Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  I felt the mad, blood-rushing horror of dropping to the ground in front of the great beast. I knew how it would trample me, toss me, rip me apart.

  And then, somehow, I was recovering my balance.

  In a blind madness of terror, I vaulted the embankment, feeling the hippo snapping its great coal-hatch door of a mouth inches behind me. Then I was clear and shooting up the slope toward the dim huddle of domes and spires that was the edge of Old Town.

  The hippo roared again: a tremendous, window-rattling wall of noise that raised every hair on my head. I squeezed my eyes shut and slammed my hands against my ears, even though I knew it couldn’t get over the embankment. Or not there, at least. In places where the brick had crumbled, it was not unheard of for hippos to blunder into the outskirts of the town. I needed to move on.

  My feet took me instinctively away from the snorting hippo in the dark of the riverbank, but I had no conscious idea where to go next. I had lost Darius completely.

  Or so I assumed. In fact my detour to the river had taken only seconds. As I looked back, I caught the movement of a distant figure standing alone on one of the long brick jetties.

  It couldn’t be.

  But it was. He must have lost me when I went down to the river, and he was no longer hiding. He was, in fact, waiting.

  I dropped into a balled crouch, then skulked crablike along the embankment wall to the head of the jetty and peered over. The hippo was grunting restlessly below me, some twenty yards to my left. Darius was perhaps three times that distance away. I watched as he drew something from inside his jacket and adjusted it. A white light leapt from his hand, vanished, then came back.

  Luxorite. Probably a signet ring or locket he had purloined from some opulent bed chamber.

  The light came again, then went. He was signaling.

  I pulled out my long lens and started scanning the water, still aware of the heavy, shuffling breaths of the hippo in the dark, but I saw nothing beyond Darius’s dim silhouette. On the far side of the river, a half mile away, there was a distant glow of firelight: some large warehouse or factory on the south bank was ablaze. I smelled the smoke despite the distance, a strange and unpleasant stench quite unlike wood fires. I checked my surroundings, my eyes fastening on the rusty scaffold of a crane that loomed over the nearest boathouse. Its gantry stuck out over the river, the end well past Darius’s spot on the jetty.

  Perhaps from there I would have a better view.…

  I moved, stepping carefully, not looking back to Darius till I had reached the foot of the girdered tower. He had resumed signaling, his attention elsewhere. I grabbed the rust-bitten edges of the iron struts and began to climb. Pushing my boots into the triangular holes where the support beams intersected, I worked my way up, thirty feet, forty, till I reached a catwalk that gave onto the operator’s winch. In use, the chains would be connected to a steam engine below, but the pulleys and cables were brown and furred with rust, as if the crane hadn’t been used for months, even years. The great arm of the main boom stuck out over the water into the night, pointing indistinctly toward the burning building on the other side. If it wasn’t structurally sound, I might not know till it was too late.

  I pulled my way up over the cab and onto the lattice boom through which the main hoist ran. It had a triangular cross section, a yard wide on top, the bottom a single beam, the whole crisscrossed by supports like the rungs of a ladder. I crept out on my hands and knees, staring through the boom as I left the wharf and inched out over the dark and steadily moving water.

  I was halfway along before I saw the rowboat approaching Darius’s position from the south bank of the river, and two thirds of the way along when someone stepped onto the arm of the crane behind me.

  I stared as he hauled himself up. Not Darius, who was still down on the pier. Someone else. This new person, a white man in an incongruous suit and tie, stood tall on the girders of the boom, hands at his side, a revolver in one and what looked like a small pickax in the other. It sparkled coldly. Even at this distance, I could see that he was smiling as he took his first step toward me.

  It was a cautious step, but he seemed quite composed, staring fixedly at me, his blond hair blowing slightly in the breeze that came up off the river, and as he took another, his confidence seemed to grow. Soon he was walking toward me with easy, measured strides, despite being fifty feet up in the air. It felt less like the skill of a steeplejack and more like the carelessness of someone who thought himself beyond harm.

