A Novel (6 page)

“Why?”

“Out all night drinking, I think. Didn't make it back till after we got up, so he probably slept rough. You know what that does to his mood. And since then, he lost his new apprentice.” He looked down as he said it, caught between shame and sadness that this was how Berrit's death would be seen: like misplacing a hammer or a chisel.

I ruffled his hair again. “I can handle Morlak,” I said.

He smiled wanly, almost able to believe it, and I pressed a couple of coins into his hand.

“Go get yourself something to eat,” I said. “Don't go back to the shed for an hour or two. It will be better when everyone else is coming off shift.”

Better meant safer. Morlak was more than capable of punishing my apprentice to spite me for my defiance.

“What did you say to the police?” he asked. The words burst out of him as if he had been saving them up.

“About what?” I asked.

“Berrit,” he answered. “You seemed upset. With the police, I mean.”

“I just don't think…,” I began, but hesitated. Tanish's eyes were wide and apprehensive. “They weren't respectful. To the body.”

It was a half truth at best, but I didn't want to worry him further.

He considered me, deciding to accept what I had said at face value, and then he was walking away down Ream Street toward the old flag market, where the remaining fruit would be on sale.

*   *   *

MORLAK WAS A POWERFULLY
built man turning to fat around the middle but still strong, and when he lowered his head, he looked like a buffalo. He wore his greasy hair long, tied back into a glossy rattail. I had hoped I could grab my satchel of tools and my water flask, then get back to the chimney unseen, but he was waiting for me.

He was sitting at his desk at the far end of the empty weaving shed so he had a good view of the door, and I caught the ghost of a grin on his face as I slid in and made for the gallery of rooms where the gang slept. Normally he would be upstairs. He had a chamber above the shed, inside the old elevator tower, which doubled as his strong room. Anyone caught on the stairs to the tower was, he liked to remind them, dead meat. There was no reason to think he didn't mean that literally. The fact that he was down here at all at this time should have made me wary, but I didn't think it through, and by the time I was coming out of my room with my satchel, it was too late.

He strode slowly toward me, a swagger in his gait, his bulk blocking the narrow corridor. I was used to his temper, his complaints about my work, his petulance and casual violence, but this was something different. It felt calculated, as if he had been planning it.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn't little Anglet, our stray steeplejack.”

I said nothing, but I had my weight carefully distributed, my knees slightly bent, ready to run. Not that there was anywhere to go.

“What time do you call this?” asked Morlak, advancing, pretending to be offended. He grasped my face with one hand and tilted it. “Someone tried to cut a smile onto that sour face of yours?”

I said nothing but peered around him, down the corridor, registering the empty shed. The silence bothered me.

“You owe me a day's work,” he snarled with feigned pleasantness, still gripping my face. “I'd let you buy your way out of the debt, but you don't have any money, do you, little Anglet?”

“No,” I said. I was frightened now. I was used to being hungry, being scorned, even being beaten, but I was not used to this, whatever this was, and I didn't like it.

“No,” Morlak echoed. “I feed you. I pay you. I give you a roof over your head. And how do you repay me?”

I never thought to protest, to mention Berrit or say that my sister had needed me. I said nothing because I knew it would do no good. I was aware of how far away the shed door into the alley was, how stiff it was to open. And then I was aware of the way his hand strayed to his belt buckle and knew, with horrified certainty, that this was not the prelude to a beating. This was something else.

I was and was not surprised. A part of me had known it was coming, had seen the way he watched me. But something had always held him back. Whatever that had been, it was gone. He had been waiting for an excuse, and now he was drunk—not on the reed spirit he stank of every morning, but on the power he had over me. He took a step toward me, and now his legs were splayed a little too, like he was poised to spring.

The corridor dead-ended behind me in a painted brick wall. The only way out was past him, back into the shed's cavernous main workroom and through the street door, but that seemed so far away that I could barely picture it.

