Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  Andrews nodded thoughtfully and made a note. I would have said more, but at that moment, the tent flap was flipped imperiously aside and the knife thrower strode in. During the performance he had been wearing a flamboyant red coat, which made him look wide-shouldered and imposing, but without it, he looked lean and efficient, his arms sinewy strong. He had an elaborate black mustache, which ended in waxed twists, and long, deep scars on each cheek, so perfectly balanced that they looked deliberate, decorative. He might have been a storybook pirate from some distant land. His glossy black hair trailed down his back like a mane, and his skin was a rich rusty brown, much closer to red than my own. He smelled of sweat and drink, and something else I couldn’t place, and he wore knives: a dozen of them in an amazing variety of shapes and sizes, all in perfect, custom-made scabbards attached not just to his belt, but to his thighs, his chest, the sleeves of his buckskin shirt, even high up his back.

  Andrews eyed him warily. “Would you mind laying your weapons on the table, please, sir?” he said, in his polite but unyielding policeman’s voice.

  “Not weapons,” muttered the man, deftly pulling the first knife from its sheath. “The tools of my craft. Nothing more.”

  Like the ringmaster, the knife thrower’s accent was strange, not quite like anything I had ever heard, and I had no idea where he came from.

  “What’s your name, sir?” said Andrews.

  “Blogvitch,” he said. “Blogvitch the Magnificent.”

  “So ‘the Magnificent’ is your surname, is it, sir?” said Andrews, archly.

  The knife thrower glared at him. “Just Blogvitch,” he said.

  “Very good, sir,” said Andrews, who was putting on a master class of being unintimidated by a suspect. Blogvitch was still engaged in the time-consuming process of unsheathing all his knives. They included something like a kukri, though more curved, some knives that were more like darts with needle points, and a pair of throwing axes with broad, sweeping heads that I hadn’t even noticed. But the one that matched the knife I had seen in the climbing boy’s chest was simpler, the blade long and leaf shaped, heavy at the swollen tip, but with a keen edge that ran all round, and a triangular point. The weight of the tip, I realized, designed to make it fly point first, would leave a wider slit than a conventional knife, and I found myself thinking of the body of Arthur Besland, late of the Bar-Selehm Standard. Andrews caught my eye, and I nodded inconspicuously. Having been recognized once already, it was probably vain to keep a low profile, but there was no point drawing attention to myself. Blogvitch had eyes for no one but Andrews and the uniformed constable who sat beside him, his truncheon pointedly across his lap.

  “Are any of your weapons—sorry, your knives—missing?”

  “No,” said Blogvitch.

  “Does anyone in the circus own similar knives?”

  “These were made specially for me. Balanced the way I like. They fit my hands.”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” said Andrews. I wasn’t certain if he was trying to annoy the knife thrower or if he just found his showmanship annoying. “And when did you last see … What was the boy climber called? The one who died?”

  There was a fractional pause before Blogvitch said, “No one died. There was a boy in the trapeze company, but he left tonight. His name was Sardish.”

  “And he left tonight.”

  “That is what I said.”

  “Because he wasn’t happy with his wages,” Andrews said, as if this were agreed.

  Another hesitation.

  “No,” Blogvitch answered. “He was sick.”

  “That’s right,” said Andrews, as if it was all coming back to him now. “Odd though that, no? When I feel sick, I go home early, maybe take the next day off. I don’t quit and leave town.”

  “He was weak,” said Blogvitch. “Foolish. A child. I don’t know why he left. He was not good at his job. Maybe he knew that there was no room in the circus for the weak and sickly. Knew that a replacement would be found.”

  “So he left,” Andrews concluded. “But I heard that he was actually quite good. A skilled climber. Pretty good with a knife himself, by all accounts.”

  Again the cautious pause before Blogvitch’s answer.

  “He did not use knife in the act.”

  “And when he wasn’t onstage?”

