Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

“Or woman.”

  “Yes. Not sure. I can ask around.”

  “Don’t know that that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Why, what did he do?” Tanish replied, but the answer came to him almost immediately. “You think he bumped off the PM? Cor! Really?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “And keep your voice down.”

  “Still,” he said, his excitement fading, “steeplejacks don’t go barefoot. You want, like, one of them black unaffiliated thatcher guys, maybe, but they don’t work up high.”

  “Any new gangs in town, Mahweni, maybe, or rural Lani?”

  “Nah. Maybe a few journeymen have come in from the sticks, but who would hire them for real steeplejacking? I can check on the Jewel, but even the Tsuvadas wear boots.” The Jewel was the great suspension bridge, which was still unfinished, and on which half the steeplejacks in the city had worked at some point, myself included. The Tsuvadas were Lani from the mountain towns a couple of hundred miles north of the city where the tallest structures were trees. They only came for seasonal jobs, Tanish was right. Even they didn’t work barefoot. He sipped his beer and mused aloud. “Who would use just a rope instead of ladders and scaffold? Mad, that is. Show-offy.”

  I nodded and drank, slipping into the familiar comfort of being in this place with him. There was something else I had to ask, but I was avoiding it, and for a moment I wanted to stop time, so that I could stay here, not think about Willinghouse or Tavestock and the over-pressurized steam boiler that was the city itself. And Vestris. I wanted to think about her least of all, but that was not an option left to me.

  “Tanish,” I ventured, “have you heard anything more about the Gargoyle lately?”

  He gave me a quick inquisitive look and a wary grin, like I might be setting up a joke.

  “Thought you didn’t believe in the Gargoyle?” he said.

  “I don’t. Not as such. But I’m curious about … anything, really. There were some attacks, which some people attributed…”

  “Weeks ago,” he said. “Nothing since that night on the docks. A few sightings, rumors really, but no attacks. Why do you…?” His eyes got big as dinner plates. “You’re looking for a climber who might have killed the PM, and you’re asking about the Gargoyle?” he gasped, thrilled and delighted.

  “I told you to keep your voice down,” I hissed, lowering my head so that he drew instinctively closer. “I don’t think … Not really. I just have to consider all possibilities.”

  “PM killed by Gargoyle,” he murmured, trying the words out like he was reading a newspaper headline. “Blimey.”

  “You are not to say a word about this, Tanish. You hear me? If I see it in the papers, I’ll know where they got it.”

  “Just an idea, ain’t it? You can’t blame me if someone else thinks up the same—”

  “I can, and I will,” I said, with a warning glare. For a couple of seconds, he held my eyes defiantly, but then he wilted, aging backwards till he was my little boy apprentice again.

  “Fine,” he scowled. “But it’s a stupid idea anyway. The Gargoyle hasn’t attacked anyone in ages.”

  “You said there have been sightings.”

  “There’s always been ‘sightings,’” he said, “but you know what most of them are: too much beer and not enough brain. Someone scared of the night or looking to get some of that fear into someone younger and stupider. You’ve said so yourself a thousand times.”

  “I have, and you’re right. But a few months ago you convinced me that there was something to the stories after all. The papers said the monster killed at least three and was seen by a lot more. Then what? Did the Gargoyle just disappear? What are people saying? Anything new?”

  He had been trying to play it off as something childish that he’d grown out of, but he knew me a little too well and could feel my nervousness, my dread. I had to know what people knew, or thought they knew, because amongst all the strangeness and half truths, one thing was certain: I was going to have to find my eldest sister.

  Tanish shrugged, but his eyes stayed on mine. His casualness was an act. He had caught something of my fear, like when you touch the stanchion of a girder bridge as the train rolls overhead and the rumble of the wheels and gears above you goes through the steel and right into your heart so that for a second you are the engine.

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said after a while, “but some of the little ’uns were working Semmerline Terrace, switching out chimney pots and cleaning the flues, you know, and they said … I mean, it’s stupid, probably nothing…”

  “What did they say, Tanish?”

  He was getting anxious, and I didn’t think it was because he was worried I’d think his story stupid.

  “Well, they said, that … You know how the Inns of Court has those five angels standing on the roof, the statues with wings and spears and whatnot?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there was another one on the end which is missing, right? Fell down years ago and never got put back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, they say, that if you stand up on Semmerline Terrace with your back to the Dyer Street cement factory, you can see the Inns of Court right over the rooftops. You can see the five angels.”

  “And?”

  Tanish licked his lips and said, “Sometimes there are six.”

  * * *

  SEMMERLINE TERRACE WAS THE last opulent street on the east side of the city in sight of the river, and all the way on the other side of Old Town. By the time I got there, the lamps were lit and the streets deserted as evening turned to night. It was the dividing line between all that was fashionable and exclusive to the north and the industrial clutter to the south, where the factories and warehouses clustered along the northern bank of the Kalihm as it flowed into the sea. As if to prove its hold on the socially elevated realm it faced, the Terrace seemed to be in a state of constant refurbishment, and barely a day went by when there wasn’t a team on scaffolding and ladders painting, repointing masonry, planting ornamental roof gardens, or adding decorative trim in accord with the latest architectural fashion. It was a half mile or so southeast of the Inns of Court, and I went there first to test whether the young steeplejacks’ story could be true.

