A Novel

by A. J. Hartley

  Up there in the roof, I could feel the tension, the menace, as if it were drifting up to me on the cigar smoke.

  The Westsiders spread out, creating a wide circle around Fevel and the box, but the conversation, when it started, was so low that I couldn’t catch what was said. One of them threw a bag of coins to the floor at Fevel’s feet, but he did not move from his seat, waiting instead for one of the boys to stoop to it, check it, and pronounce it acceptable. It was only when the boy tipped his face up to speak that I realized who it was.

  Tanish.

  I gasped and began, against all reason, all judgment, to get to my feet. A sudden hollowness gripped my stomach, and my chest and throat tightened, as if some great vise were crushing the air from my body. I hadn’t thought they would involve him in this, hadn’t thought they trusted him. He had probably asked for the job to prove his loyalty.

  Stupid, I thought. Both of us. I should have seen this coming.

  And in that instant, I caught a flicker of movement, not down on the warehouse floor but from the observation booth in the roof. Someone had raised the blind carefully, and I could see two figures working by the light of a dim oil lamp: two uniformed figures and a piece of equipment with a hopper and a long, hefty barrel like a sawn log.

  I stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, catching the chink of metal as one of the men in the booth upended a bag into the hopper and the other took hold of a pair of handles, so that he sat like a mantis, aiming the barrel down in the warehouse.

  It can’t be.

  I had never seen one before, but I recognized the machine gun for what it was moments before it opened up with a blaze of flame and a stream of deafening bangs.

  I leapt to my feet, shouting at Tanish to get down, that it was a trap, but my words were lost in the chaos as the bullets rained down. All the muted panic and anxiety were swept away as everyone down below ran for cover and returned fire. The machine gun didn’t stop, its huge barrel revolving with each shot, each yard-long spurt of fire, and I knew what I had to do.

  No one down below could stop it. I drew my pistol and ran toward the shuttered window.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam went the relentless machine gun, splintering crates, carving up the concrete, punching through corrugated metal. And flesh.

  I heard the screams.

  Tanish …

  I sighted along the hexagonal barrel of my revolver toward the shadowy figure who was turning the machine gun’s crank, and fired. The gun almost kicked out of my hand, but I held on to it, drew back the hammer, and fired again. The report was deafening and fire seemed to flash out of the side of the cylinder as well as from the muzzle, but I had just enough composure to move through the smoke, cocking the pistol and aim afresh before squeezing the trigger a third time.

  The gunner—who was wearing the silver and navy of a policeman—slumped to one side, clutching his shoulder, and his companion snatched the handle from him, dragging the barrel of the weapon up and around toward me, still spewing fire and noise all along its deadly arc, perforating the metal walls and roof as he tried to get me in his sights.

  I fired twice more, pulling the hammer feverishly back after each shot, then again, and again, shooting blindly into the smoke, driven by fear and horror until I realized the empty pistol was clicking over and over.

  But the machine gun had fallen silent.

  For a moment, I clung to the rail as the gantry swam. My stomach felt like iron but was somehow moving—cold but molten—and I sank to my knees, sweat running down my face, unable to breathe.

  Below me, Andrews and his men cannoned in, weapons raised, hunched over as they advanced into the warehouse. Andrews shouted orders, but the sound echoed oddly, and I could not hear the words. Then came the blare and flash of a shotgun, and suddenly, it was a chaos of running and shouting and gunfire.

  There were bodies on the ground.

  One of the Westsiders drew a pistol and fired twice at the policemen before rushing toward the back door. He reached it as it blew open, crashing against the wall, and more police came through. He fired again, and I heard a shout of pain before a barrage of gunfire cut him down where he stood.

  I forced myself to get to my feet, fighting back nausea and dizziness, staggering along the catwalk to the metal stairs, wincing as bullets sang and whined through the stuffy, smoke-laden air. Somewhere a shower of shotgun pellets rained down on metal, and up ahead, the gantry sparked as a stray round skipped off it.

