyre would go into the river—which was once deemed holy—where the crocodiles would take it. Tanish and I had met just outside the West Gate and he had stared openmouthed at the baby while I looked around to make sure none of the other gang members had followed him.

“How long will you keep it?” he asked, frightened for the child and for me.

“Not long,” I said, as if I knew some easy, obvious solution that hadn't yet occurred to him. “Does Morlak know where you are?”

“Too busy shouting at people to ask,” said Tanish. “And he can't really walk. Moves like a badly made puppet.”

He launched into an exaggerated imitation, limping and moaning and cursing my name, so that I laughed for real.

He gave me an uneasy look. “You should get away,” Tanish offered.

He said it reluctantly, sadly, knowing he should do so for my sake, but not wanting me to follow the advice. I grinned and ruffled his hair till he pulled free, avoiding my eyes, and skipped away, whooping. The boys in the gang all talked and smoked and drank like adults, coarse and callous, their eyes hard as their hands. But in moments like this, it was like pulling the night shroud from a luxorite lamp, all the boyish rapture he usually kept so carefully locked away bursting out and splashing the world with light.

“Can't catch me, I'm a hummingbird!” he announced, dancing in close, his little hands fluttering on crooked arms, then hopping back and away.

“Here, hummingbird,” I said, fishing a piece of succulent spine fruit from my satchel. “Nectar.”

He came weaving in again, his hands flickering fast as they could go, and dipped his face to the fruit. He took a bite, still “hovering,” and came up with juice running down his chin so that he laughed out loud even as I rapped him on the head with the rolled-up newspaper I was still carrying. For a moment, brief and vibrant and glorious, we forgot we were going to a funeral.

It was clear as Tanish and I drew near the twilit buildings that the service had already begun. I saw torchlight and wondered if the murmur of voices in chanting chorus would wake the swaddled baby asleep in my satchel.

We slipped quietly into the assembly, the hood of my black shirt pulled low over my face. For once my monochromatic wardrobe didn't make me stand out in the Drowning. The huddle of Lani friends, family, and community leaders—including Florihn, the midwife—had put aside their usual riot of colors and looked like a roost of crows. Berrit's hawkish grandmother sat at the front, her face blank save when she fiddled irritably with the mourning veil draped around her shoulders.

She was facing a stack of brushwood doused with oil. A plain pine coffin was wedged into the dry branches, and I watched as the priest's assistant—clad in gray and wearing a chain of bright metal—nudged it gingerly to make sure it wouldn't slide out once the fire took hold. I checked that the sun-disk pendant was under my shirt. I had decided to keep it on me rather than give it to his grandmother and was wearing it on the same chain as the double-headed coin.

She would only sell it,
I told myself.
Someone should keep it for Berrit's sake.

I saw the feathered top hat of Deveril, flanked by a couple of boys from the Westside gang. He looked solemn, and I held my head up long enough for him to catch my eye so that I could give him a nod of acknowledgment. Apart from me and Tanish, no one from the Seventh Street gang had bothered to come, and I found myself wondering again how Berrit could have thought that his move from Westside was a good thing.

Friends in high places …

There was, at least, no sign of Morlak. I didn't need telling that he had made a faster and more complete recovery than Tanish had expected or that he was stepping up his attempts to find me. I wouldn't be safe till …

Till what? Till the Beacon is found, Berrit's murder is uncovered, and Morlak's body is cut down from the gibbet and thrown to the sharks at Tanuga Point?

Perhaps. I rested my hand on the satchel in which the baby slept silent and unseen.

Berrit's grandmother lit the fire herself, rising just long enough to thrust the priest's brand into the pyre, then returned to her seat, showing no emotion. Once the coffin was aflame, a stick was taken from the blaze and used to start another fire some yards away in a circle of stones. Offerings that had been sacrificed earlier—some chickens and a young pig—were then barbecued for the tribe: life out of death.

It was our way. The same as it had been when Papa died.

Once I might have found it comforting, this circular continuity, but today it felt wrong, or rather
I
felt wrong, as if this were some other people's tradition and I was watching from outside—like one of the white travelers who sometimes came in search of the strange or exotic.

Rahvey was there with Sinchon and their three daughters. I watched her, uneasy, and there was something about her mourning black, her unnatural stillness, and the rare closeness of the family around her that bothered me. She had not known Berrit. None of them had. This was just community support, the rallying around of friends and neighbors, which was the best of what the Lani way had to offer.

But it felt like more than that. I watched the coffin burn, and for a moment I could almost feel the heat, as if I were in there with Berrit and Rahvey's infant daughter, all the unwanted children burning together.…

Old Mrs. Chani leaned in and squeezed Rahvey's shoulder encouragingly, so that my sister turned on her a brief, sad smile of thanks.

The moment the official part of the funeral ended and the crowd began to break up, I pushed my way toward Rahvey, keen to get the child to its next feeding. But something was happening behind me, and everyone had stopped moving, turning to look back toward the temple entrance. There was a commotion in the crowd, a rush of muttering and the craning of necks followed by a steady parting, like waves blown by a powerful wind. Through the resultant gap I saw a curtained sedan chair borne by five black men in navy robes and crimson turbans. They wore sabers and pistols at their belts.

The men stooped and the curtains parted, revealing a slender ankle and a foot in a sandal of fine strapwork. The foot found the earth, steadied itself, and an extraordinarily beautiful woman emerged. She wore a deep blue sari shot through with silver filigree and a veil of black mesh that masked her face, but there was no doubt as to her identity.

Vestris!

My heart leapt. It had been two years since I last saw my eldest sister, but her appearance now, after everything that had happened, felt like a lifeline.

Rahvey, sitting alone by the pyre, was transformed by the vision moving so gracefully toward her, and all her stoic solemnity fell away. Vestris slipped back the veil as she reached our sister, resting it around her shoulders like a shawl, and even this simple motion was effortlessly elegant. Her face—delicately, expertly made up—was serious, her fine, almost patrician features showing no emotion. She stooped to Rahvey and kissed her lightly on the forehead, and the younger woman flushed with undisguisable delight.