A Novel (35 page)

I thought of the tap of the cane between the footsteps in the fog the night Billy had died. Had that been him, or Morlak? I was as sure as I could be that it hadn't been Mnenga, and that was a bigger relief than I had expected.

On the warehouse floor, the big Mahweni had a shotgun, which he cracked and checked. Fevel produced a pistol and toyed with it. The other boys had crowbars and knives, and they fidgeted with them, putting on a show of strength they didn't quite believe.

The Westsiders arrived five minutes later, led by Deveril himself, complete with his feathered top hat. He had another four with him, big men armed with rifles and boat hooks. They looked to be Lani, and they moved with the splayed, rolling gait of men used to being onboard ship. Fevel and the boys instinctively clustered, outgunned and outmanned in every sense of the term.

Up there in the roof, I could feel the tension, the menace, as if it were drifting up to me on the cigar smoke.

The Westsiders spread out, creating a wide circle around Fevel and the box, but the conversation, when it started, was so low that I couldn't catch what was said. One of them threw a bag of coins to the floor at Fevel's feet, but he did not move from his seat, waiting instead for one of the boys to stoop to it, check it, and pronounce it acceptable. It was only when the boy tipped his face up to speak that I realized who it was.

Tanish.

I gasped and began, against all reason, all judgment, to get to my feet. A sudden hollowness gripped my stomach, and my chest and throat tightened, as if some great vise were crushing the air from my body. I hadn't thought they would involve him in this, hadn't thought they trusted him. He had probably asked for the job to prove his loyalty.

Stupid,
I thought
. Both of us. I should have seen this coming.

And in that instant, I caught a flicker of movement, not down on the warehouse floor but from the observation booth in the roof. Someone had raised the blind carefully, and I could see two figures working by the light of a dim oil lamp: two uniformed figures and a piece of equipment with a hopper and a long, hefty barrel like a sawn log.

I stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, catching the chink of metal as one of the men in the booth upended a bag into the hopper and the other took hold of a pair of handles, so that he sat like a mantis, aiming the barrel down in the warehouse.

It can't be.

I had never seen one before, but I recognized the machine gun for what it was moments before it opened up with a blaze of flame and a stream of deafening bangs.

I leapt to my feet, shouting at Tanish to get down, that it was a trap, but my words were lost in the chaos as the bullets rained down. All the muted panic and anxiety were swept away as everyone down below ran for cover and returned fire. The machine gun didn't stop, its huge barrel revolving with each shot, each yard-long spurt of fire, and I knew what I had to do.

No one down below could stop it. I drew my pistol and ran toward the shuttered window.

Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam
went the relentless machine gun, splintering crates, carving up the concrete, punching through corrugated metal. And flesh.

I heard the screams.

Tanish …

I sighted along the hexagonal barrel of my revolver toward the shadowy figure who was turning the machine gun's crank, and fired. The gun almost kicked out of my hand, but I held on to it, drew back the hammer, and fired again. The report was deafening and fire seemed to flash out of the side of the cylinder as well as from the muzzle, but I had just enough composure to move through the smoke, cocking the pistol and aim afresh before squeezing the trigger a third time.

The gunner—who was wearing the silver and navy of a policeman—slumped to one side, clutching his shoulder, and his companion snatched the handle from him, dragging the barrel of the weapon up and around toward me, still spewing fire and noise all along its deadly arc, perforating the metal walls and roof as he tried to get me in his sights.

I fired twice more, pulling the hammer feverishly back after each shot, then again, and again, shooting blindly into the smoke, driven by fear and horror until I realized the empty pistol was clicking over and over.

But the machine gun had fallen silent.

For a moment, I clung to the rail as the gantry swam. My stomach felt like iron but was somehow moving—cold but molten—and I sank to my knees, sweat running down my face, unable to breathe.

Below me, Andrews and his men cannoned in, weapons raised, hunched over as they advanced into the warehouse. Andrews shouted orders, but the sound echoed oddly, and I could not hear the words. Then came the blare and flash of a shotgun, and suddenly, it was a chaos of running and shouting and gunfire.

There were bodies on the ground.

