A Novel

by A. J. Hartley

At the edge of the dried river, the grass had been beaten flat, and I could see the prints of work boots. Lots of them. Deep wheel ruts and hoof marks crossed the riverbed back toward the city, and under a wizened marula tree I found an abandoned water cooler and a helmet. A work team had been here recently.

  I wanted to believe that they were all gone, but I knew they weren’t. My enemies were here to bury their traces for the time being, and if I didn’t find them quickly, they might still walk away rich and free. I couldn’t wait for assistance—if it would ever come—from the police. I was on my own.

  But then, you always are, aren’t you? However much you pretend that isn’t true, you will always be alone. You are the blind and blundering rhino, hornless, staggering about alone, lost, waiting for death, incapable of protecting those dearest to you.…

  I thought of Tanish and for a moment my body tightened, eyes clenching and stomach cramping so that I bent my knees and hunched my shoulders against the sun, hands drawn to my chest like a nun in prayer. A scream of anguish fought to come out, but I bit it down and shut it back inside the dam.

  I inhaled, opened my eyes, and straightened up. There would be time for such feelings later. Perhaps.

  The rhino had been mutilated. I was whole. I was strong. And the collar was a collar of the mind.

  I tied my hair back.

  There was a thin trickle of water in the base of the creek bed, but the torn-up grass on its banks thirty yards apart suggested that not so very long ago, it had been a torrent. Then it would have hummed with insects, but now it was silent, and I saw nothing but a pair of dassie watching me absently from the rocks. Nevertheless, I walked carefully, eyes down for hibernating snakes and the giant crab spiders that lived in these parts, picking my way between boulders strewn by the flood the river barely remembered. As the climb became steeper, the river divided like the fingers of a hand, each digit pointing a different route to the high ridge above. I considered it, caught sight of startled crows circling, but could not see what might have dislodged them. I checked the map, squinted into the sun, and chose the middle tributary.

  Within ten minutes, I was using my hands occasionally, and within twenty, I was climbing, being careful not to dislodge the scree, which would crash into the valley below. It was hot work, and I cursed myself for bringing no more than my usual water flask, which was already half empty. Sweat ran in my eyes, making them sting, but I could not pause. Not yet.

  I have never been so ill at ease climbing. I’m used to smooth brick and concrete, iron and stone, and I know their textures and their natures, what will yield to pressure, what will crack or splinter, how much weight they can bear, and where I might find places to hook fingers or toe caps. For the most part, the rule of these materials is regularity, and it is the breaks in that regularity—the chinks and nooks and crevices—that I know how to find and that keep me up. But cliffs are all irregularity, and while that means more handholds, more places where I can brace myself with knee or foot, the materials are unknown to me. I found that I had no idea what would crumble in my grasp, what might dislodge and fall beneath me, what might tear out as soon as I put weight on it.

  I stopped, nestled in a crevice, and shrank into the shade, where I could breathe and slow my heart. Every joint and muscle seemed to ache. If I survived the day, I decided, I would lay my battered and exhausted body down and not move for a week. One way or another, it would all soon be over.

  A breeze I had not noticed seemed to funnel up the cliff wall, and I turned into it so that it chilled the sweat that streamed down my face. As I did so, my eyes fell upon a darkness in the cliff above and to my right, no more than twenty yards as the crow flies.

  An opening.

  It wasn’t the source of the dried-up waterfall, which came from higher, but it had probably been screened by that cascade throughout the rainy season. Now it was dry, a curtain had been lifted, and what it showed was a cave—and a new one, at that. There were others in the cliffs, mere natural apses, little more than hollow pocks cut by wind and spray over time, but this was different. Its edges were hard and bright, and below, I could see shards of fractured stone the size of a one-horn. The waterfall had eroded the cliff till part of it had given way, but no one had seen the opening till the torrent dried up.

  No one, that is, except an elderly and eccentric Mahweni herder, who had then come down the mountain with tales to tell and fortunes to make.