  “I know nothing of his life. He was a child. I never spoke to him.”

  “But you were seen talking to him in town a few days ago,” said Andrews, as if mildly surprised. I looked at him. Either this was information he had not shared with me or he was fishing. “Someone saw you with him. Seeing the sights, were you? The witness was quite sure. I think you would agree that you have a distinctive—even magnificent—appearance.”

  Blogvitch smiled, and not at the backhanded compliment. It was a hastily doused smile, and that meant that it was real and he knew the inspector was bluffing.

  “Your witness must be mistaken,” he said. “Blogvitch stays in the circus. He does not see sights.”

  It was Andrews’s turn to hesitate. He considered the knife thrower thoughtfully, then closed his notebook.

  “The witness must have been mistaken,” he said.

  Blogvitch waited patiently, flexing his fingers, but he knew that the interview was over.

  “Will that be all, officer?” said the ringmaster once the knife thrower had been dismissed.

  “No,” said Andrews, clearly dissatisfied. “Send me the boy’s parents.”

  The ringmaster managed to shrug with only his eyebrows, and left.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” said Andrews, leaning forward. “What’s going on here?”

  “Foreigners,” said the constable knowingly. “Weird bunch.”

  I gave him a disbelieving look, but said nothing, and for a few minutes, we sat in silence, until Sardish’s family were shepherded into the tent. They were still wearing their strange green makeup, and they sat in stiff silence, like creatures not from another country, but from another world entirely. As Andrews made the introductions and asked some simple, clarifying questions, I studied them. The father was lean and angular, perhaps thirty or thirty-five. The mother was a little younger, though it was hard to say since they were all completely shaven, and the effect—combined with the luminous, painted skin, made them oddly ageless. The daughter was about my age. In the stage light she had seemed exotic and beautiful; up close she was ordinary looking at best, but lithe and strong as an eel. Her bilious lime-green makeup had been carefully and recently retouched, and her eyes looked pinker than was normal.

  Had she been weeping?

  As Andrews asked his questions and was given monosyllabic denials and the same word-for-word explanations about the boy’s illness and decision to leave the company, I watched her. When the knife thrower had flexed his fingers it had been a deliberate and faintly threatening show of just how uninterested he was, but as she did something similar, it was unconscious, anxious even. I wondered if Andrews had noticed.

  “So he will have gone where?” asked Andrews, who was losing patience.

  “Home,” said the father.

  “Which is?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Raspacia,” said the father.

  “Raspacia?” Andrews echoed. “That’s the other side of the world! What are you doing here?”

  “We work in circus.”

  “Well, obviously! But I mean … Oh, never mind.”

  They sat like statues, and eventually he waved them away, muttering that he’d be in touch. When the ringmaster returned, Andrews gave him the same chilly brush-off.

  “Then if your officers are concluded with their most important inquiries,” said the ringmaster with the kind of obsequiousness you weren’t intended to take as genuine, “and you might see your way clear to vacating the premises, we do have some rather important matters to address. Work never stops in the circus.”

  * * *

  WE REJOINED D
AHRIA AND rode back toward the town house in the police carriage, an annoyed Andrews drumming his fingers on the doors, saying nothing, not speaking until we were sitting in the dimly lit drawing room of the silent house.

  “It was one of their own who died,” he said. “Why does no one care?”

  “The sister might,” I said. “If she is a sister.”

  “I thought the same thing,” said Andrews eagerly. “No resemblance between any of them and no emotion that the boy was dead. We have only their word that any of these people are who they claim to be. Raspacia, indeed! If they are from Raspacia, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “Why lie about where they are from?” asked Dahria.

  “Part of the show, isn’t it?” said Andrews. “What does the poster say? Foreign and exotic, right? But why continue the illusion after the audience has left?”

  “Unless the police are the audience,” I said. “Did you see the way the knife thrower reacted to your claim that he had been seen in town? He had been worried about everything you had said so far, careful, you know. But not that. Why?”

