Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “Not steel, though. Steel is strong and flexible. Steel is pure. And to make it, all I need is some of that pig iron, with all its imperfections, and a little hot air. Now, some of my critics will tell you that I have nothing but hot air, but I’ll tell you this for nothing: I know how to use it.”

  The crowd cheered, but he waved them down and went on.

  “I pour that molten, low-grade pig iron into one of my converters and blow the hot air up through the liquid metal. My competitors say, ‘You can’t do that! You’ll make the metal cold!’ And I say, ‘Really?’ And you know what? It isn’t true. It doesn’t make the metal cold. You blow the air through, and it makes the molten metal hotter still, and as the air comes out of the top of the converter, it blows out all the carbon, which burns up in a great blue flame like a torch, and all the manganese and silicon float to the top as slag, but the metal underneath is pure steel, and you can pour it off and make it into anything you want. It’s tough, it’s workable, it’s fifty times stronger than iron.”

  More applause, though I found the speech a little baffling. Was this a political rally or a lecture on metallurgy?

  “The city we know was built from iron, and like that iron, it is full of impurities which make it brittle, so that one day, when someone hits it in just the right spot, it will shatter. I offer you a new city, purged of its impurities, the blacks burned off like carbon, the Lani so much manganese slag to be tipped away, the half-breeds, intellectuals, homosexuals, and other deviants all purged in the fires of the process, leaving only what is strong and pure and bright as steel. That is the future! It’s what we want, what we need, what we deserve. Thank you for your attention and vote Heritage, vote Richter!”

  The audience cheered and applauded, and I, suddenly cold and fearful, had to fight down the urge to slink away. I got ahold of myself and thought fast. Then, while Richter—guided through the crowd by Barrington-Smythe—shook hands and waved and kissed babies, I moved quickly around the perimeter wall, found a suitable spot, and with the aid of a dustbin, climbed over and in.

  Some of the crowd were workers, presumably given time off to hear their employer’s political theatrics, which meant that the factory would be quiet, even deserted, but not for long. I chose the building which looked most like an office and made for it at a flat run across the cathead cobbles. In other circumstances, I might have hesitated, but the more his words resonated in my head, the more Richter stoked my rage. I fished the crowbar from my satchel with trembling fingers.

  The impurities that would be burned away, the slag tipped out and discarded …

  I thrust the head of the crowbar between the door and the jamb, and leaned on it till the lock splintered. What I was doing was criminal. Again. And I felt the terror of doing it in broad daylight and in this place where—more even than Elitus—I felt the venom directed at me and my kind like smog on the air. I shouldered the door in and made for the filing cabinets, levering them open with the same blind and unreasoning fury.

  The murders, the human trafficking, the military support of the Grappoli. Richter was at the heart of all of this. He had to be.

  There were books, great binders of work orders and contracts, inventories of raw materials and finished product, and I ran through them with unsteady hands, sweating with panic at the idea of being caught, but also with a kind of wild and dangerous desire for just that, as if I wanted a reason to turn the crowbar on whoever came through that door after cheering Richter on.

  Purification …

  I found those jobs commissioned the day after Darius’s theft of the War Office’s plans, the men and machines assigned to each, focusing not on the raw steel production—which was most of the plant’s output—but on the individual projects made on-site in Richter’s own milling, turning, and forging workshops. The largest order was for locomotive rails, placed by the Bar-Selehm West Transport Corporation. There were three others for reinforcing rods for use in concrete, one for bridge girders, and another for a made-to-order steamboat hull. Two other orders stood out. One was labeled BOLTABLE SUPERSTRUCTURE/TURRET, and I would have ignored it except that it had been commissioned by Montresat Industries, the arms company charged by the War Office to produce their machine guns.

  Coincidence? The natural overlap of companies involved in related businesses? Or something else entirely? I couldn’t say, but then the other order seemed more telling anyway.

  It was for a small project calling for only two hundred pounds of steel. It was labeled simply FIREBRAND: PROTOTYPE, and if it had been commissioned by someone outside Richter’s firm, that detail had been left out of the ledger.

  It could, of course, have been anything. But my furious and terrified heart told me it wasn’t. It was a machine gun. Faster and more lethal than any made to date.

  Firebrand. A flame-spewing tool for eradicating people as his converter eradicated impurities from metal.

  The fear and anger that had been hot and swirling in me since I had heard Richter speak chilled and hardened into certainty.

  Yes. This was it. The most deadly weapon Bar-Selehm could produce, in the hands of the man who wanted to see the likes of me eradicated.

  The White Man’s Dilemma.… Which was what? When to shoot? Who to shoot? When to stop?

  All of those.

  But now I knew. For all his clever speeches, all that snide talk of metallurgical refinement applied to people as if they were so much industrial by-product, I knew, and I was going to stop him.

  But why a prototype?

  Why would Richter need to build a model of something already being produced for the military by his friend Montresat as if the weapon was still at the development stage? I drummed my finger on the book irritably and looked at the entry for Montresat Industries, mouthing the description softly to myself.

  “Superstructure/turret.”

  Meaning what?

  Seeing the work itself might give me a clearer sense of what was going on. The projects were all assigned a number and a factory location. This one was designated B-3.

