Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “The Honorable MP for Bar-Selehm Northeast, Josiah Willinghouse, Brevard,” said the secretary.

  Willinghouse’s name brought my focus back to the floor. I sensed a ripple of interest pulse through the room, a slight leaning forward in the colored gallery, and a slight leaning back in the red seats. Either way, they thought something interesting was coming. Willinghouse was, as I said, one quarter Lani.

  “Speaking as one of only two people currently on the floor likely to feel a personal impact from this bill,” he said, his tone full but frosty, his eyes hard, and with the smallest of nods toward the representative of the unassimilated Mahweni, “I would like to register not so much my doubts about its fiscal or administrative difficulty, which cluttered previous debates on this matter, but its essential moral wrongness. I am appalled that this house believes the matter worth serious consideration, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to decisively and unequivocally reject the proposed bill on the grounds of its fundamental inhumanity.” This brought murmurs of agreement from his own party and applause from the black men in the public gallery, which earned three loud strikes of the secretary’s gavel.

  “May I remind the public that their role here is strictly observational,” said the secretary, eyeing the upper story sternly. “Further disruption will force me to clear the galleries. You have been warned. Mr. Willinghouse, you may conclude your question, assuming there is one.”

  Another ripple of amusement, which Willinghouse had to override.

  “There is,” he said, “though it is less, perhaps, for the Honorable MP for Eldritch North, who has proved himself unwilling or incapable of any scrutiny of beliefs so heinous—”

  He did not get to finish the sentence, as the Heritage party roared their fury, supported by many of the National party members, and order was only restored with more thumping of the secretary’s gavel followed by another strident warning.

  “I would remind the honorable gentleman of the rules of conduct of this chamber,” he said, eyeing Willinghouse. “Personal attacks and other forms of incivility will not be permitted. Pray conclude your question.”

  “I apologize for my incivility,” said Willinghouse, biting off the last word like a jackal and spitting it out. “I sometimes forget the way that House decorum takes precedence over honesty—”

  Another boiling of discontent erupted, and the secretary beat his desk once more.

  “Mr. Willinghouse,” he exclaimed, “you will follow the procedural norms of this chamber, or you will be removed, sir. Ask your question.”

  “My question,” said Willinghouse, composing himself, “is this. What kind of world do we want to live in? The strength of Bar-Selehm is its people, regardless of color or creed. You speak of illegal immigration, of racially based resentments that have sparked protests and yes, sometimes, violence, but we do not end the root causes of that discontent by closing our doors against the unfortunate who wish to build a better life here or by pushing those who once owned this land aside, turning a blind eye to their concerns, and adding to the daily injustices they suffer by banishing them from the city they have helped to build. This assembly should yoke its energies to redressing the grievances of those less fortunate and of those who, though less well represented by this chamber, have to live by the consequences of its decisions. It is abominable, sir! And the day we must prove our ancestry to gain any kind of privilege is the day we shelve our common humanity. To vote for this bill assumes that you are more important than the Mahweni, the Lani, or those who flock to our shores daily to escape the horrors of their own world, but such a vote does not make you more. Indeed, it shows you to be less!”

  And then the chamber exploded in shouting. Defiant applause rang down from the black and colored galleries; boos and hisses rang out from the chamber below, particularly from the silver seats, but also from many in the red, and even a few in the blue who were more than a little affronted. The secretary rose and, getting no peace with his gavel, raised the golden-hilted sword, whereupon the great doors of the chamber boomed open and dragoons marched in. As one went to escort Willinghouse from the room, others appeared in the galleries, ordering us out, truncheons drawn.

  * * *

  “SO,” I SAID TO Willinghouse. “That went well.”

  We were sitting outside in a rear courtyard, waiting till it was Willinghouse’s time to vote and watching the brown industrial fog of the city thickening around us as the day warmed up.

  “Stupid of me,” he muttered, though his face showed no contrition, only the burning anger that had flared when he made his speech. “Madness. But what did they expect? How can we sit around debating such things as if we are civilized people? It’s monstrous.”