  I flattened myself into my alcove still further. If they were keeping any kind of watch, they would be close by. I checked my satchel. I had a knife with a long blade, as well as assorted chisels and a hammer, but my revolver was still empty.

  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  I shook the thought off, but before it had faded from my mind, I thought of the machine gunners I had cut down, and of Tanish, bleeding in the warehouse. It hadn’t been my enemies who shot him, not directly, but his blood was on their hands nonetheless. I tucked the pistol into my belt in the small of my back. Then, once more, and with a sense of looming finality, I did what I always did.

  I began to climb.

  CHAPTER

  35

  THERE WAS NO ONE in the cave mouth, but there was a coil of long rope, which had been fastened to a spike driven through a crack in the uneven floor.

  They aren’t all climbers, then.

  I had guessed as much, but it was as close to good news as I was likely to get, so I stored the thought away for future use and crept soundlessly inside. A jagged rock like a huge fractured canine, part of the cliff face itself that hadn’t come free when the surrounding stone collapsed, dominated the cave. I squeezed past it and found myself in an open area with a single narrow access point that burrowed back into the mountain. I peered cautiously in, but the passage turned, and no light came from around the corner.

  I swallowed, touched the empty gun at my back, and inched my way into the dark.

  I heard them before I saw them, grunting, gasping, and cursing. Flattening myself against the rock wall, I listened.

  “It’s too big,” said a gruff, male voice in Feldish. “We’ll never shift it by ourselves. We should send back for the survey team, get a couple of the biggest of them up here. Topple it across the entrance, then pile rubble on it.”

  “We’re trying to keep the place secret!” said another voice, a voice I knew, and my heart sank a little, though I was not surprised. “Are you mad, man? We can’t lead people to the very spot we don’t want them to find.”

  “We have them do the work, and then we make sure they don’t leave,” said the gruff voice, darkly.

  “That’s your solution to everything,” said the other. “And look where it’s gotten us. If you leave bodies behind, people come looking for them. Have you not even learned that much?”

  “No one will come for a couple of damned fuzzies. They didn’t come for the last one.”

  “Yes,” said the other voice. “As a matter of fact, they did, and he was an old man with no children, a bush wanderer. The men on my team are citizens of the city. They have wives and families, and you will not treat them as disposable labor to bury your mistakes. God, you disgust me!”

  There was a chill silence, and then the gruff voice I had never heard before but which I knew in my bones came from Sergeant Major Claus Gritt, the devil-man Mnenga called Tchanka, the man who had stalked me in the street and run his sword stick through Billy Jennings’s chest, spoke again.

  “Now, you listen to me, politician. This is our mistake, not mine, and if you address me in that tone again, I’ll be strewing your joints out there with the fuzzies, for the vultures. Do you hear me?” There was a muffled sound, which I took to be assent, and then Gritt added, “Now, fetch me that crowbar, the long one, and we’ll try levering this onto its side. Maybe we can roll it into place.”

  “Give me a moment. I don’t feel well.”

  I kept very still, breathing shallowly, listening as they worked, trying to decide how much more I needed t
o see and hear.

  Over the next few minutes, they tried different ways of shifting the rock, but eventually they gave up, cursing, and there was a long, ragged silence while the two men fought to get their breath back.

  “If Mandel hadn’t gotten cold feet we’d be able to do it,” said the smoother voice.

  “That’s neither here nor there,” said Gritt.

  “You said he was in all the way,” said the other. “You said he’d protect us, that he’d make sure no one looked too closely till it had all blown over.”

  “Leave the colonel out of this,” said Gritt. “He has to be more careful than us. He has more to lose.”

  “And always has had.”

  “Meaning what?” Gritt demanded.

  “We weren’t all born with silver spoons in our mouths. If we had, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “There is no mess. Our investment will take a little longer to mature, is all, and when it does, our profits will be greater since we have the colonel’s shares.”

  “And if someone finds it before then?”

