Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “Any weapons?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “But if someone wanted to build something from blueprints,” I said, liking the idea, “he might be a useful man to know.”

  Someone, I thought, who had already advocated for more open trade with the Grappoli, whom he considered the city’s natural—which is to say racial—allies.

  “Have you ever read his party’s manifesto?” she asked. While I had been thinking about Richter’s part in the death of Darius and the theft of government documents, she had been rooting through her reticule of notebooks and papers, and now—with a kind of furious triumph—she produced a slim, dog-eared pamphlet emblazoned with the lightning-fist motif. She brandished it. It was titled The Dilemma of the White Man: A Heritage Party Publication. Then, with unsteady fingers, she opened it to a page heavily scored with pencil markings, underlinings and astonished exclamation marks. I leaned in to the small, close type, focusing on a passage she indicated with a wordless stab of her nail-bitten finger.

  … which is certainly true of the various black races, their being evidently closer to apes than to white humanity, a fact which goes some way to accounting for their low intelligence and instinctive barbarism. While their innate savagery—directed frequently and spitefully among themselves, as well as with resentment toward their white superiors—is evidence of their patent failings and inability to build anything resembling civilization, it is not—properly considered—a strictly moral deficiency. Morality, as the authorities and religion of our culture have long told us, is the realm of the human and the elevated. To bewail the morality of the black man is to complain about water for seeking out its own level. This is not opinion; it is science, and one must inevitably conclude that the error manifested in a city such as Bar-Selehm is not one made by the blacks, of whom no better can be expected, but by the whites, who have deluded themselves into treating lower creatures as if they were people.

  I pushed the pamphlet away, sickened, and looked into the face of Sureyna, whose anger had burned through whatever restraint she had left so that hot tears shone in her eyes.

  “See?” she managed.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why do you carry it around with you?”

  She thought about that and shrugged.

  “Know your enemy,” she said. “Understand the way they think, what they say, the things they want to do to you. That way you never let your guard down.”

  I nodded, though I was not sure I could live like that.

  “But you remember everything,” I said. “Why keep it written down?”

  She scowled.

  “Some things I choose not to remember,” she said. “Keep them … outside.”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me about Lord Elwin,” I said, deliberately changing the subject and plucking the name at random from my list of who I had met at Elitus.

  She blew out a long breath and whisked the pamphlet away, stowing it carefully as if afraid it might get damaged.

  “Socialite,” she said, blinking her way back to business. “Distantly related to Belrandian royalty. Wealthy and well connected, but his family hasn’t done any actual work for about a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Last one,” I said. This was getting me nowhere. “Eustace Montresat.”

  “Arms dealer and manufacturer.”

  That got my attention, and I tried to remember the man I had met so briefly while surrounded by others, conjuring the image of a small mongoose of a man who kept his hands in front of his chest and gave the impression of someone finicky, nervous. Not an obvious killer, but if he dealt in weapons, he wouldn’t need to be. He would have connections.

  But then they all did. That was why they were in Elitus to begin with.

  “What does he make?” I asked. “Who does he trade with?”

  “Another family business,” she said. “Used to be swords and bayonets, but he deals in explosives now too, and has a factory that produces field guns and carriages for the military.”

  “Ours?”

  “Government contract, yes,” said Sureyna. “But he trades with Belrand directly as well, and is licensed to sell to a limited range of allies, mainly minor principalities. Bar-Selehm will be his biggest market.”

  “Not the Grappoli,” I said.

  “Not unless he wants to hang for treason,” said Sureyna. “His merchandise gets a full military escort everywhere he ships, and that makes him squeaky clean. He has another factory that builds agricultural machinery, but unless we plan on defeating our enemies by riding over them with steam tractors, I suspect that’s a blind alley. Now, about this story you are supposed to be bringing me?”

  “Markeson’s wife is dead,” I said. “Murdered last night at Elitus.”

  All sleepiness and impatience fell away from her in a second.

  “Murdered?” she exclaimed. “Are you sure?”

  “Saw the body myself.”

  “You were in Elitus? How?”

  “That doesn’t matter for now,” I said.

  “Not to you, maybe,” she said, snatching up a pencil and testing its point on a scrap of paper. “I heard the police had been dispatched because of reports of an intruder, but there were no injuries I heard of.”

  “Separate incidents,” I said.

  “Separate? The police are never called to Elitus. They are famous for their security. Two criminal acts in one night there is quite a coincidence.”

  “Isn’t it?” I mused. “Ever heard of a Violet Farthingale?”

  The reporter flicked through whatever her unconscious mind might have filed away, eyes half closed, and shook her head.

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe no one important.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Not sure yet, but I think it’s about Darius.”

  “The cat burglar?” gasped Sureyna. Her eyebrows had slid almost to the top of her head.

  I nodded.

  “You’ve got to give me something I can print,” she said. “If I have to write one more flower show or ‘Discontent in Morgessa’ story, I may kill someone myself.”

