A Novel (32 page)

“The two matters are unrelated,” said Sohwetti, flicking his fly stick, color rising in his cheeks. “The casual murder of a stray Mahweni is a tragedy that has been played month after hellish month in and around this city since before your grandparents were born! The selling of land, land which—for the most part—my people cannot use, is a completely separate matter. The tribes will benefit directly from those sales. They will see profits they would never have gotten from grazing on that worthless scrub. It is no more than a few square miles of dirt and rock. If the truth were known, the only reason the white men did not take it from us before was because it has no value!”

“So why the sudden interest?”

“I do not know,” he said, “and it does not matter.”

“Is it about the Grappoli?” I asked, desperate to keep him talking.

He shook his head. “If we go to war with the Grappoli, the city will be in ruins long before they get here,” he said sadly. “I will have no hand in that. My duty to my people will be to keep all possible peaces. To do so, there must, alas, be sacrifices. You should not have come here. You have forced my hand most unfortunately.”

“It will all come out sooner or later anyway,” I said. “Silencing me won't make any difference. The Unassimilated Tribes already know about the sales. What does keeping it quiet in the city for a few more days buy you?”

“The Unassimilated Tribes know we are
discussing
land transactions,” said Sohwetti carefully. “They do not know that they have already happened.”

I stared at him, horrified, and very slowly, he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “I am sorry. I thought I would be able to change the council's minds, and in time I am sure I would, but my buyers were impatient. Insistent. They wanted the land now or not at all. I just need a few more days of silence, time to talk the council 'round, after which we will announce the sale and no one will be any the wiser. The results would be the same. Only the date on some paper no one will ever look at will be wrong, and not by much. A clerical error, perhaps. Or it would have been, before you.”

“I'll say nothing,” I said, fear taking hold. “I promise. I'll tell no one.”

“I'm sorry,” he said again. “I am weary of this conversation and must take time to consider my choices. Excuse me, Miss Sutonga,” he said, getting to his feet. “You seem like an intelligent and interesting young lady. I wish with all my heart that we had never met.”

And with that he left, locking the door behind him.

 

CHAPTER

29

I BLINKED, AND THE
tears that had clung to my eyes broke through and ran down my face. He wouldn't come back. Not Sohwetti himself. I was sure of it. Some nameless guard would come to get me, bind my hands, and shuttle me somewhere quiet and removed. Maybe they would just do it here, then dump my body in the ocean. There was a spot not far from here—Tanuga Point—famed for the yellow-finned sharks that haunted the bay. It had been, in the old days, a place of execution, first for some of the Mahweni tribes, then for the northern Feldeslanders, because it was safe to assume that corpses tossed into the water there would be shredded in minutes. No grave, no inconvenient bodies washing ashore to be venerated as political martyrs. To enter the water at Tanuga Point was to go through the great meat grinder of the world, and what emerged was as close to nothing as made no difference.

I could brandish Willinghouse's name. Or Vestris's. Both had power and influence, albeit of different kinds, and both would come to my aid if I could reach them. But their worlds were not Sohwetti's, and their names alone would not save me here.

You have to get out.

That meant forcing the door, since we were in the core of the house and there were no windows … or using the chimney. I considered the fireplace, wiping my tears away and tying my hair back. I doubted it would take Sohwetti long to wrestle with his conscience and find a willing henchman. It didn't sound like the dead herder in the remains of the Red Fort tower was anything to do with him, but I would be a fool to think he had never been responsible for bloodshed. His manner when he left was downcast, sad even, but not horrified, not appalled by what he was considering. Sohwetti, like many a politician before him, was resigned to expediency.

I snatched up the satchel Emtezu had left behind, pulled its strap over my head, and climbed into the hearth, which showed no sign of recent use. Leaning against the sooty black wall, I looked up. There was an iron damper in the shaft, and I pulled the lever to open it. The opening was narrow and the chimney beyond it utterly lightless, which meant it twisted and turned on its way up.