  “They won’t if we can block the cave, so I suggest you get off your fancy trousered behind and get to work.”

  I thought furiously. Surely, I had enough. I had names, I had the location, and I had a complete sense of the story. I couldn’t prove all of it, but I wouldn’t get that evidence standing here. It was time to go for help.

  I turned, but found the passage behind me blocked. Silhouetted at the corner of the tunnel was a figure in gray, a bright but purposeful-looking pistol in her raised hand.

  “Greetings, sister mine,” said Vestris.

  CHAPTER

  36

  I DID NOT PLEAD for her to let me go. I did not remind her of old times or sisterly bonds. I did not ask her why. I did not tell her we could all walk away from this if only we kept our heads and didn’t do anything rash. That’s what people in books did, and that was where it worked. Not here, not now, and I would not humiliate myself by trying.

  But I felt it all. I had known that she was almost certainly involved, but a part of me was sure she would be able to explain, that it had been some strange misunderstanding, that she had been caught up in something driven by other people. But in the seconds after she had spoken in the passage, I looked into her eyes as well as into the muzzle of her gun, and I knew the truth in my heart. She was not the person I had thought her, and she did not care for me at all. I didn’t know why, would never know why, but it felt like a part of me had been cut away, torn out like the rhino’s horn, so that life was pouring out of me through the ragged hole.

  Not just life. It was the way I had thought the world was, the things that I loved and valued. That was what was gushing out of the wound Vestris’s betrayal had made. I gazed at her, the beautiful woman who had once been half sister, half mother to me and Rahvey, so graceful, still smelling faintly of sandalwood and violets. But the glow I had always felt around her, the light and warmth that made you feel special when it touched you—that was gone.

  “Sergeant Major!” she called. “Come out here, please, and relieve my sister of her gun. She is strong. She may be the third pair of hands you need to do your job.”

  I heard him move into the crevice behind me, smelled his sweat, felt his strong hands snatch the revolver from my belt; then he turned me around and looked into my face, smiling without humor.

  “Miss Sutonga,” he said in a voice cold as the steel of his sword stick. “You have been in the wars, haven’t you? I am glad to see you again. We have unfinished business.” His eyes were hard and bright, and inside them was nothing at all.

  The Tchanka, I thought. The jackal-headed devil-man who slinks under the door and eats your children. Berrit and Tanish—even, somehow, Kalla.

  Then he was pulling me roughly around the corner and into the cave.

  It wasn’t, of course, the actual cave, the cave that mattered. That was beyond an uneven hole where the rock had collapsed, the hole they were working to plug. This was a mere antechamber, roughly circular, like a bubble in the rock, scattered with weapons, tools, and chunks of stone which they were using to block the way through.

  Stefan Von Strahden was inside, lit by the soft glow of an oil lamp. He had just enough dignity to look down, shamefaced, when my eyes fell upon him. I had known as much, but I still felt a strange and sapping misery that was about far more than this one disappointing man.

  “You turned on everything you believed,” I said. “Everyone.”

  “We aren’t all born onto estates like Willinghouse,” he said, mustering a little defiance, so that his normally open, welcoming face—a face I had instantly liked—looked petulant. “You of all people should know that.”

  “I do,” I said. “And that’s why I know that excuse isn’t good enough.”

  “You’re dazzled by him,” said Von Strahden, who looked sick and sweaty. “By his elegance and good looks and money.”

  “And you are dazzled by my sister,” I said, managing a thin and hopeless smile. “We all were.”

  “I didn’t know you were sisters,” he said, as if that made a difference. He sounded weary and a little defeated, even sad. “Not till a few days ago. Vestris never … I didn’t know.”

  I turned to face her. She was staring at him, her face hard and unreadable.

  “You were a steeplejack?” I said. “Before you became … whatever you are now?”

