Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  Jadary stirred. I ignored the doctor and gave her my attention, calling her from sleep.

  “Jadary! It’s Auntie Ang.”

  The girl’s eyes fluttered and opened vaguely.

  “Here,” I said. “I’m here.”

  Her eyes closed again, but she smiled distantly as if at something in a dream.

  “Jadary!” I said, giving her a shake. “I need to know something. It’s very important. Aab had something. Something shiny. Maybe a secret thing she kept to herself. Have you seen it? Do you know where it is?”

  The girl’s face slid softly into confusion and then her eyes opened again. Her mouth moved, but no words came out and then, just as she was about to drift back into sleep, her eyes went to Aab beside her and moved deliberately to a little burlap purse half buried in the covers drawn tight around her shivering body. I reached for it, pulled it open, and emptied the contents onto the ground.

  There was a notebook full of childish scrawl and some drawings, notes presumably from Bertha’s classes. There was a soft toy that might have been a home-stitched monkey. And there was a roughly fashioned metal egg with strange luminous panels of what looked like smoked glass.

  I picked it up gingerly, half expecting it to be hot. It wasn’t, but I knew immediately that this was the source of the contagion. I could feel it in my head, my guts.

  “Where did she get this?” I demanded.

  Jadary looked scared, shrinking away from the hardness in my face.

  “You’re not in trouble,” I said. “Neither is she. But I need to know where she got it.”

  “Voresh!” the girl whispered, her eyes full of dread. “She said the Voresh brought it. Saw him down by the river. He left it.” She broke off, coughing. Aab still lay unmoving, but as I started to move away, Jadary seized my hand in her frail and tiny grip. “He came back, the Voresh. Here to the sick camp, Aab said. I didn’t believe her. But then, last night, when everyone was sleeping I thought I saw…”

  “What?” I said. “What did you see?”

  Her eyes filled, and she squeezed them shut, as if locking out a memory, so that the tears broke and ran down her face.

  “I saw the Voresh,” she managed. “Here! Moving between the beds. Hunting. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. When I looked again, he was gone.”

  “What did he look like, Jadary?”

  “Like a Voresh!” she said, and I knew from the fear and exhaustion in her face that I would get no more.

  “Thank you. Rest now,” I said. “You will be fine. So will Aab.”

  As we moved away, the doctor, who had been watching, silently touched my sleeve.

  “You shouldn’t promise them health when you can’t deliver it,” he said, not so much scolding as advising.

  “I can,” I said. He was about to contradict me merely, but he saw the certainty in my face and the question in his mouth turned into something else.

  “What is a Voresh?” he said.

  “A Lani myth,” I said. “A goblin man. One of the armed sentries of the underworld.”

  “A hallucination brought on by her fever?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Search the camp for more of these,” I said to the doctor. “There is somewhere I need to go.”

  “What about the children?” he said.

  I paused and looked around me.

  “If you don’t find any more of these, and they make it through the next few hours, I think they will be all right.”

  * * *

  I DIDN’T REALLY KNOW that. Teeth wouldn’t grow back, even if hair would, and who knew how much other damage had been done affecting things below the skin. Vestris had survived, but she was not whole, and there was something insidious about the device I had stowed in my satchel that felt worse than the cave where I had left my sister to die half a year ago. How that could be, I didn’t know, but I knew who could tell me.

  I took the underground all the way to Flintwick, staying away from other passengers as best I could, then ran flat out to Crommerty Street and Ansveld’s shop. By the time I got there, I was nauseous with more than anxiety. The device in my bag was poisoning me. I could feel it. I slammed the thing onto the counter, speaking rapidly about what I feared it was and the damage it could quickly do.

  “If I’m right,” I said, “I need a way to contain it or seal it away where it cannot harm anyone.”

  Ansveld Jr. considered me seriously, then unsheathed a luxorite lamp and placed the object under one of his large lenses.

  “Oh my, yes,” he said. “I can feel it. Most unpleasant.”

  He turned the rough metal and glass almost-sphere in his hands, then reached for a fine screwdriver. He worked it into position, then gave it a twist. The egg popped open, splitting into two pieces. Inside, bright, hard and tinged very slightly with emerald green, was a chunk of what I had once thought was luxorite.

  “So there’s more,” he said, musingly. “Or is this from the same source?”

  “I don’t know yet, but we need to find out how to stop it from doing whatever it does to people.”

  “Indeed,” he said, “though I feel we have already made progress in that direction.”

  I was about to demand what he meant, when I realized that I felt it too. The noxious effects of the brilliant fragment of crystal had already dulled.

  “Curious,” he said. “Unless I am very much mistaken, the housing functions as a kind of magnifier. Not for the light of the piece, but for its other less wholesome properties.”

  “How could smoked glass do that?” I said, peering at the intricate filigree of metal parts, all carefully bonded around the irregular fragments of glass.

  “How indeed?” he said, wonderingly. An idea struck him, and he snatched up a headpiece with a series of colored lenses, which he slid into place over his eyes, experimenting with each as he considered, not the greenish diamond-like light source, which he had already slipped into a metal box with a black velvet lining, but the roughly welded housing. “Ah!” he said at last. “Fascinating. I see…”

  “Mr. Ansveld?” I prompted.