  I slammed the book shut and left the office. I couldn’t conceal the damage I had done to the lock, so my break-in would be evident the moment the workers returned from Richter’s rally …

  Which was now.

  I saw them pouring in through the main gate, flowing up the railed drive toward the sheds and foundries. I came out into the cobbled yard, looking around for identifying marks on the various buildings around me, and spotted the designation B-1 painted in white over the door of one of the construction sites. I forced myself to walk rather than run, head bowed, as if I worked there, striding past the building to the second—marked B-2—and stopping at the next—B-3.

  The structure was apparently half workshop, half transit depot and sat astride its own railway siding, the locked double doors designed to close a few inches above the rails and sleepers. I dropped to the track, shoved my satchel under the doors, and crawled after it as quickly as I could.

  Though I could hear work going on close by—the ringing of hammers, the clank of machinery, and the drawing of heavy chain—this building was, at present, deserted. Stacked against one wall were large wooden packing crates branded with Richter’s lightning-fist emblem awaiting cargo, but the rest of the shop was an open assembly area cluttered with riveting and welding tools. There were bundled lengths of steel beams, buckets of nuts and bolts, vices, anvils, racks of hammers and pliers. The place was dominated by a small crane, beside which a gravity elevator gave access to an upper work station only a few feet below the roof.

  The two pieces under construction—three of each, in various stages of completion—were what the logbook had labeled “superstructure and turret.” Each consisted of a girder frame closed in with thick steel plate. The one I took to be the turret was a slightly irregular box with a hole in the front and open underneath. There was a hinged hatchway in the top just big enough for a man to climb through. It looked vaguely nautical, like it might be the command towe
r of a steamship, though there were no windows or portholes. The bottom of the turret was flanged and seemed to fit into the other, larger piece, which I assumed was what the ledger had called the superstructure. It was also boxlike, though much shallower than the turret, and it too was missing its lower side. It was as long and wide as a two-horse carriage and did not look remotely boatlike. I was standing there, my head tilted one side, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, when I heard the sound of a heavy lock turning over.

  I spun round in time to see the doors over the track pushed open and half a dozen white laborers coming in. One of them pointed and shouted, and then they were running. I did what I always do when life on the ground turned menacing. I went up.

  CHAPTER

  24

  I STEPPED ONTO THE gravity elevator, threw the lever, and felt the counterweight drop, dragging me up toward the pulley in the ceiling. I hopped onto the work gantry and moved to an open vent, leaning out over the cobbles of the factory yard and reaching for the ladder I knew would be there. I had worked an almost identical structure at the Dyer Street cement factory a few months earlier.

  I pulled myself out and up, conscious of the noise from below that suggested the complex had been less deserted than I had assumed, then sped along the ridgeline of the roof, hopped across the gap, and landed on the gable end of the next structure.

  Unseen?

  I thought so. Ducking behind a chimney stack, I surveyed the layout of the yard below, strewn as it was with offcut steel, barrows of coal and coke, and piles of refuse. The architecture around me formed a kind of courtyard, though it was less an open space than it was a central, roofless workshop, and at its heart sat a great pear-shaped metal structure around which men were gathered clutching chains, as if they were restraining a wild animal that was threatening to burst free. The Richter Converter. It looked like a strange, bulbous kettle, its massive spout canted at an angle where it met the smoking outlet of a neighboring furnace. The whole thing was mounted on an equally massive stand, and as I moved around the roof looking for a place to get across to the next building, the men around it pulled their chains so that the whole thing pivoted till it pointed almost upright.

  I moved quickly along the roof, getting closer to the spout of the converter, lowering myself over the edge and dropping a few feet to the adjacent roof as I heard the clanking of machinery below. There was a sudden hiss of air like a bottled cyclone, and then the sky caught fire as the converter roared, shooting a great column of orange flame only feet from where I stood. I fell back, stunned by the heat, which seared my skin and crinkled my hair, so I was lying down as the jet turned from amber to blue, a fierce torrent of burning gas hard and sharp as a blowlamp. I rolled onto my belly and drew my arms and legs in, shielding myself from the heat as best I could, then crawled away, deafened and humbled by the blast.

  At the edge of the roof, I peered over, found a set of rungs in the wall only a few yards away, and loped over to them, my elbow hooked across my face to stave off the heat. Seconds later, I was running again, like I was fleeing hell itself, too scared to look back, too dazzled by my own stupidity at coming here, and too relieved at getting out alive to think further about what I had seen.

  * * *

  THE EPISODE AT RICHTER’S plant left me cautious, frightened. Risking my life out of righteous indignation had served only to remind me of my vulnerability. This was not, as Madame Nahreem had been quick to point out after the day’s exercise and mask work, a productive lesson.

  “I thought the hyena incident had already taught you to be more judicious with the risks you take,” she said, as one of the maids applied balm from a mortar and pestle to the burned and blistered skin on my right cheek and arm. She made me sit a half hour with the ointment smeared over my face and a handkerchief taped over it, so that catching my reflection in the looking glass on the nightstand it appeared as if I was wearing some new form of the neutral mask.

