Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “Citizen’s arrest!” he proclaimed. “Take those men into custody on charges of treason against the laws and ordinances of Bar-Selehm.”

  CHAPTER

  33

  THE HERITAGE MEN MOVED with cool efficiency, their black boots almost in lockstep as they strode up the gangplank and laid hands on Montresat, Horritch, and Markeson. “You’ll hang for this,” said Richter, smiling, “and so will anyone at the War Office who has turned a blind eye to your treachery.”

  “How dare you!” barked Horritch. “You jumped-up little nobody. We are patriots, not traitors.”

  “You’re the worst kind of traitor,” Richter shot back, distaste showing through his glee. “You’re blood traitors. Race traitors. But for once in this city of appeasement, you’ll swing for it. When that happens, when the newspapers tell your story, the way you’ve supplied savages with weapons they are barely intelligent enough to operate against your white brothers—”

  “Against the Grappoli!” exclaimed Montresat. “The city’s oldest and most recalcitrant enemy!”

  “Your white brothers,” repeated Richter, unmoved. “When the people hear what you have done in violation of your own laws and treaties, your party will crumble, your government will collapse, and Heritage will take its rightful place in the ruling of Bar-Selehm.”

  The longshoremen looked cowed and desperate, as if Richter was about to begin his rule at once, and they had no more than a few moments to stop that from happening. I realized with horror that they would attack him, and that in the process, they would be cut down. As if to make the point even sharper and more terrible, I heard the splintering crack of one of the great tractor crates, and looked over to see where Barrington-Smythe had levered open the front panel, revealing the dreadful machine inside.

  It was just as I had imagined it, an armored monster with great tracks around its wheels and a turret from which sprouted the sleek new barrel of one of Montresat’s belt-fed machine guns. Barrington-Smythe gave his bland, terrifying smile, climbed onto the steel shell Richter’s company had unwittingly built, and threw open the turret’s side hatch. He assessed the interior quickly, then clambered inside and opened another hatch in the top, sticking his head up so that he could look along the barrel of the gun as he slewed the turret round experimentally.

  “My work,” said Richter, more obviously angry now. “Steel made at my plant turned into a weapon to be used against my white Grappoli brothers. Did you think I would never learn what you had done with it? It’s an abomination.” He seemed to think for a moment, and something of his reptilian calm returned. “But I am curious to see it in operation, and there are so many low-value targets on hand whose loss might be easily explained away as having occurred in the chaos of the moment.”

  He looked at Barrington-Smythe, and the blond man adjusted the weapon of the armored tractor so that it pointed directly at the container car packed full of refugees. The longshoremen dropped back, spreading out, their eyes locked onto Barrington-Smythe with horror. Several of them dropped their tools and raised their hands, though I doubted that would make any difference. Even the handful of dragoons looked uncertain whose side they were on or what version of the law they were supposed to enforce.

  “You think we don’t know that it was you and your Heritage goons who stole the plans for that gun?” demanded Montresat. He was trying to sound outraged, but there was a wheedling, anxious tone in his voice, and I knew he was scared and stalling for time, as if he knew what Richter’s men were capable of. “You were going to build it and sell it to the Grappoli.”

  “You can’t prove that,” sneered Richter, “and if you attempt to try me in the court of public opinion, I will emerge a national hero.”

  “Not to everyone,” said Constance.

  Richter looked at her as if noticing a fly that had drifted into his living room.

  “Everyone?” he said. “Since when did everyone matter? You people are all alike. No common sense, and no real principles or strength of character. I’ll be a hero to the right people, and this is, let me remind you, an election year.”

  I didn’t see the other ship till it was pulling alongside the Georgie May, and only saw it then because it unmasked a luxorite lamp with a mirrored lens that sliced through the fog and flooded the quayside with sudden light. It must have cut its engines some way out and coasted silently in.

  “Put down your weapons!” The voice was round and echoing, as if it had come through a bullhorn, distant but somehow full at the same time. Andrews? It might have been. I couldn’t be sure, but I felt relief wash over me.

