No luxorite.
I opened the second compartment. It contained a single hessian bag twice the size of my satchel. I pulled on the drawstring neck and opened it. Inside was something shapeless and wrinkled, cool to the touch like metal but yielding to pressure: a dull gray foil. I lifted it out onto the chamber floor and began to unwrap the stiff folds. The object inside was roughly spherical, no bigger than a couple of loaves of bread, but heavy as stone.
I peeled back the metal foil and recoiled from a light more brilliant than anything I had ever seen.
For a second, it was as if the tower room had exploded, but silently, the blaze of yellow-white glare causing every object in the chamber, every splinter of the floor, and every irregularity of the plastered walls to cast hard, leaping shadows. Even with my eyes closed and head twisted away, I felt its pale burning presence, and the inside of my eyelids glowed red.
At last, I thought as I fumbled blindly to re-cover it.
My mind reeled with dizzying exhilaration. I had always known it had been Morlak, and if I acted fast, I could lead Andrews right to him. My heart thrilled to the idea, though I knew it was a poor revenge for Berrit and Tanish even if it was justice as far as the law allowed.
But even there in my one moment of glory, doubt leached my certainty. I thought of the old Mahweni, of Gritt, and the strange, greenish luxorite that had appeared before the Beacon went missing.
Stop, I told myself. Morlak is guilty. You’ve seen the proof. The rest will make sense later.…
I stood there, immobile, paralyzed by a sudden uncertainty, and my eyes fell on the crack between the shutters whose lock had been so expertly cut. I thought of Morlak’s wound, the injury I gave him that had kept him largely immobilized. He could not have brought the Beacon here himself the night it was stolen because he was out drinking and didn’t roll in till morning. And from the moment I fought with him, he had been able to walk—just—but not to climb the tower. Tanish had said so.
And now the voice in my head shifted, became not the mouthpiece of surety and decision, but of doubt and unease.
So what if he didn’t bring it here? What if someone else, someone with the climbing skills to take it in the first place, scaled the tower after you had so conveniently wounded him, forced their way in, planted it here to implicate him? He hasn’t been up since. He might not even know it is here.…
Why would anyone do that, though? Why would someone steal something of such value only to point the finger at someone else?
Because they hated him so deeply? Or because they wanted the city looking in the wrong direction while an entirely different crime was perpetrated, a crime that would lead to war, devastation, and the restructuring of the entire continent?
I considered this, and suddenly it felt as if I were sinking into deep cold water. I had been sure it was all about Morlak because I hated him and wanted him to be responsible so that he could be punished for all he was, but now I was not so sure. The Beacon was so big, so bright, it had seemed that it must be the center of everything that had happened, but in the chill, dark hollow of my gut, I knew this wasn’t true.
It wasn’t about the Beacon. It never had been. I had been wrong. Again. I thought of Berrit; of Billy Jennings, the incompetent pickpocket who had made the mistake of trying to help me; of Tanish, my hummingbird apprentice—and the scale of my failure closed over me like drowning.
Not now. You have to go.
Clumsily, I thrust the Beacon back into the hessian sack and latched the compartment. After the brightness of the light, I could see almost nothing. Hands unsteady, I closed the trunk and scraped up the spilled candle wax. I had just gotten to my feet, ready to make my exit, when I heard the tower stairs creak.
It seemed I had not been so quiet as I thought.
I froze, heart in my throat, listening as the sound came again. This time it was accompanied by something between a grunt and a sigh. A human noise. A big man laboring.
Morlak.
I moved for the window, shoving at the shutters, but one would open only a few inches, and the other wouldn’t move at all. Something I had done when I forced them open—or something that was done by whoever had broken in last time—had jammed them.
I couldn’t get out.
CHAPTER
34
I MOVED QUICKLY TO the corner with my satchel of tools, flattening myself against the cracked plaster as the door flew open.
The floor was suddenly lit by a soft, filtered glow. An oil lamp. Morlak was holding it out in front of him. He came in, pushing the door so wide that it actually hit my shoulder, where it stopped, but he did not seem to notice.
The moment he cleared the doorway, I would slip behind him and out, down the stairs to freedom.
I waited, poised.
Morlak hesitated in the doorway.
I listened, my heart starting to race again, and I realized what he was doing. He was sniffing the air.
The phosphorous match.
The room still held the ghost of its acrid tang. I stifled a gasp, and in that moment, Morlak stepped into the room and slammed the door behind him. It latched, and we were alone together again.
But he had not seen me.
The gang leader made directly for the trunk, lowering himself with difficulty and muttering curses as he saw the broken half of the padlock.
In seconds he would find it. Then he would panic and turn to the door, where he would see me cowering, with nowhere to run. Noiselessly I reached into my satchel, ignored the empty pistol, and took hold of the next thing my fingers found.
The hacksaw.
I could move up behind him, silent as sleep, and sweep the blade across his throat. For years of torment. For his attempted rape. For Berrit. For Billy. And, most of all, for Tanish.
I took a step out into the room, the saw held out from my side like a talisman, a magical thing in which death strained to get out.