I remembered my first days in the Seventh Street gang, when I had still been small enough to serve as a chimney sweep for the big houses. Sometimes it was just a matter of shoving a long-handled pole with a brush on the top up the shaft, but in the older houses, especially where there were multiple fireplaces, the chimneys would meander and intersect, narrowing as their walls got caked with old bird nests, masonry shards, and accumulated soot. If the house used a lot of wood, there would be resinous tar that could burn for hours if ignited, and which had to be scraped off with chisels. Angles were tight and the shafts contracted unexpectedly in the blackness, so that getting stuck was a real danger. That had happened once to a boy called Micah. They say he died of fear, and because the owner didn't want to cut half the wall away to get the body out, they lit all the fires in the house, even though it was the middle of summer. I don't know if it was true, but I heard that for months afterwards, the remains of his blackened bones continued to tumble down into the grate every time the south wind blew.

Lani children everywhere I turned. Kalla and Berrit, Tanish and me, crammed into the darkness, out of sight, forgotten, burned up like so much trash.…

Stop it.

I squeezed the doors in my head closed again, locking out the rising tide.

At least inside the chimney I would be safe for a while from Sohwetti and his men, none of whom would be able to follow me up.

I worked my hands in through the damper, then my head. It was funny how it all came back, the childish thrill, the dread of the dark and the spiders. I was used to high places, out there in the sky where you could breathe, where you could see what you were doing, but this, the blackness, the closeness and cinder reek of the air, the tightness of the space where the bricks pressed in on shoulders, arms, legs, belly, chest, and head all at the same time, like you were in a long, upright coffin, this was different.

I inhaled raggedly, then stood tall as I could, reaching above me for handholds in the brick. I could feel where the shaft—about a yard across in the fireplace—stepped in. If it got much tighter, I wouldn't be able to get through. There was nothing to hold on to, so I drew my knees up to my chest, one at a time, and managed to put my boots on the damper. I straightened again, boosting myself another three feet to where the chimney tightened like a python squeezing a springbok. I could see nothing. I could hear nothing beyond the thumping of my heart and the laboring of my breath.

I reached higher and this time felt a ledge on the right-hand side, where the passage seemed to open. There was only one chimney stack on the roof, I reminded myself. That meant that every fireplace in the house connected inside and ran up to the top. Moving sideways might give me the option of dropping into another room, one that was unlocked, or that had windows.…

I dragged myself up and found the shaft angling up and to the right, forming a square, uneven tunnel through which I could crawl. One of the sides of the shaft was now a roof, but one that dipped erratically so that I had to stay low to avoid skinning my forehead. I inched forward, brick after brick moving under my gritty palms.

Stay focused. Keep going.

Something moved in my hair, and I brushed at it with revolted feverishness, which banged my head against the shaft wall. For a moment, the darkness was flecked with light and color, and I had to fight not to lose a sense of where I was, which way was up. It was only noise from below that brought me to my senses.

A click, like a door. Then hurried footsteps and the clank of the damper as someone tried to see up. I had left that shaft now and would be invisible to them, even if they had a light source, but it wouldn't matter. They knew where I was.

I picked up the pace, my bruised knees, back, and hands aching from the effort, and now I could hear raised voices, not just back the way I had come, but from all over the house, as every fireplace bore their voices up through the labyrinth of flues.

Faster
.

Going down to one of the other fireplaces and slipping out of the house unnoticed was not an option anymore. I had to make it to the roof.

The shaft stank, as chimneys always did, of carbonized wood and bitumen and old smoke. New smoke, fresh and sharp enough to set you coughing, was an entirely different thing, and I recognized it with a new thrill of horror.

They couldn't come up after me, so they were lighting the fires.

I crawled another yard, moving so fast that I almost fell when the floor of my awful tunnel simply stopped. I reached blindly into the space in front of me and, finding only air, had to swallow down a sob of panic as I reached around and up. I was at an intersection, perhaps the biggest in the house, and as I decided whether to try to cross the abyss that had opened up in front of me, I caught the distinct movement of the smoke coiling up from below, thick and gray, smeared with a sulfurous yellow.