  Thank the gods. We will live out the night. All of us.

  “Stand where you are and raise your hands,” said the voice again. “This is the Bar-Selehm coast guard, and I say again, put down your weapons.”

  The unexpected appearance of the boat looming out of the fog cast a strange spell over the docks, paralyzing everyone. Then Barrington-Smythe called down to Richter.

  “Don’t listen to them!” he said. “Coast guard. War Office. Government agencies. The National party and their industry cronies. Collaborators in the great race war! They are all in it together. We stand guard over the evidence here or we go down fighting.”

  For the first time, Richter looked uncertain, even a little afraid, and I wondered with a surge of panic just how much of a hold he had over his primary attack dog. I remembered the night Darius had died, when Barrington-Smythe had come after me with his little pickax, glad of the chance to use it, and all the relief I had felt burned off like river mist under a hot sun. Richter shook his head.

  “Lay down your arms,” he said. “We have the evidence we need.”

  But I heard the whirring of a hand crank, saw the turret on the armored tractor turning in its crate.

  “Purify!” yelled Barrington-Smythe.

  The gun came to life in a blare of light and noise that cut the timber to ribbons as it rotated to face the coast guard vessel.

  CHAPTER

  34

  THE CHAOS WAS INSTANTANEOUS. I couldn’t see what was happening on the coast guard cutter, but around me people dropped to the ground or scuttled crablike for cover. Men grabbed weapons or flung them down and ran, and then came the whir and screech of bullets in the air as the coast guard returned fire. Amidst the noise and thickening smoke of the battle, I saw Constance wrenching at the hatch of the container truck, and I loped over to her, wresting the door open, so that its frightened, desperate contents spilled out. They ran too, and in the confusion, I turned to Constance and, for the first time, I saw the light of realization in her eyes.

  “Lady Misrai!” she gasped.

  It was absurd, and now, with gunfire careening off metal and stone and concrete, I would not waste an ounce of strength on pretense. Before I could say anything, I saw something in her face, a hazy desperation, like one transported into a nightmare.

  Or a memory.

  “It wasn’t me,” she gasped. “I told him to take it off his stupid wife, but I didn’t know…”

  She hesitated, and in that instant seemed to come back to herself, to this place and the real danger of gunfire all around us, and she was stricken with a new horror at what she had told me.

  “Go,” I said. “Take the children and go.”

  I seized the thin wrist of Aab as she blundered past and slapped it into Constance’s hand.

  Constance ran as best she could, hunched over, her long skirts trailing in the oil and coal dust, arms spread wide, herding the children back toward the warehouses.

  The Heritage men had turned their weapons on the coast guard, Richter behind them, drawing an ornate pistol from its holster. I hit him from behind, barreling into him, and bringing the butt of my own gun down hard across the back of his head. He landed face-first on the concrete, but any satisfaction that might have given me dissolved when two of his uniformed thugs rounded on me. One raised a shotgun, but just as he was about to shoot, one of the longshoremen leapt on him, brandish
ing a length of pipe.

  I scrambled to my feet, but shrank down again as the night was torn apart by the blast of the coast guard’s cannon. The remains of the crate around the armored tractor shattered in a hale of splinters and the tractor itself rocked free of its mooring, kicked sideways by the blast, even as its machine gun continued to fire its deadly stream of bullets. It tipped from the reinforced cargo platform, off balance and sliding under its own weight, so that for a moment, its weapon spewed fire wildly up into the furled sails and rigging, and then it was teetering on the very edge of the deck. Barrington-Smythe fought to get the machine gun under control and retargeted, but a second cannon blast slammed into the armored hulk, and it slewed over the stern, smashing the wooden rail. The Georgie May seemed to buckle slightly as part of its decking gave way, and then the armored tractor was turning inexorably over and down into the gap between ship and dock. Barrington-Smythe leapt free as it fell, but with a great turbid splash the deadly vehicle vanished under the black water.