I felt in the satchel with an unsteady hand and came out with one of the iron dogs I used to anchor the ladders and ropes to the chimneys.

He hesitated when he saw it, but then his grin spread, as if I had given him the push he needed. He lunged at me, seizing my wrists so that the spike fell clattering to the ground. He shoved and I fell to the concrete floor at the foot of my bedroom door. He was on me then. One of his massive fists slammed into my face, and my head banged hard against the ground so that the world darkened and swam. In that moment, he fumbled with his clothes, but when he reached for mine, I kicked up once, hard, catching him somewhere between groin and stomach.

It wasn't a clean hit, but he shrank away, releasing my hands in the shock of the moment, and in that half second of blind, unthinking instinct, I reached for and found the metal spike.

I stabbed once.

It pierced his side somewhere between the ribs, and he bellowed with pain and astonishment.

I did not pause to judge the severity of the wound but skittered out from under him, caught up the satchel, and bolted down the corridor to the door.

“You'd better hope I die!” he roared after me in his agony, his blood pooling under him, his voice bouncing off the walls. “You'd better hope that. Because if I don't, I'll find you. You hear me? I'll find you!”

 

CHAPTER

5

I FLED. BREATHLESS AND
half-blind with tears, I dashed out of the alley—across Bridge Street and down the back of the Weavers Arms—torn between the terror that Morlak might be coming after me and the terror that he was already dead.

I blundered into the nearest alley. Not even an alley, really, more a ginnel, a mere crack between the backs of buildings, barely wide enough to turn in. I staggered into its darkest recess, mad with fear and fury, and stopped, hands shaking, fighting down the urge to vomit.

For a horrible, desperate second, I considered returning to the shed and cutting his throat where he lay. Just for a moment. I saw it through a red mist in my head, and it made a terrible sense, and not just for what he had tried to do. Morlak was a brute, a terror to the “apprentices” in his charge, and little better than a slave holder.

The world would not mourn him.

But to return, to slit him open in cold blood, to drain the life from him, that was beyond me.

For now,
I thought bleakly.

Who knew what horrors I would become capable of now that life as I had known it had ended? I had no work, no means to feed myself or the child I had stupidly promised to care for, and if Morlak survived, I would not be safe in Bar-Selehm. Ever. He had promised to kill me, and in such matters, the gang leader was a man of his word.

*   *   *

I HAD NOWHERE TO
go, no one to talk to, so I stayed behind the rubbish bins in the alley, trying to shut the terror and shock inside the iron-braced doors of my heart. Even alone, I could not give way to grief or fear. If I did, I might never get out from under them.

I was hungry, and it was getting cold. It was these that finally drove me out into the evening. I was back at the cement works, where I had begun the day so very long ago. A corner of the alley by the factory was still wet where it had been hosed down, but there was otherwise no sign that a boy had died there. Life had moved on, and insofar as the world had known Berrit existed, it had already forgotten him.

As it will forget me if Morlak finds me. As it forgot Papa.

The iron-braced doors creaked at the thought, but they held, and when I opened my eyes again, feeling my breathing steady and my muscles relax, I knew I had to do something, if only to ease the turmoil in my head.

I studied the wall at the base of the chimney, tied back my hair, then began to climb. There was a ledge ten feet below the cap and several bricks wide. I remembered sitting on it to eat my lunch the last time I had worked this chimney. It circled the stack and jutted out far enough that someone falling from there would hit nothing but the ground 150 feet below. With nerve and poise, it was walkable.

I kept my eyes open for Morlak's men, but there was little danger of me being seen up here at this time. Even so, I had to go slowly. My hands were unsteady, and I paused midway up to wipe a fleck of blood from my left wrist.

Morlak's
?
Or mine from where Florihn slashed my cheeks?

I squeezed my eyes shut to push the memories away, and began to climb again in earnest. I was losing light.