  There was no scaffold rigged, but the gang’s ladders had been stowed around the back, carefully chained and padlocked. Not that I would need them. The stonework all over the front of the three-story houses had been studded with brass accents a few feet apart, each one a well-fashioned ornamental pinecone that stood a couple of inches proud of the masonry. They were as good as a ladder.

  Somewhere below on the back side of the terrace I caught the sounds of laughter and shouting, but it wasn’t directed at me, and eventually moved slowly off toward whichever pubs might still be open. I squatted on the ridgeline and turned to the northwest. In the distance I could see the bright, hard radiance of the Beacon shining out over the Finance District and giving a little spangle to the colonnades and statues as far south as the Martel Court. The Inns of Court, which stood between them and me, were largely dark, save where their own gas lamps picked out a little pearly silver on the stone and ironwork. The statues on the roof were not individually lit and were visible only as pale, ghostly shapes against the dark sky.

  There were five, as I had expected there to be. Their attitude was not visible to me now, but I knew them well enough. Tanish called them angels, but they were figures from the mythology of justice, metaphors in stone and bronze proclaiming the city’s essential rightness in defiance of all the evidence in the streets below: two white—tall and godlike, two black—wild and strong—two Lani—draped in fluttering saris. It was one of the city’s rare monuments to its entire population, though whether the high-minded sentiments of the architect and sculptor were enacted by the business conducted below was a matter of debate. The missing figure on the end—one of the Lani angels—had fallen from its niche some thirty years ago, I was told, though I didn’t know what had happened to i
t. Some of the city’s older statues were held together with iron rods slotted through the stone. When they rusted, the pieces fell apart, which was probably what had happened to the sixth angel. Nowadays they dipped the iron in molten zinc.

  The shouts from below came again, nearer this time, and I slid down the slope of the roof so I wouldn’t be visible even as a silhouette. A Lani woman skulking round by night would be viewed with considerable suspicion. With Willinghouse in prison and Andrews keeping a low profile, I could not count on my ability to slip out of an arrest. I waited, listening, and again the sounds seemed to move off.

  Nothing to do with me, I decided again, but I waited a while longer before moving to a position from which I might climb down. I had seen all I needed. The steeplejacks might have been making things up or been caught in their own fearful imaginings, but their story was at least plausible. You could see the plinth on which the sixth angel had once stood from here.

  I had thought of the angels as figures of justice and—by association with the folklore surrounding the Gargoyle—vengeance. I recalled in the northern religion, angels were also guardians, protectors with flaming swords watching over places, but also over people. That might be a better association for those that kept vigil over the city. Or at least I would like it to be.

  I stood on the edge of the roof, poised to turn and begin working my way down bit by cautious bit. In the last second something caught my eye and I hesitated, staring back across the roofs toward the Inns of Court. It was dim out there, the building and its statues mere shadows and grayness in the thin light of the gas lamps below, but there could be no doubt.

  There were six angels.

  * * *

  I RAN THROUGH THE night, making a hard beeline for the elegant formal buildings of the Inns of Court. I thought of the unvisited clock spires and pinnacles and tower rooms that dotted its roofline. All good hiding places for someone unafraid of heights. I had used the Martel Court on the opposite side of the square in just such a fashion on several occasions. Bar-Selehm loved its extravagant and imposing skyline, particularly in the grander parts of the city where it gave the eye a much-needed respite from the clutter of chimney stacks. Once built, though, the city didn’t do much with its lofty architectural features. They were turned over to the steeplejacks, vultures, and bats that haunted the higher reaches of the town. That these niches above might also be home to the creature known as the Gargoyle seemed to me perfectly plausible.

  So I ran, but I also chose the shadows and the alleys that would keep my approach least visible. Reaching the Inns of Court, I looked to make my ascent to the roof on the northwest side of the building. That way, if someone was up there on the angel’s plinth, I would come at them from behind.

  I wore the kukri that I habitually carried. Heavy as an ax, it served as a tool as well as a weapon, and if I was caught, it would not get me into the same legal difficulties as a pistol, but as I began to climb, it felt clumsy and inadequate. I suddenly realized that I had spent so much mental and physical energy reaching this moment that I had given no thought to what might happen next. If the person up here—assuming it was a person and not a trick of the gloom—was no one I knew, I might escape without incident. Or I might find myself in a fight to the death. It was unlikely that anyone up here at this hour was merely an upstanding citizen taking in the view.

  And if it was someone I knew? That seemed even less clear.

  I was climbing using the sharp prominent edges of the stone blocks, but it was finger and toe work: safe enough if there were no distractions, deadly if there were. I felt with the steel toecaps of my boots, pulling myself up step by step like a fly on a water pitcher, and I hoped to all the gods that there was no one waiting at the top. A well-placed kick would be as sure as a bullet between the eyes.

  I waited, breathing, feeling the strain in my arms, my body taut as piano wire, and then I sprang for the top, three fingertip grabs, three precise stabs of my boots into the grouted gap between the blocks, and I was up. I rolled over the cornice and onto the roof as silently as I could.