  Without warning, it was three months ago and I was back in the opera house, pursuing the figure who had tried to kill me, a figure that had turned out to be my sister Vestris. She had been wearing a strange, featureless mask.…

  I touched the makeshift bandage, suddenly cold, and stared at my unfamiliar reflection. The eyes looking back at me were mine and not mine. I could almost have been my dead sister.

  “Is everything all right, miss?” asked the maid.

  “What?” I said vaguely, coming back to myself with a strange sense of disorientation, as if I had just woken from an unsettling dream and was not yet sure where I was. Madame Nahreem was watching me, her face blank. She was quite still. “Yes,” I said to the maid. “Thank you. I’m fine.” Feeling Madame Nahreem’s eyes on me, I turned to her and, to change the mood of the moment said, “Can I borrow a pistol?”

  Dahria had lent me one once before, but I had returned it to her, intending never to use one again. Madame Nahreem knew as much and scowled.

  “I thought you didn’t like guns,” she said.

  “I don’t,” I said. “But I think perhaps I need one.”

  I didn’t like guns because I had killed two men with one. It had been, I was quite sure, the right thing to do, but I had never gotten over the fact of it, and I still dreamed of that night in the dockside warehouse three months ago: the smell of the smoke, the noise, the blood.

  “You will need to show me that you can use it,” said Madame Nahreem.

  “I don’t have time for that.”

  “If you want to carry a firearm, you will make the time,” she said.

  Half an hour later, she led me to the courtyard, where Namud set up targets and told me how to stand to stabilize the weapon. Unlike the heavy revolver I had borrowed from Dahria, Madame Nahreem had presented me with a much lighter and simpler pistol, which had to be reloaded after each shot. It was silvery, elegant in its way, with a gracefully curved handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and it was clearly designed for a woman. I made a face at it, and Madame Nahreem raised an eyebrow.

  “Problem?” she prompted.

  “It’s not very functional.”

  “It works perfectly well.”

  “I’d rather have less pretty and more bullets,” I said.

  “While I’d rather we perfect your shooting before we give you anything that will spray projectiles all over the house,” she observed.

  I thought of Sergeant Emtezu and his disdain for the lazy inaccuracy of machine guns and sighed, watching Namud’s hands as he walked me through the laborious readying of the weapon. I aimed, sighting down the barrel as he had shown me, fired, broke open the barrel, inserted another cartridge, snapped the barrel back into place, cocked the hammer, and fired again, hitting the target squarely both times.

  “Not exactly a battlefield weapon, is it?” I muttered.

  Madame Nahreem’s batlike ears somehow picked up the comment.

  “Then it’s a good thing you have no plans to enter a battlefield, isn’t it?” she said. “One shot at a time. Make each one count.”

  Actually I was almost relieved that the gun forced me to be so deliberate, because it felt like I could do nothing rash: rushed decisions made in anger were one of the things that scared me most about guns. They were just too easy to use, too deadly in effect. But the more I practiced, the slower the process seemed, and my frustration mounted. If I really had to face down someone who wanted to kill me and I was armed with nothing but this antiquated thing, I had better kill them with the first shot. I doubted I’d get another.

  So I fired and reloaded and fired again, while Namud adjusted my posture and told me when to breathe. For her part, Madame Nahreem watched critically, correcting me without gentleness or encouragement, and as my irritation increased, my shooting got wilder.

  “No!” she exclaimed. “Don’t yank the trigger like you are plucking a chicken. Squeeze it gently.”

  I bit down on my anger and fired again.

  I should be out looking for the refugees instead of wasting
time here with this maddening woman—

  “Worse!” she said. “If you cannot learn to shoot more accurately, I cannot let you go armed. You are a danger to yourself and others.”

  I fired twice more, furious, and the target did not so much as move as the bullets sailed wide.

  Madame Nahreem stepped up close and put her palm on my chest.

  “Your heart is racing,” she said.

  “I need to go,” I said. “And you annoy me on purpose.”

  Namud took a discreet step away.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yet my words are nothing to what someone will do to you if they mean you real harm. I thought your experience at the opera house taught you that. Put away your fury and your fire,” she said, handing me the hot pistol. “Remember the neutral mask.”

  It was a monument to my composure that I slid the gun into my satchel without shooting her first.

  * * *

  THE REFUGEES HAD TO be my highest priority. I could still see their upturned faces in the boat, their hollow cheeks and glistening eyes, their hands outstretched for something they could grab hold of, some way to pull themselves out of all they had been forced to endure. I did not know where they might be, but I would find them.

  I just didn’t know where to start.

  “There must be empty buildings where they would hide around Dagenham Steps or in the railway sidings,” I said to Dahria after dinner. I had felt the need to confide in someone, but could not bring myself to confess my plans to Willinghouse in case he demanded I focus entirely on Elitus and the stolen plans. “Abandoned factories. Warehouses.”

  She looked dubious.

  “My dear steeplejack,” she said, “you are thinking like a city girl. These are people from villages and farms. Some of them may be itinerant herders. Their first experience of Bar-Selehm was being mistreated and imprisoned. The last thing they would do was seek refuge in the city.”