And I hesitated. For the torment and what he had tried to do to me, he was certainly guilty, but for the rest? I had thought so. I had wanted to believe so. But now? I was not so sure.
And then the room went white and glaring, as if I had been dropped onto the surface of the sun, as Morlak dragged the Beacon from its foil wrapping, cursing amazedly, and I stepped back, blinded.
I collided with the door and, sightless, fought for the latch. I heard him behind me, shouting and stumbling about, but I had the door open and he was—I was almost sure—at least as surprised by what he had uncovered as I was. I ran. On the second step, I missed my footing, and fell headlong, the satchel spilling open beneath me. Pain burned bright as the Beacon in my head, but I fought to right myself and my already bruised legs felt unbroken. I half ran, half fell down the stairs.
I could still see nothing.
I blundered into a doorjamb, dimly aware of another male voice, dull and confused by sleep, at my elbow, but I kept moving. Eyes squeezed shut, I recognized the smell of the weavers’ shed, the edge of oil and unwashed bodies, and I made for it, feeling rather than seeing the cavernous space open up around me. I faltered for a moment, trying to get my bearings in the unnatural darkness, then plunged on. Somewhere a door opened and a boy cried out, “Who’s there?”
I adjusted, then picked up speed, heedless of the damage I might do to myself if I ran into something, or somebody. Farther back, still on the stairs, I could hear Morlak bellowing curses.
I ran into the wall, taking most of the impact on my outstretched arms. I felt the brick and, gazing into the blackness, caught the merest shadow of difference two yards to my left. I made for it, and my hands found wood and the metal fittings of the alley door.
I pressed the latch and shouldered it open.
Instantly, the darkness grayed a little, which was enough. I could have walked these streets blindfolded.
I burst into a hard run, feeling nothing because to feel anything would have made me stop. They would come after me, but I had a head start, and they would not know whe
re I was going.
As I ran, I replayed the one thing I felt sure of in my head.
It’s not about the Beacon. It never was.
It was about money, of course, and about the deaths of a boy and an old man who no one thought worthy of attention. These were what really mattered, and I felt suddenly ashamed that it had taken me so long to recognize as much.
* * *
SUREYNA WAS WAITING FOR me at her spot on Winckley Street. The lamps were still lit, and the dawn was, for the moment, cool and fresh, but there was broken glass in the street, burned-out carriages on the corner, and shops with their windows shattered and shelves ransacked. And blood. Not a lot. Not yet. But there would be more. “Unrest,” the papers would call it, if there still were papers. The protests were souring, the city splintering along lines of race and faction, and Willinghouse’s dire prophecies were coming true. We were falling over the brink, and the blood would run in rivers through the streets long before the Grappoli ever got here.
Mnenga’s among them.
The idea shocked me, but a part of me was sure it was true. The city blacks would revolt against the rich whites who were leading them into war, and the Unassimilated would come to their aid, bringing spears and hide shields to fight men with machine guns. For a second, I could see his face in the crowd, proud and open and strong even as the gunfire rang out.…
Sureyna looked anxious and checked over her shoulder as I approached. I spoke urgently, telling her what had happened at the warehouse, all I knew and suspected, so that she took out her pencil and started scribbling.
“You need to go to the police,” she said.
“That’s your job,” I answered. “There are some things I have to do first, and not all of them are strictly legal.”
“Why am I not surprised?” said Sureyna.
I gave her a bleak smile. “I have no choice,” I said. “I have to end this before anyone else gets hurt. And, Sureyna?”
“What?”
“This is not about the Grappoli. It never was. Say so. Say it clearly.”
She nodded with grim understanding, then—as if remembering something important—snatched one of the newspapers from her stack and thrust it into my hands. “There’s a follow-up piece in there you are going to want to read.”
I looked at the cover story. For a long moment, the headline stopped my breath and closed my eyes. It read:
SECRET LAND DEAL COALITION CROSSES PARTY LINES
And there were photographs.
* * *
BREAKING INTO THE HOUSE on Canal Street was no harder than finding it. I entered through a third-floor window accessed via a downspout, emerging in a well-appointed bathroom. The house was empty of people, as I had expected it would be, and though I moved silently from room to room, I felt no sense of danger. The Lani decorations in the bedroom gave me pause, but I swallowed back any feelings of sadness and remorse as I rifled the office cabinets till I found the charts I had been looking for. The locations were scattered, but I knew what connected them because I had seen the same locations in the land deal records in the library. Each one was marked, the same topographical symbols circled on each map: a broken, wavy line that might have been a stream intersected by a slash mark, over crowded contours. The locations, however, were miles apart, scattered all around the bush north and west of the city. I needed to narrow my search.
In my heart I had suspected it would come to this, though I had hoped to find another way, and I climbed out of the windows and down as if carrying a great load.
Outside, a squad of dragoons was clearing the road. A curfew had been imposed on the city. The streets would be silent until I either unearthed the truth at last, or Bar-Selehm devoured itself in blood and fire.