  But I had to get to Tanish, who was down there in the middle of it all. There was more shouting, another cannonade back and forth, and the slap of bullets into wood, then two more shots, and suddenly, amazingly, nothing.

  My ears rang, but I kept moving, half falling down the metal steps and into the cover of the stacked crates, where one of the policemen was sitting on the ground, nursing his bleeding arm. Andrews was shouting again, and in the unearthly glow of the gas lamp and the fog of gunsmoke, I could see people with their hands raised as the police closed in, weapons still up and level.

  I ran drunkenly to the light, hands shaking, almost blind with the horror of what had happened, what I had done, and what I might find.

  Tanish was sitting on the ground, his back to the trunk. Ignoring Andrews’s shout to stay back, I ran to him, dropped, and folded him in a crushing embrace, pressing his cheek to mine.

  “It’s all right, Tanish,” I babbled, pulling him to me. “It’s over now.”

  Police officers were swarming all over the place. Two of Deveril’s men were dead or badly hurt. Fevel too. Whoever had been operating that machine gun hadn’t cared which gang they hit.

  “What the hell was that?” exclaimed Andrews, who was dragging a wounded Deveril—his top hat battered but still on his head—out into the light.

  “Ambush, sir,” said one of the officers. “Someone wanted them all wiped out.”

  “And with military-grade hardware and police uniforms,” spat Andrews. “When I study that machine gun, am I going to find that it’s gone missing from storage belonging to the Glorious Third?”

  Deveril shrugged, wincing at the wound in his right arm as he did so. “What can I tell you?” he said. “Seems I have enemies in high places.” He chose the words carefully, and for a moment, his gaze fell on me.

  “Well, gentlemen,” said Willinghouse, appearing beside the crate with Von Strahden. I guess I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t obeyed Andrews’s orders to keep clear. Both men were wearing the smoked glasses worn by luxorite dealers. “Shall we see what someone was so desperate to recover?”

  Andrews stepped back, and one of the policemen flipped the hasps on the crate and pulled the lid open.

  I flinched instinctively, and I don’t think I was the only one, but there was no explosion of light from within, just a large and shapeless mass wrapped in oilskin. Andrews stooped to help, and together they lifted the package out and onto the warehouse floor. The policeman unfastened some lacing, then flapped the fabric open so that it spilled its contents.

  Still no luxorite glare, and for a moment, I could only stare in baffled dismay. The oilskin contained perhaps twenty roughly conical objects that curved toward the tip. They were about two feet long and hard, the bases ragged and stained with what looked like blood. I continued to gape, but could make no sense of what I was seeing till Andrews, his head in his hands so that his mouth was muffled and the words came out low and indistinct, spoke.

  “Rhino horn.”

  There was a stunned silence.

  Overcome with a new wave of nausea, I started to get to my feet, but as Tanish began to slump, I caught him in my arms again.

  “Hey,” I said. “Come on, Tanish. Stand up.”

  He did not respond. He felt unnaturally heavy.

  “Tanish?” I said.

  But the boy did not move. Had not moved.

  No.

  One of my hands was wet and sticky.

  “Hummingbird?”

  Still nothing. />
  No.

  I pulled back to look at him properly, and it was only then that I saw the dark pool beneath him, silvery in the eerie glow of the gas lamp. I stared, speechless, feeling his blood run through my fingers, and then I was rocking him again, violently now, desperately, and someone was screaming.

  The doors to my heart, the dam I had fought so hard to keep closed, had broken at last.

  CHAPTER

  33

  POACHING THE GREAT BEASTS of the savannah was an old Feldesland problem, but it was only recently that it had become a major business concern, ivory and horn commanding astronomical prices on the Grappoli market and elsewhere where the great beasts were exotic, even magical. Once last year, some kids had come upon a one-horn stumbling about on the edge of the Drowning. She was blind and crippled by rifle fire but had somehow got back on her feet even after the poachers had sawed off her horn. She blundered around for a while, bleeding heavily, mad from the pain, and eventually collapsed down by the river. It took another two hours for her to die.

