Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “I’m not absolutely sure,” I said, “but I think it was Lady Alice Welborne, who is romantically involved with the Grappoli ambassador.”

  It was a mark of Dahria’s depression that she barely reacted to this piece of news, but Andrews looked up, and there was a light in his eyes.

  “Is that the link?” he asked. “The machine gun is being smuggled to the Grappoli? They’ll hang for it.”

  “We have to prove it,” I said, not hopefully.

  Willinghouse flicked open the paper to its society pages and showed an image of what looked to be a glamorous party in which elegant people—many of whom I now knew—milled around a familiar black-eyed man with a sash and epaulettes on his evening wear.

  “Count Alfonse Marino, royal Ambassador to the court of the Grappoli Empire,” Wilinghouse read aloud, “is currently spending all his free evenings at that most sophisticated and private of Bar-Selehm clubs, Elitus. They are all in it together.”

  “I thought the ambassador was going back home?” I asked, snatching up the paper.

  Willinghouse shook his head.

  “Changed his mind,” he said. “Matters demanding his attention, according to the Foreign Office. I don’t know what, but they weren’t very happy about it. Maybe the mysterious slowing of the Grappoli advance in the north.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, now we can arrest and question him,” I said.

  “No, we can’t,” said Andrews. The next two words came out of his mouth at the same time Willinghouse said them: “Diplomatic immunity.”

  Another inversion of how things ought to be.

  I slammed my fist onto Willinghouse’s elegant coffee table so that the untouched tea set that had been brought to us rattled alarmingly.

  “There’s no link to Montresat,” said Willinghouse. “I don’t like the man, but I find it hard to believe he would knowingly manufacture weapons for the Grappoli.”

  “Maybe it’s not him,” I said. “Maybe it’s someone else who works in metal production and has a known liking for the Grappoli.”

  Andrews gave me a quizzical look, but Willinghouse’s face lit up with a feverish inner glow.

  “You mean,” he said, “Richter?”

  “He could do it,” I said. “No one produces more steel than he does. If the plans were sufficiently exact, he could build a prototype. He’s working on something he calls Firebrand.”

  “Which is what?” asked Andrews.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It may be connected to some metal box structures he’s producing for Montresat.”

  “How do you know this?” began Andrews, but he caught himself. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “Oh, please let it be Richter,” muttered Willinghouse in a kind of dark ecstasy that drew Andrews’s amazed stare.

  “But even if we can tie Montresat—or Richter—to Markeson’s smuggling, that still leaves Horritch and his fabric,” said Andrews. “What’s the connection?”

  “Maybe he’s a separate issue,” I said.

  “Or a coincidence?” said Willinghouse.

  “I dislike coincidence,” said Andrews.

  I nodded in assent, but said, “I don’t see how cloth can be part of it. What could a textile factory be making that would be worth all this subterfuge?”

  I thought of Agatha Markeson’s shawl that had first been given to the family governess.

  “Speak to Violet Farthingale,” I said to Andrews, getting to my feet. “She will be able to identify the body of Darius as Ephraim Sandringham.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Willinghouse.

  “Something else you don’t want to know about,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  31

  THE GRAPPOLI EMBASSY LOOKED out upon Szenga Square from treelined Fullerton Lane, the heart of Fulwood and, outside the Government and Finance Districts, one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the city. The embassy was faced with white marble, and its portico boasted fluted, gilded columns. It was set back from the street and surrounded by iron railings whose ornate leaf pattern almost concealed their sharpness. Guarding the gates were soldiers in emerald green tunics and pith helmets trimmed with long, golden feathers that might have come from the tail of a king pheasant. There was nothing ornamental about their rifles, however, and it was said that the pair of decorative field cannon that flanked the entrance were kept loaded. It was, after all, only a few months since there had been rioting in front of this very building as Bar-Selehm had braced itself for a war with the Grappoli that had been narrowly averted.

  Again.

  We always seemed to be close to a war footing with the Grappoli, and whatever personal and business intimacies the current ambassador had built with his Elitus friends, I had to assume that security would be extremely tight. I had spent an hour watching the building from a series of accessible vantages, but I had another set of eyes rather closer to my target. Sureyna was camped out as close to the building as the soldiers would permit, and peppered anyone who approached with questions: nothing difficult or political that would have gotten her moved on. Just fluff for the society pages. She was brushed off twice by visiting dignitaries before some dry-looking secretary came out to give her the tidbits it would take to get her off their property with the least trouble.

  The Grappoli had no desire to cause upset where it could be avoided.

  Ten minutes later, she joined me on the roof of the Harrison Art Gallery, her paper-stuffed reticule clasped firmly in both hands, though she kept a safe distance from the edge.

  “He’s taking tea at home this afternoon,” she said. “Entertaining.”

  “Good,” I said. “Servants? Body guards?”

  “Minimal,” she said. “Most have been given the day off.”

  “Meaning he wants his privacy,” I said. “Better still. I think I smell the heady perfume of Lady Alice Welborne.”

  “Will you be swanning in as Lady Ki Misrai?”