  “How will the vote go?” I asked.

  “Richter will lose,” said Willinghouse. “This time. There are enough men of good conscience among the Nationals to ensure he does not get their full support, but it will be closer than I would like, and he will be back soon enough. He already has another bill on the docket proposing increased trade with the Grappoli.”

  “But he’s a nationalist. I’d think he would hate the Grappoli.”

  “He says they are our natural allies on the continent,” said Willinghouse bitterly. “Meaning racial allies. Anyone from Panbroke, however greedy and merciless, is—to him—a more suitable ally than anyone—”

  “Brown,” I concluded for him. “Or black.”

  Even in his anger, the baldness of the statement seemed to embarrass him. He nodded and sighed. “We have a noninterference treaty with the Grappoli, which basically says that so long as what either of us does doesn’t directly involve the other, we stay out of each other’s way.”

  “Which is why we’re sitting on the sidelines while they tear through the tribal lands in the north,” I said.

  “Richter wants to expand the treaty,” said Willinghouse. “Turn it into an alliance. And we have an election coming. Look to see the Heritage party make greater inroads into the House until the Nationals feel more and more compelled to take them seriously.”

  “That would be good for you, wouldn’t it, dividing their supporters?”

  “In the short term,” he said. “But one day we may find ourselves looking at a National-Heritage Alliance with Richter at the head, and that would be calamitous for the city.” He paused to reflect on this, then turned back to me, as if just realizing who I was. “Why are you here?” he asked. “We should not be seen together, especially since I have attracted so much … attention.”

  “I wanted to get more details about the theft of the—”

  “Not now,” he said, looking quickly around. “I have to vote, and then I have been summoned to the whip’s office, where I will be lectured on maintaining the dignity of the Brevard party.”

  “I will go,” I said. “You have enough to worry about.”

  He nodded, his green eyes thoughtful and sad, and then said, “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  I WROTE TO MNENGA at last, figuring I could send it care of the Mahweni trading post near Thremsburg. Someone would know where he was. I sat at my writing desk, staring at the blank sheet of paper, slightly ragged down the left side, and dipped my pen in an inkwell I had borrowed from my landlady.

  My Dearest Mnenga, I wrote.

  I stared at the words, then snatched the paper up and crumpled it into a ball. I took out a new sheet and began again.

  Dear Mnenga, I wrote. I do not know if this will reach you, so I will be brief. It seems like it has been years since I saw you last, and I think there are things I should say, things I meant to say before but didn’t. I am sorry for that. I never thanked you properly for your help, your support, and I fear you will think me ungrateful, even rude. Worse, I fear that you might have thought that I exploited or otherwise manipulated your feelings for me …

  I stopped, rereading what I had written. The words were all wrong. My handwriting looked childish in its formal care, as if
I was some Clock Street girl writing home for an advance on her allowance. I dipped the pen and wrote with quicker, more fluid strokes. What I mean to say is that I miss you and hope that I see you soon. You are still very dear to me—that word again, I thought, annoyed at my own incompetence—which is to say I like you very much, even if I don’t exactly feel the way I think you might prefer—

  I cursed, snatched up the letter, screwed it into a tight ball, and thrust it into the waste basket on the floor, shoving the chair back and getting to my feet, muttering expletives. It was hopeless. However much I had grown in confidence, in presence, since entering Willinghouse’s employ, I still found that I would rather scale a two-hundred-foot chimney without rope or harness than unpack my heart in words.

  I moved to the window.

  * * *

  MY AFORESAID EMPLOYER HAD put me up in rented rooms across the street from the Market Street Koresh, where some of the city Mahweni worshipped, called to prayer twice daily with the tolling of a gonglike bell up in a cobalt blue, tulip-topped minaret. They would file in silently in their drab work clothes, the men and women entering by separate doors. What they did in there I didn’t really know, though it seemed sedate, unlike the Lani religious festivals I had known growing up. So far as I understood it, their religion—Bashtara, it was called—was in many ways closer to the northern beliefs of the white Feldeslanders than it was to the fertility, ancestor, and animal worship practiced by the Unassimilated Tribes. I found it all a bit bemusing, and—when their bells woke me at first light on days I really could have used the rest—a little tiresome.