  “Because he hadn’t been in town with the boy and knew I was lying,” said Andrews.

  “Or because you said he was distinctive, easy to recognize,” I said.

  “He is, rather,” said Andrews.

  “But that’s all hair and makeup. You could smell it on him, the greasepaint. I noticed the same smell when the trapeze family—if they are a family—came in. I’ll bet a thousand pounds that his skin is not brown and that that ridiculous mustache and the pirate mop hair all comes off when he goes to bed at night. If he went out into the city without what is effectively his costume, he could wander completely unnoticed and absolutely unrecognized. That’s why he knew you were lying.”

  Andrews nodded thoughtfully, but the point did not raise his spirits.

  “We still can’t touch them. They claim there was no crime, and without a body, we can’t prove otherwise.”

  “Raid the place,” I said. “It has to be there.”

  Dahria shook her head.

  “You’d be wasting your time,” she said. “The circus I saw is a study in illusion and misdirection. If they can make a live woman disappear and reappear in front of a thousand spectators, they can hide a body. And if they don’t feel like hiding it, they have hungry weancats and lions at their disposal. Please make me say no more on the matter.”

  “If the boy was indeed Tavestock’s killer and there are other people at the circus involved—” Andrews began.

  “He is,” I inserted, “and there are.”

  “Then why are they still here?” the policeman concluded. “They could easily leave the city and vanish. Why remain where they can be watched and interrogated?”

  “Because they aren’t done,” I said.

  “Meaning what?” said Dahria, looking alarmed.

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But the murder of the PM doesn’t feel like an isolated event, and not just because Willinghouse, Richter’s fiercest opponent, has been conveniently implicated in the crime. Something larger is at work here. It feels … orchestrated, like the circus itself. Lots of sideshows and individual performances, but only one pot that all the money goes into, one mind at the center making it all work. If they aren’t leaving town yet, it’s because there’s something else they have to do. Given what they have already achieved, we have to assume it’s something big, something very bad for Bar-Selehm. I can feel it. Behind the smoke and mirrors, there’s a serious threat to the life of the city itself.”

  It was a mark of the sense of panic, which seemed to be increasing by the hour, that neither of them contradicted me, and as I looked into their faces, I was sure they felt it too.

  “There is something else,” said Andrews, eyeing Dahria. “I received no notice from the commissioner, but I have it on good authority through internal channels that your brother’s trial will begin tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!” Dahria gasped. “How is that possible? There has been no word of it in the papers.”

  “Nor will there be,” said Andrews gravely. “Not till a verdict is recorded. He’s being tried not just for murder, but for treason, and that means the entire process will take place behind closed doors. The Standard will be allowed to cover the proceedings for the look of the thing, but their reports will be heavily censored and discontinued entirely if they stray from the party line. Richter’s people favor the Clarion anyway and will feed them their own version of events, so that the Standard won’t dare risk losing their old monopoly on such matters. I fear,” he added, darker still, “that the matter will move very quickly.”

  “How quickly?” said Dahria. She looked badly startled.

  “Word inside the police station says that the investigation, such as it has been, has turned up nothing to mitigate your brother’s apparent guilt. I would not be surprised to see the whole thing concluded in no more than a couple of days.”

  He did not need to elaborate on “concluded.” They were probably readying the gibbet even as we spoke.

  “I am sorry,” said Andrews. He looked almost as lost and hopeless as we did, and he clearly felt a sense of failure, which was unjust. Dahria recognized the look in his face and nodded, suddenly her old self again, for his sake: unyielding and perfectly composed.

  “None of this is laid to your charge, Inspector,” she said. “You have been a good friend to my brother and a fine officer. You have done all you could. Others must take over the matter from here.”