  It was frightening.

  I kept crawling, though I had no idea where I would go when I reached the end of the crane’s jib. Maybe the cable would be hanging, and I would be able to swing to safety.…

  Maybe. Probably not. But the alternative was the man with the gun and the pickax and the smile. It was the last that scared me most. He came on, a man who could not fall, eyes locked on mine. I struggled to my feet and drew the kukri, knowing that it was futile against a man with a gun. His smile widened, and I was first baffled, then terrified, as he slipped the pistol into his pocket and kept coming.

  He wanted to fight me.

  I felt the breeze stir my clothes as I stood up on the narrow boom, my weight balanced over my feet. I held the kukri by my right ear and extended my left hand toward him. He didn’t even slow. He took three more steps, slightly faster now, and I swung the kukri at him, a broad, slashing chop at his shoulder. He leaned away from it fractionally. The blade cut through the air, and I almost overbalanced as my arm came round. Instantly, he reached and tapped me on the side of the head with the pick as if he were striking a bell in a temple.

  The blow stung like a wasp. I clapped my free hand to it. It came away slick with blood. He smiled again, and I knew that to him, this was sport. Entertainment. I stepped back unsteadily, then dropped to the boom, grabbed it with my hands, and scythed a kick at him.

  He jumped. High up above the river and with nothing but two slim rails of metal to land on, he actually jumped over my kick, landed, and tagged me again with the spike of the pickax, this time in the small of my back. I cried out at that, less in pain—though it was real—and more in terror.

  This, I thought with absolute certainty, is how I die.

  I stepped forward and swung wildly at his face with my balled fist. He pivoted back out of range, and my momentum turned me away from him. As he closed in, I regained my balance and seized his outstretched wrist, trying to tug him off the boom, but I succeeded only in plucking his cuff link free. It arced through the night, sparkling bluish, and bounced on the iron frame before falling out of sight. He felt blindly at his flapping cuff, and a pulse of irritation went through his hard, pale eyes. He would kill me for that alone.

  I couldn’t fight him. That much was clear. He was too strong, too fast, too skilled. Nor could I get past him. My only choice was to scramble to the very limit of the crane’s boom. I turned and half stepped, half jumped to get out of his range. He did not lunge after me, not right away. Seeing how futile my retreat was, he approached more cautiously. I backed away as far as I could, but in a few feet, I was out of room and there was nothing below me except a long fall into deep water.

  There was a flash in my peripheral vision and an almost instantaneous bang. I looked down. The boat had reached the jetty, but as Darius had stooped to extend a hand toward it, the boatman had shot him down. The cat burglar crumpled, and the man in the boat reached up to tug the document roll Darius had been carrying free. The dead man spilled softly off the jetty into the water, his luxorite lamp lighting the river up with a greenish, dreamlike haze from below, as the boatman pushed off and rowed away.

  I tore my gaze away and turned to the man on the crane, who moved almost close enough to touch. He held the pistol loosely at his side once more, but his right hand, the one with the pick, was taut and ready. Its spike was already tipped with the smallest touch of crimson. My blood. He was making no attempt to hide his face. A very bad sign. He did not intend for me to live long enoug
h to tell anyone who I had seen. He was still smiling, a bland, unsettling smile at once ordinary and terrible. Though he could easily have shot me where I was, I knew instinctively that he would prefer to use the pick.

  I jumped.

  In fact it was more a fall, a desperate lunge into the airy nothing above the water, and I had just enough time to remember the hippo before I hit the surface.

  Hit the surface I did. Hard. I have always been healthily afraid of water, because I can’t swim and I know what lives in and around the Kalihm, yet it had never occurred to me that falling into water would feel like falling onto concrete. I slammed into the river, my left knee, thigh, hip, and shoulder taking the full impact. The pain shocked the air out of me. For a second I was incapable of my own distress, stunned into inaction, turning over and over as I sank.