  “Yes, Miss Sutonga. What a remarkable young lady you are,” he observed, smiling. “Always full of surprises. This is most intriguing. You see, the green luxorite fragment is like those we saw before, quite possibly part of the same batch and from the same cave, and I’ll wager it has the same properties. If you are exposed to it for a long time, it will make you sick.”

  “But this made people much more sick and much faster than last time,” I said, “though the crystal is tiny.”

  “Because,” he said, pleased with the discovery, “what looks like glass in the housing around the crystal, is not glass at all, but very old luxorite. The real stuff, mind, not your faux green toxic variety. It seems to work as a lens, multiplying the strength of the stone inside many times over, and beaming it out in all directions. What you have found, Miss Sutonga, is a weapon. A kind of noxious bomb.”

  “Old luxorite?”

  “Of the kind recently purchased from me by my unpleasant neighbor,” he said significantly.

  “Kepahler!”

  “The very same. Now, I’m not a naturally suspicious person, Miss Sutonga, but until you walked in here today, I would have been prepared to go to my grave believing ancient luxorite has no practical use or commercial value, and anyone purchasing it was a crank. But now…”

  “It can’t be a coincidence,” I concluded for him.

  “It seems highly unlikely,” he agreed.

  “All right,” I said, nodding at what felt like progress. “But first: this toxic luxorite, how do we make it safe?”

  “An excellent question. I wonder if whoever made this had the answer?”

  I shook my head. “How could we know?” I asked.

  “Do you know much about photography, Miss Sutonga? A faddish thing, being popularized by the newspapers now and a little hobby of mine.” As he spoke, he turned to the cabinets behind him and rifled through them
, producing some small dishes and glass jars of fluid from a medicine chest. “Some time ago a friend of mine, a colleague in the luxorite trade with a similar interest in photography, you understand, chanced upon an interesting discovery. He found that luxorite—the real stuff, I mean—will darken an unexposed photographic plate even when its light is completely shielded by almost all substances. Quite fascinating. The mineral seems to stream through the majority of materials as if they are not there at all. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  “Yes,” I said, shortly. “But how does that help us here?”

  “True luxorite casts its light, and whatever else is in there, at all times and through most substances, but it is quite harmless,” he said, apparently missing my impatience, as he measured out liquids and swabbed the outer metal of the egg. “Now your green, venomous variety—we really should give it a proper name—does, I’m guessing, something similar, but whatever it radiates is lethal to human beings. Now if I were trying to use such a substance to nefarious ends, I would begin by finding a way to protect myself from the core toxin, and the first thing I would try would be the one substance which shields those photographic plates from the strange, invisible effects of shaded luxorite.”

  He pulled the glass stoppers from two bottles, one of which smelled sharply of vinegar. The other was labeled SODIUM RHODIZONATE. He mixed the contents together, and then took the swab he had used to rub down the surface of the egg and immersed it in the liquid.

  “The metal casing is simply iron,” he said, “but whoever put it together protected himself from the mineral inside and left, I hope, a trace of…” He considered the liquid, then smiled, as it turned pink. “Lead.” He clapped his hands together in delight, and grinned at me. “I believe I have a suitable piece of foil in the back.”

  He was gone less than a minute, returning with a square of charcoal gray metal thin as paper into which he placed the fragment of green luxorite, folding it tightly and evenly.

  “There,” he said. “Quite safe. Though I suspect that this is only part of whatever mystery you are trying to unravel.”

  “Thank you,” I said, almost hugging him with relief, which would have been as inappropriate as it was out of character for me. “One more thing. Last time we spoke, you mentioned Colonel Archibald Mandel.”

  “I did.”

  “You warned me to stay clear of him.”

  “Before he became the architect of the Bar-Selehm police state,” said Ansveld with grim amusement.

  “You said he knew your father and that his politics were…” I hesitated, seeing the way Ansveld shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “You are wondering about my father’s politics,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to gauge exactly what kind of threat Mandel represents, and I thought perhaps you might know because…”

  “Because my father was a racist?” said Ansveld. He held my eyes, and there was a sudden coolness in the room as the silence blossomed. “There is no other way to say it,” he conceded, “and the answer, I’m afraid is yes. A good old-fashioned Bar-Selehm racist of the unapologetic kind, the kind Mr. Richter has made respectable again.”

  “And Mandel is the same?”

  “Worse.”

  “How far would he go…” I began but could not find the words to end the sentence.

