Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  “I wouldn’t do that, and you know it!” I shot back.

  “You’ve done it before,” said Willinghouse.

  Dahria gave me a look. “He’s not wrong about that,” she said, clearly enjoying herself.

  I had given Sureyna, my friend at the Standard, the occasional scoop.

  “That was quite different,” I said, flustered and covering. “I only did it when I felt she had earned the story. And you don’t need to lecture me on importance and secrecy and delicacy. I may not be able to vote—for the moment—but I am not an idiot.”

  Dahria grinned and turned expectantly back to her brother, like she was watching a tennis match. Willinghouse scowled, particularly at that “for the moment” and then muttered his grudging agreement and a halfhearted apology.

  “I don’t believe you answered her question,” Dahria prompted. “Did your little meeting achieve anything?”

  Willinghouse blew out a long sigh.

  “That remains to be seen,” he said. “The conversation is far from over, but it is at least continuing, and that, I suppose, is something.”

  “Ah yes,” she replied, rolling her eyes, “what politicians like best: more talk.”

  “If it leads to changes in electoral law—” Willinghouse began.

  “You really think it might?” I cut in. “Women voters and black MPs?”

  Such things seemed impossibly far off, particularly with Richter pulling the Nationals farther to the right.

  “Not now,” said Willinghouse. “Maybe not even soon. But eventually, if the city as we know it is to survive. It is, I think, the only way forward.”

  “Black MPs won’t change anything unless there’s also a change in voting districts,” I said. It was well known that the constituencies with the largest black populations—Willinghouse’s among them—were massively underrepresented.

  “That will come too,” he replied.

  “When it does,” said Dahria, “white rule in the district, including your benevolent leadership, dear brother, will end. Maybe not at once, but eventually, and everything you know will change, not all of it for the general good and certainly not for ours. You know that, don’t you?”

  For a second we both looked at her. The studied ennui and practiced wry amusement had fallen away, and she looked serious, thoughtful.

  “I know,” said Willinghouse. “But as I said to the prime minister: better to be on the right side of history.”

  Dahria eyed him thoughtfully but said nothing, so that I wondered, with a curiosity the intensity of which caught me quite unawares, what she was thinking.

  * * *

  I CONTINUED TO TRAIN with Madame Nahreem, though I had no specific task to perform for Willinghouse, occasionally working with the neutral mask but generally focusing on the Kathahry exercises, which combined strength and balance. Often she would do them in silence beside me, and there were surprisingly few she could no longer manage, despite her age. She was no more nurturing than before, but she was less critical and seemed to move from pose to pose with an abstracted numbness as if she was only half present, and when she was not exercising herself, it felt like her attention was elsewhere.

  “I miss Namud,” I said after one session.

  She gave me a startled look, and her vague expression became carefully blank.

  “Indeed,” she said.

  “I mean, I didn’t know him as well as you, of course. I can only imagine what you … How much you must miss—”

  “Do not presume to discuss my feelings with me,” she said, indignant.

  “I just meant that—”

  “I have no interest in what you meant.” Her face became granite hard. “If I want your advice or your sympathy on personal matters, private matters, I will request it directly. If, however, I do not, I would appreciate it if—”

  “Yes,” I said quickly. “I understand.”

  “Very well. Now, let me see you move from weancat to pine tree again. Your posture was sloppy, and the movement graceless.”

  I took a breath, swallowed back my retort, and moved carefully into the weancat pose.

  * * *

  “YOUR LITTLE SCRIBBLING FRIEND has been at it again,” said Dahria, pushing a newspaper to me across the dining table that evening.

  I looked up from my plate of chicken anduul—a hot, dry spiced curry with cardamom and lentils—and read the title in the bottom right corner of the second page.

  GRAPPOLI PUSH ENDS

  The story was, surprisingly, by Sureyna. I knew she had earned the respect of the Standard’s editorial staff, but it was unusual for her to be covering international news, and I read eagerly. It turned out, however, not to be an international news story at all, or at least, not the kind that came from foreign correspondents or war reporters.

  Sources close to the Grappoli ambassador suggest that the recent Grappoli push across northern Feldesland has come to a complete halt. Troops have withdrawn and no further movement seems evident. Reports suggest that the Unassimilated Tribes have proved increasingly resistant, making incursions into Grappoli territory and assaulting travelers south of the desert. There have even been reports of Mahweni placing blockages on railway lines, attacking those sent to remove them, and generally disrupting traffic bound for Bar-Selehm.

  I looked up, baffled. South of the desert meant close to the city. If the Unassimilated Tribes north of Bar-Selehm were attacking traffic so close, we were moving into a new chapter of local unrest.

  “Can this be right?” I said.

  “If the paper thought it was,” said Dahria, shaking her head, “it would be screaming at us in three-inch capitals from the front page.”

  “Why don’t they believe it?”

  “The key is in that sources close to the ambassador stuff,” said Dahria. “I think your friend has been talking to servants. Or to the ambassador’s lady friend, Lady Alice Welborne.”

  “I don’t think they are together anymore,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Dahria. “Lady Alice, never the keenest intellect in the city, is trying to attract attention to herself with rumor in the hope that she can whip up a reputation as a delightfully knowing socialite before the cream of Bar-Selehm abandon her to the fate she so richly deserves.”