  Then I was drifting to the surface again, borne toward the ocean by the current. All I felt was pain, so that I was not even able to keep my eyes and mouth closed. Before I broke the surface, my throat was full of the warm, soiled water of the Kalihm. I coughed it up and promptly swallowed more. My body screamed with the agony of impact and my lungs filled.

  I was dying.

  CHAPTER

  3

  “WELL, OBVIOUSLY I SURVIVED,” I said.

  Willinghouse watched me, his face stern, while the man I had known as Detective Andrews—now Inspector Andrews, thanks to his part in the Beacon affair—motioned one of his men to replace the sopping blanket around my shoulders with another.

  My left arm was dislocated, and they had strapped it in place till someone from Saint Auspice’s could tend to it properly. My face throbbed. Most of my left side was suffused with a deep and coloring bruise that made the slightest movement painful. More to the point, as Willinghouse’s very first question had made clear, I had neither the stolen plans nor any clue to the identity of who had orchestrated the theft. The police had recovered Darius’s body and were planning to put notices in the papers requesting assistance from the public to confirm the cat burglar’s real name.

  I had described the man with the pick, but he was nondescript in everything but the strange detachment with which he had planned to kill me, and I couldn’t put that into words they understood.

  “He was white,” I said. “Blond. Ordinary-looking but well dressed.”

  Willinghouse, never a man to hide his disappointment in me, scowled and looked away across the river to where a thick smudge of smoke hung over the remains of whatever had burned the night before. I had drifted only a few hundred yards down the river, my barely conscious body pulled into a central channel too deep—mercifully—to run afoul of the nearby hippo pod. I had snagged upon a raft of driftwood on the central stanchion of the shifting and rickety Ridleford pontoon bridge and been spotted by Mahweni longshoremen on their morning ferry ride to work. They had alerted the coast guard, who were out in unusual numbers.

  “What burned last night?” I asked, following Willinghouse’s green eyes.

  “What?” he asked, as if just remembering I was there. “Oh. Nothing. An abandoned factory. It’s not relevant.”

  And that was Willinghouse. There was work—which was relevant—and there was everything else. I hopped from one category to the other like a secretary bird hunting snakes.

  “Why all the coast guard boats?” I asked. I could see three this side of the Ridleford pontoons. They had armed men in their bows, and one seemed to be towing another vessel—actually more a raft bound together with rope and buoyed up unevenly on rusted barrels—crowded with people. Black people. Thin and ragged looking. Almost all women and children.

  “Illegals,” said Andrews. “Trying to sneak into the economic paradise that is Bar-Selehm.”

  I watched the people on the raft as they gazed from one shouting officer to another, uncomprehending and scared, the children huddled around their mothers, their faces tear streaked.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Andrews. He was a thin-faced, clean-shaven white man whose eyes had a predatory intensity, but his voice was soft, and his concern sounded genuine.

  I reached for my injured shoulder with my right hand, but couldn’t grasp it before the pain became too much. I winced, and he nodded.

  “Anything other than your shoulder?” he asked. “That was quite a fall.”

  “Just my pride,” I said, still watching the children as they were lifted from their listing raft and into the arms of the police who clustered around in the thigh-deep water. One of the women—wearing a filthy and soaking orange sarong that stuck to her sticklike limbs—was nursing a tiny infant.

  “Why did you jump?” asked Willinghouse, peering at me from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. “You couldn’t have, I don’t know, fought them off or something?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I thought you were more adept at this kind of thing.” He didn’t sound critical as much as curious, and when I glared at him, he shrugged. “What?”

  “The one who came after me was too strong, all right? Too skilled.”

  “And you saw nothing to identify either him or the gunman in the boat?” Willinghouse pressed.

  I shook my head, feeling stupid and useless, looking back to the ragged immigrants, then caught myself.

  “There was something,” I said. “He lost a cuff link as we fought on the crane. It might have fallen in the river, but it might not.”

  “Where?” asked Andrews.