  Barrington-Smythe landed on the dockside, knocking one of the rattled dragoons off his feet in the process, and came up running, laying about him with that miniature pick to clear the way. I didn’t know if he was just trying to escape or if he was looking to do some more spiteful and murderous mischief, but he went in the same direction as Constance and the children, so I went after him.

  In a handful of strides, we had left the lights of the harbor behind and were lost in the sour-smelling darkness of the warehouse alleys, where jerry-rigged rooflines, gables, elevator towers, and crane booms loomed jagged and erratic out of the night fog. Sound bounced hard off the brick walls but came wreathed and matted in smoke and river mist, so the footfalls I was trailing seemed like things heard underwater, soft but percussive, close and far way all at the same time. What little moonlight had softened the blackness at the harborside vanished utterly here, and I slowed against my will, hands outstretched, conscious of the worn irregularity of the cobbles under my boots. I turned left at the corner, listening hard, then right at the next, but I knew I was losing him, losing myself in the process.

  Catching the pearly glow of gaslight filtering around another corner, I made for it, pistol out in front of me like a talisman against the darkness. My sense of space had shrunk in on itself like a frightened rabbit, and I longed to be up on the roofs and gantries four stories above me. I glanced up, my eyes sucking in the merest hint of light like lips drawing in air, and as I did so, I thought I caught the black flash of movement, as if something or someone had leapt over the ginnel from one roof to another.

  A fishing bat? Perhaps. Some of them were very large when their wings were spread.

  My feet slowed still further, and that was bad. The children would be lost, or Barrington-Smythe would catch up to them, which would be worse.

  Unless that had been him above me? He had shown uncanny composure the first night we met, as if the possibility of falling had simply never occurred to him. At the time, I had assumed that meant he was an expert climber, but now I wondered if he just thought himself special, untouchable—and not merely because he had skills. He was the right hand of an anointed people, an angel of death, beyond the reach of those ordinary mortals he thought refuse, detritus to be burnt and purged away …

  “You,” he said, as though reading my thoughts.

  The gas lamp was still fifty yards away, a thin and inefficient lantern hanging over a warehouse door. Barrington-Smythe was between me and it, so he appeared only as a shadow, a smoke-edged silhouette, and the only part of him that wasn’t black was the miniature pickax, which sparkled like diamond as he held it away from his body. Like he was showing it to me. He had stepped out of an alcove in the wall where he had been waiting, and was only two long strides away.

  “I know you,” he said, musingly. He was quite still, and though I could not see them, I could feel his eyes burning into me, skewering me so that I could not move, a nyala under the predatory stare of a clavtar.

  I stabbed the muzzle of my pistol toward his chest and fired, but he was moving before the shot went off, peeling to the right and vanishing against the blackness of the wall before he came at me. I felt the sharp tang of the pick in my forearm, and the empty gun fell heavily to the cobbles. Crying out, I turned into the fight, swinging with my left fist, only to have him block it and hug me to him, a terrible, stifling action that overpowered me and threw me off balance. I fell back, and he came with me, his full weight driving me to the ground so that I gasped in wordless agony, incapable of anything as he reached for my face and snatched the scarf roughly away.

  “You!” he said again, but it was different this time. The first recognition had been about the night Darius had died: now he knew me for Lady Ki Misrai.

  It didn’t matter. His eyes glittered, hard as the pick in his hand, and I guessed he was smiling to himself. The pain had driven any bodily control I might have from me, but my arms and legs were pinned anyway. I could think of nothing to say, and that made no difference either. There was nothing to do but die, and not with dignity and peace. I would die full of rage and grief, hot and wholly ineffectual.

  I thought of the neutral mask and found an unlikely calm, a deliberation, but I had no weapon, no strategy, no strength left.

  He adjusted his position so that the lamp at the end of the alley touched him with silver light, and the pick flashed as he raised it above his head. I stared into his face, refusing to close my eyes, so I saw the sudden blackness that dropped from above before he did, saw the way it snatched at his hair, dragging his face up as if about to haul his entire body weight skyward, saw the flash of silver across his throat before the hot blood sprayed.