I blinked. I could see the smoke. And that meant …

Above me, the chimney flue narrowed to a square of bluish light.

Sky
.

I reached across, testing for the far wall, then braced my feet against it and scrabbled for handholds in the brick. For a moment I was hanging over the emptiness of the shaft below like an insect, and then I was climbing, the smoke billowing about me, thick and hot. I coughed again, but knew that hesitation meant death. I fixed my eyes on that square of light and hauled myself up. Where there were no handholds, I used the strength of my knees and back, bracing myself across the shaft and walking up the flue as I had done at the cement works the day we found Berrit's body.

The temperature was rising fast. Too fast. I glanced back down and saw not merely the dense swirl of gray smoke, but flashes of orange too. Part of the unswept chimney had caught fire.

Great,
I thought.
I'm going to die ironically.

I swallowed hard and pushed my way up to where the breeze from outside was dragging the smoke and flames upward. I pushed the clay chimney pot clear, seized the mortar cap, and dragged myself up and out onto the roof. I had barely moved more than a couple of yards over the tile when the smoking chimney became a jet of fire, shrieking up out of the flue and scattering sparks. I moved as far away as I could, but my coughing doubled me up and I spat soot.

I could hear voices, people running around outside. They would have guns, so I stayed low. But as I looked cautiously about, trying to find a safe way down, I realized that the smoke wasn't all coming from the chimney. The sparks from the blaze were scattering all over the house, and in at least two places the lower thatch, Sohwetti's concession to his Mahweni roots, was already ablaze.

I moved upwind, toward the front of the house, going quicker than I would like, banking that the fire would take more of their attention than hunting for me. I reached the edge of the roof, found an ornamental buttress carved to resemble a buffalo head, climbed the first ten feet down, and dropped the last five onto a portion of thatch that wasn't yet ablaze. I loped along, bent over like a monkey, then slid down a snake-shaped column, spiraling as I went, and hit the ground at a staggering run.

I didn't go down the road to the gate, but through the wooded parkland to the high wall of the estate, where—still coughing, still holding off my smoldering exhaustion—I pulled myself up. As I sat on top of the wall and risked a last look back at the house through the shrubbery and the great tower of yellowish smoke rising from it, a black weancat with a collar, its spots just visible in the sheen of its coat, gave me a long look with bright yellow eyes.

I felt no fear, and was sure that even on the ground only feet from the beast, I would be in no danger, and not because it was a pet that looked dangerous only to people who didn't know the truth. This, in spite of its collar, was a wild and powerful hunter, a creature of speed and stealth that would kill without hesitation. But it was also somehow, and in ways that made no literal sense, me, and I felt only an uncanny kinship with the creature.

It was an animal out of place, separate from its kind, fatherless, uncertain of who it was, who it could trust, knowing the collar was there but knowing also that it was a collar of the mind: when the moment was right, you could refuse to believe in the collar and it would go away. And that was essential, because all the cat had was itself: muscle and sinew, claw, tooth and bone, senses, experience, skill, instinct and roaring, blood-pumping animal need. Nothing else, not the wall, not the strange people, not the food and water meted out at regular times daily, and not—most certainly not—the collar, none of it mattered one iota.

I dropped onto the other side of the wall and ran.

 

CHAPTER

30

“WHAT'S THIS?” ASKED SARAH,
considering the sheaf of papers I had pushed into her hands.

“Your first story,” I said.

It had taken me over an hour to get back into Bar-Selehm through the orchards and gardens behind the oceanfront mansions, twice as long as it had then taken me to cover the familiar streets to the newspaper stand on the corner of Winckley and Javisha. I had paused only once at a fountain just south of Tanuga Point to wash the worst of the soot and smoke from my clothes and hair.