A Novel

by A. J. Hartley

  “Excellency,” said Emtezu with a nod that was almost a bow.

  “And you have brought a guest,” he added, turning to me. “And such a pretty one. What is your name, child?”

  “I am Anglet Sutonga,” I said. I almost added “Excellency,” as Emtezu had done, but the word felt strange in my mouth, so I simply lowered my eyes.

  “Perhaps we should converse alone,” said Sohwetti to Emtezu. “If the lady would not mind. For a moment.”

  “That is not necessary,” said Emtezu. “It’s her you need to speak to.”

  Sohwetti hesitated, and for a moment I was sure he was displeased, but the smile never went away, and when he turned it upon me, it seemed genuine again. He took a couple of long, ponderous steps, lowered himself into a thronelike chair beside a desk and nodded. “Very well, child,” he said, his voice low but still booming, like barrels rolling in a cellar. “What have you to tell me?”

  I was confused and embarrassed. What I had to say, insofar as I had anything to say, concerned land deals on which this man had signed off. Unless the signature was forged, I had nothing to tell him that he did not already know. I gave Emtezu an appealing look, but he just nodded encouragingly.

  So I told him about the body in the tower and my idea that it might be spite at the handoff of the fort, and he listened gravely as Emtezu nodded along, as if in time to a tune he already knew.

  When I was done he added, as if it were an afterthought, “And tell him about the land deals.”

  Sohwetti looked up, and his eyes moved from the corporal to me very slowly. His hands became unnaturally still.

  “It’s all public record,” I ventured in a small voice. “I’ve seen nothing that isn’t open to anyone who looks in the right places and connects the pieces.”

  “What have you seen, child?” asked Sohwetti. His voice was calm, even soothing, but it didn’t make me feel better.

  “Maps,” I said dully. “Charts of land parcels. Letters of agreement. Contracts issued by Future Holdings and signed—”

  “I see,” said Sohwetti, interrupting. “Yes.”

  He rose and turned to the desk so that for a moment I could not see his face. I felt a curious, thoughtful stillness about the man, although when he turned round again, he was his usual, beaming self.

  “I know what you are referring to,” he said. “A small matter we did not think worthy of attention, but your curiosity—and your dedication, Corporal Emtezu—suggest that we may have miscalculated, and for that I thank you. We can resolve the matter publicly before anyone gets, as they say, the wrong idea.” The smile bloomed again, showing white, even teeth.

  “And the dead herder?” asked Emtezu.

  “That is most serious,” said Sohwetti. “I will follow the police investigation closely, publicly if necessary, and if it seems that it is being swept under the Glorious Third’s rug, as it were, I will bring the matter to the council itself. Times have changed. Some of our northern brethren have been reluctant to accept this fact, but if they think they can torture and kill our citizens because they have lost a thimbleful of their power, they are deeply and tragically mistaken. We will bring the wrath of eight hells down upon them.”

  His voice had swelled and his face darkened as he spoke, but now he breathed again, shrugging off his stately passion. When he smiled, he seemed ordinary.

  “This has been most helpful to me and to the Mahweni Nation,” he said. “I am in your debt, Corporal.” He took the younger man’s hand once more, clasped it, then made a fractional turn, which presented Emtezu with the door.

  “And there is nothing else I can do, Excellency?” he asked.

  “Nothing at all,” said Sohwetti genially. “I will see that my carriage gets you back into the city.”

  Emtezu bowed, took a step toward the door, then glanced back to where I had begun to get to my feet.

  “But Miss Sutonga has not enjoyed my hospitality before,” said Sohwetti. “She should stay here awhile.”

  “I need to get back to work,” I said.

  “Nonsense.” Sohwetti smiled, flicking the notion away with his fly stick. “I won’t hear of it. I will treat you to a true Mahweni banquet. You have never had the like, I guarantee it. I will show you the estate personally and see to it that you get back home safely this evening.”