  I parted the thin curtains and looked down into the street, the quiet crowd flowing steadily into the Koresh, and I rolled my injured shoulder experimentally. It ached, if less fiercely, and I wondered how many hours of sleep I had actually been able to get. The hospital staff had sent me home with a paper of powders to numb the pain, but I had opted not to take them. Yawning and gazing out into the rapidly warming morning with bleary eyes, feeling my shoulder begin to grumble with the slightest movement, that was beginning to look like a bad decision.

  I washed with a jug and basin and dressed, the twinge in my shoulder slowing me, making me cautious. It was annoying. I had not intended to keep wearing the sling, but that looked like another bad idea. I put it on, took the powders after all, locked my room, and trudged wearily down to the dining room, where I helped myself to honey, yogurt, flat bread, and starfruit washed down with two cups of spiced chai. After years of gruel, crusts, and what I could pilfer from the market, this breakfast, simply—almost magically—laid out by Mrs. Topesh, the landlady, felt like a feast, a secret and luxurious discovery, as if someone had mistaken me for an adult. Or a white person. It never failed to raise my spirits.

  The boardinghouse was famously quiet. Mrs. Topesh insisted upon it, demanding a kind of civility better suited to rather more respectable lodgings. There were eight rooms, all singles: three black girls who worked as servants in neighboring houses and shops; two older women who were part of the weavers’ guild and had positions at one of the Fourth Street factories; two unmarried black men, one a steel worker, the other a butcher for the Bashtara community; and an elderly white man, widowed. Mrs. Topesh spoke to them all with the same benevolent politeness—her manner as rare as the mere existence of the boardinghouse she maintained. Chitchat, especially between the sexes, was frowned upon, however. That suited me just fine. My life had changed drastically since I had been a steeplejack for the Seventh Street gang, but I was no more social now than I had been. I relished my privacy, even if I felt like an imposter in the scrubbed silence of Mrs. Topesh’s rooms.

  My temperament and lack of social skills could be, however, a liability—one Willinghouse was apparently looking to solve so that I could find my way into Elitus. A note, folded discreetly and brought to my table on a tarnished silver tray by a wordless Mrs. Topesh, told me to report to Willinghouse’s town home at ten. I knew better than to thank the landlady in words and merely inclined my head a fraction. She returned the gesture and slid away, as if she was waiting on some dowager duchess.

  That Willinghouse wanted to see me right away suggested he had an idea, which made me feel both a thrill of anticipation and a hint of panic. I wanted to get a look at the inside of Elitus and see if the bland assassin with the pick would show his face there, but if the club was as exclusive as he had suggested, I would be badly out of my element, and not only because I was brown. The world of silks and jewelry and sophisticated banter was something I had only read about in books or seen dimly reflected in Vestris.

  The association made me uneasy. I had looked up to my eldest sister, idolized her, but she had not been the person I had taken her for. She had been, in fact, my opposite, and with no other options left to me—or so I continued to tell myself—I had left her to die for it. I would not become her just to get into some fancy club.

  The stand in the gloomy downstairs hallway, its air already smudged by tendrils of the city’s penetrating smog, held the morning’s paper. I saw the headline—DARIUS IDENTIFIED—and picked it up.

  The infamous cat burglar who captured the imagination of Bar-Selehm until his mysterious death has been identified as one Karl Gillies, 31, a sign writer from the Hastingford District, by his tearful fiancée, Leticia Jones, 22. His employer, David Vandemar of Vandemar Paint and Signage, expressed his considerable surprise and disillusionment at the revelation of his erstwhile employee’s nocturnal activities and hoped that the city would not hold it against a company with a reputation for fine and reasonably priced work.