  “Which is what?”

  “What ladies such as Lady Alice dread most: being ignored.”

  “I’m surprised Sureyna would give her the spotlight,” I said, considering the article. “She’s not interested in being a gossip columnist.”

  “You think,” said Dahria. “There’s money in it, not to mention fashionable parties, concerts, the kind of exclusive clubs that wouldn’t normally allow someone like her to darken the door—no pun intended.”

  My frown deepened, but I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “Sureyna isn’t interested in those things.”

  “Well, why should she be?” said Dahria with feigned agreeableness. “Why would a young black girl want wealth and power? Obviously nonsense.”

  “She wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Everyone you know is so altruistic, have you noticed? Pillars of virtue. Except me, of course. Unless the saints and angels with which you surround yourself are actually more human than you realize, and would be quite happy to line their own pockets even if they let slip some of your high ethical standards in the process.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, hoping it was true.

  “Frequently,” Dahria agreed. “Which is why I have no qualms thinking that my blessed brother will push only for unpopular but virtuous things like votes for women and black MPs against his own self-interest when he knows he can’t possibly win.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” she said sweetly. “But I wonder just how hard he would fight for such things if victory were indeed in his grasp. So impressive, don’t you think, to be the lone voice for selflessness and truth. It almost doesn’t matter that he’ll never actually win, will never have to deal with the conseq
uences of victory.”

  “You think he doesn’t really want women to have the vote or for the Mahweni to have more control of the country?”

  “I think there’s power of a sort in being seen to be the person who wants those things, even if you never get them, and when getting them might lead you to being less powerful, well…”

  She let the sentence trail off and went back to her food, humming absently to herself and not looking at me.

  * * *

  I STRUGGLED TO FALL asleep that night, even though I did an extra exercise session and added a run before sundown so that my body was close to exhaustion by the time I got into bed. Usually, the run clears my head, but Dahria’s cynical words circled in my mind, making my anger and anxiety leap like tongues of fire. I was used to the idea that the Grappoli were the enemy and that Richter and his Heritage party were at least as bad, but as I had shed some of the isolation I had felt as a worker in the Seventh Street gang, I had come to new ideas about friends and family and being on the side of right. Willinghouse, and his grandmother, Inspector Andrews, Captain Emtezu, Sureyna, some of the ladies of Merita, and my sisters, Rahvey and—in ways I could not properly explain—Vestris, stood with me on that side. Even Dahria had played her part for what I felt sure was right. The idea that their intentions were not what I assumed—hoped for, needed—bothered me, and I lay awake in the dark, listening to the sounds of the bush not so very far from the walls of the estate with increasing unease. When I woke, tired and irritable, the go-away birds crying their melancholy dawn chorus, I knew I had to get out of this place and back to where life made more sense, in the smog and hubbub of the city.

  * * *

  WHAT I HAD PLANNED as a retreat from the complexities of life with the Willinghouses proved hard to shake, however, and my announcement was greeted with declarations from both my employer and his sister that they also had to go into town, so we would all travel together. I sat in the hot coach, dressed in the fusty waiting maid’s dress and bonnet for propriety’s sake, sulking in silence, while Willinghouse pored over papers from his valise and Dahria fanned herself. The long ride into town from the estate was always stressful, since the area was home to elephants and one-horns, both of which would reduce the carriage to kindling in a heartbeat, but today I was doubly anxious to get out and slip away down the brick alleys of Bar-Selehm and the streets I called home.

  I was, I had realized that morning, angry with Dahria, who had made me doubt her brother’s motives and—therefore—the value of my work for him. I had always been able to endure the unfamiliarities and irritations of my job because I had believed in its essential rightness. The possibility that I was merely a pawn in Willinghouse’s political long game meant that such things would have to be reconsidered. While I didn’t believe it, not yet, Dahria had created the flicker of an anxiety I had not felt in months.

  Perhaps I was not being rational, but she had spoiled it, my sense of purpose, my life.

  I hated her a little for it, and for the studied indifference with which she had raised it, as if it were another mildly amusing curiosity, something about which she could be cynical and witty.

  As ever. She was being glib about things for which she felt nothing.

  I had gotten used to thinking that her distant posturing was some aristocratic self-protection, that at heart she was someone quite different, someone passionate and principled. Someone more like me. That she might not be was more than a disappointment. It pained me unreasonably, reminding me in some dull, unspecific way of my sister Vestris.

  In the stuffy dimness of the carriage, I could not meet Dahria’s eyes, thought they flicked toward me several times, watchful and, as usual, amused.

  We entered the city through Deans Gate where a pair of sentries waved us through without even looking in. As soon as we hit the cat-head cobbles of Fullerton Lane, I opened the door beside me and dropped to the street. Willinghouse looked up, startled, from his reading, but I didn’t pause, walking briskly away.

  I had, I reminded myself, no assignment, no mission, no mystery to unravel. I was, for the moment, free. What I would do with that freedom remained to be seen, but my plan was to visit my true friends: first Tanish, then Sureyna, then Captain and Mrs. Emtezu, and then—continuing my journey west, to the Drowning and my sister Rahvey.