  I hesitated. Emtezu was lingering in the doorway, one hand on the knob, looking back at me unreadably.

  “I really can’t stay, Your Excellency,” I said, trying for politeness. “My employers will be worried.”

  “I will send word of your whereabouts to assuage their anxieties,” he said, magnanimous in his certainty. “I would take it as an affront if you were to decline.” He made a mock show of offense, though the smile crept back into place like a jackal stealing into an untended kitchen.

  I gave Emtezu a last, uncertain look, but knew he could do nothing without upsetting the great man for no real reason. A moment later, he was bowing his way out, leaving me alone with Sohwetti.

  “Sit,” he said, doing so himself. He said it almost casually, but the smile was gone. He took a long breath and reached for a silver box on the desk beside him. He opened it, took something, and pushed the box toward me.

  “Help yourself,” he said. “Dried cadmium grapes. Sweet and tart. They are a small addiction of mine. Quite harmless, I believe, but it bothers me nonetheless, feeling like a slave to my body’s cravings. Do you ever feel that, Miss Sutonga, that you are not completely in control of your own life?”

  “I’ve never felt otherwise,” I said.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I used to feel that way,” he said, as if we were old friends at the end of a long evening’s catching up. “Long ago. I used to feel powerless in the face of all I could not do because the world had taken from me what should have been mine. And not just mine. My whole people’s. Robbed by diplomats whose friends had better weapons.”

  He smiled again as broad as before, but bleak now. He chewed one of the dried grapes reflectively.

  “It is a terrible thing, not to be in control of your own life,” he concluded.

  “It’s just how things are,” I said.

  “Really?” he said, genuinely interested. “You think so? And yet here I am, in this house, a man of power and influence because I chose to make it so, while you are … what? Not a reporter, that is for sure. Those cuts on your face are recent. So you are … what? A detective? A spy? Working for who? The Grappoli?”

  His confusion seemed real, but his manner was somber, and it made me uneasy. I thought of Emtezu, wishing—despite the manner in which he had brought me here—that he had not gone, and I realized his mistake. The news he had wanted me to bring was about the outrage represented by the dead Mahweni herder in the ruins of the tower. He had wanted me to bring this to Sohwetti as evidence of racial atrocity perpetrated by men in the Glorious Third, something to be exposed and punished. But Sohwetti wasn’t interested in that. Not really. He was interested in the land deals, and not because he hadn’t known about them.

  The house was utterly silent. I could hear no voices, no distant birdcalls. We were deep in the heart of the building. If I were to run, I would have to go through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors before I made it outside, where armed men and big cats with spiked collars patrolled the grounds.…

  Sohwetti was still watching me, waiting for me to answer his question about who I was working for. His eyes were attentive, almost predatory in their focus, and I understood that whatever danger I was in could be held off so long as he thought I had important information. How he might opt to extract it, I did not dare consider.

  “I have … connections,” I said. “But I am working for myself.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Investigating.”

  “Come now, Miss Sutonga,” he said, suddenly brusque. “Do not play games with me. I do not have time for such things. What are you investigating?”

  “Partly,” I said, watching him carefully,
“the disappearance of the Beacon.”

  He leaned forward fractionally, and his eyes contracted. “A strange occurrence indeed,” he said, giving nothing away. “Was it the Grappoli?”

  “I have found nothing to suggest so.”

  “That is my feeling too,” he said. “Though I fear that truth alone will not save us. But you said ‘partly.’ What else are you exploring?”

  “The death of a Lani boy called Berrit,” I said simply.

  His confusion seemed to deepen. He was either a skillful actor or had no knowledge of either matter. It was unsettling.

  “Who is this boy?” he asked.

  “Nobody,” I said, and even here, when things might go so very badly, the sadness of that truth pained me. “Just a boy who got in the way of other people’s plans and got killed.”

  “I know nothing of any dead Lani boy,” he said.

  “But you know about the land deals with Future Holdings,” I said. “You signed the deeds yourself.”