Hoisting myself carefully off the ladder, I moved onto the ledge. Carefully but not slowly. There was no advantage in being in a dangerous situation longer than you needed to be, and caution itself can be dangerous. For a moment, I got one of those rare vistas on the city as the smog shifted and the dying light of the sun picked out the towers, minarets, and spires in amber and gold.

There was no clue that Berrit had been here, no sign of a struggle, though I didn't know what that would look like, and suddenly coming up here looked like a waste of time, a ruse to get my mind off other things.

If I were him, if I were a boy apprentice on his first day, what would I have done? Why would I have climbed up here before my tutor arrived?

To prove he wasn't afraid? To make the initial ascent alone so he wouldn't be embarrassed by how slow and scared he was?

Or because someone told him to?

But if he were meeting someone on the chimney, he'd see them as soon as he came up. Anyone planning to attack him—for whatever reason—would want the element of surprise up here, where one false move meant death.

So if you were his would-be killer, how would you give yourself an edge?

The side of the chimney with the ladder faced the city. The other side faced the river. Even without the usual smoky haze, anyone waiting around that side would be invisible from here, and almost certainly invisible from below. I put my back to the slow brick round of the chimney barrel and inched my way around the ledge.

At first I saw nothing. But at the halfway point, I paused and squatted. There were two distinct indentations in the mortar between the bricks of the ledge, about a foot and a half apart. They were new, unweathered, and sootless.

Hook marks.

*   *   *

THE POLICE STATION ON
Mount Street was a blank-faced structure of pale stone steps and columns, undecorated but somehow outsized. It loomed out of the gathering evening breathing power and stability. Around it, the flying foxes were leaving their roosts in its eaves, and the lamplighters were rigging their ladders.

For a long moment, I sat on the steps of a bank across the street, looking at it. Reporting Morlak would achieve nothing other than getting me arrested for assault or murder, but that was not why I was there. I got to my feet, crossed the street between a pair of horse-drawn cabs, and ascended the long, tall steps to the entrance.

I had expected the lobby to be a bustle of noisy activity, but it was silent, and my feet echoed on the tiled floor of a vast, open chamber with a high counter at the far end. I'm taller than most girls, but I still had to look up to speak to the desk sergeant, though I refused to use the wooden step stool. I took a long steadying breath and tried to find the words.

“Can I help you?” he began, looking up from his evening paper and mug of tea, his smile curdling slightly when he saw me.

“The steeplejack case,” I blurted. My heart was beating fast and my mouth was dry. “I want to talk to someone. An officer working the steeplejack case.”

“Steeplejack case?” he said. “What steeplejack would that be?”

“The boy,” I said. “Fell from a chimney.” I was gripping the edge of the wooden counter with both hands, knuckles whitening.

“Oh, that,” he said, shaking off his momentary confusion. “There's no case. He fell.”

“He didn't,” I cut in. “I told the … the officer at the scene. He was stabbed.”

He frowned. “Saw it, did you?”

“I saw the wound,” I said.

“So someone killed him, then hauled his body all the way up one of those chimneys just to throw him off again?”

“No,” I said. “They killed him up there. They waited for him on a ledge below the cap. They used a body harness or rubble skip hooked to the edge. Then they attacked him from behind.”

The policeman was unmoved. “All that to kill a street kid?” he said.

“He was a steeplejack,” I said, defiance bristling. The muscles of my forearms were tight with the pressure of my grip on the counter.

“So?” he said. “Not exactly a rare commodity in Bar-Selehm, are they?” He looked me over pointedly.

I fought back the urge to run. I reached across his desk and tapped the headline of the newspaper he was reading. It blared,
BEACON THEFT
.

A change came over him then. He put down the mug he had been cradling, and his eyes narrowed. “You know something about the Beacon?” he demanded.

“No,” I said. “But whoever took it would need a skilled climber.”

He was alert now, his eyes fixed on me as one hand groped for a pencil. “What's your full name?” he began, but I had said all I meant to. “Miss!” he called after me as I crossed the empty vestibule and pushed through the revolving door into the street.