  My friends. The people most like me: not all exactly poor, but certainly not the landed gentry. My people. People I could trust.

  But as I walked the streets of the Soot, where chimneys towered, belching their thick, caustic smoke into the Bar-Selehm sky, and I heard the ringing of hammers, the hiss, whir, and clang of steam-driven machinery, it all felt at once familiar and strangely distancing. All around were people working, because at this time of day that was what you did. That was what I had done once. But not now. A curious sensation fell upon me, and it was as if I had gone to the zoological gardens to see the animals, but here—instead of the iron bars of cages and enclosures—I was peering in through filthy windows and half-open doorways, spying into a life I no longer lived. Before I realized I had made the decision, my feet were taking me east, along Winckley Street and past the public library, where someone had pasted up a series of handbills for a traveling circus.

  I paid them and my surroundings no mind. I had to return to see Willinghouse. Dahria had planted a question in my mind. I needed to ask it.

  So I walked beside the embankment of the Flintwick railway station to the opera house and the Winelands Arcade, all the way to Hanover Street and Grand Parade. The Parliament House loomed over the streets with their lampposts and ornamental trees, a great, brooding domed building of elaborately latticed pink stone, which glowed like fire in the sunlight. There was scaffolding on the northwest corner where it looked like work was being done on some of the stone cornice and trim, but I didn’t recognize the russet-painted wagon, and there was no one on the scaffold. I wasn’t sure if Parliament was in session, or whether Willinghouse would be in his backbencher’s office on the second floor, but that didn’t matter. Whatever his schedule, he would make time for me. I would give him no alternative.

  As I walked, I formulated the question in my head, trying to find words I would actually be able to speak.

  Do you really want the things you stand for, or are they just banners to wave while you storm the government? Who do you really represent—your constituents or yourself? Are you chasing justice, or do you just want to be prime minister?

  The very phrasing made me angrier, and my pace increased. I knew that my cheeks were hot and—bafflingly, maddeningly—I felt my eyes brimming with furious, unshed tears, but I kept walking.

  I arrived to find the public doors closed and guarded. The House was in private session, and I would have to wait till they adjourned to ask my questions, if that was what they were. The more I turned them over in my head, the more they sounded less like questions and more like accusations. I lowered my bonneted head, not wishing to attract hostile looks from the various soldiers and police who were on duty, and made for the Brevard party offices. I couldn’t get up to the MPs’ chambers without an appointment, so I sat on a hard wooden bench in the lobby, head down, watching the comings and goings for signs that the politicians were back and scattering for lunches and meetings in the surrounding buildings.

  It didn’t take long for them to arrive. In their monochrome suits and close-fitting trousers, they looked like lapwings squabbling along a riverbank, and the lobby was soon full of their chatter. There was, however, no sign of Willinghouse.

  I waited, but as the crowd thinned and Willinghouse still did not appear, I went back outside, meaning to return to the main entrance in case he was there. I did not want to miss him, but then, now that I was here I found that I did not want to ask my questions either. Or rather, I feared what he might say in response. If he so much as faltered, if I smelled his guilt as I might once have probed the mortar line of a chimney for damp, I would leave and never speak to him again. I would go back to being a
steeplejack, a cleaner, a doer of odd jobs …

  Better that than … what? A tool for Willinghouse’s advancement? Something like that.

  It was no wonder my heart was thumping like the pistons of the Thremsburg Flyer.

  I had to fight the remains of the crowd on the steps of the Parliament building, and when I dithered in the flow, a guard called to me.

  “No point going in now,” he said. “Everything’s finished.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m just … I have to see something.”

  “Suit yourself.” He shrugged, half blocking the tide so that I could slip through and into the main entrance hall.

  A few MPs were talking to each other or meeting with men I took to be lobbyists or delegates, but they were drifting out, and the great double doors to the main debating chamber had been closed. There was still no sign of Willinghouse, so I took a hard left and, at the end of a hallway, found a flight of stairs up to a long corridor floored with polished wood with marquetry trim. A pair of dragoons in ceremonial blues eyed me, their rifles at their sides, but they did not prevent me from moving to the little door that led up a narrower staircase to the public galleries.

  I had been here only once before, but I found my way without difficulty, though it felt different this time, silent and abandoned, the chambers having a cathedral stillness and grandeur about them that made me feel small, and the hot little questions in my mouth seemed foolish and impertinent. I climbed the narrow stairs and opened the door at the top.

  For a moment I thought everyone had left, the great domed debating hall below me seemed so big and empty. But then, apparently startled by my movement, Willinghouse looked up at me, his face pale and eyes wide. He was stooping over something, leaning his weight on the end of one of the silver-trimmed seats. He spoke, but I could not tell what he said, and when he moved, straightening up, I could see that there was another man lying faceup on the floor.

  The man’s starched shirt was soaked with crimson, his neck horribly gashed. As Willinghouse started shouting for help, even as the guards burst in through the lower doors in the House itself, I saw the knife in his hand and realized that the dead man at his feet was Benjamin Tavestock, the prime minister.