  He smiled again, smaller this time, and there was something in the look that spoke of weariness and regret. “Yes,” he said. “Those I know about. I wish to the gods that you did not. I wish that our worthy corporal had not thought to bring you to me.”

  “Why did he?” I asked, pressing for time to think. “He didn’t know about the land deals. He didn’t know you were involved. I expect he thought you had been cheated or deceived by enemies of the Mahweni people.”

  He nodded sadly. “Corporal Emtezu is alert to enemies of the Mahweni,” he said. “It is his passion and his secondary occupation.”

  I gave a sigh of understanding. “You pay him to inform on race issues within the military,” I said.

  “Actually, he does it for free,” said Sohwetti. “I offered him money, but he declined it, said it was a matter of principle. He considers himself a”—he smiled at the word—“‘watchdog.’ And there is a great deal to watch. We say we are all equal in Bar-Selehm, but you know as well as I do that that is not even close to being true. You cannot simply take people’s land, property, freedom from them and then, a couple of hundred years later, when you have built up your industries and your schools and your armies, pronounce them equals. And even when you pretend it is true, you do not change the hearts of men, and a great deal of small horrors have to be ignored, hidden, if the myth of equality is to be sustained.”

  It was, I suspected, a familiar speech for him, though he believed it still.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I am sure you do. The Lani have never organized as we have and they never had anything to barter, being themselves outsiders. So yes, I am sure you understand. Corporal Emtezu is, for the most part, focused on the smaller crimes, those little lingering uglinesses that people perpetrate when the world around them changes faster than they would like.”

  “Like the imprisonment, torture, and murder of a Mahweni herder who had the misfortune to meet up with some old-fashioned soldiers?” I said carefully.

  He sat back then, looking me up and down with something like respect, though it was colored by a resignation that drained him of the energy he normally conveyed. “Precisely like that,” he said, “yes.”

  “So he gathers evidence against his superiors,” I said, “channeling it through you and the council you represent.”

  “I have a voice in government,” said Sohwetti, drawing himself up. “I may not have the ear of the prime minister like some of my white colleagues, but I am a man of influence and I do my best to use it for my people.”

  “But you also feather your own nest at your people’s expense,” I said, once more amazed by my own self-possession. “Secretly selling off their land, their birthright, despite the fact that they have clung to that land against the very men Emtezu is trying to expose.”

  “The two matters are unrelated,” said Sohwetti, flicking his fly stick, color rising in his cheeks. “The casual murder of a stray Mahweni is a tragedy that has been played month after hellish month in and around this city since before your grandparents were born! The selling of land, land which—for the most part—my people cannot use, is a completely separate matter. The tribes will benefit directly from those sales. They will see profits they would never have gotten from grazing on that worthless scrub. It is no more than a few square miles of dirt and rock. If the truth were known, the only reason the white men did not take it from us before was because it has no value!”

  “So why the sudden interest?”

  “I do not know,” he said, “and it does not matter.”

  “Is it about the Grappoli?” I asked, desperate to keep him talking.

  He shook his head. “If we go to war with the Grappoli, the city will be in ruins long before they get here,” he said sadly. “I will have no hand in that. My duty to my people will be to keep all possible peaces. To do so, there must, alas, be sacrifices. You should not have come here. You have forced my hand most unfortunately.”

  “It will all come out sooner or later anyway,” I said. “Silencing me won’t make any difference. The Unassimilated Tribes already know about the sales. What does keeping it quiet in the city for a few more days buy you?”

  “The Unassimilated Tribes know we are discussing land transactions,” said Sohwetti carefully. “They do not know that they have already happened.”

  I stared at him, horrified, and very slowly, he nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am sorry. I thought I would be able to change the council’s minds, and in time I am sure I would, but my buyers were impatient. Insistent. They wanted the land now or not at all. I just need a few more days of silence, time to talk the council ’round, after which we will announce the sale and no one will be any the wiser. The results would be the same. Only the date on some paper no one will ever look at will be wrong, and not by much. A clerical error, perhaps. Or it would have been, before you.”