One of the Westsiders drew a pistol and fired twice at the policemen before rushing toward the back door. He reached it as it blew open, crashing against the wall, and more police came through. He fired again, and I heard a shout of pain before a barrage of gunfire cut him down where he stood.

I forced myself to get to my feet, fighting back nausea and dizziness, staggering along the catwalk to the metal stairs, wincing as bullets sang and whined through the stuffy, smoke-laden air. Somewhere a shower of shotgun pellets rained down on metal, and up ahead, the gantry sparked as a stray round skipped off it.

But I had to get to Tanish, who was down there in the middle of it all. There was more shouting, another cannonade back and forth, and the slap of bullets into wood, then two more shots, and suddenly, amazingly, nothing.

My ears rang, but I kept moving, half falling down the metal steps and into the cover of the stacked crates, where one of the policemen was sitting on the ground, nursing his bleeding arm. Andrews was shouting again, and in the unearthly glow of the gas lamp and the fog of gunsmoke, I could see people with their hands raised as the police closed in, weapons still up and level.

I ran drunkenly to the light, hands shaking, almost blind with the horror of what had happened, what I had done, and what I might find.

Tanish was sitting on the ground, his back to the trunk. Ignoring Andrews's shout to stay back, I ran to him, dropped, and folded him in a crushing embrace, pressing his cheek to mine.

“It's all right, Tanish,” I babbled, pulling him to me. “It's over now.”

Police officers were swarming all over the place. Two of Deveril's men were dead or badly hurt. Fevel too. Whoever had been operating that machine gun hadn't cared which gang they hit.

“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Andrews, who was dragging a wounded Deveril—his top hat battered but still on his head—out into the light.

“Ambush, sir,” said one of the officers. “Someone wanted them all wiped out.”

“And with military-grade hardware and police uniforms,” spat Andrews. “When I study that machine gun, am I going to find that it's gone missing from storage belonging to the Glorious Third?”

Deveril shrugged, wincing at the wound in his right arm as he did so. “What can I tell you?” he said. “Seems I have enemies in high places.” He chose the words carefully, and for a moment, his gaze fell on me.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Willinghouse, appearing beside the crate with Von Strahden. I guess I wasn't the only one who hadn't obeyed Andrews's orders to keep clear. Both men were wearing the smoked glasses worn by luxorite dealers. “Shall we see what someone was so desperate to recover?”

Andrews stepped back, and one of the policemen flipped the hasps on the crate and pulled the lid open.

I flinched instinctively, and I don't think I was the only one, but there was no explosion of light from within, just a large and shapeless mass wrapped in oilskin. Andrews stooped to help, and together they lifted the package out and onto the warehouse floor. The policeman unfastened some lacing, then flapped the fabric open so that it spilled its contents.

Still no luxorite glare, and for a moment, I could only stare in baffled dismay. The oilskin contained perhaps twenty roughly conical objects that curved toward the tip. They were about two feet long and hard, the bases ragged and stained with what looked like blood. I continued to gape, but could make no sense of what I was seeing till Andrews, his head in his hands so that his mouth was muffled and the words came out low and indistinct, spoke.

“Rhino horn.”

There was a stunned silence.

Overcome with a new wave of nausea, I started to get to my feet, but as Tanish began to slump, I caught him in my arms again.

“Hey,” I said. “Come on, Tanish. Stand up.”

He did not respond. He felt unnaturally heavy.

“Tanish?” I said.

But the boy did not move. Had not moved.

No.

One of my hands was wet and sticky.

“Hummingbird?”

Still nothing.

No.

I pulled back to look at him properly, and it was only then that I saw the dark pool beneath him, silvery in the eerie glow of the gas lamp. I stared, speechless, feeling his blood run through my fingers, and then I was rocking him again, violently now, desperately, and someone was screaming.

The doors to my heart, the dam I had fought so hard to keep closed, had broken at last.