  “I will, I promise. But I have to do my job first.”

  “Which is what exactly? You still working for Willinghouse?”

  I looked around and put a finger to my lips.

  “No one knows,” she said, and there was a question in her look. “You should be famous, but you’re not.”

  “Better that way, “I said. “Montresat’s factories. Do they make machine guns?”

  “Machine guns? They might. Why?”

  “What about the other industrialist I mentioned: Horritch? Does he make anything that could be used in guns? Steel? Machine parts? Anything like that?”

  “No,” said Sureyna. “He’s all about textiles, carpet, sacking.”

  “Uniforms?” I tried.

  “So far as I know, he produces fabric, not garments. What is this about?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, feeling suddenly stupid and annoyed at how little I had come away from Elitus with. “The factory that burned was one of these, spinning or weaving and such?”

  “May have been once,” she said. “But it was derelict. Worthless. The fire brigade weren’t called out till other buildings in the neighborhood were threatened. By the time they got there, it was too late to save the structure, so they just closed off the streets around it and let it burn.”

  “Do you know how the fire started?”

  “I don’t think anyone really asked,” said Sureyna. “The police were busy that night with the Darius incident, so they didn’t go over there till the next morning, by which time it was all over. As I heard it, even Horritch didn’t much care what had happened.”

  “Are they going to rebuild?”

  “What for? It was empty. I think he’s looking to sell the land once the remains have been bulldozed. Maybe he’ll build another warehouse, since it’s between the docks and railway sidings
.”

  I scowled. It felt like another blind alley.

  “Why are you asking about guns?” Sureyna prompted, her voice even lower.

  “The plans Darius stole that night,” I said.

  “A weapon?” said Sureyna. “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “So he was working for a foreign power?” said Sureyna, the story taking shape in her head. “The Grappoli!”

  I shushed her.

  “When I know for sure, I’ll tell you what I can,” I said. My eyes strayed to a bulletin board where headlines and stories had been pinned up so that someone could plan the layout of the page. The word Grappoli leapt off several of the stories. “They’re saying that the Grappoli advance across the north has slowed down. Do we know why?”

  Sureyna made a face and waggled her head noncommittally.

  “Our war correspondent thinks they are just pausing for breath,” she said. “Regrouping to make sure their supply lines hold, but his contacts say they have also suffered what he calls unexpected reversals.”

  “Military losses?” I said, surprised.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Seems unlikely. Probably they’re just preparing for another big push. The people, I mean the tribes…” She faltered and shook her head.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s awful.”

  “No one here cares,” she said. “We’ve tried to cover the refugee crisis, show what the people are running from and what happens, but no one wants to know. Our rival’s circulation has gone up significantly since they started printing those ‘Kick Them Out’ stories. People don’t want information. They want justification for what they already believe.”

  She stared hopelessly at the scraps of paper pinned up on the board. Not knowing how to comfort her, I gave her a matey nudge, such as I might give to Tanish, and said, “You need to get back to your cucumbers.”

  “Hardly,” she said, getting to her feet and recovering something of her professional air. “I have policemen to interview and, if they’ll let a humble reporter through the door, the staff of the Elitus club, where I have it on good authority that an eminent citizen of the city was horribly murdered. Has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “Just keep me out of it,” I said, wondering if I had done the right thing. “And be careful. We’re dealing with some dangerous people.”

  “Want to share a cab?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going the other way.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  I STILL DID NOT go to Willinghouse’s town house. Instead, I worked my way southwest across the city, using the roofs and fire escapes where possible to stay out of the alleys around the factories and tenements of the Thornhill District west of the Holymound market. There were still at least two hours till dawn, and there were certain parts of the city, parts ignored or forgotten by the members of Elitus and Merita, where it was not safe to be after dark. I reached the half-converted weaving shed on Seventh Street that I had once called home, went to the water tower above the ironmongers on the corner, and scaled it. I had spent many an hour up there in the past, usually hiding from the gang, and I could have made the ascent blindfolded. At the top I nestled onto a rusting metal gantry and curled up. I would sleep until the sun brought my former companions out to begin the morning shift. I had a job for one of them.

  Tanish, now almost thirteen, had been my apprentice when I worked for the Seventh Street steeplejack gang. Life in the gang had changed over the last couple of months because the leader, Morlak, had been arrested and confined to Rivergate prison, where he would remain for the next eight years.

  My doing, much of it, though I never actually testified against him in court.