  I rolled and scrambled away in equal parts horror and relief, thrusting myself up against the far wall of the alley as the creature held him by the head for a moment, making sure, then let him slump to the ground, lifeless as the cobbles. I cringed away, feeling desperately for the fallen pistol, and the Gargoyle turned its bald head swiftly toward me, a snarl breaking from its awful lips. Its dreadful face was gray and patchy, hollow cheeked, but its strange, deep-set eyes found mine, and with a shock of recognition, I knew her.

  My sister Vestris stared at me, sucking in the night air, her eyes showing no more than a hyena might when caught on a kill, but I knew that this had been no random attack. She had been watching. Waiting.

  I stared, taking in the ruin of her once remarkable beauty, and even though I knew that ruin had been my fault and that she had tried to kill me more than once, I felt no threat from her now. She looked at me, still and impassive as one of the actual gargoyles that braved the smog from the cornice of the trade exchange, and then she was folding the razor into its handle with long, bony fingers.

  I tried to say her name, but my lips could produce no sound, and when I did manage to speak, I could frame only a single word.

  “Why?”

  My sister’s strange, blank eyes flickered, and her mouth opened. The inside was black, and when she spoke, the words were strange, furred and liquid as if she had lost most of her teeth.

  “Atonement,” she said.

  I stared at her in bewildered horror as the word echoed through my head, casting uncertain light on another dark corner, another bleeding corpse.

  Don’t be too hard on her.…

  I thought of my sister when we had fought over the stage of the opera house, when she had been wearing the neutral mask.

  “You trained with Madame Nahreem,” I said.

  The name seemed to arrest something in her face, stilling her as she was about to flee, and for a moment, it was like she had fallen into the past and was trying to find something that had once been important. When she could see me again, her eyes were lit by that animal fierceness and instinct, so that for a second I was almost too afraid of her to realize that she had nodded.

  “Why did you leave her?” I tried.

  She blinked, and her mouth creased slightly, so that for the briefest of moments I
could almost see my beautiful sister as she had once been, smiling her elegant, knowing smile.

  “I was never good at being … neutral,” she said.

  “You knew Namud,” I said.

  The smile, if it had been there, was gone now. Looking into Vestris’s ravaged face was like beholding a blasted landscape after some terrible flood had subsided. It was an island of bones. She said nothing, and I knew she would stay with me only seconds more.

  “He told me that Madame Nahreem also sought atonement,” I said. “What for?”

  The barren sadness melted from my sister’s hollow eyes, driven by a heat like the heart of a furnace when the bellows blow, white and all-consuming. It was terrible to look upon.

  “Ask her,” she said.

  And suddenly she was away, leaping like an antelope down the alley and up the wall, sure-handedly pulling herself up on pipes and lintels and the broken irregularities that were a steeplejack’s salvation. At the top she looked down to where I still lay motionless, disbelieving. Then she was gone.

  CHAPTER

  35

  “I DON’T THINK MARKESON meant to kill his wife,” I said to Inspector Andrews. “Connie told him to take the shawl from her, but—”

  “Connie?” Willinghouse said sharply.

  “Constance Horritch,” I said. “Agatha was drawing attention to the shawl, and Connie told Markeson to take it from her. I think he was already angry with her and that they argued about Miss Farthingale. They were overheard by the servants. If I had to guess, I’d say that he snatched the shawl from her shoulders in the hallway outside my room. She was wearing new shoes with very high heels, not designed for a lady of her age: a response, perhaps, to her husband’s admiration of the lovely Miss Farthingale. As he took the shawl from her, she fought back, overbalanced, broke her heel, and hit her head on the stone plinth of a floral arrangement when she fell. I smelled the blood on my fingers shortly after touching it. I think he panicked, put the body in my room because it was handy and his key opened it, and then went to join the others, taking the shawl with him. Probably burned it later. Horritch was furious, of course, thought he’d risked drawing attention to the one thing Richter and the Grappoli didn’t have: the fabric that they used for the machine gun belts, without which their guns were useless.”