  “To rid the city—to rid the world—of blacks and coloreds?” Ansveld concluded for me. “How far would a farmer go to eradicate rats and cockroaches? Colonel Mandel was always a dangerous man, ruthless and manipulative, and he always had powerful friends. But now, with his so-called Security Force on hand, and whispering into Richter’s ear … Yes, Miss Sutonga, I would be very wary of him indeed, and I would believe nothing below him when it came to people who did not share the color of his skin. Nothing at all.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  THERE WAS A NEW curfew for nonwhites in the city, which meant that you could be locked up for being out after sundown unless you could prove you were either working or on your way—by a very direct route—to or from your place of employment. I was used to not attracting notice, but I couldn’t afford to lose a night’s investigation by being tossed into some stinking cell, so I went over the roofs wherever possible, approaching the Inns of Court from the northwest via the elegant curl of Long Terrace. I watched the Martel Court and other civic buildings from behind a marble statue of a self-righteous Justice to ascertain the city’s increased security forces weren’t around before making my final approach. I say “the city” but it wasn’t, not in my head. It was Richter. Everything that was happening to the city was at his urging, cheered on by Mandel and his Heritage party cronies and facilitated by the spinelessness of the Nationals. Some of the latter were probably secretly delighted to watch the government make this hard turn to the right, but others were closer to the Brevards ideologically. They just didn’t have the guts to stand up and be counted.

  I scaled the walls as before, all fingers and toe caps, up the grout lines between the stone-block facing, pulling myself onto the roof. I moved cautiously, not because I expected there to be guards, but because there was something eerie about the six stone angels up here in the dark and silence. Particularly since one of them was my sister.

  A guardian angel? Or simply an angel of death and vengeance?

  I didn’t know how often she stood up here, how long she held her strange, watchful vigil, or why. It made me wary, and I realized that I had begun to suspect that the injuries done to her by the false green luxorite had affected more than her body.

  Vestris did not turn to greet me, but she seemed to sense my presence, though she waited till I was almost close enough to touch her before she spoke.

  “If you pushed me now,” she said, as if pondering some abstract philosophical problem, “I would not be able to stop you.”

  I hesitated, unsure how to respond, then said simply, “I would not.”

  “No?” she said musingly. “No, perhaps not.”

  I didn’t ask why she thought I might push her to her death. I knew. We both knew. There were things in her past for which she would never be able to completely atone. I would not kill her for them, of course.

  Of course.

  Though I thought of Berrit often …

  “Did you take tea with the spider?” she said.

  A cold chill of alarm ran through me, and I felt the hair prickle on my neck before I remembered that she had used that word before to mean Madame Nahreem.

  “Not yet,” I said, recovering my composure. “I came to ask you something.”

  “Then ask,” she said, seeming to lean out over the abyss, as if contemplating one final step into nothingness and death.

  “The false luxorite cave in the mountains,” I said. “Was that the only source, or were there others?”

  “The cave where you left me to die?” she said, almost wistfully.

  I swallowed and licked my dry lips.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That was the only place we knew of. Why?”

  “I found another piece, here in the city.”

  She turned to me then, the wind rustling the light hood of fabric around her unearthly face, her eyes smoldering inside its dark folds like coals.

  “That isn’t possible,” she hissed.

  As she spoke, she seemed to shrink slightly, drawing herself into a crouch, like an animal poised to spring, and her mouth opened. I took a step back, afraid, but she stayed frozen in that attitude as if she was indeed the gargoyle for which she had been named.

  “It’s true,” I managed. “Someone took a piece to the Drowning. Magnified it with true luxorite so that it made the children sick. Rahvey’s girls…”

  For a moment, Vestris just stared, and then she crouched lower and leapt forward on all fours like a baboon. I shrank back against the stone, fumbling for my kukri, but she went right past me without so much as a backward glance, trotting along the very lip of the roof, and then dropping
over the edge.

  Coming back to myself, I took a few hurried steps to the brink and looked down; she was crawling like an insect on the face of the building. Her black eyes found me, and she hissed again, before continuing her descent. At the bottom, she leapt into the shadows of the street and loped away at considerable speed, so that a moment later, she was gone and I was left alone. As I stood there, lost in confused thought and a dreamy, unplaceable fear, the thought dawned slowly on me that if anyone happened to look up to the roof of the Inns of Court, they would think me the sixth angel. The thought chilled and hardened within me like molten iron, and I wondered again what that meant.

  An angel of death and vengeance, or a guardian?

  * * *

  THE MORNING PAPERS ANNOUNCED that, in late-night session, Richter’s coalition government had pushed through a series of laws in the interests of “National Security” that included orders of removal for all nonwhites from the east side of the city along a line slashing up from the Ridleford pontoon bridge up to Deans Gate. Blacks and coloreds were given two weeks to move. Effective immediately was an order that all nonwhites carry papers of employment at all times should they cross over into the designated area, and that those papers could be demanded for inspection by law enforcement or by members of the new civilian militia.

  I had already seen this so-called “civilian militia” on patrol. The organization—too grand a term for a uniformed gang that served as the armed wing of the Heritage party—had no training or experience, and their qualifications were limited to a shared ideology. They had been around for a while, skulking in the corners and prowling like jackals around party rallies, tapping truncheons into their hands and leering meaningfully, but they had been few, regulated by real law enforcement, and generally despised. They were thugs and bullies playing at soldiers, poor whites looking for someone other than themselves to blame for their low standing. Now, however, they were legitimate and respected, a breeding ground for the politicians, generals, and leaders of the future—according to the recruiting handbills that had suddenly appeared all over the city. They were still thugs and bullies, but now the leash that had kept them in check had been taken off, and people—including white people, even including those politicians, police, and military who were not so high in the esteem of the Heritage party—were afraid of them.