  The boys spilled out of the weavers’ shed just after dawn, bleary eyed, trailing satchels of tools. I watched from my vantage as they divided into their work teams for the day, nodding their wary greetings to the familiar black workers who shared the streets with them at this time—the road sweepers, milk and coal sellers with their horse-drawn wagons, the rag-and-bone man with his half-starved orlek, the flower girls who hawked their wares outside the inns of court, and the men and women who rolled barrows of fruit and vegetables to Bar-Selehm’s varying markets, some official, some less so. I was glad to see Tanish heading off down Seventh Street alone. I tailed him for three blocks, the first from the rooftops, then came down and caught up with him two roads west of the domes and minarets of Mahweni Old Town. He beamed delightedly when he saw me, then quickly doused the smile and looked away while he recovered his adolescent nonchalance. That didn’t matter. It had, I realized, been a hard night in lots of little ways, and it was good to be with someone who knew who and what I was and liked me for it, however much he pretended otherwise.

  Sarn, one of the eldest remaining boys, had tried to step into Morlak’s shoes, but he didn’t have the old gang leader’s connections, and work—real steeplejack work of the kind that paid better than mere chimney sweeping—had become harder to come by. A compromise of sorts had been reached when the remnants of Seventh Street had merged—cagily—with the Westside boys, who were also short on numbers since the arrest of their leader, a man called Deveril who had, in his way, helped me in the past. The new gang was called simply New Boys, so that no one could claim precedence, and they had—said Tanish, sounding older than his years—“pooled their resources.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, warily. I always wished he would find some other, less dangerous kind of work, though I had no idea what that might be. The factories hired black and Lani, but they didn’t pay them as much as the whites and tended to keep them in menial positions.

  Tanish shrugged, shedding his momentary adulthood and looking lost.

  “It’s not the same as it was,” he said. “I hated Morlak, but it was better before. In some ways. When you were there. I wish…”

  But he was too kind a soul to actually say it. He knew how miserable I had been in the gang, and how much Sarn still hated me. Like it or not, my life had carried me away from them.

  “They think you left the city,” he said at last.

  “Probably for the best,” I replied. “Let’s not tell them otherwise, all right?”

  He nodded.

  “I went to the Drowning yesterday,” he said. “Saw your sister and her family.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just thought you should know.”

  “Why did you go?”

  He shrugged, but I could tell he was being evasive. He looked young and embarrassed, but also a little sad.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Tanish?”

  “When you were in the gang, it felt more like a family, you know?” he said. “Now it’s just a gang.”

  But Rahvey has a family.

  I nodded.

  “I’m sure they’re glad to see you,” I said.

  “The kids are,” he said significantly.

  I grinned. If Rahvey felt any tenderness toward the boy, he would never know. My sister prided herself on her flinty exterior. She had always confused hardness with strength.

  “Where are you working today?” I asked.

  “Winelands bell tower,” he said. “Just a cleanup job, but it will take a few days.”

  “Can I help?”

  His face lit up.

  “Really? You can come?”

  “Something I want to talk to you about,” I said. “A job. Earn you an extra shilling or two.”

  “Yeah?” he said, hope taking another year off his face.

  “Yeah.” His relief surprised me. “You are doing all right, Tanish, yes? Sarn isn’t being too hard on you?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, so spontaneously that I believed him, though he looked away and added, “But there is something. Not about the gang.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Promise you won’t laugh?”

  “Promise. Go on.”

  “People have been talking. The Westsiders, mainly, but some o
f our boys too. They say they’ve seen … the Gargoyle.”

  I didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing, and he pouted at me.

  “The Gargoyle is a made-up story,” I said. “You know that. It’s a steeplejack myth that kids like Sarn use to scare the new boys, the one you get round to late at night when you’ve already told every Crane Fly legend and the one about the time Daven Saide got forgotten and was hanging for three days in his bosun’s chair on the backside of the Dock Street clock tower. It’s not real.”

  “The Crane Fly was real,” he said, as if that proved him right.

  “Supposedly,” I said. “But the Crane Fly was an actual person, even if we don’t know who he was. The Gargoyle was never more than a way to give little kids nightmares.”

  “I know!” he protested. “And I didn’t believe in it, but Javesh, who was, like, second in command of the Westsiders before they joined us, said he saw it two nights ago way up on the old candle factory stack on Oatshill Road. Said it looked right at him. Scared him half to death, it did.”

  “It’s not real, Tanish. He’s trying to wind you up.”

  “He didn’t say it to me. I heard from his apprentice. All thin and gray, it was, bald too, and its teeth were like … I don’t know, like broken fangs.”

  He shuddered, and I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll come see you on the Winelands bell tower,” I said, “and if I see the Gargoyle, I’ll give it a smack on the nose. Sound like a plan?”

  He smiled grudgingly and shrugged the moment off.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “On the south bank there are some warehouses and factories owned by blokes called Markeson, Horritch, and Montresat. Three different businesses.”

  Tanish nodded immediately, the Gargoyle forgotten.

  “I know them,” he said. “Down by the potteries. One of them burned, right? Horritch’s.”

  “Right.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Just information,” I said. “Anything. But don’t ask a lot of questions. I’d rather you just watched them when you get a spare few minutes. See what they’re making, what their schedules are, who they deal with. Anything really.”