* * *
IT TOOK ME ALMOST an hour to reach the Lani temple on the edge of the Drowning. I did not think Mnenga would be there, would not blame him if he wasn’t. And if he was, I had no time to discuss what was on his mind. So though I ran every step of the way, I dreaded getting there, and feared finding him almost as much as not.
He was there. He stood up when he saw me, and his smile was lit by relief, by hope. It broke my heart to see it, to know that I was breaking his, but I had no time to soften the blow.
“I did not come to take back what I said before,” I said. “I’m sorry. I came to ask you about something.”
“You do not treat me well, Ang,” he said, sad rather than angry. “Do you know this?”
“I know,” I said. “You are right. I know and I’m sorry. But I must ask you this.”
He looked away, his eyes squeezed shut as if he did not want me to see his face.
“Please,” I said. “I will ask nothing more of you after today.”
He turned back to me then, his face hot as if I had slapped him. “What about me?” he said desperately, hating to have to put it into words. “After today, what about me?”
I looked down and tried to find something to say.
“I see,” he said in a hollow voice. “Very well. Ask your question.”
“Mnenga,” I said, “it’s not that I don’t—”
“Ask your question,” he repeated.
I took a breath. “The old man,” I said.
“Ulwazi,” he said. “It is important that you call him by his name.”
“Ulwazi,” I said. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“You said he was dead.”
“He is,” I said. “Where did he come from? Before he came to the city, where had he been?”
“The bush,” he said. “The mountains.”
“Yes,” I said. “But where. Show me.” I rolled out the maps.
He peered at them, then me. “What is this about?” he said.
“I will tell you everything,” I said. “I promise. But right now, I just need to know where he was before he came to Bar-Selehm. Your people saw him after he had been sunburned and before he came to the city. Where was that?”
Mnenga scanned one map and shook his head, then considered another. “I do not understand these,” he said. “I cannot read them.”
“Look,” I said, trying not to sound impatient. “Here is the city. These are the mountains. The ocean is here. See? We are here, so the bush goes this way, away from the river.” I turned the map and pointed.
He nodded thoughtfully, then leaned over the map and put one dark hand over it. “Here,” he said. “There are … high walls of stone.”
“Cliffs?” I said.
“Cliffs, yes. And streams when the rains come with—” He gestured vaguely with his hands: something rolling down.
I gently pushed his palm aside and put the tip of my index finger on one of the circled topographical symbols, the stream, broken by a short line.
“Waterfall,” I said.
* * *
I TOLD HIM HOW to find Sureyna and—on impulse—gave him the address of Pancaris. Perhaps with Willinghouse’s help, the nuns would let him return Kalla to Rahvey so she could make one last appeal to the elders. I had to try. The orphanage was a terrible place, and I couldn’t set off for the old freight line that snaked out of the Riverbend sidings without feeling like I had at least tried to save the girl from it. I may never get the chance again.
So I hopped on the back of a locomotive hauling a mixed cargo of coal and grain, knowing that I was asking too much of Mnenga, but that there was no one else I could trust.
Trust.
I reflected on the word miserably as the train slid its slow way north, leaving behind the weedy, soot-blackened brick of the railway yards, the signal boxes, and gravel access roads as we circled the city like an aging lion, then began the climb toward the mountains.
And who do you trust now, Anglet? Who, apart from the Mahweni boy you have rejected, will stand by you now?
I rode on the footplate because cargo can shift with the movement of the train, crushing those unwise enough to be sleeping between pallets. Not that I would be sleeping. The sun beat on my arms and face, swe
at ran down my neck, and the noise and smoke from the rattling engine overwhelmed my other senses, but I had never been more awake in my life. I watched the increasingly wild and ragged bush, catching sight of a herd of black wildebeests and a loping group of rinx giraffes—the ones with the gray and yellow mottling—but no people.
I had never been comfortable outside the city.
Suddenly, strangely, I found myself missing Papa again, and I wondered if the day he died had been the day I stopped trusting anyone.
They would be ahead of me. I knew that the moment I saw the empty house. The police, and maybe a reporter or two, would be following, but my enemies were ahead of me.
Curious that people I barely knew could be my enemies, but they were, and not merely because they wanted me dead, something they would feel more strongly with every step I took toward the point marked on that map. I was more than an inconvenience to them, someone who would upset their plans. I stood for something. Or they did. I wasn’t sure what those things were exactly, but I knew they were opposites, and that was why we were enemies.
The collared weancat prowled my mind.
I didn’t study the map, but as soon as I saw the water tower, I started looking for a place to jump down where I was least likely to turn an ankle. There was no cover to speak of, just elephant grass and the occasional thorn tree, and no way to go but to follow the streambed till the slope became a cliff. If they were expecting me, they might pick me off with a rifle long before I got there, but I was trusting their arrogance and condescension. They didn’t think me worth watching for.
I was fairly sure of my destination now, the only spot where Ulwazi’s wanderings overlapped with the parcels of land sold by Sohwetti. The rest, I was sure, added up to little more than a ruse, a screen so that no one would notice the one location that mattered.
Well, I had noticed, and as soon as I was certain of all the details, they would answer for their crimes.
A Novel Page 28