  Her face flashed with anger for a second, and I braced myself for her to slash the pistol across my face, but she recovered her composure and framed a smile, though I saw the sweat glistening on her forehead. Like Van Strahden, she looked greenish, unwell, and there was a spot above her left ear where the scalp showed through her hair.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said. “I have moved up in the world, and not by climbing chimneys.”

  “Climbing into people’s beds—” I began, but did not finish.

  The inevitable blow made the chamber spin, and I went down for a moment. I tasted blood in my mouth, and the raging throb of my already battered cheek, but I felt only vindication and a strange, savage joy.

  “All my life I have looked up to you,” I said from the ground. “Everyone back home does. But now that I know you for what you are, I pity you.”

  “Home?” snapped Vestris. “You think that stinking shanty was home to someone like me? I’m above it. I always was, and in your heart, you think that you are too.”

  I blinked, trying to keep the truth of her remark from my face, but she saw it anyway and smiled.

  “What a strange and self-deluding person you are!” she said. “You thought you could be a mother to Rahvey’s brat? You thought you could escape your past by working as an aristocrat’s hired help? Poor, sad little Ang. I once thought us so similar. It’s really rather disappointing.”

  “We were,” I said, unable to keep the sadness out of my voice. “Once, when it was just Papa and the three of us—you, me, and Rahvey. We were similar. Did you forget?”

  She made to hit me again, and I flinched away. “As for pity,” said Vestris, as if I hadn’t spoken, “save it for those who need it. Yourself, of course. And your apprentice, Tanish.”

  She read the flicker of puzzled anxiety in my eyes.

  “Oh, you won’t have heard!” she said. “I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Your little friend died this morning.”

  No.

  I said nothing as they got on with their work. I felt the cool stone beneath my hands, heard the breathing of my enemies, and saw the brutal cascade of images in my head, things I had done, things I had failed to do, but I said nothing. There was nothing left to say. My eyes had flooded, and though I fought to keep them open, I blinked at last, and tears ran down my face.

  I’m not sure how long I stayed there like that, but after a while, as if bored by my silence, the woman who had been my sister spoke again.

  “You want to see, little Anglet?” she said. “You might as well. It is, after all,
what you will die for.”

  I looked up at that, searching her face for a glimmer of doubt or remorse, but there was nothing. I knew she had tried to kill me at the opera house, but I was still surprised. She was implacable, determined, and it was as if I had never seen her before, or if in pursuit of what she most wanted, she had gone through some appalling transformation, a nightmare butterfly. The Vestris who had read to me when Papa could not was gone.

  “No,” I said.

  “Ah”—she smiled—“a little spirit yet. But there are times when you should do as you are told.”

  “You’re going to kill me anyway,” I said.

  “True,” she said. “but I haven’t decided what to do about Rahvey’s brat.”

  I stared at her. “Why would you harm Kalla?” I asked. “She’s not even Rahvey’s anymore.”

  “Because it would hurt you,” she said, as if it were obvious. “You see, Anglet, how much better it is to be truly independent? Too late now. Climb through there, or I will find the child and kill it.”

  I did as I was told.

  The passage was already half packed with rubble, and I had to squeeze my way through, stooping so as not to hit my head on the low ceiling. Vestris followed, moving more awkwardly than usual and breathing heavily, but the pistol stayed leveled at my back. I wondered if she could really shoot me down, or murder her sister’s infant out of nothing more than spite.

  Family is family, said the vestiges of the Lani way in my head.

  No, I decided, and not just for Vestris. Willinghouse was right. Some things were more important. Or you made your own family. Tanish was family. So, I decided, was Mnenga. It couldn’t just be about blood.

  We walked and the corridor turned, swelled, then clenched again, turning twice more before I was sure. It should have been dark as the inside of a chimney, but it wasn’t, and with each step, the light ahead grew stronger. I rounded the final corner and had to turn away.

  I was standing in a vaulted cavern, but the details were impossible to see because it blazed with a hard, white light that pulsed from every inch of the rock surface, a blinding, constant wall of energy so intense, you could almost hear it.