  “I’ll show you,” I said, getting to my feet with the inspector’s help. I scowled at Willinghouse, but he was watching the raft and seemed to have forgotten me entirely, so I led Andrews along the riverbank to the steps and the pier and the crane, a uniformed officer trailing us, uninterested. The hippo was still there, its back turned to the water, pinking in the sun.

  “There,” I said. “We were at the midpoint of that boom when he lost the cuff link. It went behind him and hit metal on the way down.”

  I shrugged apologetically. It wasn’t much of a clue.

  “Benson!” called Andrews to the uniformed officer, pointing.

  “Down there, sir?” protested Benson. “There’s a bloody great hippo!”

  “Well, keep your distance from it,” said Andrews, not very helpfully.

  Benson gave me a baleful look.

  “Was it luxorite?” said Willinghouse suddenly.

  “What?”

  “The cuff link your assailant dropped. Did it contain luxorite?”

  “I don’t think so. It was bright but only by reflection. Why?”

  “If it was luxorite, he would have had an easier time finding it in the dark,” Willinghouse said with a noncommittal shrug. “Unless it fell into the river, in which case the point is rather moot.”

  He said it sourly, the scar on his cheek tightening, as if where the item had fallen was somehow my fault. I talked to push away the sense of failure.

  “Probably just crystal or enamel,” I said, “but large and blue.”

  It took a moment for this to register in my employer’s face, but the transformation was marked.

  “Blue?” snapped Willinghouse. “You’re sure? What shape?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at it—”

  “Diamond shaped?”

  I thought hard, sensing how much he needed me to remember more than I had seen. I shrugged, and my shoulder cried in protest.

  “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “Could have been.”

  “On a white background?”

  “White or silver, yes,” I said. “You know it?”

  “Oh yes,” said Willinghouse, and there was something more than pleasure in his face. His jaw was set in grim resolution. He hurried away and was soon poring over the ground behind Andrews and Benson, who was peering into the water below the crane’s piers, keeping a watchful eye on the hippo some thirty yards away. I joined the hunt, but only for a moment. Willinghouse suddenly straightened up with a cry of “Huzzah!” He held the cuff link aloft, and his face was full of grim triu
mph.

  “What is it?” asked Andrews.

  “Elitus,” said Willinghouse, holding out the cuff link for Andrews to inspect it. It was indeed a blue crystalline diamond on a silvery white enamel background. “A club. Very exclusive.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Andrews.

  “No,” Willinghouse answered. “You wouldn’t have. No offense meant. If it’s any consolation, they wouldn’t have me as a member either.”

  Andrews raised his eyebrows. Willinghouse was only a junior member of Parliament, but he was a man of considerable means, which was how he was able to employ me.

  “Excuse me!”

  We all turned to look down to the shore, where Benson gazed up at us with a look of considerable unease. “Did you find what you were looking for? Only, this hippo is eyeballing me something awful…?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, man!” exclaimed Andrews. “Yes, we found it. Get up here.” He turned back to Willinghouse irritably. “You were saying you wouldn’t be allowed to join this Elitus club. Why not?”

  Willinghouse smiled mirthlessly.

  “Well, I’m not a member of the right party for one thing, but…” He hesitated. “Let’s just say that the cuff link’s white background is … symbolic.”

  Andrews looked taken aback, embarrassed even. He knew that Willinghouse was a quarter Lani, though it wasn’t clear from his appearance. His hair was jet-black like mine, but his eyes were green, and most people would assume he was merely a little tanned by the Feldesland sun. His socialite sister, Dahria, passed even more completely for white.

  “Did he see your face? Your skin?” asked Willinghouse.

  I bit back my irritation.

  “Are you asking if he saw who I was or what I am?” I said.

  “Both. Either.”

  I looked away.

  “My face was masked,” I said. “He didn’t get a good look at me. Whether he could tell I was Lani … I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Willinghouse scowled, dissatisfied.

  “There’s no need for that, old fellow,” said Andrews. “Miss Sutonga has had a singularly trying experience—”