  What the poachers took was sold as trophy art or ground into “medicine” overseas. The barbarism of it all, the pointlessness, sickened me, but then, in the stony silence of the police carriage, I had other reasons for that.

  The dam had burst, and I was swept away by what came through.

  I held Tanish’s body for a long time, and crying seemed to drain me of strength and will, so that I was only partly in the world. The rest of me was nowhere, was nothing, and my sense of what was happening around me was muted, my vision blurred by more than tears, sound echoing faintly, as if coming through fog from a great distance.

  Andrews had roared and cursed and said he had been a fool for listening to some slip of a Lani girl, and how was he supposed to look the prime minister in the eye after this fiasco? Von Strahden tried to say that the smuggling bust was a significant achievement, but Andrews told him that no one cared about a few one-horns. We had nothing on Morlak, on Mandel, on Gritt. Nothing at all. It had all been a waste of time.

  “I was sure it would be the Beacon,” said Von Strahden, speaking as if in a daze.

  “The Beacon!” sneered Andrews darkly. “I suspect that the next people to see the Beacon will be Grappoli troops who dig it out of the rubble of what was Bar-Selehm.”

  The two machine gunners were not merely costumed gang members. They were junior police officers from the Fourth Precinct, though who had ordered them to join the operation—if anyone—no one knew. Someone had, presumably, given them the hardware and told them to cut down whoever showed up in the warehouse. They had no interest in the crate and were there—Andrews said—to clean up loose ends. We would never know who hired them because both gunners were dead.

  I had done that. I had killed two men whose names I didn’t know, whose faces I never saw. I had done it to save Tanish, and I had failed.

  Willinghouse said nothing, just watched me, his eyes hooded, even when the stretcher bearers came to take Tanish away from me. I leaned into his shoulder, staining his clothes with Tanish’s blood, crying as I have never cried for anything before, not even Papa, so that I was not Anglet Sutonga anymore. I was a screaming, writhing, desperate animal of grief and guilt and horror, and it was only Willinghouse’s grip on my shoulders that stopped me from flying into madness.

  “Shh,” he whispered. “I will see that he gets the best doctors in the city. He is not dead yet. We will do everything we can. You have my word.”

  * * *

  THE POLICE WENT TO PICK up Morlak, but he denied any knowledge of the deal, suggesting this was a sideline operated by Fevel and some of the other boys. There was nothing to connect him to either the poachers or the smugglers for whom he had been the middleman, and Andrews—already humbled by his shamefaced report to the prime minister—said they did not have enough even for a search warrant. If Morlak had the Beacon hidden away in the shed, it would likely stay there for the foreseeable future.

  Not that I cared. They told me, and I heard, but that was all. I sat at Tanish’s bedside, holding his hand, reading him the story of the cloud forest, the one we always read together, the one Vestris had once read to me, and I spoke to no one else. He just lay there, small and frail, still and silent.

  “Sorry,” I whispered through tears. “I’m so sorry, hummingbird. I would have taken you with me.”

  Willinghouse said I should go home and rest, that he would sit with Tanish in my place, but I didn’t respond.

  Home.

  What did that even mean? His home, I suppose he meant, as if I were living there now, their pet steeplejack. No. That was not my home. But then neither was the Drowning. I hated to admit it, but in my heart, home was the weaving shed on Seventh Street, bleak and miserable though it was, because for the better part of a decade, it had been mine, though I could never go back there again.

  Morlak. Everything came back to Morlak. I couldn’t connect all the pieces, but he was at the heart of everything, like a spider in his web, and somehow, in spite of the stolen Beacon, and the fort, in spite of Berrit, Ansveld, and the Mahweni herder, in spite even of Tanish, who lay huddled on the bed in front of me inches from death, Morlak was free and likely to stay that way. The police wouldn’t even search his place because he was, in the eyes of the law, a fine, upstanding citizen.…

  I stared at Tanish, tears streaming down my hot face.

  “I have to go now, hummingbird,” I whispered, squeezing his tiny hand. “I’ll come back. Unless they kill me, I’ll come back. I promise. But there’s something I have to do.”