  “I don’t know whether that identity is still secure,” I said. “Either way, it wouldn’t get me in. I plan to take a more direct approach.”

  Sureyna winced playfully, then caught herself. She looked into my face and what she saw clearly worried her.

  “This is personal for you,” she said.

  “For lots of reasons,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. I wasn’t a refugee and never had been one, so perhaps my sympathy for their plight should have been distant and intellectual. It wasn’t. My own separation from where I grew up, my sense of unbelonging, the drifting unmoored feeling I had felt in my gut like a knot or a stone ever since the rice festival dream all weighed on me.

  We are the lost, I thought, the discarded, the not quite human. We are the rejected, the unwanted, the detritus of other people’s comfort and profit.

  Richter’s speeches and Namud’s death had made this feeling hot, angry, though I didn’t know how to say any of that to Sureyna. I shook my head, eyes lowered.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “That depends on the ambassador,” I said.

  * * *

  SUREYNA WAS THE DIVERSION. She went back to the front door with more questions ten minutes after Lady Alice had pulled up in her coach, and while she did that, I jumped the wall at the back and shinned up the downspout on the one corner the rear guard couldn’t see. I pulled myself over the balcony and took a sink plunger and a glass cutter—a simple metal thing with a diamond tip that I used to use for scoring tile—from my satchel. I squatted at the window and spat on the plunger’s rubber head before pressing it onto the glass. Pushing the diamond point of the glass cutter against the pane with one hand while I held the plunger with the other, I traced a circle around it, over and over, biting deeper with each revolution. At last I felt the glass snap, and I lifted the circle out with the plunger, leaving a hole
broad enough to reach through and unlatch the window from within.

  I had chosen the third story because I expected security to be tighter downstairs. Now I slipped inside and kept very still, listening. I was, I realized, behaving like a cat burglar, and the memory of Darius, the gentleman thief who had befriended Constance Horritch and who crept around in people’s bedrooms as they slept, came unsettlingly to mind.

  Technically speaking, I was in Grappoli territory, so while I was armed, I knew that attempting to deal with the embassy’s guards would likely get me killed. Whether it was on the spot or at the end of a rope a week later didn’t make much difference. I was going to have to be careful.

  As I took in the well-appointed bedchamber, I heard shouts from the street, and for a second, I thought I had been seen. I dropped out of sight, listening but unable to see whoever had been yelling. The voice came again, two brief shouts suddenly cut off, and though I could not catch the words, I thought I knew the voice.

  Sureyna.

  She had been caught, or—and this seemed more likely—she was trying to warn me, to put me on my guard, and that could mean only one thing. Someone had arrived. Someone I had not been expecting had come to the front door of the embassy.

  Who?

  Her voice had been shrill with more than panic. It had been angry, and I knew only one person who may have come to see the ambassador who would incite that kind of rage in Sureyna. I thought of the way she had looked when I had left her, the reticule clasped tightly in her arms and in it, almost certainly, the Heritage party’s pamphlet on The Dilemma of the White Man.

  Know your enemy, she had said.

  Richter was here. He had to be. Fear only kindled the fire in my own breast, like the terrible heart of his famous converter. I reached for the pistol in my satchel and checked its chamber. Crossing the room swiftly, I cracked the door, listened, then stepped out into the hallway. Suddenly, terribly, I realized why I had asked for the gun in the first place.

  Voices below.

  I moved carefully to the stairwell, conscious now of the Grappoli ambassador’s rich, fluid tones on the floor below me, then there was the opening and closing of a door, and the voices became muffled. I looked down the stairs, saw no one, descended lightly, found the door they had gone through, and pressed my ear against it.

  At first there was only muttering, low and indistinct, so that no matter how hard I focused, I could not catch the words, but then the ambassador’s voice cut in sharper and louder, and it was so clear I almost recoiled.

  “Again?” he barked. “How can it have failed?”

  “I cannot say, my lord.” Richter’s voice. My fists balled till the nails bit into my palms.

  “Then find out! Make another.”

  “There is no point in making another, my lord. The flaw is in the design.”

  “Nonsense. It works,” the ambassador shot back. “We know it works. You must not have built it correctly.”

  “The parts were made with the greatest exactitude,” he said. “I oversaw the boring of the barrel myself. Everything fit together precisely, just as the first prototype did. The weapon simply does not work.”

  “Then how do you explain the death of Grappoli soldiers at the hands of men armed with exactly such a weapon?”

  It took a second for the impact of this demand to hit me. Grappoli soldiers were being killed by the machine gun Richter was trying to build? The Firebrand was being used against them? How was that possible? Who could be using it? I could not guess, though I wondered if this was an explanation for the mysterious slowing of the Grappoli advance.

  “I cannot explain it, my lord,” said Richter, “but I assure you—”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t work? In exactly what way does it not work?”

  “It jams, my lord, just as the other did,” said Richter.

  “Then the measurements are wrong.”

  “No,” said Richter, more forcefully now. “The measurements are precisely as indicated in the plans, and the problem is not that the bullet won’t fit in the chamber or go through the barrel. The first shot is fine. But there is no second shot. It misfeeds every time. The problem is not the steel or the workmanship. It must be the design.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you that our generals have seen the weapon in enemy hands and in action?” bellowed the ambassador. “It works!”