 

CHAPTER

33

POACHING THE GREAT BEASTS
of the savannah was an old Feldesland problem, but it was only recently that it had become a major business concern, ivory and horn commanding astronomical prices on the Grappoli market and elsewhere where the great beasts were exotic, even magical. Once last year, some kids had come upon a one-horn stumbling about on the edge of the Drowning. She was blind and crippled by rifle fire but had somehow got back on her feet even after the poachers had sawed off her horn. She blundered around for a while, bleeding heavily, mad from the pain, and eventually collapsed down by the river. It took another two hours for her to die.

What the poachers took was sold as trophy art or ground into “medicine” overseas. The barbarism of it all, the pointlessness, sickened me, but then, in the stony silence of the police carriage, I had other reasons for that.

The dam had burst, and I was swept away by what came through.

I held Tanish's body for a long time, and crying seemed to drain me of strength and will, so that I was only partly in the world. The rest of me was nowhere, was nothing, and my sense of what was happening around me was muted, my vision blurred by more than tears, sound echoing faintly, as if coming through fog from a great distance.

Andrews had roared and cursed and said he had been a fool for listening to some slip of a Lani girl, and how was he supposed to look the prime minister in the eye after this fiasco? Von Strahden tried to say that the smuggling bust was a significant achievement, but Andrews told him that no one cared about a few one-horns. We had nothing on Morlak, on Mandel, on Gritt. Nothing at all. It had all been a waste of time.

“I was sure it would be the Beacon,” said Von Strahden, speaking as if in a daze.

“The Beacon!” sneered Andrews darkly. “I suspect that the next people to see the Beacon will be Grappoli troops who dig it out of the rubble of what was Bar-Selehm.”

The two machine gunners were not merely costumed gang members. They were junior police officers from the Fourth Precinct, though who had ordered them to join the operation—if anyone—no one knew. Someone had, presumably, given them the hardware and told them to cut down whoever showed up in the warehouse. They had no interest in the crate and were there—Andrews said—to clean up loose ends. We would never know who hired them because both gunners were dead.

I had done that. I had killed two men whose names I didn't know, whose faces I never saw. I had done it to save Tanish, and I had failed.

Willinghouse said nothing, just watched me, his eyes hooded, even when the stretcher bearers came to take Tanish away from me. I leaned into his shoulder, staining his clothes with Tanish's blood, crying as I have never cried for anything before, not even Papa, so that I was not Anglet Sutonga anymore. I was a screaming, writhing, desperate animal of grief and guilt and horror, and it was only Willinghouse's grip on my shoulders that stopped me from flying into madness.

“Shh,” he whispered. “I will see that he gets the best doctors in the city. He is not dead yet. We will do everything we can. You have my word.”

*   *   *

THE POLICE WENT TO PICK
up Morlak, but he denied any knowledge of the deal, suggesting this was a sideline operated by Fevel and some of the other boys. There was nothing to connect him to either the poachers or the smugglers for whom he had been the middleman, and Andrews—already humbled by his shamefaced report to the prime minister—said they did not have enough even for a search warrant. If Morlak had the Beacon hidden away in the shed, it would likely stay there for the foreseeable future.

Not that I cared. They told me, and I heard, but that was all. I sat at Tanish's bedside, holding his hand, reading him the story of the cloud forest, the one we always read together, the one Vestris had once read to me, and I spoke to no one else. He just lay there, small and frail, still and silent.

“Sorry,” I whispered through tears. “I'm so sorry, hummingbird. I would have taken you with me.”

Willinghouse said I should go home and rest, that he would sit with Tanish in my place, but I didn't respond.

Home.

What did that even mean? His home, I suppose he meant, as if I were living there now, their pet steeplejack. No. That was not my home. But then neither was the Drowning. I hated to admit it, but in my heart, home was the weaving shed on Seventh Street, bleak and miserable though it was, because for the better part of a decade, it had been mine, though I could never go back there again.

Morlak. Everything came back to Morlak. I couldn't connect all the pieces, but he was at the heart of everything, like a spider in his web, and somehow, in spite of the stolen Beacon, and the fort, in spite of Berrit, Ansveld, and the Mahweni herder, in spite even of Tanish, who lay huddled on the bed in front of me inches from death, Morlak was free and likely to stay that way. The police wouldn't even search his place because he was, in the eyes of the law, a fine, upstanding citizen.…