  He nodded gratefully and excused himself, leaving us sitting alone in silence. I watched Dahria in the gloom, as her carefully erected restraint crumbled and, for the first time in my life, I saw her weep. She muttered my name in a kind of desperate trance, leaning into my arms, and sobbing bitterly. I held her, feeling my own tears mix with hers as our cheeks pressed together, and for several minutes, we sat there unspeaking. I doubt either of us had shared so intimate a sadness before.

  CHAPTER

  18

  “ARE YOU SURE YOU want to do this?” I asked Dahria as we gazed up at the elegant white frontage of the Heritage party headquarters, its flagpoles flying both the Bar-Selehm standard and the black and red lightning fist of the party faithful. I had visited the doctor on Dahria’s insistence to have my wounds tended right after breakfast, but that hadn’t taken long at all, and it was still early.

  “I most definitely do not,” she replied. “But what choice have I?” She looked at me, but it was not a real question, and eventually, seeing the desolation in my face, she smiled softly. “Come along, Ang. It may not be as bad as all that.”

  The fact that she’d called me by my real name suggested that it was exactly that bad, but I nodded and steeled myself for what would follow.

  The white guard on the door—and he was a guard, uniformed in gray with shiny black boots and the Heritage armband worn above the pistol holster on his belt—was unimpressed by us and disinclined to let us in, doubly so when Dahria said she was there to see Richter.

  “The Lord Protector does not take visitors off the street,” said the guard derisively.

  Lord Protector was a new one on me, but I managed not to show the disdain I felt for the title. Dahria did not give an inch.

  “Tell the prime minister that Josiah Willinghouse’s sister is here to see him,” she said coolly, handing him a cream-colored calling card from her purse.

  The guard hesitated then ordered us to wait outside while he consulted with his superiors. Dahria looked affronted, but there was nothing to be done, so we stood there as instructed. Out in the street, people passed by, glancing toward us. Dahria turned her back on them, but her face burned all the same. At long last, we were showed in to an antechamber where Jebediah Saunders, Richter’s weasel-ish private secretary, gave us a scornful look and said, “The Lord Protector is in a meeting and is very busy. If you will wait in the room at the end of the hall, he will join you when he has a free moment.”

 
; Dahria managed a stiff smile and a minute nod, then turned in the direction he had indicated. I followed, my head lowered, glad, for once, of yet another maid’s outfit, hastily cobbled together from the town house stores. We were running out of them, but since the staff had been temporarily dismissed because they could no longer legally live in the east end of the city, that didn’t much matter.

  “Impertinence,” Dahria murmured as we walked.

  There were several maids and footmen around, but they were all white, and no one spoke to us. Nor, when we had let ourselves into the room to await the Lord Protector’s appearance, did anyone come to offer us refreshment. We heard distant voices, the occasional closing of doors, and brisk footsteps in the corridor outside, but no one came. While the clock on the mantel wound slowly on, we sat, saying nothing. An hour passed. Then another.

  “This is deliberate rudeness!” said Dahria, getting abruptly to her feet and beginning to pace.

  “Yes,” I said, though being less accustomed to people dropping what they were doing to serve me, I was less concerned with the impropriety than I was with the waste of time. I could be doing something—anything—more useful than this.

  “Maybe he won’t come at all, and this is a kind of bitter joke. Perhaps his cronies are sitting in some other room even now, smoking cigars and laughing at the Lani mongrel sitting fruitlessly alone while her brother is arraigned for execution.”

  “You’re not alone,” I said. “And your brother will not be executed without a trial.”

  “Of a sort,” she said. “One guaranteed to reach the verdict they want.”

  I couldn’t argue with that and wouldn’t insult her by trying.

  Ten more minutes passed and, after a few furious, rustling circuits of the room, Dahria settled herself in a chair again, her eyes fixed on the clock. I watched the windows, wondering how dark it would become before we were seen or we abandoned the mission and went home.

  The door cannoned open without warning, and Norton Richter strode in. He wore the gray trousers and high boots of his followers, but his silver-trimmed jacket was black, which made the red of the armband even more strident.