  I considered this, feeling the paper’s palpable disappointment that the “gentleman thief” had turned out to be among the city’s poorest white people, no more than a jobbing day laborer who had used the climbing skills developed while painting hoardings and advertising panels to pilfer from the rich and respectable. I knew that the people who had discussed Darius’s exploits with such breathless excitement would have no interest at all in Karl Gillies. A chapter of the city’s history had just closed forever. The headline below it read HERITAGE SUPPORTERS PROTEST DEFEAT OF SEGREGATION BILL. That chapter was still very much open.

  I scanned the paper throughout, but saw no reference to the flower-filled sandals on the riverbank, or what might have happened to the people who had owned them.

  * * *

  AS USUAL, I MADE my way to Willinghouse’s home by a series of back streets that took me all the way from Szenga Square almost to the north wall and east, approaching the elegant town house from the rear. The scullery maid let me in through the tradesmen’s entrance and showed me into the kitchen; the butler—there was no other suitable name for him—told me to go through to the drawing room, where I was to begin my instruction. In spite of my former anxieties, I followed him down the carpeted hall with mounting excitement. That was doused the moment I knocked on the paneled door and stepped inside. The room was empty save for a single person perched on an overstuffed love seat and smirking like a cat that had gotten into a cage full of songbirds.

  Dahria.

  She was poised and elegant, beautiful in a chill, aristocratic way, and dressed in a cream-colored tea gown with dainty shoes and preposterous elbow-length gloves.

  “You?” I exclaimed.

  “You may call me Professor,” she cooed, delighted by my outrage.

  “Do you think I’m likely to?”

  “I think you are in my brother’s employ,” she said, smiling wider still, “and that if you hope to remain so, you will undergo this course of instruction with focus and deliberation, lest you fail to attain passing marks.”

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “Not with you.”

  “Now, that’s the Lani street brat in you talking. An aristocratic lady can do anything she puts her mind to.”

  I bristled at the remark, and she beamed.

  “Why doesn’t he just send you?” I demanded. “You are much paler than me.”

  “Because, Miss Sutonga
, while a member of Bar-Selehm’s ruling class despite being tainted by my grandmother’s Lani blood, I am known. You are not.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, used to the idea that the people she spent much of her time with probably thought her somehow less than they were. She smiled again, and this time it was a brittle, knowing look that made her brown eyes hard.

  “Then he should find someone else,” I said. “There must be some suitable white person he could pay as an informant.”

  “Possibly,” she answered, “but my brother puts a lot of store in trust. He trusts you. I’m not entirely sure why, but there it is.”

  “His trust won’t get me into Elitus,” I said.

  “No,” she agreed, “but some training and a little creativity might.”

  “Creativity?”

  “You will go in not as Anglet Sutonga, but as Lady Ki Misrai—”

  “That won’t help!”

  “From Istilia.”

  That stopped me. Istilia is a small kingdom in the northeast of Lanaria, the ancestral homeland of the Lani, a vast subcontinent located hundreds of miles off the eastern coast of Feldesland. I knew little about it, my people having left centuries before I was born, brought to Feldesland to help the white colonists build the infrastructure of Bar-Selehm. They were imported as something as close to being slaves as was technically possible and driven with the promise of a better life, which for most of them, had never materialized. I thought of the Lani as poor, downtrodden, and politically powerless, but that was because I knew only what we were here. Istilia was a different world entirely.

  “Would that make a difference to Elitus?” I asked.

  “Let’s call this lesson one,” said Dahria. “Elitus, like all subsets of high society, is driven by self-interest and exclusivity. Racism is endemic in such places of course, but among such people it usually bows before snobbery. As you are now, they would bolt the doors to keep you out. But as a young Istilian princess trailing the exotic whiff of a distant land where she sleeps on beds of rubies? Yes, I think we might just get you in. If you can learn not to fart in public or put your work boots up on the supper table.”