  “I’ll say nothing,” I said, fear taking hold. “I promise. I’ll tell no one.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I am weary of this conversation and must take time to consider my choices. Excuse me, Miss Sutonga,” he said, getting to his feet. “You seem like an intelligent and interesting young lady. I wish with all my heart that we had never met.”

  And with that he left, locking the door behind him.

  CHAPTER

  29

  I BLINKED, AND THE tears that had clung to my eyes broke through and ran down my face. He wouldn’t come back. Not Sohwetti himself. I was sure of it. Some nameless guard would come to get me, bind my hands, and shuttle me somewhere quiet and removed. Maybe they would just do it here, then dump my body in the ocean. There was a spot not far from here—Tanuga Point—famed for the yellow-finned sharks that haunted the bay. It had been, in the old days, a place of execution, first for some of the Mahweni tribes, then for the northern Feldeslanders, because it was safe to assume that corpses tossed into the water there would be shredded in minutes. No grave, no inconvenient bodies washing ashore to be venerated as political martyrs. To enter the water at Tanuga Point was to go through the great meat grinder of the world, and what emerged was as close to nothing as made no difference.

  I could brandish Willinghouse’s name. Or Vestris’s. Both had power and influence, albeit of different kinds, and both would come to my aid if I could reach them. But their worlds were not Sohwetti’s, and their names alone would not save me here.

  You have to get out.

  That meant forcing the door, since we were in the core of the house and there were no windows … or using the chimney. I considered the fireplace, wiping my tears away and tying my hair back. I doubted it would take Sohwetti long to wrestle with his conscience and find a willing henchman. It didn’t sound like the dead herder in the remains of the Red Fort tower was anything to do with him, but I would be a fool to think he had never been responsible for bloodshed. His manner when he left was downcast, sad even, but not horrified, not appalled by what he was considering. Sohwetti, like many a politician be
fore him, was resigned to expediency.

  I snatched up the satchel Emtezu had left behind, pulled its strap over my head, and climbed into the hearth, which showed no sign of recent use. Leaning against the sooty black wall, I looked up. There was an iron damper in the shaft, and I pulled the lever to open it. The opening was narrow and the chimney beyond it utterly lightless, which meant it twisted and turned on its way up.

  I remembered my first days in the Seventh Street gang, when I had still been small enough to serve as a chimney sweep for the big houses. Sometimes it was just a matter of shoving a long-handled pole with a brush on the top up the shaft, but in the older houses, especially where there were multiple fireplaces, the chimneys would meander and intersect, narrowing as their walls got caked with old bird nests, masonry shards, and accumulated soot. If the house used a lot of wood, there would be resinous tar that could burn for hours if ignited, and which had to be scraped off with chisels. Angles were tight and the shafts contracted unexpectedly in the blackness, so that getting stuck was a real danger. That had happened once to a boy called Micah. They say he died of fear, and because the owner didn’t want to cut half the wall away to get the body out, they lit all the fires in the house, even though it was the middle of summer. I don’t know if it was true, but I heard that for months afterwards, the remains of his blackened bones continued to tumble down into the grate every time the south wind blew.

  Lani children everywhere I turned. Kalla and Berrit, Tanish and me, crammed into the darkness, out of sight, forgotten, burned up like so much trash.…

  Stop it.

  I squeezed the doors in my head closed again, locking out the rising tide.

  At least inside the chimney I would be safe for a while from Sohwetti and his men, none of whom would be able to follow me up.

  I worked my hands in through the damper, then my head. It was funny how it all came back, the childish thrill, the dread of the dark and the spiders. I was used to high places, out there in the sky where you could breathe, where you could see what you were doing, but this, the blackness, the closeness and cinder reek of the air, the tightness of the space where the bricks pressed in on shoulders, arms, legs, belly, chest, and head all at the same time, like you were in a long, upright coffin, this was different.