  The police couldn’t do it, but I, as Andrews and Willinghouse had pointed out so many times, was not police.

  * * *

  I STUDIED THE LINE of the shed roof where it met the tower and chimney stack. It was a smooth red brick that gave no climbing purchase, but there were drainpipes, and in places there were rungs set into the wall. Two of the lower windows had been bricked up years ago, but the top one was shuttered, and I could see how to get to it, though it would take nerve.

  Nerve, I had. Nerve and fire. When the dam broke, more than grief gushed out, and some of what came slicing through those awful waters had teeth.

  I watched a jackal prowl along the street, its sleek body low to the ground, its ears pricked, and as it rounded the corner and trotted out of sight, I moved.

  After shinning up the downspout to the roof of the shed, I picked my way softly over the slates, moving almost on all fours, low and swift like the jackal. At the point where the blockish tower reared up from the shed, I squatted, listening. The city was as quiet as it would ever get. Somewhere down Bell Street, I could hear the distant clank of machinery as the night shift worked on, and there was an occasional boom from the foghorn at the river mouth, but otherwise the night was still.

  There were rungs set into the tower wall, though they had probably not been used since the weavers left, and they were rusted and flaking. I took hold of one, tested it, and pulled myself up. I climbed swiftly till I was forty feet above the roof of the shed, then paused. Higher up, the rungs led to the roof, where the old winding gear had been, but the shuttered window to Morlak’s treasure house was on the other side of the tower. A ledge ran around to the window. It was a single brick wide.

  I took a breath, then stepped out onto the ledge, my back to the tower and all my weight on my heels. I kept my arms beside me, palms flat to the wall, back slightly arched so that my shoulders brushed up against the brick. I did not look down, not because I was afraid of the height, but because tipping my head might throw off my equilibrium. Right now, I was afraid of nothing. I edged a few inches at a time, out into the night.

  I hesitated at the corner, feeling my way around, thinking of nothing but Tanish’s face.

  Three more feet and I was at the window aperture. I felt the timber of the shutter and the simple iron hook hinges and taking hold of them, pivoted briskly to face the wall. Death waited, hard and hungry on the cobbles below, but I disappointed him.
My mind and fingers probed for the crack between the shutters, then I reached into the satchel, which had lately doubled as a cradle but was now just a tool bag again. I produced a slim and serrated metal blade on a wooden handle. I slipped it through the crack near the top, guiding it down till I found the restraining bolt.

  But there was no need. The shutters were not closed properly, and the haft for the bolt had been cut. Puzzled, I put the saw away, wrenched the uneven shutters apart, and climbed through.

  The night was moonless, and if there were stars, you could not see them through the smog, so the room was utterly dark even with the window open. I paused, feeling my heart starting to thud against my ribs. I had felt no fear perching birdlike on the tower ledge, but being inside it stirred an old dread.

  Morlak.

  He would be downstairs, sleeping, perhaps still incapable of coming up to catch me, but I felt his presence like a foul and poisonous odor.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, filling my chest, holding it in my lungs for a moment, before blowing it softly out. I did it again, and felt my heart steady a little. I dragged the shutters closed so that anyone who happened to look up from the street would see nothing amiss. They snagged and squeaked, as if out of alignment, but I got them shut.

  I took a stick of candle and a metal box with a close-fitting lid from my satchel, drawing from it a single phosphorous match, which I struck on the brick of the windowsill. The match popped and flared white then yellow as the wooden stick took hold. I lit the candle and shook the match out, taking in the room by the uneven light.

  It was a cramped space, the walls crudely plastered, just big enough for an untidy bed, a chair, and in the corner, a chest with a heavy padlock.

  Easy.

  I squatted down, set the candle in a hardening puddle of its own wax, and got to work with the hacksaw.

  But this too had been cut. I dragged the lid open and peered in.

  The inside of the trunk was divided into two latched compartments. I opened the one on the left and rummaged through books, ledgers, and files before reaching a bundle of pound notes, a bag of coins, and several small pouches of gold and rough-cut stones.