  There was no one in sight.

  I stepped carefully, hugging the pitched roof in the center, every sense alert for movement, peering cautiously round the corner toward the rear of the building. I could see the backs of the five angel statues, their bronze swords and spears held like talismans.

  The sixth was slightly smaller but just as still.

  The figure was wearing a long gray hooded cloak and was standing, like the angels, gazing out toward the river and beyond. Not taking my eyes off the living statue, I reached back and drew the kukri from its sheath.

  It did not move, and only the faintest stirring of the wind in its robe distinguished it from the statues lined up beside it. I straightened up and took three long, silent steps toward it, feeling the weight of the heavy, curved knife in my hand. After two more steps, the figure turned fractionally toward me, and though I could see no face within the shaded hood, I knew it had seen me before it turned back to the cityscape below.

  I waited but, when nothing happened, began walking again till I was only twenty feet away.

  “Hello, Ang,” said Vestris. “I wondered when you would come.”

  The voice was odd, slurred and muffled strangely despite what sounded like careful enunciation. It was neither the voice of my sister as I had known her in my youth nor the animal snarl of the Gargoyle creature she had been when I saw her last.

  “It is remarkable up here, is it not?” she said. “So much beauty and ugliness together. So much life and death.”

  “I don’t see death,” I said, still holding tight to my kukri.

  “But you know it’s there,” she answered, still not looking at me. “Everyone does, though some are better at not seeing it than others. I would have thought the poor, the disenfranchised would all see it quite clearly, and you perhaps most of all.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was an accusation, but I said nothing. This was strange. I didn’t know what I had expected, but it was not this.

  “I am alive,” she said. “Which would come as a surprise to a lot of your friends, I suspect. But if I take a single step forward, the kind of step I take all the time on solid ground, out into the air, all that life—the pumping blood, the thought, the feeling—it all goes away in an instant. It is remarkable, is it not, that we are so extraordinarily fragile?”

  “That’s why we take care to stay alive,” I said, as if we were making conversation while cooking Papa’s supper.

  “Indeed,” she said. “And I have taken more care than most.”

  She turned to me then, and pushed the hood back.

  It was almost her. The beauty I had known, but which had been so blasted when I saw her last, had made some small gains on her face. Where her skin had been gray and patchy, she had become brown and smooth once more. Her bald, skeletal head was regrowing its hair, if unevenly; a short bob of glossy black now reached where her collar might be. It was not unbecoming. Her eyes were the same as ever, deep and powerful, but her cheeks were still hollow, and I could tell from her speech that she had lost most of her teeth. However else she reclaimed her former health, they were gone forever. She managed a dry smile at my reaction.

  “You have recovered,” I said, unable to contain both my surprise and my conflicted feelings. Vestris was my sister. She was also a killer, and while her most recent victims had been the rough justice of a vigilante, not all her victims had been guilty of anything. I worked for Willinghouse because of a boy called Berrit who would have been my apprentice if he had not fallen to Vestris’s knife.

  “In part,” she said. It was amazing how much weight, how many mixed and competing meanings she could pack into those two simple words. It seemed, judging by the way she returned her gaze to the city spread out to the south, that I wasn’t the only one with conflicted feelings.

  Or the performance of them.

  Yes. Vestris, I reminded myself, had been a consummate liar and manipulator
for many years. I should be on my guard.

  “You came to ask me something,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Three things, actually,” I replied, refusing to be cowed by my sister’s recapturing of some of her old dignity.

  “Let me tell you before you ask,” she said.

  “I see no reason for playacting—” I began, irritated by her composure, by how easily she took charge.

  “First, no, I did not kill the prime minister,” she intoned, eyes still fixed on the dark middle distance. “I would not be surprised to learn that he merited such an act. Most politicians do, in my experience, but I did not kill this one, and I do not know who did.”

  I believed her instantly, which was probably foolish, but in the moment, though I barely knew her at all anymore, I felt sure she was telling the truth. I felt an unexpected sense of relief, as though she had removed a burden I hadn’t known I was carrying.

  “Your second question is, I think, more difficult,” she said musingly. “You want to know why I helped you a few months ago.”

  “Yes,” I confessed. “And more generally why you changed.”

  She laughed at that, making a strange soft-edged coughing sound.

  “Because I changed,” she said.

  I scowled, dissatisfied.

  “Because I went through death and out the other side,” she said, not laughing now, “and the process broke me apart, showed me what I was, what I had become. Because surviving meant deciding to live for something, to be something, and I found I could not muster the energy to return to what I once was. Not that that was ever a possibility. Bar-Selehm prefers its society mistresses to have teeth and hair.”

  The starkness of the truth embarrassed me, and I looked down.

  “Do you remember me as I was before I left the Drowning?” she asked. “When you were a girl, I mean. When it was just you, me, Rahvey, and Papa. Do you remember me as I was then?”

  She had turned to gaze out over the city again, but I suspected it was because she could not look at me, and her voice was strained with emotion. She sounded more than sad. She sounded desperate.