  “The belt snags or shreds no matter what we make it out of,” Richter protested. “We’ve tried canvas, cotton, leather, even silk. They either tear away from the bullets, or they pucker and jam the mechanism.”

  The belt?

  I thought of the strap we had recovered from Horritch’s factory with its little pockets each just large enough to hold a pencil.

  Or a cartridge.

  There it was. Another tumbler of the lock turned over in my head.

  The Firebrand had replaced the older machine gun’s hopper loading mechanism with a fabric belt into which the bullet cartridges were inserted, but the belt only worked if it was made of Bar-Selehm silk. I thought of the awful guns I had seen shredding muscle and bone all those months ago in the dockside warehouse the night Tanish had been hurt, and I thought of this new weapon, spewing bullets at twice the speed or more. For a moment I was so overcome with the sheer fact of the thing that I heard nothing as the theater in my head played out the whole awful truth of the weapon and how it worked.

  “Either way,” Richter continued, “it does not work, and I would advise you that I have some expertise in mechanical engineering, expertise which you—for all your titles and flunkies—do not have, so kindly stop questioning my judgment and workmanship!”

  “How dare you!” exclaimed a new voice. A woman.

  Alice.

  “My dear,” said the ambassador, “I pray do not concern yourself.”

  “He insulted you!” Alice riposted.

  “Go upstairs!” snapped the ambassador. “Wait for me there, and don’t presume to meddle in things you do not understand.”

  This time I did recoil. I leapt for the stairs and was halfway up when I heard the door snap open.

  “Constance is right,” Lady Alice spat. “You don’t take women seriously.”

  She slammed the door and stomped toward the stairs as I vaulted the top, turned the corner, and opened the bedroom door as quietly as my haste would let me. I made for the bay window through which I had come and turned into the long and heavy curtain, my heart thumping.

  I was barely in place before the door opened again and Alice barged in. As she threw herself onto the bed, sobbing, I kept very still, shielding the broken window with my body lest she discern the draft and come over to investigate. The curtains were long and heavy. Enough to keep me concealed unless someone attempted to draw them closed.

  As her weeping subsided, I heard Alice light the oil lamp by the bed. I heard the argument below rumbling confusedly through the floor. I heard the slam of the door on the lower floor and footsteps on the stairs. I heard the bedroom door open and the ambassador enter.

  “I hate you,” snapped Alice.

  “My dear—”

  “I defended you, and you treated me like a fool. You always do.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. He was trying to soothe her, but he remained angry about Richter. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “No,” I said, unfurling the curtain and stepping into the half-light, my pistol extended. “Let’s talk about it some more.”

  “Who in God’s name are you?” snapped the ambassador, peering at me. I had the window behind me and my face wrapped as before, and was confident they would glimpse nothing of Lady Misrai in me. He took a half step toward the door, and I snapped back the hammer of the pistol. In the silence, it resonated like a bell. The ambassador became very still. Alice was sitting wide-eyed on the bed like a discarded doll, her hands clasped girlishly in front of her chest.

  “What do you want?” asked the ambassador. He was calculating. I could hear
it in his voice.

  “From you?” I said. “Nothing. But I would like to ask Lady Alice a question.”

  “What nonsense is this?” spat the ambassador.

  “Sit down and be quiet,” I said.

  Reluctantly, his eyes on the muzzle of my gun, he did so, perching on the edge of the bed.

  “You wanted to ask me something?” Alice said in a breathy whisper that contained an edge of excitement.

  “Two things,” I said. “First, who is Georgie May?”

  Alice’s thrill died immediately. She looked confused and disappointed.

  “Never heard of her,” she said.

  “Ambassador?” I prompted.

  He shook his head too, his eyes blank.

  “What else did you want to know?” asked Alice, determined to contribute something to the air of mystery and intrigue she apparently saw in me.

  “Why did you say that the body of the man they called Darius was Karl Gillies, sign writer from Hastingford?”

  Alice took a breath, and all the curious glee drained from her face.

  “What?” sputtered the ambassador again. “She didn’t!”

  “She did,” I said. “Didn’t you, Alice?”

  The woman said nothing. She was close enough to the thin glow of the lamp that I could see the fearful calculation in her face.

  “Alice?” prompted the ambassador. “What is she talking about?”

  I believed him instantly. Whatever Alice had done, he did not know about it. As the silence unfurled like smoke from the lamp, I said, “She gave her name as Leticia Jones, the dead man’s fiancée. Isn’t that right, Alice?”

  The woman still said nothing.

  “I don’t understand,” said the ambassador. “What did you do?”

  “I had to,” she said, turning to him suddenly. “To protect you. So no one would know about … you and that awful man.”

  “Don’t say another word,” said the ambassador, panic overwhelming his confusion. “I don’t know who this person is—”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am,” I said. “What matters is why Lady Alice did what she did, because I do not believe it was her idea.”

  Another shocked look from the ambassador. He turned to Alice with horror.